…the Scourge of the Underworld’s identity?

The following guest post comes from AF McGill who has been reading comics since 1995 and collecting them since 2006. Despite that, she finds herself hating comics more often than not. She might be a contrarian, she might be wrong or she might just be passionate to the point of insanity. She has absolutely no love for several of the “acclaimed” creators or books, instead her favourite comics include mostly Mark Gruenwald, J.M. DeMatteis, Fabian Nicieza, John Byrne and Roger Stern stuff. Her favourite characters are a bit more traditional and include Spider-Man, Captain America, Quasar, Quicksilver and Emma Frost. She also likes some DC but not enough to ever write anything of meaningfully amount about them.  Over to AF:

Jack was the 1950s Bucky who took an incomplete version of the super soldier serum and wound up going a bit insane and becoming an evil racist. He was eventually rehabilitated by S.H.I.E.L.D. during the 1980s and became the real Captain America’s sidekick as Nomad.

During J.M. DeMatteis’ Captain America run, Nomad is routinely shown to be a bit of a chump. He always falls into traps, he is headstrong and brash, pessimistic and defeatist and his old way of black-and-white thinking is too ingrained for him to truly accept the way things are now. One more than one occasion, Nomad uses excessive force on super-villains much to the protests of Captain America while Nomad debates Cap’s lake of finite action and how the villains will always come back and they don’t care for the sanctity of life the way Cap does for theirs.

DeMatteis wraps up writing the book with #300, and then we enter the “Gruenwald era” (although the first few issues aren’t by him, they still feel part of his run). One of Gruenwald’s first goals was to write Nomad out as he saw no point of having Captain America have a sidekick who had equal (or debatably greater) strength to him. There’s a lot going on with Nomad in this issue, firstly Nomad tries to establish a normal civilian life for himself as Jack Monroe and it seems to be going well but then it’s all ruined one day by the arrival of a super-villain called Madcap. Jack is fired from his new job, rejected by the girl he fancied and then pursues Madcap to exact revenge. Instead, Nomad ends up discussing philosophy with Madcap who is… well, mad. Eventually, Nomad, who’s agenda and views are portrayed as wonky throughout the tale, takes Madcap down by himself and announces to Captain America that he wants to strike out on his own and try being a hero in his own way.

Captain America #309 ends with Nomad and Cap parting ways.

And started pretty much then across all the Marvel books, Scourge arrived. A master of disguise who dispensed justice by executing supervillains. Of particular note in Captain America #311 – only 2 issues after Nomad left the book – Scourge makes one of his first appearances targetting Constrictor who is the first supervillain Nomad faced on his return in DeMatteis run, a supervillain who beat Nomad spectacularly. Scourge’s assassination of Constrictor is foiled by Cap but Scourge is more successful in other appearances.

In Captain America #319, after the mass murder at the Bar with No Name, Scourge removes his mask and his silhouette could match Jack.

Likewise on the cover to #320 shows Scourge unmasked and the person again resembles Jack.

However in the actual issue, he doesn’t have the same features as on the cover.

So, eventually, the storyline/crossover is wrapped up in the aforementioned Captain America #320 where Captain America draws Scourge out into the opening by disguising himself as a super-villain as bait. This is where the story gives us the great ambiguity with the ending. “Scourge” arrives to assassinate Captain America but is depicted in an entirely black catsuit costume which is neither Scourge’s costume nor a disguise.

Captain America subdues “Scourge” and unmasks him to discover he doesn’t know who the guy is. “Scourge” offers up a origin story but before Captain America can cart him off to jail, “Scourge” is shot dead from off-panel as a voice cries out “Justice is served!” (Scourge’s catchphrase).

The issue points out all the possible things going on here. Was that REALLY Scourge Cap caught? Or was Scourge still at large? Who killed him?

For the sake of this, we are going with the idea that Captain America going on the television to bait Scourge inspired a copycat to follow in Scourge’s steps. Cap fought the copycat and when captured the copycat offered up a pleasing sounding tidy origin story. He was in it for the glory (as echoed in his “went out with a bang”). The copycat was assassinated by the real Scourge who arrived later and discovered it was a trap when he found Cap fighting “Scourge”. Realizing this was also a perfect “out”, especially since Captain America was now investigating him, Scourge retired for a time following this.

The Scourge saga resolved then in #320. And what do you know in #324, Nomad – who has been absent from the book since #309 – returns! This time Nomad is planning to murder a drug dealer called the Slug and is employing disguises to get close to his target. How appropriately Scourge-like.

Captain America eventually confronts Nomad and the two engage in a debate and a fight over killing a villain.

Eventually, Nomad relents but makes no effort to save the Slug’s life, firmly establishing that Nomad can’t argue with Captain America but doesn’t agree with Cap.

Nomad remains a supporting character in the book for the next 20 or so issues. This debate continually rears it’s head. Nomad is always quick to suggest fighting or killing baddies and in #340, when Captain America isn’t around, he proudly allows super-villain Vibro to fall to his death.

Honestly though, I’m glancing over a lot, there is loads of more evidence in both these issues and the DeMatteis issues to support Jack’s uneven character but they usually are a lot of very similar debates about brutality/killing, Nomad acting suspicious or being unstable, Nomad being cynical about the whole superheroes v supervillains dichotomy. I’ve not even mentioned his frequent bouts of anger with “boy scout” D-Man.

Eventually, Captain America and Nomad lock horns over these issues in #345 and a drunk Nomad, after suggesting “storming” the Commission on Superhuman Activities, gets mad and basically calls Cap a pussy. This is Nomad leaving the book’s supporting cast. Forever, actually. He never does return to the book.

That was #345. In #347, you’ll never guess who returns? Scourge. This time Scourge is shown assassinating the 1950s Red Skull – one of Nomad’s MAJOR enemies.

A subsequent appearance (#351) has Scourge arriving at the Commission on Superhuman Activities office and assassinating a member of the Watchdogs (after he in turn attempted to assassinate John Walker). This neatly aligns and mirrors with Jack’s proposed attack on the CSA.

But by then the Scourge thing more or less fell apart. There was contradictory appearances and a complete lack of success of Scourge’s part to actual do anything. The character was shown to be associated with the Red Skull but also shown to be operating independent. He was killed in one issue by the Red Skull and re-appeared in another completely fine. Eventually we got the explanation that Scourge was basically an organization funded by the Golden Age Angel and there were loads of them.

Meanwhile, Nomad eventually pursued his whole Renegade Easy Rider solo series when he began to notice the complexities of villainy and the law (that’s the actual canon reason for that cosmetic change). Many many years later, Nomad did actually become Scourge in Thunderbolts #33-50. At this time, it was the result of brainwashing.

Here’s where the more tenuous stretches come in.

I’m not sure how to handle Nomad’s relationship with GA Angel. On one hand, the first time around with Scourge, it’s not necessary. But if I want the Scourge who appears in #346-351 to be Nomad, it needs to be established. However, that second round can also be attributed to a subsequent Scourge – but it does ruin the neatness Nomad’s storming out and returning next issue as Scourge.

Secondly, a lot of people cite the Scourge appearance in an issue of Thing where Scourge was disguised as a female wrestler as early evidence there were more than one Scourge because he passed himself off as a scantily clad female.

However, in Captain America #320, we see Scourge disguised as a pretty convincing woman.

He also disguised himself as women in other issues such as Cap #311.

In one issue of Nomad’s solo series, he dresses up as a woman to go undercover.

When Nomad was Scourge in Thunderbolts, he used an image inducer. He could use one here but that makes the idea of disguises a bit redundant. But Scourge was a MASTER of disguise, he could disguise himself as a bulked up female wrestler.

It’s actually pretty easy to rationalize that Nomad and Angel have met or have a previously unseen adventure together. For what it’s worth, Nomad was shown to interact and have unseen history with some other Golden Age heroes in New Invaders #2 and #9.

Nomad and Angel (along with “sidekick” Domino, Scourge’s info supplier) could have been behind the original Scourge and when Nomad abandoned the guise he convinced Angel and Domino that they should lay low for a while until the heat dies down so Captain America or others don’t investigate them. Or perhaps first time around it was just Nomad and Domino and Angel only came onboard to finance the second round. Either way, After Nomad returned to Captain America’s side, Angel received funding and support from “John Smith” (a.k.a. Red Skull).

I also think it’s a very very smart way of explaining the sudden change in the Scourge organization as being the suggestion of Red Skull – who himself was exploring capitalist ventures, as a means of spreading his evil. He gave Angel the idea to restructure the Scourge idea now as an actual organization with several Scourges (unknowingly ultimately in the Skull’s pocket). But this may have come before or after Nomad’s brief return.

When Nomad abandoned Captain America he briefly returned to being Scourge for a few hits. He was happy to assassinate 50s Red Skull at the command of “John Smith” due to his past with 50s Skull. Or perhaps “John Smith” is receiving the report from GA Angel and Nomad really isn’t aware of the outside source of target selection.

Either way his next hit was again personal; U.S.Agent.

However the first new recruit appeared in #350…

However, he was beaten and killed (latter off-panel) by U.S.Agent. (originally I came up with that this could be Jack, and the reason he stopped being Scourge was when he realized “John Smith” was also aligned and working with terrorists, but you see a big pool of blood coming from Scourge on a later page).

Nomad soon went to the building housing the CSA to kill U.S.Agent but instead found he’d been beaten to it by what was apparently a member of the Watchdogs. Nomad killed him instead and fled.

Following that Nomad hastily abandoned the guise forever, either realizing that the Scourge organization was being played by “John Smith” (and suspecting that the information he was fed about U.S.Agent had also been supplied to the Watchdogs). He may also have been aware of the new recruit who died in #350 alongside other terrorists which further made him realize Scourge was being made into a puppet. Or he didn’t agree with the idea of franchising the Scourge character.

However, Angel was either not made aware of Nomad’s concerns or didn’t care where the funding was coming from since it seemed sincere in support and he continued the program with what was now an organization with it with multiple new recruits to be Scourge. At least one of whom was loyal to Skull.

(Note: In actual fact the “Watchdog” was a CSA agent in disguise)

The Skull had high expectations for his new Scourge organization but found them to be incompetent without a dedicated operative like Nomad and abandoned them – killing (one of?) his inside men and cutting off funding.

Despite this, Angel had enough money to continue on. Nomad’s hatred for John Walker from those issues in the #340s could also contextualize why the Scourge organization / GA Angel spent so long screwing with U.S.Agent in U.S.Agent #1-4. Maybe they even held him responsible for Nomad retiring as Scourge.

And that’s more or less it. Nomad pursued his solo career as a hardened but complex character and along the way began to realize the Scourge M.O. didn’t really work. There was evil that escaped notice, there was innocent people, there were victims who turned to crime. And his care for Baby Bucky also helped him find the humanity and balance to stop him from going full-on Scourge again.

Also worth noting is following the original Scourge saga, Jack hooks up with a woman Priscilla Lyons who is the basic reason Nomad was going after Slug that time. They eventually fall apart but she goes on to becomes one of the subsequent Scourge recruits in U.S.Agent #1-4.

In all his publishing existence Nomad has been brainwashed 6 times and he has been “dead” 3 times. If ever a character was so messed up in the head to justify dramatic psychotic breaks in becoming a serial killer, it’s Jack Monroe. But, as you can see, it takes quite a lot of legwork to reconcile the latter appearances, but in my mind, the original Scourge was definitely Nomad. While I think the Scourge well has been tapped well past the point of dehydration and adding anything else to it would be pointless, if I was writing Captain America or an appropriate book, I would try and find some way to hint at this idea. Even if it was just adding a few big hints that Nomad was the original Scourge without actually pursuing the idea beyond suggestions.

…Black Widow’s unusually youthful lifespan?

A year after the Communists rejected Nixon’s Five-Point Peace Plan for Southeast Asia and Matt Damon’s birth, Brian C. Saunders was born to redress the balance. Regrettably, the infant failed to stop either the Vietnam conflict or Matt Damon’s career.  For his sins, he was punished with enrolment in US public education and, addled with lack of knowledge, went on to public university for good measure. During this time, he filled his hours with drugs, alcohol and sex with women comic books!, which filled his days with a warm and happy glow. Many careers later, he writes for the public good, using facts and avoiding social media for information or human interaction.  You who read this are welcome.

Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanov, aka the Black Widow, was at a bit of a crossroads in 1990.  That’s when she unexpectedly appeared in one of the most popular issues of the Uncanny X-Men, #268, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Jim Lee.

At the time, for anyone who had been reading comics for over five years, it would have come as no surprise to see the late 20’s Black Widow turning out to have known Wolverine since her childhood since by that stage, the trope of Wolverine already knowing everyone who turned up in his path had become an entrenched part of the character.

What would have confused readers, though, is the fact that Uncanny #268 depicts Natasha as a young child in World War II, almost 50 years before the present of the issue’s main story.

So what sort of perspective might Chris Claremont have had to account for the Black Widow’s apparent lack of aging?

Readers would sadly never find out, since while the September 1990 dated issue of Uncanny X-Men #268 raises the question, it never provides an answer, and Claremont is booted off the title before having an opportunity to follow the story up at a later date.

“Madripoor Knights” is very much a Wolverine story.  It is early in Captain America’s career, in “Late-Summer 1941” that he engages ninjas (genin field agents) of the Hand on the streets of Madripoor to rescue Ivan Petrovich.

Both men are hard pressed to overcome the tide of battle against them, when Logan (the character we are to know as Wolverine) appears, turning the tide in Cap and Ivan’s favour.  After the fight, Logan takes the two men to a local establishment, Seraph’s Bar, where Logan and Cap are briefed by Ivan on his mission and Logan narrowly avoids causing a bar fight with Baron von Strucker and his Nazi aide.

Natasha Romanov has been captured by Strucker to be delivered to the Hand.  The Hand has identified her as gifted with extraordinary aptitude for the martial arts, and means to begin her indoctrination into their organisation.

The men rescue Natasha but lose Logan, and instead of returning to the bar they go to the local American Consul, who, turning out to be a fascist loyal to the Nazis, promptly delivers them back to Strucker and the Hand.  Only Logan’s return to the conflict halts the ritual death of Ivan and Cap by a blade wielded by the Hand-entranced Natasha.  Freed to act, together the three men defeat Strucker and the Hand, and Logan sees to the safe return of all involved to their respective countries.

In the present of the story, Natasha, as the Black Widow, is surveilling the sibling group Fenris: Andrea and Andreas von Strucker, mutant children of the abovementioned Baron.  She falls prey to Hand field agents under the command of the evil organisation’s new jonin, Matsuo Tsurayaba, but is rescued by Wolverine, Jubilee and Psylocke who are on the run and searching for the missing X-Men. Upon her recovery, Natasha hugs her “Little Uncle”, Logan, and expresses concern at his debilitated state.  After briefing them, Logan and Natasha draw comparisons with their previous encounter almost 50 years ago to a dismayed Jubilee’s shock.

Natasha and the X-Men find an informant who gives up a meet location for Fenris and Matsuo. The location turns out to be a sham with decoys, and the villains themselves drink a toast to their victory from a safe, alternative location.

To understand this curious story requires a little history of Marvel itself.  Established in 1961, the Marvel Universe was born piecemeal from characters created in the late 1930’s and 40’s such as Captain America.  Steve Rogers was created in fact early in the year of 1941, a year partially known for fighting in Europe and sabre-rattling from the Pacific.  Nazi political interference with Jews in Germany had by this point become rumors of Ghettos and disappearing of Jewish citizens under German political influence.  These rumors of later proven fact became the impetus that Captain America was created out of, and Marvel had a patriotic Nazi fighter all ready when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7^th, 1941.

Captain America would go on to return again and again after the war in Marvel’s publishing history, but it was only in Avengers #4 in 1963 that Steve Rogers would return to ongoing publication.  Not long after, 1964 to be precise, the Black Widow was created.  She was a secret agent for the USSR who bedeviled Iron Man…

…a Cold War femme fatale who seduces the unaware Hawkeye into supporting her missions against the USA.

In a few years, she has defected to the West, gotten a makeover as a superhero and uses her Soviet training and “Widow Sting” equipment to fight for the Avengers…

…go on to work for the Western-based spy organization, SHIELD…

…and date Daredevil.

At this time, some background started to be established for the Black Widow.  She acquired a chauffeur who apparently had a long standing relationship with Natasha and he rescued her from her bombed house in Stalingrad during WWII.

Then, in Daredevil #102, Chris Claremont went on to establish two things about the Black Widow.  Her middle name was Alianovna.  Russian middle names are patronyms which means the name is a version of their father’s first name.  So Natasha’s father is named Alian Romanoff.

The second thing was that in the omnipotent captions, she is referred to as a Tsarina, which means “Empress Queen”.

As Natasha is called Princess throughout Uncanny #268…

…Claremont is clearly implying that Natasha is in fact the last surviving heir to the Russian monarchy and Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias!

But by 1990, Madame Romanoff would have been well over 50 years the age that she was depicted in 1990.  In 1964, this would have not been a problem.  In 1990, though, she was still a clearly young woman and always had been.

At this point, it is necessary to remember that the Marvel Universe has a compressed time line.  Though most of it has been depicted beginning from 1967, in fact, the compression means that working backward from the present (currently early 21st Century, the beginning of the modern Marvel Universe, Fantastic Four #1, takes place in the early 2000’s and not 1961.  However, characters tied into fixed events, such as the Cold War or World War II, require explanations to orient the reader into how they can exist in the endless present of the Marvel Universe.  For instance, Captain America, fell into suspension animation towards the end of WWII until he awoke in Avengers #4.  But the Black Widow, a WWII child survivor, had no ready reference for her youth.  How could this be?

Some real word history is called for at this point.  During the Russian Civil War, the ruling monarchy was killed.

Among them was Grand Duchess (or Princess) Anastasia, about whom rumors persisted throughout the 20th Century to the extent that she had survived and escaped.

Several women claimed to be the surviving Anastasia, but none were accepted as such in their lifetimes and have since been disproven upon the discovery of the real Anastasia’s grave and subsequent DNA testing.

However, we are talking about the Marvel Universe, which can diverge from ours in subtle ways.  Anastasia was born in 1901.  Natasha Romanoff would have been born in the mid-to-late 1930’s.  It is possible she could be the daughter of Anastasia, if her mother had survived and stayed in Stalingrad and married a man named Alian Romanoff.  This seems unlikely to me as the Secret Police would never have countenanced the existence of a Royal Heir surviving or furthering the line.  The real Anastasia and her family were executed to prevent any threat to the dominance of the Communist Party’s control on the new government.  Moreover, none of the women who claimed to be Anastasia did so within the USSR, but safely in foreign countries far away.  It’s therefore very unlikely the real Anastasia could have lived in open sight in Stalingrad until World War II.

So how could Chris Claremont have reasoned this?

Natasha survived the destruction of her own home during the Battle of Stalingrad which took place from August 23, 1942 to February, 2 1943.  We know this because she told this to Viper in Marvel Team-Up #85.

She could only safely exist in her homeland if all the ruling Romanoffs were believed dead.  But, what if there was a heretofore unknown infant born just before the February Revolution?  Conceived and born in secret because of the impeding revolution, this boy would have been the last hope for Nicholas II to continue the Romanoff house and restore the monarchy.  He could not remain in St. Petersburg, but was removed by a trusted retainer to the city of Stalingrad, where he could be raised in safety.  Nicholas II gives his lastborn son Alian Romanoff to his trusted retainer, Ivan Petrovitch.  Petrovitch raises the young Alian in a house purchased with what would be his family inheritance and there, Alian would grow to manhood, being trained by Ivan and study, waiting for the opportunity to regain the throne. Alian marries and the union produces Natasha, who is naturally athletic.  As World War II commences, Alian and his wife allow Natasha to train in ballet.  Her ballet performances expose the child’s prowess to the local martial arts community, resulting in her abduction by the Hand.  Unwilling to alert the Russian authorities, Ivan is enlisted to undertake the mission to save Natasha.  Alian’s wealth has allowed him to make contacts with foreign governments such as the USA, who are very interested when the heir to Russia’s throne asks for help and send their top asset, Steve Rogers as Captain America to Madripoor to meet Ivan, thus setting the stage for a young Steve Rogers to meet Logan and rescue Natasha.

In 1990, it had been many years since Black Widow’s WWII history had been referenced and many political changes had befallen the relationship with East and West since.  It was a shock to see it thoroughly and somewhat definitely referenced.  The floating timeline of the Marvel Universe wherein all present day issues took place in a past circa some eight to nine years since Fantastic Four #1 meant that the Black Widow’s childhood, fixed in WWII made her older than her apparent age.  While her present day adventures could be compressed, her past expanded as her meeting Wolverine and Captain America, and presence at the battle of Stalingrad locked her origins much the same way as Captain America and the Sub-Mariner’s were.  Steve Rogers was in a state of suspended animation until Avengers #4, Namor is a hybrid with an enhanced lifespan.  How does the Black Widow, a human peak athlete remain so?

The answer, I posit, lies in Claremont’s Spider-Woman #42, “The Judas Man.”

Michael Kramer has disappeared and daughter Pamela hires Jessica Drew, aka Spider-Woman to find him.  Michael is on the run from Viper and Silver Samurai.  Viper has gotten the catalyst for a virus that’s 99% fatal to all human beings.  In 1944, Kramer and his fellow American servicemen went down behind enemy lines, only to end up implanted with the deadly virus by the Red Skull.  The virus, dubbed the Judas Plague, required genetic modification to create immune plague carriers for distribution of the agent.  The antidote for the plague is generated via human reproduction by the “Judas Men”: their children will be born with the mutated matrix that will provide the antidote.  However, Captain America and Nick Fury and the Howling Commandoes destroyed the lab and all the research…

…except for the catalyst which was later found.  The sole survivor of the Judas Plague experiment, Michael escaped, and hid.  He also gained extended longevity…

…and his virus was discovered to have mutated into an inert form after Spider-Woman defeated Viper and Samurai’s plot.

In 1945, we know victorious Russian forces in Germany took resources and assets from the conquered country as reparations for the War.  As part of this process, it is likely the Russians would have been instructed to collect any scientific research or seize sites of laboratories.  Although Fury and Captain America reported the Judas Plague research destroyed, the report was obviously not entirely accurate, given Michael Kramer’s status and the catalyst’s destruction given Viper’s later obtaining of it?

Jessica Drew recounts in Spider-Woman #43 that the Judas Plague was “required reading” for all Hydra agents.

Viper, having likewise been a Hydra recruit, would have likely known about the site of the experiment and that Fury’s report was inaccurate.

It stands to reason, then, that acquiring the Plague was an operational goal for Hydra, so at some point, Hydra got the catalyst from the Russians and Viper later stole it from Hydra.

But what were the Russians doing with it for so long?

By the late 40’s, early 50’s, Natasha Romanoff would have been identified as a prime candidate for espionage.  Instead Natasha was allowed to be a ballerina…

…and marry Alexei Alanovich Shostakov, a top pilot for the Soviet military.

After she was told he was killed (in reality, Shostakov was in training as the Red Guardian) she volunteered and trained for the KGB.

The aptitude for martial arts that the Hand had seen in 1941 would have been manifest and she would have been trained in those arts and spy craft to serve the USSR.  As a Hand candidate for Master Assassin, she would have been top in her class and a prime asset.

As the Red Guardian, Alexei would have been a public figure, a role model to rally Soviet patriotism in the public and inspire fear of the strength of Russian might in the world.

This did not happen because of his apparent death after Avengers #44 and the length of his experiment, which displayed considerable flaws such as his psychological volatility and his willingness to die to save the embodiment of Soviet Russia’s arch-rival.

Had that not happened, however, he would have been an individual of considerable influence according to Soviet planning.

I would further posit, therefore, that the Soviet government could not allow either Natasha or Alexei such unchecked influence.  Thus, both of them married and were subsequently separated for training alone.  The KGB by this time would have found the surviving German scientists of the Judas Plague experiment site.  Natasha was then subjected to a KGB-run Judas Plague experiment as the agency’s scientists would have deemed her likely to survive and then used as a spy. Natasha would assume the code name of the project, “Black Widow,” although she would be likely be unaware of the actual project or her status as a vector of a plague that could virtually depopulate the planet.  At the time that Alexei completed his training, Natasha would have been reunited with him.

And with that reunion, Alexei would be exposed to the plague, it likely being a sexually transmitted disease, and thereafter he could be deployed in the field with full confidence, either under Natasha’s influence as a loyal wife and operative or blackmailed with his life should he turn against the motherland.  He would serve as public relations at home and at the forefront in the Rodina’s military defense.

However, it obviously took much longer for Alexei to complete his “training.”  The Marvel compressed timeline meant that when Natasha was told Alexei was “dead” in the flashback in Avengers #44…

…she spent decades believing he was dead.  During this time, the Red Guardian project crawled on.  Obviously inspired by the West’s Super Soldier Project, the Soviets’ process was flawed, with Alexei being endowed with superior strength, but a volatile psyche.  These setbacks might have required lengthy periods of mental conditioning, revealing the Super Soldier longevity effect.  Being the first operational asset, any other subjects of the project were likely driven insane if they survived the physical and psychological trauma of the incomplete chemical and radiological procedure.  Alexei’s personality was so altered, Natasha perceived little of the man she loved.  It’s likely he was brainwashed repeatedly in an effort to restore his sanity and bring him to operational readiness.  By the time he was, Natasha’s Judas Plague infection, like Michael Kramer’s, would have been found inert.  Well before then, she would have noticed her own longevity via the Judas Plague process and found out about what happened to her.  She would have been about 40 some years old and although youthful, she would have also realized she was infertile from the Judas Plague treatment (designed for men, I have to assume it wouldn’t be good for a woman’s reproductive ability).  This would have been another factor leading to her eventual defection to the West.

Without either Natasha or the Judas Plague, the Red Guardian project would have needed another control, but it’s likely at this point the break-up of the USSR would have loosened the paranoia and the need for a counterpart to Captain America.  At any rate, the Red Guardian went into the field with an unstable mentality and apparently died, leaving Natasha an indefinitely young widow.  Considering Alexei’s mental instability, his mission would have been selected to cause the most damage and result in his death.  Ironically, he died a hero, saving his wife and Captain America, somewhere in Southeast Asia.

When Natasha defected and her infection was inert, the catalyst would have been of no use and the Russians would have been either glad to sell it, or warehouse it.  Through either of those opportunities, Hydra and Viper could have acquired it, not knowing that the lifespan of the active virus in Michael Kramer had already expired.  After Viper stole the project from Hydra, she acquired Michael Kramer before the virus’s efficacy was verified.  By the time Spider-Woman freed Kramer, Viper’s scientists had determined his infection was inert as well.  The project was a failure and was subsequently abandoned, leaving two survivors, Michael Kramer and the Black Widow, forever changed.

Among her friends, such as Ivan and Logan, Natasha is called Princess or Tsarina.  It seems like a nickname to those who overhear, but in truth, she is the last surviving member of the Romanoffs and the rightful heir to the long deposed Russian Monarchy. She will never claim that crown, because her calling is a higher one.  She claims the titles of S.H.I.E.L.D agent, Avenger, and most importantly the Black Widow as a remembrance of the insidious exploitation of female agents by the Rodina through projects like the one that created her.

…the reason for the Reed Richards’ Rocketship?

Today’s guest post comes from Justin Zyduck, who used to write about superhero comics at the Adventures of Wyatt Earp in 2999 and was a semiregular guest contributor to Mightygodking dot com from 2009-2010. Since then he’s had two children and has retired from active blogging, but he still thinks about comics all the dang time even if he’s not writing about them. These days he writes and performs music as half of Madison, Wisconsin-based indie pop duo Evening Afternoon. He’s also published some short horror fiction under the name Justin Pollock and still works at prose in fits and starts.

“If Reed Richards is so smart, why did he take his girlfriend and her kid brother on the first test of his experimental rocket?”

Everyone from J. Jonah Jameson to Jay Leno has posed that question, or some variant of it, over the years.  Professional and amateur pundits alike have long debated the reason behind Susan and Johnny Storm’s presence on the historic flight that created the Fantastic Four. Feature films and other fictionalized versions of their exploits tend to portray the Storms as fellow scientists or astronauts to Reed Richards and Ben Grimm.  But, in reality, they had little, if any, training in those fields.  Sue Storm (now Richards) holds a bachelor’s degree in theatre, and Johnny Storm was, by all reports, an average-to-bright but underachieving high school student at that time.

When faced with the question himself, Richards plays it off charmingly.  “Even before we were the Fantastic Four, we were a team,” he said at a press conference shortly after their public debut.  It’s a sentiment he’s repeated many times since. “Every risk we took, every success we celebrated, we shared equally. Sue and Johnny are two of the bravest individuals I’ve ever known and – with no disrespect intended to the highly trained and dedicated astronauts in the international space-exploration community – there’s no one I’d have rather had with me.”

Beyond this seeming non-explanation, we can only speculate. Frustratingly, due to the nature of the U.S. government’s funding and involvement, official explanations and documentation on the Richards rocket project have been largely classified. In most cases we must depend on the licensed Fantastic Four comic books as primary sources.  However, whether through deliberate or accidental miscommunication between the Fantastic Four and the creative teams behind the comic – or perhaps even for matters of simple artistic license – details are often inconsistent.

Indeed, the very nature of the rocket itself has been inconsistently portrayed over the years. The flight was described as a mission “to the stars” in the debut issue of the Fantastic Four comic book (Vol. 1, #1.)  Later retellings frequently speak only of a nebulous “spaceflight” that may or may not have involved a “hyperdrive” or “star drive.” Furthermore, the first issue presented Richards’ decision to launch the rocket without official clearance as a spur-of-the-moment impulse because “conditions are right tonight.”  Only later did Vol. 3, #11 reveal that Richards effectively stole his own ship after the government withdrew funding from the project. When we don’t even know why Richards himself undertook that flight, is it any wonder that researchers and journalists have had difficulty reading between the lines to figure out what exactly the Storms were doing there?

But what if, instead of trying to determine what Richards is not saying about his friends’ involvement, we were to focus on what he is saying? Perhaps it’s a dead end to read such statements as the one quoted above as merely some kind of media-friendly deflection. What if we take him at his word? A man goes into space with his three closest friends. What would it suggest about the mission?

In following that question to its logical conclusion, we may discover not only why the Storms were on that rocket, but the purpose of the flight itself. And, quite unexpectedly, it may also lead us to the secret behind one of the other great and terrible marvels of the modern age: the so-called “Incredible Hulk.”

*

Let’s begin with one of the few details that remains consistent in almost every account: the Fantastic Four gained their powers because the Richards rocket was insufficiently shielded from cosmic radiation.  What was the nature of that radiation? “Cosmic rays” are not in fact unusual in outer space.  Their effects have been known, studied, and guarded against in the shielding of conventional spacecraft for years. Why, then, was the Richards rocket not so protected? Critics of Richards cite this seeming negligence on his part – negligence paid for by Ben Grimm in his transformation into “The Thing.”

Others, however, rush to defend Richards. On a special edition of the TV news magazine Lateline, Dr. Henry Pym – a leading biochemist and founding member of the Avengers under identities such as Giant Man and Yellowjacket – stated the incident was “a freak accident. No one could have predicted it. A cosmic ray storm on the surface of the sun produced particles that reacted with the star drive” (Vol. 3, #543.) This statement suggests a singular, anomalous incident that Richards was not and could not have been prepared for, which would seem to absolve Richards at least partially of blame.

The “freak accident” theory, however, while occasionally repeated elsewhere, can’t be entirely accepted because the effects of the cosmic rays have been reproduced. Specifically, rogue scientist Ivan Kragoff – alias the Red Ghost – exposed himself and his trained “Super-Apes” to what would appear to be the same type of cosmic rays, as did the terrorist group known as the U-Foes. Both teams traveled in spacecraft even less shielded than the Richards rocket for the deliberate purpose of gaining cosmic ray-derived superhuman powers. The Fantastic Four themselves have re-encountered the same or similar cosmic rays on subsequent flights.  During the account of their first battle with the extraterrestrial Skrull race, a spacecraft containing the Fantastic Four passes through a “radiation belt” that temporarily cures Grimm of his condition.  It is suggested that this same belt gave them their powers in the first place (Vol. 1, #2.)  Today, it is commonly held that this radiation belt was the Van Allen belt, two bands of trapped particles held in place by the Earth’s magnetic field.  At least one account of the Fantastic Four’s origin, in Vol. 3, #60, explicitly names the Van Allen belt as the source of their powers.

We can even resolve the Van Allen belt explanation with some of Pym’s comments.  As recently as 2013, space probes detected a third radiation belt, presumably created by unusual solar activity and apparently destroyed by a subsequent shock wave from the sun.  A “cosmic ray storm on the surface of the sun” as Pym describes might indeed have created an additional, temporary radiation belt with unexplained properties – a “fantastic belt,” if you will – that interacted with the Richards party to alter their genetic structure.  A reaction with a “star drive,” however, seems unlikely given that Kragoff and the U-Foes’ ships would almost certainly not have had the same hyperdrive on board.

In any event, we can likely pinpoint the cause of the mutation as abnormal, but by no means unique, activity in the Van Allen belt.  Such fantastic belts may be created and destroyed all the time.  The ones that affected Kragoff and the U-Foes might have been different belts that shared a common origin with the one that empowered the Fantastic Four. At the time of Richards’ flight, however, the existence and effects of these fantastic belts would have been unknown.  So, it is quite possible that the “insufficient shielding” of the rocket might have been perfectly sufficient if not for the unusual Van Allen belt activity.

*

Still, there is the detail, again unusually consistent among accounts, that Ben Grimm warned Reed Richards about the shielding on the rocket. Many underestimate Grimm due to his gruff layman’s persona, often portrayed referring to Richards’ inventions as “doohickeys” and “whoziwhatzis.”  But, his credentials in the aerospace field are not to be sniffed at.  It does seem unusual that he would have been so incredibly right and Richards so incredibly wrong about the shielding. In fact, why would anyone build a rocket with anything less than the standard amount of shielding?

But perhaps the shielding not being “standard” was precisely the point. Radiation shielding is bulky and expensive, and any spaceship traveling to interstellar space would require even more than conventional spacecraft. Seeking to get around this, Richards may well have used unconventional shielding. Scientists today have proposed spaceships that generate magnetic fields to block cosmic radiation; Richards may have beaten them to this notion several years ago.  Therefore, Grimm’s concern in Vol. 1, #1 that “[they] haven’t done enough research into the effect of cosmic rays” may not have been referring to the cosmic rays themselves, but rather the ability of this unconventional shielding to successfully block it.

*

Because we tend to focus on the failings of Richards’ rocket and the seeming impracticality of bringing largely untrained astronauts aboard, we tend to overlook the true marvel of its engineering: the very fact that it could be successfully operated by civilians.

It was eventually revealed that Richards and Grimm were originally intended to pair with two trained astronauts identified as Burroughs and Hennessey, although those might be pseudonyms employed by Marvel Comics for legal reasons.  Vol. 3, #11 shows that these two were pulled from the mission, along with the government’s funding. Yet, on short notice, Richards, Grimm, and the Storm siblings launched the rocket without clearance, without ground support, fast enough to take off “before the guard can stop them” (Vol. 1, #1.)  Then, in the worst possible conditions, they navigated the rocket safely back to Earth.  They achieved all this despite half their number having effectively zero astronautics training.

We can attribute their takeoff and survival to luck, or we can ask a more compelling question: what if the Richards rocket was designed to be operated by untrained astronauts? Richards’ decision to include the Storms on the mission would no longer be a massive mistake, but instead a test of the rocket’s intended function.

This question, however, seems to muddle the purpose of the mission at first glance. By itself, a spacecraft that can be launched and operated by a mix of professional and amateur astronauts with no outside support is a lofty goal.  Faster-than-light travel is even more wildly ambitious. Combining these two parameters makes the job exponentially more difficult. Why would Richards need to build an interstellar spaceship that requires minimal training?

*

On the same edition of Lateline where Pym described the incident in space, Dr. Herbert Eagle, former Dean of Men at Eastern State University, is quoted as saying, “When [Richards] proposed a practical hyperdrive… financial backers fought for the opportunity to invest in his prototype.” Yet, ultimately, the project was funded and pulled at the discretion of the U.S. government. With the private sector champing at the bit to fund Richards’ project, why was the government interested enough to foot the bill themselves, and again, why was a hyperdrive and the ability to be operated with minimal training a necessity?

It was only after Reed Richards’ encounter with the extraterrestrial creature known as Gormuu, self-proclaimed “Warrior of Kraalo,” was declassified and published in comic book form (Vol. 1, #271) that we could begin connecting these dots. The account revealed how, some time before making his flight with the future Fantastic Four, Richards helped defeat this would-be conqueror through ingenuity and quick thinking. The incident strengthened his resolve to complete his in-progress “experimental star-drive rocket” because “this experience with Gormuu has shown [the] universe to be more dangerous than anyone ever suspected.”  It seems probable, even likely, that the U.S. government agreed with Richards’ assessment, and that they agreed to finance the rocket not for research or exploration, as Richards intended, but for defense purposes: as a prototype for the next generation of military vehicle, one that could engage extraterrestrial threats.

Here, the unusual requirements of the rocket start to make sense. It would be prohibitively expensive to create a military fleet of conventional spacecraft with heavy radiation shielding, each of which would require massive, highly trained crews on the ground and in the air just to take off and land. But, what about a spaceship, with cost-effective magnetic shields, operated by one or two experienced astronauts that would allow additional, minimally-trained personnel to perform other functions, perhaps even combat?  Whatever Richards’ original goals for faster-than-light travel, such a ship creates compelling military implications.

Why, then, would the government abandon this idea? In fact, they might not have, at least not completely. Shortly after the Richards’ flight, a lower-profile but still very unusual space launch was undertaken by Col. John Jameson – not from NASA’s usual launch site at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, but just outside New York City.  This launch could take place close to a major metropolitan center, with relatively little preparation time.  Jameson was not even in the rocket fifteen minutes before launch! Perhaps this unique launch received so little attention because it was overshadowed by a malfunction with the rocket and its subsequent rescue by the burgeoning vigilante Spider-Man, then known largely for his television appearances and live stunt shows. But might that rocket have been a derivative of Richards’ technology? Did the government steal Richards’ designs and then shut down his program in favor of a homegrown one? Richards might have been uncomfortable with his work being used for explicit military purposes.  His own subsequent work, after all, has largely been focused on exploration, with superhuman combat used only when needed and as a last resort.

*

We can make an even wilder speculation here, an intriguing speculation which has never been proposed before now. Consider the other unusual major military project undertaken at around the same time as the Richards project.  Just what was Dr. Robert Bruce Banner working on in the New Mexico desert before the accident that transformed him into the Hulk?

If the Richards rocket was top secret, Banner’s project was doubly so. The official story, as it was originally disseminated, was that Banner was studying gamma radiation for medical or genetic research.  Some sources or adaptations continue to use that explanation, undoubtedly because it makes Banner a more sympathetic figure. But today, we know that Banner was actually working on a gamma-powered weapon, although its purpose has never been made clear.

A “gamma bomb” would likely be considerably more powerful and considerably more deadly than any conventional nuclear weapon in history. The utility of such a weapon seems limited: most nuclear weapons research focuses on variable yield rather than just a bigger payload.  Whatever your political and ethical feelings about weapons of mass destruction, harnessing this highly unusual radiation for a bomb that could only sanely be conceived of as a “use only in case of Armageddon” deterrent would seem to be an egregious waste of a potentially world-changing form of energy.

But what if the gamma bomb was never meant to be used in defense or offense against another nation on Earth? What if it was a weapon designed to be used against Kraalo, or the other hostile civilizations of the universe we were only just beginning to encounter? What kind of deployment system would such a weapon require?  In light of the Fantastic Four’s reputation as peaceful ambassadors representing humankind at its finest and most high-minded, it is chilling to consider that in other circumstances, the Richards rocket might have been used as an interplanetary Enola Gay carrying a gamma-powered Little Boy.

…the Origin of Doom 2099 (or “The Fate of Doctor Doom”)?

In this special guest post, Victor Cardigan, admin of the 2099Bytes Facebook page and owner of a fan-site dedicated to 2099, gives you his thoughts on Doom 2099’s true identity.

In the year 2099, mega-corporations rule everything. They run the United States, with each of the mega-corp CEO’s ruling their own slice of the country. Mega-Corps such as Alchemax, Stark-Fujikawa, Pixel, and D/Monix, to name a few, serve as the primary antagonists in the 2099 books.

There are no heroes in 2099, at least not at first. The heroes we know – the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the X-Men – are all gone after the end of the Age of Heroes. Exactly how that age ended is shrouded in mystery. The world of 2099 suffers from a “cultural amnesia.” Only snippets of the Heroic Age remain, distorted by the passage of time.

When Marvel launched the 2099 universe in 1992, it included four characters: Spider-Man, Punisher, Ravage, and Doom. Ostensibly, Doom 2099 was the only character implied to have a direct connection to the original.  In fact, he believed himself to be the original Doctor Doom. Given Doom’s penchant for time travel, a technological capability of his since his very first appearance in Fantastic Four #5, it seemed reasonable that this Doom was the genuine article.

But, writer John Francis Moore threw readers a curve ball in Doom 2099 #1, planting the seed of doubt when Doom 2099 faced his first opponent, Tiger Wylde.  Unmasked, Doom 2099 was revealed to be a young man sporting an unscarred face – definitely not the original. He was also definitely not a Doombot, since Tiger Wylde burned his face away, leaving him to bleed all over the office carpet. Adding to the doubts about his identity, Doom 2099 suffered from amnesia and could not account for his whereabouts prior to his sudden arrival in 2099.

Despite these clues, Doom 2099 clearly had extensive knowledge that only the real Doctor Doom could have. For example, he knew the true purpose of an amulet he gave to Boris, his longtime friend and ally.

Writer John Francis Moore teased readers with more details surrounding Doom 2099’s past in issue #2.  There, we learned that Doom apparently outlived allies and enemies alike, surviving the end of the Age of Heroes. Doom, however, was still human, and age took its toll on his health. His friend Boris, apparently deceased, was replaced by Damon, who attended to his declining health.

Despite his triumph, Doom became convinced that shadowy wraiths were subverting his empire. In order to rout them, Doom “hurled himself again into the void.”

Another fragment of his past was revealed in Doom 2099 #3, where we learned that Doom’s attempt to bring unity and vision resulted in the destruction of a city or cities. Accompanied by his servant Damon, Doom concluded that to restore order he must leave. He knew where he would find answers, but readers were left to ponder where Doom went. All we knew for sure is that after his journey, whatever the outcome, he ended up in 2099.

These questions were tabled until Doom 2099 #19, when Doom 2099 received a vision that made him doubt his own identity. He saw another man’s face reflected in a mirror. He saw himself seemingly tortured by the “real” Doctor Doom.

Later, in issue #21, Doom 2099 received further evidence that there was another Victor von Doom in the mad ranting and ravings of Christian L’Argent. L’Argent, an Alchemax employee gone AWOL, traveled to the Savage Land in order to escape the all-seeing eyes of the Shadows who truly rule the world above and beyond the powers of the mega-corps.  L’Argent identified Doctor Doom as one of these Shadows.

The quest for the truth about his identity led Doom 2099 to the island of Myridia, a nexus of information ruled by General Tibor Czerny. There, Doom 2099 learned that General Czerny had a son, Erik. Erik disappeared fourteen years ago, obsessed with finding the Shadows he believed were responsible for the “political and social crises of recent years.”

In issue #25, Doom 2099 learned that 14 years earlier, in 2085, Erik Czerny was captured by one of the shadows he was chasing: Margaretta von Geisterstadt. Margaretta also happened to be the lover of another of these shadows: Victor von Doom. Margaretta and Doom played games, deadly games, against each other. Margaretta’s most recent scheme ended with Doom being severely wounded. She then placed Doom in a regenerative bubble to be healed. Meanwhile, she brainwashed Erik into believing he was the real Doctor Doom until the healed Doom was ready. This healing process would take fourteen years. Once he was ready, she unleashed him with Erik’s memories mixed with his own incomplete ones into the year 2099.

This “origin,” however, left some questions unanswered. Certainly it remains an open question if Doom 2099 is indeed the real Doom. Margaretta, a brilliant geneticist, could easily have “grown” her own Doctor Doom. L’Argent suggested as much during the Savage Land incident. There is also the question of character: how did the Doctor Doom we know evolve into Doom 2099?

After Doom 2099 was cancelled, I still wondered how Doctor Doom became Doom 2099. Although I believe them to be the same man, they are clearly the same man at two drastically different points in their life. The younger Doctor Doom is still fueled by his desire to destroy the Fantastic Four and rule the world.  Doom 2099 wants primarily to safeguard his homeland, Latveria. If that means taking over the world and making it a better place, so be it. But based on what we see in Doom 2099 #25, Doom decided at some point to leave Latveria and rule the world from the shadows. How? Why? When?

I propose that Doctor Doom made the choice to withdraw from the world and rule as a shadow king after two life-altering encounters with his own future. The first encounter was in Iron Man #250. That story showed Doctor Doom transported to the year 2093, a mere six years prior to 2099. He met and killed his future self, finding him a pathetic shadow of Doom’s former self. The Doom of 2093 was more robot than man. He lived only by virtue of the mechanics in his armor. Doom swore that this would not be his future.

Yes, at the end of Iron Man #250, Merlin erased both Iron Man’s and Doctor Doom’s memories of the events which transpired. However Iron Man: Legacy of Doom showed Tony Stark breaking through Merlin’s spell to recall the events of Legacy of Doom. I propose that Doom could similarly break through the spell and recall the events of Iron Man #250 at a later date.

The second encounter took place in the pages of Doom 2099 itself. Issue #43 tells the story of how Doom 2099 traveled to the year 1996. During his trip, he met his past self. After learning of his failed conquest of America and the subsequent destruction of Latveria, Doctor Doom once again denied this would be his future.

I propose these two encounters had a profound effect on Doctor Doom. They gave him important information about his future and informed his decisions on how to extend his life – and how to live it. From both encounters he learned that by the 2090s, he would still be trying to take over the world.

Remember, Doctor Doom has successfully taken over the world on a number of occasions. Two things always happen.  One, he gets bored.  (See the graphic novel Avengers: Emperor Doom and the two-part story Super-Villain Team-Up #14/Champions #16 for examples.)  Two, he is overthrown.

I propose that at a future date, a unique solution occurs to him. Instead of conquering the world publically, he will conquer the world in secret and become its shadow king. Thus, Doctor Doom leaves Latveria, possibly leaving a Doombot in charge, or maybe Kristoff.  Doctor Doom moves into the shadows to do his work, and he succeeds.

Doctor Doom quickly realizes that by removing himself from the scene, he can assert greater control over the world. Being in the shadows has its benefits. For instance, no one is trying to overthrow him, because they don’t know he’s really in charge. Also, he need not become bored with the daily drudgery that comes with being ruler of the world.

In time, he discovers he is not alone in the shadows. There are other such shadow kings – possibly Vulcann, Essex, and the Shaper’s Guild, all mentioned by John Francis Moore at the end of X-Men 2099. These Shadows are a loose cabal who do not exactly work together. In fact, they vie to wrest control of the world from each other. These Shadows, including Doom, push the world’s buttons from behind the scenes. It was their machinations that ignited the Pollution Wars which erupted between elected governments and the giant trans-national corporations. It was the hand of the Shadows which pulled the strings of the ruling mega-corps to hide advanced technology from the public. The world is their chessboard. Hidden from public view, Doom is no longer a piece on the board but one of the players moving the pawns.

In the shadows, Doctor Doom meets a woman, Margaretta von Geisterstadt, whose intelligence is matched only by her cunning. She is a master player in the chess game of the Shadows. Where she comes from is not important. She is the last of her people, as her name implies: von Geisterstadt = of Ghost Town. She lost everything in her past because of events completely out of her control. To make up for this lack of control, she sought total control of the world.  She has attained this, arguably, as a Shadow Queen.

This brings us to the second part of my proposal. I posit that the “cancer” which gnaws at Doctor Doom in the flashback from Doom 2099 #2 was not a preoccupation with the Shadows subverting his empire.  That was merely Erik Czerny’s memories bleeding into Doom’s. Rather, it was a real cancer.

What caused this illness? Take your pick from all the various energies Doom has exposed his body to over the years.  His body has held the power cosmic (stolen from the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #57), the power of the Beyonder (Secret Wars #10), the power of Galactus (Fantastic Four World’s Greatest Comics Magazine #10), the power of a Watcher (Fantastic Four #375), and the Life Force (Avengers: The Children’s Crusade #7.)  A line of dialogue in Doom 2099 #43 could be interpreted as evidence of this future cancer. Doom 2099’s final warning to his younger self was, “But know this, for every victory you savor, there will be a loss that scars you.”

A human body was never meant to hold or endure being exposed to such energies. I propose that as the Age of Heroes ends and Doom survives triumphantly, his body finally succumbs to the years of torment he has put it through.  Never one to lie down and die, Doom seeks options to extend his life. However, Doom is acutely aware he must be careful of the choices he makes. At all costs he wants to avoid the future he saw in Iron Man #250.

Having vowed to change this future, and seeing that technology alone will not save him, Doom attempts to restore his health through mystical means. He returns to the place of his “birth” and attempts a “rebirth.” Doom travels to the Himalayas and visits the hidden order of monks who forged his first armor.

In a repeat of what Dr. Strange once did for him during the Infinity Gauntlet story (Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #34,) Doom attempts to heal himself in the furnace of his birth as Doctor Doom. Unfortunately, the restorative qualities of the flames are not enough to completely cure him.  They only stall his death. Doom leaves to continue his search for a cure, but not alone.  As seen in the Doom 2099 #2 flashback, he takes with him one of the monks, Damon, who administers his medicine.

For his cure, Doom turns to an unlikely source: one of the Shadows. Doom has always been drawn to powerful women like Morgan Le Fey, Storm, and Dorma.  It is not surprising he was drawn to Margaretta. Margaretta is likewise drawn to Doom because, in his weakened state, he is a man she can dominate.  Just look at her style of dress in the flashback in Doom 2099 #25 if you need evidence that this is her type of thing. Margaretta, a master geneticist, offers Doom a cure for his illness. He promptly accepts. In this way, Necrotek’s tease about Margaretta in Doom 2099 #13 comes true: her “love” redeems him. But how does it curse him?

A “cured” Doom begins an ongoing relationship with Margaretta. But, theirs is not a flowery romance. It is a game of chess, with the whole world as their chessboard. We know of Doom’s penchant for chess games from tales like Fantastic Four Special, Master of Kung-Fu #59-60, and Strange Tales #167. Doom and Margaretta’s games, like those of all who lurk in the shadows, shake and move events on a global scale.

However, by 2085, it becomes clear that Margaretta’s cure is not as permanent as they thought. Doom’s condition begins to deteriorate once more. Margaretta concludes that in order to heal Doom once and for all, she requires a “clean” genetic sample of Doom. She needs a sample not tainted by the energies he exposed himself to in his public quest to rule the world during the Age of Heroes.

Doom plans a journey into his own past to obtain the required sample. However, by doing this, he is inserting himself once more onto the chessboard at the mercy of Margaretta’s games. The journey into the past is a trap. Doom’s trip is diverted into a time corridor where Doom is forced to revisit his worst defeats, over and over again. The arduous flight through time ends with Doom’s arriving back at his citadel in the Pacific nearly dead.

This brings us full circle to the events depicted in Doom 2099 #25 where Margaretta finds a good use for Erik Czerny while healing Doom for her next game. She mixes Doom’s memories with Erik’s and erases some of his own memories before sending him out into the world of 2099.  This represents her best challenge yet for her lover. Doom, of course, overcomes her obstacles and wins the game. He is, after all, Doom.

…the Molecule Man and the Beyonder?

Today’s post is fnord12’s, of the Marvel Comics Chronology project.  This time around, he has decided to unpick the fixes for the Beyonder’s origin, and the character’s connection to the Molecule Man, thereby weaving a logical rat’s nest into a wearable garment.  So over to fnord12.

Ok, ok, put the pitchforks down.  I know no one wants to hear any more about the Beyonder ever again.  I know we all hated Secret Wars II, and that’s fair enough.  I’m right there with you.  But, you have to admit the ending of Secret Wars II was pretty good.  The Beyonder, we had learned, was once a universe unto himself.  After he spent the series thrashing about in our universe in various ill-advised ways, the Beyonder decided to return to the void of his previous existence.  He would forego his consciousness and become a new universe – perhaps even a New Universe.  And that’s pretty cool.  Whether you see Secret Wars II as a metaphor for Jim Shooter thrashing about and disrupting the status quo in the Marvel offices, or just a cosmic storyline full of admittedly goofy moments, the ending has a nice sense of closure.  It’s a shame it got ruined when the Beyonder was brought back and “fixed” in a really weird way – actually, in two really weird ways.  And that’s what I’m hoping to get at with this piece: a way to unfix the fixes with my own fix.

But before we get to that, a more esoteric and personal bugaboo of mine:  the handling of Molecule Man in the 1970s.  Molecule Man first appeared in Fantastic Four #20 as a nerdy dweeb who suddenly had vast power and was immediately corrupted by it.  This triggered the Watcher to break his personal vow to never interfere (we know it doesn’t take much) and alert the Fantastic Four.  Then, the Watcher spirits him away in the end.  That was Molecule Man’s only Silver Age appearance.

Then, in the 1970s, things got weird.  Steve Gerber brought the character back in the first issue of Marvel Two-In-One, but it wasn’t really him.  It was Molecule Man’s son, which he somehow produced in the isolated dimension where the Watcher had trapped him.   When his “son” comes back to Earth, he’s a much more generic villain in terms of personality.  He loses his body and instead possesses whoever holds his wand.  The resurrection as his son was also supposed to eliminate his inability to affect organic molecules.  But, that starts creeping back in later stories, beginning with an inability to affect unstable molecules.  Along the way, he also seems to become his original self again, dropping the idea that he was actually Molecule Man’s son.

Then, in the early 80s, Jim Shooter brought back Molecule Man as the original Silver Age version.  Molecule Man re-grew a body for himself, ditched the wand, and went back to his old nebbish self that we all know and love from the first Secret Wars.   (I don’t care what anyone says.  The first Secret Wars was a fun story, and Molecule Man’s interaction with the Beyonder was one of the best parts of the second series.)   Molecule Man even regained his inability to affect organic materials.  The Shooter story in Avengers #215-216 gave a quick hand-waving explanation about the wand possessions, but offered no explanation for the son thing or the reversal of his power limitation.  That always bugged me.  The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe says something about the son being a construct he created to serve as a companion, but I never liked that.  Molecule Man was never shown to be able to create something with a consciousness.  It seems like a step too far even for his godlike powers.

Now, back to the Beyonder.  Apparently, Ralph Macchio disliked the Beyonder so much that even though the character was done/finished/caput/off being another universe where he would never bother us again, he ordered Steve Englehart to bring him back just so he could do away with him again.  Fantastic Four #318-319 showed the Beyonder merging with Molecule Man so they could become a cosmic cube.  Just typing that makes my brain hurt.   Of course, this “fix” actually had the opposite of Macchio’s intended result.  Molecule Man eventually disentangled himself from the Beyonder, or Kosmos or whatever we have to call it, and went back to his usual routine.  Now, instead of having a nice finite ending, the Beyonder is free to menace the Marvel universe (and us!) without notice, as s/he did in the 2003 Thanos series.

Then, we have the second, most recent, “fix” from the New Avengers Illuminati series by Brian Michael Bendis.  The nearly incomprehensible third issue suggested the Beyonder was a mutant Inhuman all along.  It also implied that all of Secret Wars II was just an illusion played out on an unpopulated moon out in space.  It seems unlikely, considering the number of actual developments that came out of Secret Wars II, like the first appearance of Boom Boom and the curing of Rick Jones’ cancer.  How could it in any way jibe with the Kosmos story?  Bendis has said that he kept the story deliberately vague, so that we could interpret it however we want.  I am now exercising my option to do that in a way that a) preserves the original ending of Secret Wars II while b) compartmentalizing the two Beyonder “fixes” so that we can blissfully ignore them both at once, and c) addressing my personal problem with the long forgotten weirdness of the 1970s Molecule Man.  So, here we go!

What if there was a mutant Inhuman?  Let’s call him Kosmogar Beyondagon.  (That’s a Blackagar Boltagon reference, people!  Look it up!)  Kosmogar, although incredibly powerful thanks to the mind-blowing awesomeness of his mutant Inhumanism, might lack and covet a corporeal form of his own.  He would sense Molecule Man and secretly break into the dimensional prison where the Watcher was keeping him.  He would possess the lifeless construct of a “son” that Molecule Man created and then start manipulating the guy.  Eventually, Kosmogar would use their combined powers to escape, but trap Molecule Man in the wand.

Throughout the 1970s, then, we really saw Kosmogar.  That’s why he possesses various bodies, and why his powers are inconsistent.  Eventually, though, Molecule Man subconsciously asserts himself enough to expel Kosmogar.  From Shooter’s Avengers through the two Secret Wars series, we have the “regular” Molecule Man again.  But, we do see Kosmogar separately at this time, taunting the Illuminati and priming them to think the worst of the Beyonder.  Kosmogar plans to swoop in and steal the Beyonder’s power at the right moment, something he fails to do behind the scenes in the final issue of Secret Wars II.

We could tell a whole behind-the-scenes story from Kosmogar’s point of view where we get to relive a fairly chaotic battle devoid of character moments in that issue.  This story could deliver bonus fixes, like explaining why Cyclops didn’t recognize Rachel Summers using the Phoenix Force at a time when he didn’t know she was his alternate future daughter.  It could explain some of the minor errors in character appearances, like the roster of Alpha Flight that appears in that issue, while also telling the story of how Kosmogar failed to steal the Beyonder’s power.  We can also use the bodiless Kosmogar during the early 1980s period for other fixes as well, like explaining The Thing #3 where Lockjaw talked.   The other Inhumans seemed convinced he was a real person and not a dog, but Peter David’s reversal of that had some inherent contradictions.  Kosmogar wouldn’t want to risk the emergence of another mutant Inhuman, so he possesses Lockjaw long enough to make him talk and discourage Quicksilver from exposing Luna to the Terrigen Mists, and then puts it into the Inhumans’ heads that it was all just a practical joke.

After Secret Wars II is over, Kosmogar starts manipulating Kubik and the other cosmic entities.  He gets them to think he is the Beyonder and force him to merge with Molecule Man again – which is what he actually wants.  When Molecule Man disentangles himself, Kosmogar goes on to appear in the short-lived Thanos series, where he’s put into a coma (Thanos #10).

This fix keeps the real Beyonder safely away from all of the post-Secret Wars II nonsense, allowing him to have retired in peace never to be used again.  Plus, it provides an explanation for the changes to the Molecule Man.  If we were doing all of this in some actual comics, we could frame it around a Secret Wars III.  Don’t groan!  We could have all of our various sentient cosmic cubes – Kubik, the Shaper of Worlds, and, yes, the Kosmos/Beyonder – each pitting a faction of heroes and/or villains against each other for the purposes of some cosmic contest set up by the Grandmaster.  Keeping it not too complex leaves room to work in all our changes.  It starts to come out during the course of the story that the head of the third faction isn’t really the Beyonder.  He is really Kosmos, or rather our Kosmogar.

What does Kosmogar want?  What was all that possession of the Molecule Man and his various machinations for?  Well, that’s what Secret Wars III can be about, interspersed with some classic Secret Wars-style slugfests.    We can flash back to his birth and childhood and exposure to the Terrigen Mists, seeing how he first gained his powers but also lost his corporeal form.  For all his vast power, he’s been unable to create permanent body for himself.  The “son” created by the Molecule Man got burned out by his energies, and he had to release all the other forms he possessed or they would have burnt out too.  In order to form a permanent body, he needs truly cosmic power.  The real Beyonder could have created one for him, but Kosmogar failed in that attempt.  Now he needs to win the Grandmaster’s contest.  But, why does he want a body?  Again we go back to his childhood to find a very simple and human reason:  a boy that could never receive a hug from his parents, a kiss from his girlfriend, or even pet his Lockjaw puppy.  Over the years in his quest for power his mind has become more twisted, and he’s forgotten the reason for his quest.  But with this, we can resolve the character arc for Kosmogar without him ever succeeding in gaining a body, as our heroes delve into his psyche and learn that, deep inside, he’s just a little boy that needed a hug.

…X-Men Forever

This post comes from G. Kendall who began his blog Not Blog X to answer a simple question: Were X-Men comics in the ’90s as bad as you think?  The focus eventually began to shift to all mainstream comics from the ’90s, leading him to review everything from Spider-Man’s clone saga to the Archie TMNT series.  Over the years his site has been linked on major comics sites like CBR, The Comics Journal, Newsarama and even the New York Times’ pop culture blog.  Amazingly, ’90s comics haven’t killed him yet, but they have tried very hard at times.

X-Men Forever debuted in 2009 as the latest Chris Claremont X-project. The premise was simple but also intriguing: what if Claremont never left the X-Men in 1991? Claremont’s abrupt departure from the X-Men titles after his historic run of over fifteen years seemed unthinkable to the core fan base at the time. Now, years later, readers had a chance to see what could, or if you’re a certain type of fan, should have happened next.

Hopes were high, but as soon as the preview pages for X-Men Forever #1 were released, Internet Outrage had officially begun. The next chronological issue of Claremont’s run would’ve been X-Men (vol. 2) #4, an early entry in the “merged team” era of the titles that featured an X-Men cast consisting of over a dozen characters. The teams were divided into Blue and Gold squads, with each squad receiving a separate title dedicated to their exploits. X-Men Forever #1 opens with no Blue or Gold squads, just a single group of X-Men that’s missing several established members of the team, circa Claremont’s final issue.

A logical assumption can be made that the other cast members are on a mission and that Claremont never intended for the Blue and Gold squads to have static line-ups. Not that these words were ever spoken aloud in the series, of course, but it’s a painless No-Prize explanation. But, there is a larger problem for the continuity-minded reader. Shadowcat and Nightcrawler, two characters written off years earlier to appear in the British-themed spinoff Excalibur, are now members of the team. A line or two indicates that Excalibur still exists, but what are these two characters doing here? How could this possibly be the X-Men (vol. 2) #4 the readers never got to see?

The real reason: a decision was made at some point in the development of X-Men Forever to keep the cast relatively small and not to dwell on every character who should hypothetically be an X-Man. That means around half of the cast is dropped, and two of Claremont’s favorite characters that he hasn’t used in ages pop up as new/old members of the team. Broadly speaking, this is a defensible position, even though the cast will soon balloon out of control with characters that weren’t X-Men in 1991. The execution, however, undermines the premise of the series. X-Men Forever #1 is clearly not the next issue of the Claremont canon, and the questions raised from the awkward transition are never adequately addressed.

Let’s find a way to get to the starting place of X-Men Forever #1 without causing any continuity headaches. How would I fix the questions of who should be where? I’ll begin with the cast as it exists in X-Men Forever #1: Xavier, Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Beast, Storm, Jean Grey, Gambit, and Shadowcat. Nightcrawler and Shadowcat are in America for Magneto’s memorial service, as established in X-Men Forever Alpha, and are now considering rejoining the team. Fair enough. Who is missing at this point, following X-Men (vol. 2) #3? Colossus, Iceman, Archangel, and Psylocke haven’t been accounted for. Plus, the mansion’s support staff, Banshee and Forge, is missing. We can’t forget Jubilee, who was last seen in the Muir Island Saga storyline. Her whereabouts during X-Men (vol. 2) #1-3 remain unknown. Future issues of X-Men Forever hint that Psylocke has joined Excalibur, and we later discover that Colossus has returned to Russia to work as a government-sanctioned superhero. Fair enough, again. But that leaves no explanation for Iceman, Archangel, Banshee, Forge, and Jubilee. Where could they have disappeared between issues?

My solution: Australia. Specifically, the deserted outback town populated by the X-Men from Uncanny X-Men #229-#251.

When last seen in Chris Claremont’s canon (Uncanny X-Men #269), the X-Men’s outback base had been overtaken by the Reavers. The last X-Man at the location was Rogue, who emerged in her old room after using the Siege Perilous to escape Master Mold. The rest of the X-Men were gone, following the events of Uncanny X-Men #251, which had Psylocke tricking the other team members to disappear through the Siege Perilous in order to avoid a fatal battle with the Reavers. Rogue found herself in enemy territory, fleeing from the Reavers. She promised Gateway that she would find the X-Men and return to help him, as she absorbed his powers and teleported far away. That’s a promise that subsequent writers quickly forgot.

The next time we see the outback base in the mainstream continuity (Uncanny X-Men #281,) Gateway is still a prisoner of the Reavers. The X-Men have found the time to defeat the Shadow King, reassemble the team with the members of X-Factor, and rebuild their mansion in Salem Center. But, they never got around to helping poor Gateway. What if, in the Forever continuity, Rogue didn’t forget about her promise? I posit that after the united X-teams battle with the Shadow King, Rogue explains the situation in the outback to her teammates. Their response would not be to sit around and do nothing. It would be an all-out mutant assault on the Reavers! Gateway is rescued, the Reavers are defeated, and the X-Men have control of their former base once again.

What if the months spent rebuilding the mansion were also spent reclaiming the Australian base? So, where did Iceman, Archangel, Banshee, and Forge disappear to? They split their time between Salem Center and Australia, thanks to Gateway’s teleportation powers. What are they doing there? My theory is that they’re training the next generation of young mutants. That’s where Jubilee’s been the entire time: she is the first student of the All-New, All-Secret Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.

While the school in Salem Center is in fact a home for well-educated adults, the real Xavier school is in a secret ghost town in Australia. What better place to hide the next generation of mutants from a world that fears and hates them? The geography is almost impossible to reach, protecting the school from intruders, while Gateway’s teleportation powers grant easy access for the mutants to travel to any location they wish. The school in Salem Center can be the cover, the public face of the school, while the students are actually in the safest possible location.

Now, you might ask why Xavier himself isn’t in Australia training these mutants. I have two rebuttals. One: the precedent set in the mainstream continuity is that Xavier stays with the adult X-Men in Salem Center while Banshee (with Emma Frost) trains the neophyte mutants in Generation X. It is plausible that a group of X-Men, including Banshee, would be chosen to head up the new, secret school in the outback. Two: who is to say Xavier isn’t teaching these kids? He could reach them telepathically, or travel there at any time thanks to Gateway’s powers. Just because we never saw the events on-panel doesn’t mean they couldn’t have happened. It’s not as if we ever saw the mansion being rebuilt, either.

With the Australian base reintroduced into the series, Claremont has the option to finally resolve all of the danglers relating to Gateway and the outback ghost town. He would not have to shift the focus of the series to this location, but he could throw an occasional storyline towards the “B-team” while also giving the readers the answers he teased decades ago. If anyone is going to unlock the secrets of the Australian base, wouldn’t Forge be the most likely contender?

I can’t speak for what Claremont had in mind for the Australian base, but he certainly planted enough clues following its introduction Uncanny X-Men #229 to indicate that he had some elaborate plans for the future.  (As I’ve mentioned earlier, this site has the most comprehensive list of the danglers and possible resolutions I’ve ever read.)  Why is the computer system seemingly alive?  Why is it exempt from Roma’s spell of invisibility?  Who built the tunnels underneath the town?  What’s Gateway’s connection to the land?  What’s Gateway’s history with the Reavers?  As cryptically hinted in the letters page – why would the full truth behind Gateway cost the X-Men dearly?  Perhaps after some of the answers are revealed, we’ll discover this isn’t the best place to be training teenage mutants.  But would the X-Men discover this information in time?

Are all of these X-Men traveling across the globe for the sake of educating one mutant? Of course not! There are plenty of unclaimed mutants at this point in continuity that could be potential recruits. The X-Terminators are still around, leaving Wiz Kid, Artie, and Leech as potential students. X-Men (vol. 2) #1-3 has already been established as predating Uncanny X-Men #281. That means it could conceivably take place before X-Force #4 as well. X-Force #4 had Siryn joining the team. But, had she been reached by Xavier sooner, it is entirely possible that she would have joined Jubilee in the outback. That’s one more student. Rictor and Wolfsbane are unaccounted for during this period, with Rictor abandoning the New Mutants in order to “rescue” Wolfsbane in Genosha. Shouldn’t the X-Men take care of something like this? And, while we’re at it, wouldn’t the former members of X-Factor be interested in rescuing Rusty and Skids from the MLF? See, there’s an entire student body waiting to be taught at this location.

It’s a simple solution, and it’s a shame X-Men Forever never gave the readers an explanation like this. It’s an easy, one sentence justification for shuffling any unwanted character from this era off the stage. “Where’s Iceman?! I know he was an X-Man at this point!” “Australia.” There. Done! Not only does this solution ease the transition from the original continuity to the Forever continuity, but it leaves several doors open for new stories. It also gives Claremont an opportunity to resolve storylines he was never able to finish in his original run; i.e., what the audience expected from the title in the first place.

…Avengers Forever? (part three of three)

Aaaand here it is, Fan-Fixers, the epic conclusion! This is where I sign off, and turn control of your television back over to you! I’d like to thank Nate for letting me post this gargantuan folly on his blog, and thank him and Richard Bensam both for being faithful beta-readers…both highly inventive fellows! There really is some nice stuff floating around here, isn’t there? Barring a massive public outcry, I think I’ll have to return soon, and dash some more absurd paint on these still-partly-blank walls…

Thanks for reading! Your pal, Plok.

Like Johnny Storm, Reader, you are passing through the celestial barriers known as Un-Life! To touch them is to perish! But this is why I have selected you! Only you possess the necessary skill to make this journey!

Reed, Sue, and Ben can’t hear you yet! You’re still on some different plane! But you’re getting closer…CLOSER…!

THE MISTS ARE CLEARING…!

“It’s the kid! He’s okay!”

Indeed he is, and look what he’s brought with him.

It’s gonna go fast, now. The moment of truth is at hand.

Fair warning, for those of you who haven’t done the assigned homework.

SO!!

The important thing to bear in mind, is that within the confines of the MU’s fictional reality the divergent timelines do not share an equal ontological status with the main timeline. In our own reality, things that didn’t happen can be mapped, and that map can be used to explain why the world’s actual events took the actual course they did…and the MU is no different, notwithstanding the fact that you can go visit the places where things happened differently and fall in love with Kitty Pryde there or whatever. In the limitless branches and sub-branches of the tree of never-happened that supports the world, these encounters are accounted for too, you see…and they’re not nothing, not by any means, but they do remain merely a part of the overall “calculation”. Well, if they could be any more than that, the MU would have imploded as soon as Professor Horton let that first little bit of oxygen into the Torch’s glass tank!

Every moment in time would have attained an infinite energy density, and closed just like the mouth of a wormhole before a single photon could penetrate to its centre!

Because in a fictional universe one can arrange for many things to happen that ordinarily cannot happen, but one cannot arrange for EVERYTHING to happen that ordinarily cannot. Or at least: one cannot arrange for all these to happen at once.

So by the immutable law of the real-world physics that have crept into the MU just by accident, even though such creeping-in was never actively intended by anyone, it is nevertheless true that the main line is “real”, and the divergents are not. Even a divergent that also diverges further by having a visitor from the main line “enter” it…well, that does add to the mix, but it only adds to the mix, and it doesn’t change the fact — the fact! — that the divergents are constituents of the main line in the same way that the main line is not a mere constituent of the divergents. Oh, to be sure, the main line wouldn’t be what it is without the divergents! Ever wonder why the heroes always win, and the universe never dies? Well, it’s because there’s a universe out there where that does happen (even though everybody does the exact right thing), but there’s also a universe out there where it doesn’t happen (even though everyone screws up!), and when you count up all these different kinds of universes what you find is that they basically sum to “Peter Parker eventually became Spider-Man anyway”. Johnny brought back the Ultimate Nullifier. Dr. Strange beat Dormammu. Thor still made his father proud, even though his father was so pissed at him, and Jean still died because she loved Scott.

Or to put it another, slightly-weirder way: we know there’s only one main line, because seeing the divergent timelines is actually proof that there’s only one main line. The robustness of the main line is accounted for by a (relatively) simple tally of other possible universes: the universes where things break down utterly are outliers, and the universes where they don’t are amplifiers. And it isn’t that it couldn’t be otherwise — because anything may occur in a fictional reality — but it’s that it isn’t otherwise, because the necessities of the publishing business in the real world have made Marvel’s fictional universe stable over time in its world. Interstitial space clutches at vanished forms, and preserves them against some future day of resurrection: however things fall out or fall apart, the MU “remembers” them as they were before things went pear-shaped.

However.

There is also Avengers Forever.

The fractal net of Limbo extends to everyplace there’s a phase transition, to everywhere there’s a boundary…and there is a BIG one between the main line and its constituents in the counting universe of Hilbert Space. Going into Tme is dangerous as hell for Immortus, because (in complementary fashion) it is only from Time that you can actually change things pretty fast and pretty directly. There may be a What If? in which Reed Richards is kept from stealing the Pocket Rocket, and in that alternate universe it may develop that he steals it anyway, or that somebody else steals it, or anything else that makes it so there’s a Fantastic Four in any event…or the universe may end because there isn’t a Fantastic Four, or anything at all may happen but it’s still subject to “calculation”, still just a matter of where that branch is located on the ol’ Tree of Life…but if you get into Dr. Doom’s time machine and go back in the main line to that fateful day, you will be able to definitely stop that rocket from taking off, and there is no “calculation” about it.

Oh…except that the main line is robust, right? So you may stop the rocket from taking off, but you will not be able to be sure that the FF won’t still come into existence somehow. Somewhere there are a bunch of possibilities surrounding the FF that most definitely include you stopping them from taking off in the rocket, and if in a lot of those they become the FF anyway, well you may not be able to stop that from happening. Possibilities boil and bubble beneath the skin of eventuality, and all of them count…so cut one away, and that doesn’t mean you have cut all away. Before your intervention, the sum of divergents ensured a Fantastic Four…

And after your intervention, they may still ensure it, but the real point here is: a time machine does allow you to cut into the flesh of “what happened”, very directly and to immense immediate effect. And hey, it’s possible that you may succeed anyway, right? After all you don’t know that your own robustness might not triumph over that of the Fantastic Four…!

Maybe they’re not so special as you are, right?

But there’s another way to change the main line, and that’s by pruning the divergents. An unimaginably monumental task! To create a “diffraction grating” of that scope, that’s as contingent on other divergents not changing around it, that involves messing about with such frighteningly infinite numbers of universes…to be honest you would be better off taking your chances with the time machine, but for Immortus it’s a better option, because going into Hilbert Space doesn’t threaten him at all. It’s far more difficult a matter than just sending the Space Phantom to alter real and actual Time, but it has the twin advantages of safety and precision…because there is probably some serious question about whether or not it can even be done, but at least all your mistakes will be confined to the laboratory, right? God, how long would it take to alter the weave of the divergents enough to cause a real change in the main line, could you even be sure that it would work at all much less the way you want it to…but again, there’s complementarity there: the more time it takes, the more you can take your time. And since in Limbo there is no time anyway, you have to think that Immortus could eventually do just exactly as he pleased…

If he had a reason to, which of course by himself he does not. What can change his own life? Nothing, anymore. What does he care about what happens in Time?

There’s no reason for him to care about any of it.

Except maybe Kang. At some point Kang “wearies”, and becomes the second Rama-Tut…and it does appear as though once he does so his transformation into Immortus may not be capable of being halted. Immortus certainly doesn’t appear to care much about interfering with Rama-Tut II! But he does care about Kang, thus we might assume that Kang’s retirement is the key. A sophisticated Limboite like Immortus can probably feel when the boundaries that make up his environment change because something has disappeared or something has emerged — or re-emerged — in much the same way that the Space Phantom can probably feel when the number of his fractured selves is going up or down. So perhaps Immortus knows that the MU has a tendency he can’t hope to entrain very much, of sending forms away and then bringing them back. After the meeting of all three of his selves in the affair of the Celestial Madonna, he didn’t give a damn if Kang died — although Rama-Tut II did! — and in fact we could even go so far as to suggest he wanted Kang to die, that once he and his earlier selves had met in the same place and gotten their timelines irretrievably tangled it was his plan that Kang must die…but whether he wanted it or he didn’t, whether he planned it or not, in the end it didn’t matter because the MU brought Kang back.

Complementarity: Kang wasn’t necessary to Immortus anymore, but because of that Immortus also had no say in whether he had to exist or not. Once the threat of paradox no longer bound their fates, then…well, their fates weren’t bound, were they?

And Kang’s Decision once again was a threat. BUT!! Complemetarity one more time: Immortus probably concluded that the MU didn’t need Kang to turn into Immortus, in fact might be inclined to continue “remembering” his form even after he turned into Immortus…so was this not, perhaps, the very source of the danger to him? Multiple reappearing Kangs, all headed toward the unfixed point in the interstitial fluid that was blowing little Immortus-bubbles into Limbo. As long as Kang could become Immortus, then Immortus was in danger of becoming Phantomized…but if the universe didn’t need Kang to become Immortus, then all Immortus had to do was…

…Just make sure that what his fictional reality wanted, it got?

But then enter the Time-Keepers. Immortus lied about this too, it seems, because the Time-Keepers are not exactly figures shrouded in mystery. In fact, it’s painfully obvious that most of what’s ever been said about them can’t be straightforwardly true. And should Immortus not know about it? At the end of Time, in its last moments, the “One Who Remains” creates the Time-Twisters, beings charged with immense temporal powers…then thinks better of letting them loose, creating the Time-Keepers instead. And we are told this resulted in two separate flip-flopping states of possible reality, a final divergence between two timelines: one which was dominated by the “evil” Time-Twisters, and one which was dominated by their “good” twins the Time-Keepers.

And what we are told here is obviously not true, to the point where if we accept it we pretty much must also accept Gerry Conway’s mistake about how rocket propulsion works. A rocket doesn’t need anything to push against, obviously, no matter what it says in a little yellow caption box. For that matter, and just to show that even the original talent must not be limitlessly respected in this way, the Hulk cannot be just so strong that he can change course on a massive jump through the air, because there isn’t any strength like that outside of Flex Mentallo. The Hulk also (unlike Flex) can’t be just so strong that he can read minds or turn invisible, either! And in a like manner…

The episode of He Who Remains cannot have created two divergents at the end of time, because it actually created four. One in which there is only the Time-Twisters. One in which there is only the Time-Keepers. One in which both exist. One in which neither of them exist. And also we could even imagine a “hidden fifth”, an implied negative — oh, how I love these implied negatives, a staple of Western literature since The Brothers Karamazov! The obscured ground, upon which the forms float! — in which He Who Remains doesn’t even make it to the end of time, never thinks of making any powerful Time-Beings at all, where it all just sort of…never happened even a little.

And in the calculation of all that, it is apparent that the mainline MU is one in which there are Time-Keepers but no Time-Twisters, which would ordinarily be the end of it…except that there are a couple of extenuating circumstances, because the Time-Twisters, like the Time-Keepers and the Time Variance Authority they (presumably) founded, have too much power — and too little sense of responsibility! — to be trusted anywhere near anything that’s even like time. On the Tree of Never-Happened there are millions of Peter Parker branches and millions of Fantastic Four branches, and they’re all different…but every last twig terminates in one of only five conditions as regards the Twisters/Keepers, and none of those twig-ends has any other idea in their tiny minds except “survive” and “beat the other guy”. So that ubiquity actually represents a tremendous power to trim divergent universes — well, that’s what you get when you advance a pawn all the way to the end of the board! — but there are a couple of things standing in the way of this power being fully employed.

One is theoretical: inside Hilbert Space the Keepers and Twisters doubtless act to create a terrible centipetal power that could collapse all the divergents together, but the manner by which they might accomplish this is not necessarily clear. How does it work, exactly, when inside a divergent universe there lies an amplitude for said universe to alter another? Would a dimension-hopper from inside Hilbert Space actually be able to make it to another branch of the Tree? Or would it simply create another sub-branch? The question is open, but if it so happens that the second possibility is the one that obtains, then it would seem that Twisters and Keepers across the Tree would have to be content with competing on the basis of who could create the greatest number of sub-domains: in a manner slightly analogous, then, to how altering the mainline by screwing with divergents is less direct than simply entering Time. So if that were the case, Immortus’ power to operate from Limbo as a Limbo-seated being (something which neither Twisters nor Keepers, Universe-dwellers by law of what’s printed in a Thor comic somewhere, can do), would be a powerful weapon for doppelganger to employ against doppelganger…

…If only they could compel Immortus to do their bidding somehow!

Another thing that stands in the way of the Keepers/Twisters War destroying the Tree is mathematical: they just cannot comprehend that numbering divergent universes doesn’t do any good unless the universes are enumerable…which they’re not, or at least not without using the invention known as “fractions” that both Keepers and Twisters seem so senselessly to abhor. But I guess this is just a way of thinking inherited from the unimaginative hordes of the TVA whose ultimate product was He Who Remains…patrollers of time who do little more than walk up and down the same sidewalk on the same side of the same block all day, and call it a city. To explain how the TVA can even continue to function in the MU without so much as the ability to count properly (I mean really, there are four divergents there at the end of Time, for heaven’s sake! How do they stubbornly see only two?) would probably take an essay even longer than this one (!), but I can only assume what they’re doing is analogous to what the Twisters/Keepers would be doing in Alternity if they were actually unable to jump from branch to branch of the Tree…just constantly expanding a sub-domain that they perceive as the All. Powerful? Tyrannical? Absurd? Yes, yes, and yes…but fortunately also small. Did they really threaten to take the Watcher’s dimensional viewer away? It’s hard to imagine anything more rewritable at some future date than the adventures of the TVA, in fact at this very moment I am holding myself back from proposing that they’re all just Space Phantoms, and that Immortus cooked the whole batch of them up as part of a plan to make a better diffraction grating! And, consequently, that it isn’t by accident the Keepers and Twisters find themselves needing his help…deluded about the nature of Time…

Finally, the third thing that stands in the way of the ultimate domination of the Keepers and Twisters, is that they have an Enemy. And that’s Rick Jones, wielder of the Destiny Force…although regular readers of this blog might know him better as the descendent of Moon-Boy: unintended “brother” to Michael Korvac.

What?

You think the Time-Keepers care about the brutal Human Empire of the future?

What did they ever do about the brutal Empires of the past?

And meanwhile…back in Limbo…

Immortus finds that Kang is back. It doesn’t even matter how…in fact, it barely matters who, because Kang the individual isn’t the problem: his timeline is.

How to make it take another direction?

What matters to the Space Phantom is what happens in Time; divergent universes, which he can pretty much spawn at will, can’t hurt him…but his own presence in Time can. What matters to Immortus is breaking the time-loop that connects him to Kang; once he doesn’t have that to worry about, he’ll be completely immune to consequences arising from Time. What matters to the Time-Keepers is divergent universes; in Alternity, they are racing their dark reflections to see who can produce more divergents that are under their control, in order to replace the other in the mainline MU…although they are unaware that such an attempt is doomed by their stubbornly number-line thinking, no matter how Aleph-1 ubiquitous they may be on the tips of the branches…

And somewhere in the middle is Rick Jones…since evidently the Destiny Force can affect what goes on in every sphere of existence that we’ve detailed so far. And perhaps its reach may even extend to the interstitial fluid, wherein all forms are remembered? Rick’s power of imagination seems functionally identical to Roy Thomas’ power of memory — that is: it is a reader’s memory — though it seems quite certain Rick can’t possibly know this — which implies that his Destiny Force is an active factor in all three of the realities we have examined: Universe, Limbo, and Alternity. Which is no particular problem for any “metaversal” figure who’s trying to escape overdetermination…as (in this construction) Immortus and the Space Phantom surely are…but it’s absolute FROZEN HELL on any such figure who is seeking a defence in overdetermination, as the Time-Keepers are. Rick Jones, after all, can summon forth from his subconscious characters that are NOT currently in MU continuity…not to yank you out of the fictional context for no reason, Reader, but Rick Jones is one of those characters that provides writers and artists with the opportunity to drawn in le vrai Alan Moore-style “Alternity” …over there in the corner, that’s Mr. Magic…the Phantom is punching him…Neil The Horse looks on…Linus cowers under his blanket while the original Daredevil bloodily subdues Fin Fang Foom…Doc Savage looks on in concern, while The Shadow stands invisibly behind him and laughs…

So there’s no “control”, in a situation where that’s possible. The TVA seizes the tremendous power of the very last instant of Time, to create a method of exerting control over continuity that couldn’t possibly exist otherwise…but Rick Jones, though initially just an Atom Age Jimmy Olsen for an Atom Age Superman, became something else when Roy Thomas wrote him as an identification figure: became connected to the desires of a real person in the real world to have an effect on the fictional world, and so he is in possession of an ability that dwarfs anything else to be found there.

In effect: he’s become a Cosmic Personification.

But, of what?

The answer is right there at hand: “fictitiousness”. Or maybe: ‘”fictionality”? But this isn’t as straightforward as perhaps it may seem to us: within the MU the key concept in play here is IMAGINATION, but from our lofty real-world perspective it’s quite clear that “imagination” in the MU is not a very “imaginative” thing at all…since Imagination, as a cosmic force in the MU, is just a grandiose helmet that Memory wears. Rick’s imagination is massively dull by our standards…oooh, look, call out Plastic Man, or Buck Rogers! Or Prospero or Mary Poppins! Or Mandrake or McMillan & Wife. Alternity begins here, in terrible boredom…the sudden influx of imagination into the MU is only stuff that we’ve seen before, and never stuff that we haven’t…the breaking of the fourth wall is only the cracking of the cache of memory in there, that’s never not-uncracked here. And Rick isn’t the only Marvel character whose writer has meant for him to break the fourth wall by remembering things the other characters around him can’t, but most of these other attempts at the same thing have tended to fail rather dismally: metatextual awareness in a world constantly being rewritten just isn’t a very useful attribute, right! Because the world of Cosmic Atoms is all about forces and actions, not manifestations of the secret knowledge of the reader…since 1986, the DC Universe has had a “top layer” of reality, and therefore a universe in which if a character receives some vague intimation of his or her fictitiousness then that is meaningful…since you will probably never see a story at DC which reveals that the Crisis actually never happened at all. But the culture of Marvel has never permitted such finality, to the extent that Avengers Forever is probably as close as we will ever get, to a “Marvel Crisis”!

Or at least, to a constructive one…

But things are moving too fast, now, to stop and wonder about what a “Marvel Crisis” would look like! I’m running out of pages! And so we’re running out of time to get to Immortus’ real plan.

Now, bear in mind I am not definitely saying that he created the TVA, just so they could produce the Time-Keepers and the Time-Twisters and thus place a perfect infinite diffraction grating in his hands…although it might explain why they’ve always had the wrong information…but whether he did or didn’t, it still doesn’t change the fact that for all the Keepers’ power they can never do what he does. And can he ever screw them up, if he wants to! From inside the main line, in the very trunk of the tree of Time, the Space Phantom can generate an arbitrary number of divergent possibilities…has, in fact, already done so just by the fact of his existence…as the fact of a “main line” is itself necessary to the creation of divergents OH YES OF COURSE IT’S TRUE…!

…But not only that, but he can keep doing it, too, and Immortus knows that the integer-bound Keepers will never detect this counterforce to their attempt to own all and claim all, and resolve all. They can blast him dead where he stands, even in Limbo…but he holds their lives in his hands too. What they most desire is security: therefore they send him into every divergent that promises to support any other of the four He Who Remains divergents than their own, and they also send him everywhere they can to try and eliminate Rick Jones…

But Rick Jones proves very hard to eliminate by messing around with time, again for reasons this blog’s readers know very well…and this naturally implies he’ll be awfully hard to kill by killing him, as well, but of course the Time-Keepers don’t see this, and Immortus chooses not to tell them. Because he needs Rick Jones: things can happen, around Rick Jones, that can’t happen anywhere else. Kang and Immortus could be completely split, one from the other, if Rick Jones only wants it…

…So Rick Jones will make excellent cover, for Immortus’ scheming. It’s apparent that he can’t kill Kang, so what else can he do with him? Well, he can educate him in a false theory of time, that will leave Kang unable to figure out how to re-seat himself in Limbo in the first place! Without a shared ontological status between the main line and the divergents, there can be no possibility of a Council of Cross-Time Kangs, but somehow it seems as though there is…”somehow”, because Immortus tricks Kang into believing it. Rama-Tut II is already gone, thousands of years ago, into Limbo…and what do you suppose was the thing that made him go? Way back in the Celestial Madonna Affair, Rama-Tut II stays the Swordsman’s hand when he’s about to kill Kang, wondering if the act would wipe out his own existence too…and the next time we see him, he’s Immortus. And it’s just a coincidence, sure, but this is still both the first and last time that the man we now call “Nathaniel Richards” will be seen to worry much about paradox…and very shortly afterwards, he stops worrying about it once and for all.

After, possibly, he realizes the true nature of Time and Limbo?

But Kang will now never get there, because Kang now believes in the same sort of abhorrent state of “paradox” that the TVA does. And, in the same stroke, Kang no longer believes that he is fated to become Immortus at all, now that he’s successfully removed various other sorts of “impostors”. Oh, he still fears it…!

But deep down, his victory over the “other Kangs” has convinced him that his destiny can be changed. Meanwhile Immortus merrily removes, at the Time-Keepers’ urging of course, a vast number of divergents that make a Kang-who-becomes-Immortus a robust form. Now, the last thing to arrange is the showdown with the Keepers!

In which he is destroyed by them!

But he knows something they don’t, which is that the MU wants him around…and wants Kang around…and Rick Jones is right there, so it’s a calculated risk but as it turns out he’s calculated it right. The Time-Keepers, possibly his own devious creations, are destroyed…just by weaponry, or also by the Destiny Force reaching out and snipping all the little twigs off all the ends of all the branches, on the Tree of Never-Happened?…and Kang is set free, in that very same gesture which reconstitutes Immortus himself, just as it was all planned.

So…

What was he hiding, from Genis-Vell’s cosmic awareness? Naturally it was never that the Space Phantoms were playing dress-up, as no one has ever needed cosmic awareness to find that out! But it was the fact that they were all the same guy, that Immortus didn’t want discovered. Because in the final confrontation with the Time-Keepers, the Avengers must believe absolutely in all the lies Immortus has told them, all the way from there being such a thing as “42%” of an infinite number of universes, to his final Marvel-style last-minute conversion and self-sacrifice…and if they were to see how powerful the Space Phantom really is, it would all be an awfully tough sell. It needs to be sold to the sort of people that can be believed, but that’s what makes it such a dangerous game, you see? Because the only reason to believe them, is that they might have found out it was all just another big Immortus lie-fest!

But fortunately for him…they didn’t find that out!

And they will never all be together in the same room ever again, so they won’t find it out later either. And…

…

Oh my goodness…is that the end?

Did I actually finish this thing?

…

Can’t help thinking that I’ve left something out…

…Avengers Forever? (part two of three)

Once again, faithful Fan-Fix Followers and Front-Facers, it’s Plok reporting in while Nate’s off watering his orchids, with yet another turgid mess of continuity contortions calculated to glaze the ol’ eyes! And that voice in your head? The one that’s whispering there are better cures for boredom than reading this? You should probably listen to it…

But if you’ll stick with me, then I’ll stick with you!

*

Immortus is a liar.

That’s the one thing we know for sure about him, the one thing that Avengers Forever established beyond a shadow of a doubt. The guy just can’t tell the truth.

But, maybe that doesn’t matter.

Because if the only reality in the MU is what’s in the publishing record, and if the only immutable physical laws are mere grandiose reflections of the necessities of the publishing business, then we don’t need Immortus to tell the truth, and maybe we can even get a better read on what the truth is when we have his lies to help define their shape negatively. Kurt Busiek is not to blame; this was a monumental effort, a towering achievement of reconciliation! But Kurt had to contend with Immortus’ lies too, and so perhaps it was inevitable that he’d write a few of them as well. It’s isn’t really his fault.

But it’s the cosmology that’s to blame. Way back in Avengers #2, the Space Phantom shows up, and reveals himself to have the power to swap places with any Time-dwelling individual…sending them to Limbo by taking their place in the world in a way that cannot be discerned by all but the most extraordinary means because it is not an illusion: he really does “take their place”. But there are a couple of limitations on this power. One limitation is that the Space Phantom can only take the place of the living.

And another limitation is that he can’t take Thor’s place.

You have to wonder why. For myself, though I can understand the appeal of the “speciation of Gods” that’s ultimately accounted for in modern Marvel dogma by the “Elder God” clique of Gaea, Set, and Chthon — and it’s not un-Norse, actually, this speciation idea! — hell, it’s not un-Greek, either! — I still feel like it’s a bit less impressive in practice than it is in theory: somehow missing the boat of Kirbyishness on the mythological side, in the same way it misses it on the “Gods are really super-scientific aliens” side. Perhaps just because it fails to really conflate the two, for real? But instead just sifts them together in a materialistic way. “Magic is really just science we don’t know”, well that’s fine as far as it goes, but talk about burying the lead! Magic is “just” science we don’t know?

Maybe we’d be better off saying that our science starts looking like not such an impressive thing, when we consider all the stuff its current perspective excludes…and although in the real world we haven’t found anything that must lie outside that perspective, in the Marvel Universe such evidence is, if not a dime a dozen, then at least three for a buck. Asgard, for example, has plenty of high technology…but it also has the Odinsword and the Norn Stones, it has a Land of the Dead you can visit on foot, too, and though it’s no particular trick to think of technology sort of like our own that would explain it all…something something COMPUTERS something something ENTANGLEMENT…still that is all “just” science we don’t know yet, and to turn a Jack Kirby comic book into a Charles Stross short story seems a bit like…I don’t know, maybe to kill a mockingbird? Because there’s nothing wrong with a nice Charlie Stross story, but then again there’s nothing wrong with a nice Jack Kirby comic either, and we really should be able to have both…

…Rather than just creating a lot of new problems for the materialistic perspective to solve, and all hail the materialistic perspective but it’d definitely have its work cut out for it. On a good day Dr. Strange can trade spells with Dormammu for at least a time — and Dormammu can trade spells with Eternity for at least a time! — but “Asgardian magic” has always been beyond him. Dormammu may be the Ditkovian Devil, but Loki is a God, so Strange knows it takes another God to beat him. But, can’t he call upon the power of Oshtur, sister to Gaea from whom every God is descended? And, hasn’t he fought people from “pocket dimensions” before? Hasn’t he, in fact, gotten away with his skin intact from the Old Serpent himself?

So why is he so powerless against Loki?

“Technology” could give us the answer: Asgard is a program running on a massive computer (a bit like a video game!), and when Thor crosses the Rainbow Bridge it’s merely a photonic projection of him that arrives in Midgard, while the “real” Thor hangs suspended in potential. No one can tell! Except that when the Space Phantom tries to steal his form he can’t do it, because (perhaps like him) Thor isn’t really there. Likewise, Strange might be powerless against Loki because “Loki” is merely a projection, and all his spells projections too…the real Loki being no more than a very long string of numbers circulating in a superconducting lattice somewhere, and his magic just a bunch of cheat codes, a remote superuser mode for Midgard…which after all is also just a fictional construct anyway…and so once again there’s no “they” there, which consequently causes a great power to be vested in a version of Truth that’s (uniquely) born of recursion: Midgard is fictional, but Asgard is even more fictional, thus Asgard as a deliberate fiction within the fiction is paradoxically in a position to control it more aggressively. Inside the giant robot, a smaller robot who nonetheless lives in a wider context through seeing his own nature mirrored back to him…

…Is the one who pulls all the levers and pushes all the buttons, that makes the bigger robot go. And I wouldn’t necessarily propose anything too different as a non-technological answer for these questions, except that I would just leave out the “technology” part. Because it isn’t necessary! For since the fictional universe is fictional already, it doesn’t need to be digital as well…and anyway we know for a fact that its fictional status is NOT based on ones and zeroes, but on pens and inks instead. So why feel the need to insert a tissue of digital automation there? Snow Crash, after all, only proposed that its digital platform could be used to host fictional seemings otherwise impossible in a “real world” context…but where the non-real-worldness of the fictional environment need not be excused or explained away, “platforms” like this are just ideological frills…

…Aren’t they?

So, here’s how it works in the absence of secret digital automation, which is actually pretty much the same way as it works in that digital automation’s presence…the Space Phantom can’t take Thor over, because there’s something special about him. Thor can’t be sent to Limbo against his will in the same way Iron Man and the Hulk can. But, why is this? What makes Thor different from all the other dwellers in Time?

Perhaps it’s because he isn’t a dweller in Time. Or at least: not a dweller in the ordinary parts of Time. If “Limbo” exists wherever there are phase transitions to be had, it doesn’t seem very much like there must be a lot of phase transitions in Asgard, does it? Odin never goes back in time to give himself advice…Hel can be visited on foot or on horseback, if you just follow the roadsigns…in fact now that I think about it, everything in Asgard seems to be part of a continuum, everything seems “horizonal”…there seem to be very few possible paths in or out, and what paths there are seem largely “physical”. The secret tunnel to Olympus, for example!

The Rainbow Bridge itself!

And there are more powers in those precincts than just science or magic. The Queen of the Norns practises “magic”, as Loki and the Enchantress also do, and a most powerful magic it is! But Odin simply has the “Odin-Power”, and Sif travels to Midgard by “a Goddess’ right!”, or somesuch…while their machinery lies all about, evidently applied to other things. And!

You never see Immortus there, do you?

(awkwardly adjusts Roy Thomas mask over face)

HAWKEYE: “I don’t get it, Morty — you make such a big deal about being master of time, and master of space, and I bet you’re master of kung fu for all we know…so if you’re so hot to visit Thor’s stomping-grounds, why do you need the Avengers?”

IMMORTUS: “Prattling fool of an archer! If you were as perceptive as your name suggests, you would see that even a Master of Time must have his limitations…!”

Roy was great, wasn’t he? That incredibly overexplanatory style. Also I like Hawkeye, don’t you? In Avengers Forever (“you remember Alberich?”) Kurt Busiek reveals why Rick Jones’ mind selected just these Avengers and no others for the Destiny War…but, you know, I always regretted that AF didn’t come out in the Seventies, because then there would’ve been a big illustrated text page going into those choices in more detail. Consider, if you will, how this particular selection of cross-time Avengers might’ve presented challenges for Immortus that another selection wouldn’t have: it’s conceivable that Genis-Vell’s cosmic awareness might be the one power in the universe (barring the superpowers known as Reason and Intuition, of course) that could detect a Space Phantom’s substitution, if given a minute or two to get around to it…and the version of Henry Pym known as Yellowjacket being in a fugue state might be pretty darn unreadable by mind-scanning, because most of his mind is so locked off that he doesn’t even know what he knows. YJ in his first appearance is practically Hank Pym’s genius unleashed, set free from all other considerations besides “making stuff” and “doing stuff”…he doesn’t even know where his education came from, or why he thinks the thoughts he does, and if you think about that old psionic saw that says “psychics can only penetrate surface thoughts with difficulty so TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR, FOUR PLUS FOUR IS EIGHT”…well, the original YJ is all “surface thought”, isn’t he? So he’d be pretty unpredictable…

As regular old post-YJ Hank Pym would be predictable, except…except, would you be predictable, if your past crazy self was there, competing with you for your wife’s attentions and trying to show you up every five seconds, and insisting he’s not you, and always not saying that he’s in a state of constant horrible mental anguish that you yourself remember all too well? And the damnedest thing about it is that he is more “intuitive”, too, you know? He’s a shittier scientist, and a more incomplete person, but he’s sure as hell a better genius…

Then Jan is in the middle, and so it’s unbalanced stress all around. She can manage it — no one else could! — but it doesn’t leave much time to manage anything else. And then there’s the Hawkeye of this time, who is distinctly un-manageable by anyone he ever knew, even if they’re a future-Jan who turned out to be one of the all-time great Avengers Chairmen…this is Clint at his most irreverent, the Hawkeye who could give a damn about proving anything to anybody, and I really love this guy. He’s over his Cap-worship, he doesn’t feel like he has to hold up the name Goliath on Hank’s behalf, he doesn’t even feel like he has to rehabilitate his old criminal costume…as Kurt notes, any Hawkeye is a supreme natural irritant, but due to word-count pressures he can’t find the space to say that this Hawkeye may just be the best at that business…and you could even argue that in this Hawkeye is found the very beginning of the Clint Barton who’ll go on to be right up there with Steve Rogers and Janet Van Dyne in the All-Timer’s Club? Of which there’s only one other member, and at last that’s Songbird, who’s the only person in the universe who can manage any Clint Barton she sees, because who knows fathers better than their daughters do? And also she’s the one person who can keep things from really going to shit in this little group, because coming from the future and having been an Avengers’ Chair she knows everybody’s story…

…Except just one person’s story, and that’s the Englehart Cap’s story, because I doubt all that guy’s thoughts and feelings are set down in the official record. Kurt, for brevity’s sake, describes this Cap as “diffident”, but he’s really not diffident, you know…he’s only less prone to instinctual action because he’s working hard at trying not to be paranoid, though everything in his life seems to be trying to make him so. Wrestling with the problem of the limits of knowledge, questioning every appearance, and trying to drill down to his own personal heroic cogito. It’ll come, in time, with the words “every bit as bad as the Red Skull”, and then he’ll be sure of his compass again, but until then, while all the regular step-back-and-reflect people are in a mad whirl that keeps them mentally on the hop…he’ll be the guy trying to make sense of it all so he can find his way through it, and he’s a pretty smart cookie but we don’t often see him in this role, and so how d’you like that for misdirection, eh? The ordinary understanding of “how the Avengers typically function” is completely blown-up by this sortation, but unless you are intimately familiar with each of the Avengers in question you wouldn’t know it…you’d expect New Sober Reflective Hank to dominate Old Crazy Intuitive Temper-Tantrum Hank through being a thoughtful guy, you’d expect shit-disturber Hawkeye to snap to unreflective Cap in support of Decisive Action above all, you’d expect Songbird to defer to Jan’s superior mediation techniques, and pair off as a scouting unit with a Genis-Vell who’s respectful enough of the old legendary warhorses to submit to being used as a Special Tool…sure, you’d expect all that, if you only knew the Avengers by their considerable reputations…

But we were discussing Asgard, where time-travel isn’t used, because as we know “all time-travellers must pass through Limbo to get where they’re going”…however Asgard’s relative paucity of phase transitions means there are few places where Limbo can be called in, so interdimensional travel is hard, there. Why it’s almost as though Asgard is at the bottom of an energy well, almost like Eternal Asgard exemplifies an entropic principle in the MU, indeed almost like…

…Asgard is at the centre of the bubble. Or in its central precincts, anyway! In Olympus there is technology too, and also some magic, and then there’s the stuff Zeus exercises which I believe is simply called “Olympian Power”…hmm, sounds kind of like “the Odin-Power”? Deep in toward the centre of things, the fluid of Limbo is gradually excluded, squeezed-out until it isn’t there at all — just as in the “computer Asgard” there isn’t any time-travel because reversing an equation doesn’t change the equation because it’s an equation — and so making a “bubble” to instantly transit locations is more than just a matter of putting together some diodes and running some current, not any old Tom Dick or Harry can do it, because the whole business of quantum tunnelling is extremely vexed down here on the abyssal plain of Universe where everything is pinned down by pressure and density until you don’t swim you just walk. Up a couple miles, in the pelagic zone, swimming is cool…why you can even swim up to the surface if you want to, maybe even jump like the flying fish or vault like the dolphin, and when you go up into the air all the other fish say “shit, where’d he go, it’s like he’s OUTSIDE THE OCEAN”, and then when you come back down again they’re all like “HOLY HANNAH, how in the heck did he get there?!“…

And it’s a common cosmogony in pre-industrial cultures: the dense black chthonic realm of total fact is the circle in the middle, the large and changeable blue pelagic ring outside it is the world of human life, and the clear ring of the atmosphere above is the abode of mobile concepts, pure concepts, concepts with feet…

Concepts that are on the move, beyond our imagining. The alert reader of this long, long chain of pointless reasoning may have already recognized a bit of Vernor Vinge in it; so for that person, this is the place where I reconnect Vernor Vinge’s Milky Way with old Welsh mythological patterns. Annwyn and the Pig-Run and the Bright World…

They’re in the MU as well!

And that’s why when the Space Phantom tries to steal Thor’s form in Avengers #2, he’s instantly cast back into Limbo. Why? Because the Space Phantom stands in Limbo, and the Hulk stands in Time, but Thor stands in the Godly Realms…and Limbo connects with Time, and the Godly Realms connect with Time, but only Time connects with both. Different grounds mean different soils, and different roots: Thor and the Space Phantom are both just visitors here. Just extensions, perhaps, or projections…but anyway the thing about Thor’s reality is that it doesn’t border on any bubbles. Inside the body of every person living in Time are phase transitions at every possible level…even at a cellular level there are such transitions, or how else would Henry McCoy have cured Henry Pym?…but inside Thor’s body there are no transitions of this type, because his body was formed in a place where there are no such transitions anywhere, or at least very few, and maybe this is even the source of the typical Asgardian density, durability, and strength? That one’s body is not shot through, on even a sub-atomic level, with rivers of nothingness that suck away mass and energy…

…Along mysterious dimensional paths, and for heaven’s sake let’s get back to those paths, or I promise you we’ll be here past the time when Odin fights the Fenris-wolf. Paths, we should conventionally expect, always begin in their home soil and then parabolically arc back to it, but Thor once again gives the counterexample, as his father was nonetheless able to re-seat him in Midgard as Don Blake in order to punish him…and then Thor didn’t want to give up having, as it were, a foot in both worlds. So let it be a lesson to you fathers out there! Tough love will indeed make your children independent. It’ll totally work.

You should know that going in. But ANYWAY, what was I saying about the paths? Oh yes: that from the quantum-mechanical perspective you could say that the paths define the place…because the “place” really only exists as the product of the paths. In Limbo, paths can link to paths can link to other paths…Limbo, being all edge, is all path and no place: Limbo has too much definition by possible paths, for any part of it to be stable in a place-like way. But down in Universe, it’s different: here, paths are mostly between places, because there are fewer of them. But…

There is also that potential for Universe (at least, the Time parts of it) to make paths leading into Limbo. And no one in Universe can be grounded in anything but Universe, so they can’t be like the Limbo-dwellers and link through from bubble to bubble to other bubble ad infinitum…but what would happen if a single piece of Universe spawned many parabolic paths into Limbo, that all came back to the same place? The ordinary inter-Universe paths might then get lost in that jungle of time-loops…you’d be hard-pressed to locate among all the incredibly open doorways the ones that led to just a regular, conventional other place…a regular place that’s probably within conventional walking-distance…and so you might get stuck there, mightn’t you, and your little piece of Universe might become, let us call it, “limbo-like”.

Only after a while, it might not even be so “little”.

You have to wonder how many times this could happen, or even if it would be possible to know how many times it could happen, or has happened. Square blocks of city streets could become vast churning grids of constantly-shifting location…underground tunnels could be transmogrified into convoluted maps of Hell. There could be bubbles within bubbles, constantly casting out wind-borne spider-strands to Elsewhere…and if there are no Things, but only Interactions, then might there not be some point at which what can’t be told apart from Limbo actually becomes Limbo?

Or, at least: “Limbo”?

Hmm…

So now that we’re finally here, let’s talk about Avengers Forever.

Problem Number One: the Space Phantoms don’t work right.

Problem Number Two: Immortus is a liar.

Let’s let these two fight it out!

If a Space Phantom can’t take the place of a character that is dead at the moment he wishes to enter Time, then AF is riddled with impossible events…not only was Phineas Horton an adult in 1938, and dead by the mid-Seventies (a problem that only gets prettier as the sliding timescale’s effect goes on, since Horton is every bit as pinned to the late Thirties as the young Steve Rogers), therefore not available for a Space Phantom masquerade in the pages of John Byrne’s West Coast Avengers, but also we are explicitly told in AF that the Space Phantoms impersonated the Gunhawks after they had already met their historical end in the Old West a couple of years earlier. There are two obvious solutions to this inconsistency: either Space Phantom impostures don’t work as they’re said to in Avengers #2, or the Space Phantoms impersonating Horton and the Gunhawks were brought forward in time by technological means to a point after which they had (if you follow) already eventually relinquished the forms of those they were impersonating. For cosmological reasons I am going to suggest that the latter solution makes the most sense…and maybe it would make it that much harder for Captain Marvel’s cosmic awareness to detect a Space Phantom impersonation, if technically it had already “ended” by the time he encountered it? Of course once you have Space Phantoms being moved about the temporal chessboard from Time rather than from Limbo, you don’t really have all that much need for there to be more than one Space Phantom in existence…if the impersonations caused by a Limbo-switch are then being moved about in Time, then one Space Phantom could impersonate each of the Old West gunmen in turn, move each to a time where all those impersonations coexist simultaneously, do his thing and then move back to give the forms up. Apparent “deaths” of a number of different Space Phantoms could then be explained as one guy playing possum several times, knowing that a return to the past is imminent…and the exposure of the true Space Phantom form could be explained as what happens when an impersonation is disturbed that’s technically not even happening anymore, as other odd effects might be seen if a Limbo-switch imposture was then taken back into Limbo before the form was given up. So although AF may tell us that there are many Space Phantoms, its events remain explicable if there were really only one…which is an explanation I prefer, since it changes less of what we know.

However if that were the case, then why send the Space Phantom, in his many guises, so far through time? From Limbo, all times and all places (with just a few exceptions) are equally-reachable — standing in Limbo is itself a method of time-travel, if you can only leave it! The Space Phantom’s impostures are straight out of “Quantum Leap” — he can’t take someone’s form without having travelled someplace in Time! And so one imagines that if he so chose he could take the place of a whole bunch of characters in a manner that would seem serial to him, but simultaneous to us, if they only happened to already be in the right place at the right time all together. Why, if you wanted to you could have a whole planet of people impersonated by the Space Phantom!

A galaxy-spanning Empire, populated by no one but the Space Phantom!

And the name rather gives it away. Imagine some long-past date in the MU, when the Space Phantom terrorized other peoples of the universe as he once sought to terrorize the Avengers. If you crossed him up, there could be no escape from his vengeance…the fastest ship couldn’t outrun an enemy to whom distance is a null category; the loneliest interstellar waste couldn’t hide you from a creature whose reach into spacetime is unlimited. As well, there seems no particular reason that the Space Phantom couldn’t live an entire life in Time, so long as that life belonged to somebody else. He could live a billion lives…a trillion lives. He could rule the Universe completely.

Why hasn’t he ever done it?

Or, to be more specific: why make the confrontation with the AF crew so complicated? Why not just move the Gunhawks through Time and then have the Space Phantom do his thing? On the surface, it seems as though the best answer to this would be “because the story’s right, and there are many Space Phantoms, and they’re all just standard-issue shapeshifters”, rather than “because it’s all to fool Genis-Vell”, but I’m not so sure about that…for one thing, he’s an awfully funny-looking dude for people “lost in Limbo” to just sort of turn into just because — for that matter, why wouldn’t Immortus have turned into “him” too? — and for another thing it makes him kind of boring, just another Moloid. When really he should be a Tyrannus!

He has a really impressive power, right?

Yet we are constantly directed away from thinking it’s as impressive as it is, and given that we’re dealing with Immortus then anything that involves him lying is more likely to be true, than anything that involves him telling the truth. What if there really was just the one Space Phantom? If he was under Immortus’ thumb, things could easily be arranged so that we would think there are many…and a bunch of indistinguishable servitors who just shapeshift every now and again doesn’t really seem like too big a deal, so that would only encourage us to take the Space Phantom lightly. If there is just one Space Phantom, with time-travel powers that are better and sneakier than anyone’s, then that’s a cosmic-level threat! But if there’s just some mob of functionaries who are extra-good at putting on disguises, well we’ve seen that before. Who worries about henchmen?

They’re really only good for bringing Immortus his slippers!

But on the other hand, if Immortus had under his thumb a being who could potentially replace all the people in the universe…then that’s not “a crowd of henchmen”, that’s a secret weapon of terrifying importance, and if the Space Phantom is only one of the instruments at Immortus’ command, then that makes Immortus an awful lot more powerful than we’ve been led to believe. Kang’s just another Caesar, but Immortus is a Prospero…and that’s a BIG step up in power, for the man who was once Rama-Tut!

You can see why he went for it!

Except…no, that isn’t the story, is it? Kang wearied of a life of endless conflict, and wanted to retire. Just get a cottage in Limbo, and play benevolent gardener to Time among his books. That’s what Immortus says happened, and apparently Immortus is now to be considered an honourable man…the enormous, mind-staggering power? No, no, now why would the man previously known as Kang ever be interested in getting his hands on that? To want such a thing, well you’d have to have some kind of limitless ambition and unquenchable thirst for dominance, or something…!

And Immortus, as we know, is just a humble scholar.

And definitely not a guy who lunged at power, only to find it all turned to ashes in his hands!

So…I admit, my off-the-cuff reasoning for why the fake Horton and fake Gunhawks might have been brought forward in time, it maybe sounds a bit thin. All to fool Genis-Vell, eh? But then at times it seems as though there’s nothing easier than penetrating a Space Phantom disguise. You don’t really need cosmic awareness, for that! So it’s a bit of a crap reason…it won’t suffice…

What would suffice?

What could cosmic awareness potentially discern, about Immortus and the Space Phantom and the Destiny War, that would be worth going to these slightly-ridiculous lengths to obscure?

And if Immortus was so concerned with removing the obstacle the Avengers represent to the safety of the timestream, why didn’t he just, you know…kill them? Kang almost killed them, on his first appearance, and Immortus must have technological capability far beyond Kang’s. Why muck about with the Legion of the Unliving and the Masters of Evil? Why all the slow-pitch?

Why all the “cackling like a supervillain”, over the years?

For the answer, let’s return to Doctor Doom and the Cosmic Cube. If Doom knows the method by which a Cosmic Cube is made, then why hasn’t he ever made one?

In this little fan-fix narrative of mine, it’s because he never trusted the Theory of the True Vacuum. If the force-field that is created is eventually transformed into a thought-into-reality machine, it isn’t because the True Vacuum is trapped in there! The nameless scientist at A.I.M. who talked his way into Cosmic Cube funding — which included MODOC funding, let’s not forget, so: big megaproject — may have believed that if he could make a little “bubble” in space that zero paths entered and zero paths left, then the True Vacuum would be the only residuum…but Doom, who’s got a bit more on his resume than this guy (hello? time-machine inventor over here?), doesn’t buy that for a second. To make a force-field whose interior is inaccessible to the realm of Universe, okay…okay, theoretically you could make that. But to make a force-field whose interior is inaccessible to Universe and Limbo? That’s just wrong on so many levels, that’s not even wrong, for one thing it’s “thermodynamically” impossible, for another thing you are essentially making a Limbo-bubble to try to do it, so it really fails in a tautological way at the first effort…and even if you could do it you would still not “capture” the True Vacuum because the True Vacuum — how does one put this — DOESN’T EXIST! In purely technical terms: it doesn’t “exist”, right? Where “to exist” is a thing, it isn’t that. And where “to not exist” is a thing, it isn’t that either. Total nullity lacks even a definition — the whole thing’s just question-begging, because when you say you’re going to make a force-field whose interior is inaccessible to both Universe and Limbo, and that will prove the True Vacuum…well, that’s backwards, because what could one employ except the True Vacuum, to make such a force-field in the first place? You’d have to have the stuff already in hand! Unless, oh yeah, it was just an ordinary Limbo-bubble anyway, and you’re just pretending it’s something else because you’re a failure as an intellect. You know, Doom has put up with a lot, when it comes to other scientists crashing around in the china shop of his scientific discoveries — Reed Richards even modified his time machine so it can go into “divergent realities”, which just shows how Richards is a pathetic excuse for a scientist, because the whole trick of building a functioning time machine in the first goddamn place was figuring out how to keep it from going into divergent realities! CURSE YOU, RICHARDS…!

But this “Cosmic Cube” thing…this is really just too much. This is table-rapping, it’s just garbage. And the scary thing about it is, it works…

…But no one takes two seconds to think about why it works, when it obviously can’t bloody work, so Doom wouldn’t touch the thing with a ten-foot pole as long as he doesn’t understand its principles. You have to be able to control the thing, you know? Otherwise it’s just a bomb going off in slow motion. Only a fool — or an engineer, like that imbecile Tony Stark — would just try to make something without knowing what it was he was making. Doom worked every day and night for years coming up with his time machine, he knew exactly what it was going to be before he so much as picked up his screwdriver, his knowledge of the principles of time-travel is second to none…these A.I.M. clowns and their hucksterish wannabe scientists, they’re a dangerous embarrassment. Doom never touched a Cosmic Cube until he understood why it worked the way it did, at the end of Englehart’s “Secret Wars III”…never touched one until he knew what was inside it that wasn’t the True Vacuum. Until he had proof that its interior actually wasn’t inaccessible to Limbo, but was simply in a relationship with only one part of Limbo.

Which, fair’s fair, is a pretty impressive achievement anyway…especially for a contemptible pack of morons who can’t even keep their own automation from enslaving them…

And here we leave Doom ranting in his castle, but let’s take away with us his idea of the impossibility of having a Limbo-bubble that doesn’t link to other Limbo-bubbles…the ineliminability of path-connection that he waggishly refers to as “thermodynamic”. Well, I guess it’s kinda thermodynamic, really! But let’s take this another step or two, to get to what he’s really saying. He’s really saying that when all you’re dealing with is bubbles, you never do encounter “interstitial fluid” on its own in a non-bubbly form. You never encounter anything like a “permanence” of medium. Paths make the bubbles and the bubbles support the paths…all bubbles are “made”, you know?

So the Limbo of Immortus and the Space Phantom is “made” too. But who made it?

Of course, now that we’ve actually seen a crapload of Space Phantoms, they’re all “real” — since what happens in a published Marvel comic is the only true record of events occurring in the shared universe. But interpretations of those events can change, so…given only one Space Phantom, and yet a profusion of other Space Phantoms, and given that Limbo itself is outside Time — I’d suggest that the idea of time-travel within Limbo is pretty much a non sequitur — then how come there are all these copies of ol’ Phanty running around? Well…he can’t be called “the Space Phantom” for no reason, so how about we assume that at one point he did terrorize the universe, and rule space with an iron fist? Limbo, as I’ve proposed, might be a terribly lonely place…you might think “yes, awesome, all that power, what a great time I’ll have with it!”, but power is only real big fun for a creature seated in Universe, whether it’s ordinary Time or the Godly Realms…whereas for a Limbo-dweller, you just straight-up get the monkey’s paw. And all parabolic paths only lead back to their origins, so you can’t really escape the place once you’re there…

Except the Space Phantom does seem to be able to escape, by “taking places”. How tempting this must have been, then! Live a trillion lifetimes, enjoy the fruits of limitless power and indestructibility! Nudge events into any course you please. How easy would that be? If you want something changed, you just Quantum Leap it…replace a person in a position to alter the chain of causality. Simple.

Simple for a while.

But then what the hell do you do if you replace someone at Time X (let’s say), and that turns out to be a blast, but then when you go back to replace someone at Time X-minus-1, although you also have a blast you change the timeline of the person you replaced at Time X? And then when you pop back to Limbo, there’s another one of you there, because in Limbo there’s no paradox (because where there’s no Time, there’s no paradox) so you can’t sort it out, so that guy is simply you as well, and suddenly you’re one being in two parts. Which is annoying. And gives you a headache. And your thoughts are a bit crackly from all the interference.

So maybe you try to fix it, see? By going back to Time-minus-2…but that only makes it worse, and actually things get a lot worse in a tearing hurry, because of course there is no person you can ever replace, who doesn’t have the ability to deflect causality, and you don’t really give a damn if you’re making different timelines by leapfrogging back over your previous instantiations but you’re making different Space Phantoms, because you’ve been stupid and invited Time into Limbo, and Limbo doesn’t tolerate Time, so it just kicks Time back out and makes you pay the price. The Universe breathes a sigh of relief, as it starts to see less and less of you…but you’re still not done, because now every time some asshole with a time machine in Universe goes back and does something which alters the timeline of one of your replacement-selves…POP! Another Space Phantom, and a still more fractionated consciousness. So hard to think, damn it…so hard to remember…!

And then every once in a while someone down in Universe does something with a time machine to your causality that trims a Space Phantom…or two, or three, or a hundred…and it’s like a game: sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. When there are fewer of you, you can think better, you’re more effective, you can reconsolidate. When there are more, you’re a mess. But at least there’s hope, that one day your past replacement-selves might get trimmed down far enough that you could trim the last ones on your own, return to your original, singular state?

And then Immortus arrives. How he got there you don’t know, how he became unseated from Universe and reseated in Limbo (if only you could remember!) is a mystery, but when he gets there he realizes in an instant what the deal is with all these scatterbrained Space Phantoms lying all around the joint…and he makes you an offer:

Do his bidding, and he’ll change time to trim your other selves.

So…many Space Phantoms, and it’s just a horde of Moloids who’ll follow any leader.

But one Space Phantom, and he’s an immensely powerful spirit who’s willing to make a devil’s bargain with Immortus…and Immortus had better not betray him, either…

Because Immortus needs him too. Immortus, you see, if he realized in an instant what had happened to the Space Phantom, would know darn well he could never safely go into Time if it meant crossing over his own causal footsteps…and that he probably shouldn’t go into Time at all unless he absolutely has to…and so whatever he does in Time has got to be absolutely hygienic! But the Space Phantom is another story: already contaminated with Time, he can go anywhere Immortus chooses to send him, without incurring any ill effects that, really, he isn’t already suffering from. Just so long as Immortus has his confidence, you know? So Immortus never has to “split”, as he otherwise might, and even if he does he probably is fortunate enough to have an exit strategy planned in advance…and as a result there are no “many” Immortuses, but only the one. Which is the one Kang turned into.

Oh, except that’s another lie, as long as we’re talking about lies…

Because of course it wasn’t Kang that turned into Immortus, but instead it was the second Rama-Tut. You remember, the one who was integral to the turning-out of the Celestial Madonna storyline? The one Kang became, when he “wearied of conflict”?

So, obviously this is all just a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface. When Englehart wrote the death of Kang in battle with Thor, the fans howled: “Englehart, you idiot, if Kang is dead then how can he eventually become Immortus? You’ve created a TOTALLY NEEDLESS PARADOX AT THE VERY LAST SECOND…!“ But there are paradoxes, and then there are paradoxes. What happens in the published comics, is the only true record of events that have taken place in the fictional universe, right? So the death of Kang at the hands of the Thunder God doesn’t matter, because we have seen the second Rama-Tut, and we can’t be made to un-see him. The orthodoxy of time-loop logic jumps the track at this moment, but it doesn’t take the train with it, and so there might be any later explanation for why a second Rama-Tut who remembers a life as Kang is there to stay the hand of the Swordsman, but there is no explanation in the MU that cannot be reversed anyhow, and then re-reversed, and re-re-reversed again, world without end, all without changing the fact that Rama-Tut is there, in the Celestial Madonna storyline, and speaks the dialogue that was written for him to speak, and you know what? Cosmologically, nothing comes of it. So the paradox clearly isn’t a paradox, according to the true and actual extrauniversally-determined physical laws of the MU…because to be a true paradox, something paradoxical would have to exist on the PAGE, you know? Some real pen-and-ink depiction would somehow and at once have to contradict that same depiction that it is, in a way that frustrated narrative’s power to account for it with a new chain of logic. And this is not what happens with Kang’s death. Kang gets brought back, not because without him the paper will fall away from the staples, but because the interstitial fluid “remembers” him: which is to say, future writers want to use him. They don’t have to use him, if they don’t want to…!

But as it happens they do, and imagine Immortus’ annoyance! He is, after all, happy when Kang is killed, because the time-loop is broken…

But, why would he be happy about that?

If the world of Limbo is truly “outside Time”, then an answer suggests itself: Immortus doesn’t need his old worldline to exist, in order to keep on living. One day the second Rama-Tut just sort of…comes to an end, in Universe, and that’s the end of his story as far as chronology goes. Born in the 30th century, goes back to 3000 B.C., fights the FF…then forward to the 40th century, becomes an intertemporal conqueror, fights the Avengers…then retires to 3000 B.C. again, then one day mysteriously vanishes without a trace. Severs his causal connection to history. So, can anything that might happen to Kang really affect Immortus now? Especially since we’ve already seen the result of that experiment, and the result is “nothing happens to Immortus”?

And if anything that happens to Kang could affect Immortus, would Immortus really sport with his own survival by taunting Kang? Would he constantly torment him with the inevitability of his decline into a Humble Scholar?

Yet why does he bother with that either, if you see what I mean. If Kang might not one day become Immortus, thus wiping Immortus from existence, then Immortus wouldn’t want to taunt him…but if his transformation into Immortus is inevitable, then that also means none of Immortus’ taunts can have any effect on what is fated to occur, so then again Immortus wouldn’t have any reason to taunt him. Well, he won’t change anyway, so why bother talking at him? But consider how the picture changes if Immortus wants Kang to reject the destiny of the Humble Scholar! If Limbo is time-free, then nothing will change for Immortus if Kang rejects his destiny. But what if he doesn’t reject it? Perhaps the end of the second Rama-Tut’s timeline, fixed in Universe, is a loose point in Limbo, like a fire hose without any firemen to hold onto it…potentially spewing random copies of Immortus into the borderlands. The time-loop means Immortus and Rama-Tut and Kang are always crossing paths…so maybe every time a Rama-Tut II does whatever it was he did to become Immortus, a new Immortus is created?

Is it possible?

Well…if someone might write it into a comic, then yes: it’s possible. Heck, it’s more than possible! It’s almost necessary. And sitting right there is the Space Phantom, an object lesson in what can happen to you if you invite Time into Limbo, or indeed if you are so unwise as to choose to be a character in no particular fixed state of Time, in a storytelling milieu in which time-travel and the world at large can both exist at the same time; Immortus has been very careful not to let himself become Phantomized by his own actions, but what will happen to him if he once enters Time after the date of Kang’s conversion to the second Rama-Tut? If we reason from the extrauniversal level of the real world, we can see immediately that the fictional world of the MU is astonishingly tolerant of paradox; every instance of time-travel constitutes a paradox, after all! So consider the possibility of someone writing a story that involves Limbo starting to fill up with Immortuses, if you will, O Notional Reader…

Well, could we ever really write that eventuality permanently out, once it was written in?

Or consider if you will the Space Phantom himself: given that he might, under any given future writer’s direction, insert himself into any previously-documented moment of the publishing history…then hasn’t he himself spawned, all on his own, an infinite number of divergent universes? Just by not inserting himself everywhere, hasn’t he created a departure-point into alternity from every instant, along the paths he didn’t take?

I promise, this is the very last thing I will say “we’ll come back to that” about…because really, no foolin’, we’re coming back to that, and SOON!

We’re actually almost done with our mad whirlwind of a trip!

I promise!

Any minute now, we will re-enter reality!

But for just a moment more…we hang suspended.

…Avengers Forever? (part one of three)

Hello, fellow readers of the Fan-Fix blog! It’s Plok, here, of A Trout In The Milk, posting something for Nate while he tends to other business. Part fun, and part obligation, this three-part excursion into fixing a fix that was already fixed by a better fixer was generated by some discussions with Nate in which he informed me that it’s been THREE YEARS since my “How Would You Fix…Kryptonian Exceptionalism?” post for him…and I thought “WHAT?! Could it really have been so long?

It could, he informed me gravely, have indeed been so long.

So I thought I’d better head over to the anvil and bash out some nails. This is actually an excursion in six parts, three of them here, and three of them on my own blog…and to get the whole picture I would most definitely recommend popping over to check out “Principia Comicbookia” first, and then following the link-trail back here….which will eventually lead you back over there…which will eventually lead you God-knows-where, but then in a way isn’t that the point?

As to and fro we wander, amid Limbo’s hedgerows…

So see you soon, Nate!

And: here it is!

*

Sometimes I wonder at my own hubris, if “hubris” isn’t too grand an accusation to level at someone who spends so much of his time trying to make sense of a fictional universe whose nominal “sense” he isn’t even responsible for. And what makes me so sure there’s really any sense to be made in it, eh?

Well…

As I said here, in my enormous two-part run-up to this post, part of the appeal of the Marvel Universe is that it had a Principal Author who instilled in it just this kind of sense…that would be Jack Kirby, of course, who liked mythology and science fiction, and who also possessed a strange talent that allowed him to begin drawing a splash page in its upper left-hand corner, and make his way down to its lower left-hand corner without roughing anything in beforehand. So he didn’t plan it all out in the conventional manner, but I don’t think anyone looking at any of his pages could miss how integrated the “sense” always was. We’re all conscious of his stylistic innovations, however it wasn’t just style that he commanded, but narration too: drawing vast freewheeling murals of causation, that didn’t just tell a story but imprinted a definite philosophical character on the world in which the story was being told. All Marvel stories since then have had some truck or other with this spirit of integration, writers and artists sensing that in the universe Kirby created half the adventure was in the production of explanations…fans in the letter columns competing for No-Prizes for the same reason. This little essay isn’t one that sets out to criticize Stan Lee, I should be sure to point out; Stan’s contributions to the Marvel Universe are real, and they’re deep as well…but it wasn’t primarily Stan Lee who established the physical and cosmological character of the place.

So the well of sense that later authors kept returning to, for the longest time, was the one Kirby had dug out in the first place: Roy Thomas’ play with the historicization of the Marvel Universe was his elaboration on Kirby, as his development of second-person narration was his elaboration on Lee. And Steve Englehart made a career from setting entire storylines, as it were, in the yellow caption box…thus arguably combining both kinds of play. Oh, Steve Englehart of the Two Steves! What an influence he was on me! Always picking up on threads! Always playing fair with other peoples’ stories! Why if he hadn’t existed…

…Then Kurt Busiek would probably have had to invent him. And that’s what makes me feel as though I could filch some licence to “fix” Busiek’s Avengers Forever, because I see us both as descendents of the Englehart Approach…both interested in the same Englehartian things, and for the same Englehartian reasons. Those who followed Steve Gerber on books like The Defenders and Marvel Two-In-One may have been inspired by him, but they were not like him…but Kurt Busiek is like Steve Englehart when he writes The Avengers, and he has the same interest in dropped threads and saved phenomena. All of Avengers Forever is nothing but a giant “fix”, so admirable for the way it seeks to repair toys and timelines smashed or sundered by others! However it does not make a perfectly tied-off Gordian Knot, despite his monumental effort. Perhaps because…

There’s still something “off”, about the cosmology of it all.

Fortunately, as I also said before, it isn’t just Jack Kirby’s design that creates the sense-making capacities of the MU, but also the fact that fictional universes are extremely hard-pressed to disinclude the physical principles of the real world. These always get in there somehow, as conditions that obtain in the environment of the author are inevitably transmitted into the imaginary realm the author controls. All fiction relates to the real world in some way, and it’s just a matter of how more or less a good model of reality the fiction is…design it just so, and it’s a moral mirror only! But design it just so in another way, and it can catch more than morals in its sieve. In a moment this preamble will be over, and I’ll begin talking about Limbo, and Immortus, and Doctor Doom and the Cosmic Cube, but just before we get down into the valley we should stop at the peak, and take in the wider perspective while we have the chance. There’s a signpost up ahead, and on it is written three things:

1. The events shown to occur in comic books published by Marvel are “what happened”. There is no other record that can be set against the published comics, and no way for any current interpretation to constrain what may become part of that record in the future. DC Comics has a tradition of publishing stories billed as “imaginary”, stories that by editorial fiat not only never happened but never could happen…but Marvel has never done this, so within its publishing record every fictional occurrence is — at a minimum — equally historicized. If Superman replaces Mowgli as the hero of the events of The Jungle Book in a DC comic, the comic has no point of contact with the “real” history of the DC shared universe, no one ever assumes that it does, and the whole fact of the story’s publication never even so much as rises to the status of “non-issue”…whereas at Marvel the essential “happenedness” of each published story is sacrosanct.

2. But that isn’t to say Marvel wasn’t interested in the device of the “imaginary” story. Roy Thomas’ response to these stories at DC was “What If?”, a series in which the omniscient Watcher peers into alternate universes — presumably with the help of something like a “dimensional viewer”? — to see what would have happened, had the events of published stories been slightly different. This is your classic “divergent worlds” formulation, long beloved of SF writers, where one tiny change creates an entirely different chain of causality. And because it comes out of the toolkit of SF in this way, is one reason it isn’t scientifically-irrelevant. Not the only one, as we shall see! But a big one, and one that has far-reaching consequences: Marvel has all kinds of alternate universes in it, fanciful places where things are just plain different, but the divergent universes are not of a kind with these, and one major reason why they’re not is that when we’re presented with a story entitled “What If…The Fantastic Four All Had Different Powers?” we’re not just shown what would happen if they had different ones, but we’re also told why they have the ones they do. Thus What If? bestows a canonical factoid on us, even though its subject is “all that didn’t happen” — all that is not canon, except that by contradistinction it describes what is canon far more completely than canon itself ever does. Of all Marvel’s stories, then, the ones in What If? are the hardest to reason away, because they involve an omniscient being explaining the necessities that obtain in the “main line”, through providing annotated counter-explanations that dwell some distance off of it. And since the very nature of the “What If?” conceit makes it necessary that any event in any comic published by Marvel can be shown occurring in a different way, there is no end to the amount of material that must — at least potentially — defy reinterpretation in this way.

3. The facts of the publishing business condition the expression of physical law within the MU. No Cosmic Being’s pronouncements can ever be authoritative, no yellow caption box can ever contain the real truth about what things are or why they happened, why interstellar flight is possible or why magic spells have their effect or even why water flows downhill…because it could all be rewritten in some future comic, EXCEPT that although interpretations of events in the fictional world may not constrain future events within it, events and interpretations that lie in the real world may and do. Therefore if there is an ultimate ground of “what is possible” in the MU, in a physical and cosmological sense, it must analogize the principles obtaining in the real world that guide corporate and editorial and artistic choices. These principles, fortunately for the plan of the fictional universe, are fairly stable: highly unlikely to change in any significant way over decades, whatever the occasional minor shift in fashion may dictate. But, should they so change, the physics and cosmology of the fictional universe might well change with them. Perhaps precipitating a sort of…well, a crisis, in the fictional reality? And it’s not my intention to show that such a crisis has indeed occurred, but the interested reader might find a couple of reasons to think it has…

Down in the shadowy valley of this already too-long essay, which will shall descend into…

…NOW!

There’s a thing in the real world, actually with a rather impressive pedigree, which has gotten into the MU as well. Let’s say they call it, down in that fictional reality, “The Theory Of The True Vacuum”. That would be an utterly empty space, with no qualities in it…and with no absence of qualities either, but simply a comprehension-defying blank. In our own world, we have not found any evidence that such a blank state is possible: nature seems to abhor it, you know? Pair production fills even the space between galaxies, and indeed space itself could simply be a non-natural property of matter…not really existing. Well, have you ever seen “space”?

But down in the fictional reality, from the fictional reality’s perspective, something like it may exist. Because there is a gulf between our own reality and the fictions that ride on it, and that gulf can never be crossed — no one, not even Grant Morrison or Cary Bates, can ever really enter the fictional world, and no one from the fictional world can really enter this one. This seems basic, but I think probably that’s just a good reason to keep it in mind: a fictional world doesn’t actually share an ontological status with the real world, but is a construct only. Furthermore, everything inside it is equally fictitious, and when I start going on about how things “seem” to the denizens of the MU, I’ll have to remember (and you will too) that I’m not really talking about anything at all — it’s all just a game. For example, when I say that to the denizens of the MU our own reality must remain forever unreachable and unknowable, though it controls their every move, that would only be true if they were real…which they aren’t, because (to mangle a witticism) there’s no “they” there. However…

If they were real, then the force of imagination we possess, that writes their world, would not be something they could comprehend…would not be something they could ever access. So between us and them — if they existed, which they don’t — there might well be a fundamental gap, a true cosmological emptiness, out of which all the features of their worlds appear. But, they could never get their hands or minds on this gap. Hmm, everyone is so obsessed with power in a superhero universe…imagine what power an access to the True Vacuum would bring! A nothingness with no rules, with nothing to impede the manifestation of thought as reality. A place without thought or reality!

You have to think it’d be good for something. But here’s the problem with that: you’d also have to be a bit of a nut to imagine there “really is” a True Vacuum. Doctor Doom, for example, probably doesn’t believe in such a thing…magic and time-travel are okay, but talking about True Vacuum is a bit like talking about G-D, and so you might as well not. That a thing called Limbo exists, we must imagine that he knows very well…and was the time machine just an application, as was the “netherworld probe” of his college days, of experiments with the theory of the True Vacuum? Doom might’ve learned through experience not to believe in any emptiness more rarified than Limbo’s own…not least because Limbo is represented as a real thing in the MU, whereas the gulf between the writer and the story is never represented there…cannot be represented there if the writer can’t appear as “himself”, see? Well, but maybe Doom does not conclude this after all, since he has never been shown to, but to me it seems fairly supportable that he has concluded it. For one thing, he never tries to make a Cosmic Cube, though in Englehart’s FF we’re told that he knows the principles well enough. And what could the Cosmic Cube be intended as, but a little prism of the True Vacuum through which thoughts may be focussed? The “A” in A.I.M. doesn’t stand for “Average”, so maybe there was a nut over there, a stubborn scientistic bastard, a Teilhardian charlatan Doom would no doubt despise, who really believed in the stuff, and sought a way to catch some of it in a net…and A.I.M. let him do it, funded him, gave him equipment…

We will, I promise, get back to that guy. But first we have to go through every other coordinate point in the universe. Limbo, eh?

What d’you suppose it is?

I have found that when confronted by such questions, it’s as well to seek refuge in the dictionary, which gives us the derivation from “limb” — meaning “edge”, or “border”. So: the borderland of Limbo, the edgelands of Limbo? The name seems to fit, as Limbo appears to be a kind of place chiefly identified by its delocalization: being nowhere in particular, and existing outside Time in a space “between”, it’s what every time-traveller has to pass through, and it’s the home of “lost” things — indeterminate things, forgotten things, things no longer quite real. Trackless and shifting and infinite, there is no end to it…well, there’s no end to things located in the state we shall call “Universe”, the realm of Time, either, but Limbo’s unendingness is a bit more immediate! Since without localization whether spatial or temporal, you don’t have to go far to encounter its limitless nature.

Oh yeah…and the Space Phantom lives there.

We’ll get back to him, too.

But first: how might we conceptualize a country all border, all edge, and absolutely no middle at all? It make me think of Cosmic Strings a little, if you want to know the truth…which are not really “strings” at all, but borders between phase transitions. The theory goes, that just as ice freezes with little lines in it (where the rate of freezing was different), so too the fabric of spacetime “froze” as the early universe grew and the forces separated themselves out from unity…and to the extent they separated themselves out at different rates, there appeared “little lines” to mark these phase transitions. Except, the lines aren’t “lines”, anymore than they’re “strings”! Instead being curled-up dimensionality with an intense gravitic attraction. Not mass, nor energy either! But just a tortured kind of spacetime, twisted and compacted. If we ran into one in our spaceship, we’d know it — it’s be like running over a tug’s line in a speedboat! — but for all that a cosmic string may look like a “thing” and act on us as though it were a thing, it really isn’t a thing. And, ha ha, you know there may not actually be “cosmic strings” at all? Since the theory’s far from proven. It just seemed like a good way to explain the rapidity of galaxy formation, you see: cosmic strings lying invisible across space, like strings in an oyster bed, there only to provide the gravity that allows material to coalesce in a hurry…

But, “phase transitions”…

Those are edges, aren’t they?

So imagine Limbo — for right this minute, anyway — as not a place so much as a kind of fractal web: anywhere there’s a phase transition in the MU, there Limbo stands. We must remember that the MU is different from our world in a couple of possibly-illuminating ways, one of which being that its many-worlds theory isn’t about a collection of divergent universes based on the collapse of the wave function, but a collection of divergent universes based on whether Peter Parker chose to have a chocolate shake or a vanilla shake down at the Coffee Bean Barn that time. In the real world this isn’t the case; in the real world it is only about wave-function collapse, irreversibility carried out at the quantum scale…and macroscopic events don’t tally, so between one of the real-world “other universes” and our own there might not even be many differences that we would be able to see, at our scale. But the MU is a land of SF, and in SF this state of affairs is always analogized for us as differences in people, differences in places, difference in human-sized events presented to us in order that we may more ably play with the concepts. Again, the already-tiring refrain: we will get back to this later, but for now the point is that cosmologically-significant phase transitions must be everywhere in the MU, at every scale from the cellular to the galactic, and so Limbo’s garden of forking paths — if it is indeed a garden of forking paths — must be located “everywhere” as well. And nowhere, obviously, since if “the whole place” is just a spidery network filtering through all space and time then it really is all edge, and no centre…

And can anyplace really be anywhere, without having a centre to it?

Think of the places we call Universe as — uncomplicatedly — a bunch of bubbles floating in foam. Limbo, on a massively macroscopic scale, is the interstitial space between them. The MU’s cosmological structure, as a grandiose reflection of real-world publishing practices, is full of phase transitions too: some of the bubbles are near one another, and others are far away. Sometimes, adjacent bubbles “pop together”; other times, a bubble simply pops out of existence. There’s a mathematical regularity to it, and the mathematical regularity is not an illusion! Up here in the real world, Rich Buckler’s Deathlok was a character very firmly and explicitly grounded in the 1970s, in a handmade universe completely detached from the House That Jack Built…but owned by the same publisher, so in time it not only became possible for Deathlok’s world and the world of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four to enjoy congress with one another, but eventually to also “pop together”. And this was a sadly final event for the original Buckler/Moench creation, for who has the power to “unpop together” fictional milieux that Editorial has joined? Deathlok’s history is rewritten, in an invisible retcon, as the much larger “bubble” of the main-line MU takes him over…

…And so then what happens to the interstitial space that once lay between him and the world of Pocket Rockets and spider-suits, that border he once crossed in Marvel Team-Up, that border taken away from him in Marvel Two-In-One? “Mathematical regularity”, I said, and since there is no reason I can think of why it would be inappropriate for us to model universes as bubbles, pi inevitably pops out of the model. The “fluid” of Limbo is changed, when Deathlok enters the main line…geometrically, the Very Large Multiverse is no longer quite the same. If we can think of the “fluid” as being pressurized, then we can imagine its pressure decreasing when the bubble of the main line expands to swallow other bubbles near it.

Just as, when licensing agreements expire, that pressure decreases as well. Rom: Spaceknight, not being owned outright by Marvel, could not “pop together” with the main line’s bubble, but instead popped out on its own…and what did it leave behind? Decreased pressure, a “depression” in the fluid of what we might as well call Limbo…but the reason we might as well call it that, is that there are many Rom fans still out there who would like to see the character return, and this means that there is a marked possibility that he may do so. In cosmological terms of the MU, then, the interstitial fluid “remembers” Rom: preserves his potential, though he no longer enjoys an actuality. And if his “bubble” pops back in, it will pop back in from the same medium in which it popped out…provided that “pressure conditions” are the same. We might drop down the macro scale a bit at this point, and surmise that the same sort of thing occurs when characters are killed and then return to life…Milligan and Allred’s “Deadgirl” mini shows Dr. Strange confessing that there are rules governing the return of characters to life, but that the reason behind the rules remains opaque. Well, opaque to him, but then he’s the resident of a fictional universe and hasn’t been written to know that his reality is an imaginary one…clearly if he could think for himself, at this point he might well realize that it is! But of course we can see the reason for it all quite clearly, being real ourselves: it isn’t about the love, it’s about the demand in the marketplace, and that demand in our world is inversely proportional to the pressure in the interstitial fluid in the MU. Lots of things could mitigate against the return of a beloved character, by increasing the pressure…in fact we might think that the “pressure” is increasing all the time, as new elements are added to the fictional environment. Separate original bubbles like Deathlok’s are becoming fewer, not just because they’re being swallowed but because they’re not being replenished by fresh creations…and licensed bubbles like Rom’s are becoming fewer as well, for a host of reasons that (it pains me to say it) want of space prevents me from listing here. But compensating for this is the ongoing expansion of the main line, and the increasing convolution of its own internal composition. Gwen Stacy wasn’t resurrected because Mary Jane Watson took her place as Peter Parker’s love interest: no one needed Gwen anymore. The demand went down as the pressure went up; the fictional universe was simply topped up with more stuff.

That’s one way of looking at it.

But there are other ways, too. One of them follows Einstein: Limbo is simply Elsewhere, the vast realm outside the light-cone from which all previously-forbidden places become reachable. During the Inferno crossover in Fantastic Four, Steve Englehart reminds us that all time-travellers must pass through Limbo to get where they’re going, which would be a statement quite straightforwardly true if Limbo were Elsewhere by a different name…because the only thing that keeps the past from being the present, is the fact that you can’t get there from here. So okay, so far so fine and so dandy, but the really interesting thing about this conception of Limbo is that it means it really is NOT a “place”…because the whole thing about Elsewhere is that because it’s “anywhere you can’t get to”, it’s pretty much almost all of the universe, except just this little spot where you are. And if you’re in a different spot, then what’s in Elsewhere changes for you. At this moment, the chair in which I sit is Elsewhere to anyone more than 300,000 kilometers away in any direction…but everyplace that’s more than 300,000 kilometers away from this chair at this instant is also Elsewhere to me. So that’s quite beyond “Limbo is delocalized”, you see: that’s “Limbo is compositionally different for each observer”, because each observer will see a different list of spacetime coordinates in it. And that’s an interesting principle, so we’ll return to it shortly…but remember, inside the fictional universe nothing that isn’t extra-universally controlled can ever be the top level of physical description, so we must continue to privilege descriptions like that of the sea of bubbles in the endless foam even if in our own world we’d be more comfortable letting relativity stand on its own. And this is because relativity applies within the MU only because it’s been added to the fiction both deliberately and accidentally, so it only applies to the extent that it fails to conflict with the necessitous demands of our own higher order. Real-world physics has nothing to say about parts of the universe vanishing from existence one day, but then perhaps reappearing later because they’ve been remembered by spacetime…but MU cosmology would be ludicrously incomplete if it didn’t include this sort of thing, because frankly we can see that it bloody well happens all the time.

The same is true if we leave relativity and move over to quantum mechanics — for it, too, is conditioned from “above”. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful…the QM perspective of Limbo would junk Elsewhere, sort of in the same gesture that it would dump what we might call the “stability of particles”. QM is all about the measurements, you see, rather than about the nature of the underlying objects that produce them…in fact the QM perspective holds that we might as well not even talk about “underlying objects”; since the measurements are all we ever see, we might as well respect the measurements as the only reality there is! Because to suppose otherwise is to reason on facts not in evidence. Thus QM concentrates on interactions over substances — particles aren’t objects with radii and mass, they’re bundles of quanta whose interreactivity with other quanta makes them what they are. It’s called “topological order”…as a recent example had it, if you want a picture of New York City you could draw out all the streets and photograph all the buildings, but that would give you a very static and inferior map; whereas if you regarded NYC primarily as a network of interactions, if you scooped up all the telephone traffic and the credit-card purchases you would get a much more detailed and responsive view, and as a side-effect you’d be able to see the buildings and streets represented very accurately in that data as well. It’s be like Neo’s “Matrix-sight”, right? Or Daredevil’s radar sense…eventually you’d have even a more accurate picture of the measurements of the buildings and the streets…

And the definition-by-contradistinction technique of topological order works just as well for everything, at every scale: you don’t need blueprints and photographs to see an atom, which is good because they’re very hard to photograph. Similarly, you don’t need to measure the straightness of the path of light, if you just give up the idea that it is straight…what you do instead is assume that each photon has a certain chance of taking any old path from the emitter at A to the receiver at B. Long, loopy paths. Straight, short paths. Paths that, indeed, go through every other coordinate point in all of spacetime before they finally arrive at B. This will be important in a minute! But first, speaking of Limbo…

I promise, this really will all come together at some point…

That thing about the bubbles in the fluid works pretty well, I think…but does it work well enough? Sure, the fractal web of Limbo is both everywhere and nowhere, but mere everyplaceness/noplaceness won’t cover the entirety of what its nature must be like…and what of the Theory Of The True Vacuum? As well, we’ve seen very many different representations of Limbo, and the fractal web alone won’t explain their dissimilarities. Moreover, what of Limbo’s activity? It “remembers” things that the Universe has forgotten, and it can replace lost things again by forming new “bubbles” from its substance. And that’s some pretty weird activity for a mere interstitial fluid to get up to, damnit! Because if it’s the stuff defined as being between the bubbles, then how can it also be the bubbles it’s between…?

So maybe the “bubbles” are all that there is, and the interstitial fluid’s a bit more evasive than it seems. After all, if you think a bit more about what a bunch of bubbles in foam look like, they look like unusually large bubbles surrounded by a medium made up of much smaller bubbles, on down to a practically infinitesimal size. The “fluid”, then, is not really “fluid” at all…or, to put it another way, the fractal web of fluid is MUCH more fractalized then it first appeared. Now, here’s the thing about the Theory Of The True Vacuum: as Doctor Doom knows, you just can’t get to the True Vacuum. And from all we’ve seen of Limbo, it’s like that too: people think they’re going into the “real” Limbo, but they’re really just going into the bubbles it supports. The True Vacuum and the Real Limbo and the Gulf Of Imagination, no one in the MU can ever get to these, never touch them or so much as accidentally scrape against them…and following this principle it seems as though to make a journey in a time machine, to be exiled to a “pocket universe”, to cross between dimensions or into the Negative Zone, must be merely to create a new bubble in the foam and transit it. To enter it and then leave it. Limbo and the True Vacuum is never seen, but space is carved out from it, inflated from it…perhaps left to pop back down into it, or perhaps not. “Placeness” in Limbo — all of it, even including the castle Immortus returns to from his excursions into Time — may be so mutable that nothing stands still and no foot is ever put in exactly the same river twice! Because as with QM, there are only interactions: no particles, but only paths.

Paths. Let’s think about what they look like. The time-traveller moves out of the type of place we call Universe, and into a Limbo-bubble…then, back to Universe again. And this doesn’t look very different from a parabolic arc, really. Out they go, and back they come, and if they ever get stuck it appears as though there’s some sort of a mass-energy tradeoff involved. So we might assume that the nature of paths originating in Universe is that they go from place to place in the Universe…no trick at all if you just live there all the time! But perhaps to follow a Universe-originating path in Limbo you pretty much have to be planning on a return trip; there has to be a path back out, even if you don’t take it, because even if you are in Limbo you are still of Universe…therefore Limbo is not your home soil, and you can’t put down roots there. One supposes, quickly scanning the evidence, that a person based in Limbo would be rooted in Limbo in a complementary fashion: the Space Phantom always goes back to Limbo, as does Immortus. And perhaps it’s even that they never “really” leave Limbo at all, always standing rooted in that other ground, though to us they seem like they’re “here”. You have to figure it’s a lonely life, not being part of Time, part of Universe! Everything is so rich, there. There is stability. There is consequence, and the whole glorious chain of cause and effect, as events stick to people. But in Limbo there are none of these things, only the waiting path back…if indeed you ever really left.

But possibly there are paths within Limbo as well, eh? Just as there are paths within Universe. A Limbo-dweller may be able to link from one Limbo-bubble through to another much as Universe-dwellers link through a Limbo-bubble back into Universe…and in this way all of the fractal web may be, if not already connected, then connectable. The “relative simultaneity” problem of the light-cone and Elsewhere may have a similar “other side” solution, too…to Universe people, the contents of everyone’s Elsewheres are different from their neighbours, but to Limbo people the conditioning fact of the light-cone may indeed be absent. Everywhere may be Elsewhere, and everyone may have all the same stuff in their List of Places…it’s just that you can never go to exactly the same place on that list two times.

We might want some math, for this. Boy, when am I going to get to Avengers Forever? Never mind: first, the math. Imagine if you will a rough country road, bumping up and down, and imagine yourself travelling along it in a car. And now imagine that the road is intersected by Flatland. Up and down your car goes, passing through the plane, and A. Square and his friends all see the same thing: a blob that changes shape and size and mass (and colour too, probably), going about NNE at about twenty miles an hour. The reader will forgive me for inserting a little witless observation of my own, here: that the addition of dimensionality tends to remove components of motion. So, up one level to our cozy 3D world, and the shapechanging and mass-shifting goes away — the car is a stable form, simply moving at a certain speed over variable terrain. Up one more level, if we are saying (for the sake of argument) that the fourth dimension is Time, and the speed then disappears: the car is a long metallic bundle of wires stretched out atemporally along the road. And…

Up one more dimension, to a 5D view?

Very possibly, the direction disappears. Instead of one car travelling SSW – NNE in one universe, there are many cars in many universes, of which this car is only one, and they are all taking different lines across the face of the compass. North to South. West to East. And all the points in between. So, if we wanted to count these universes, we could just count the number of straight lines we could pass through a compass, right?

I’ll do the counting for you: that number’s called Aleph-1, which represents the number of mathematical points in a continuum. Like the number of points on which a pure-mathematics dart can land, on a pure-mathematics dartboard. It’s a pretty big Infinity! Bigger than Aleph-0, which we could represent by the number line. So, yeah: the number of those different “road” universes is bigger than the number of all the integers — because no matter how infinitely long the number line is, the compass face is still deeper. So, just before we jump into the matter of the Divergent Universes, I just thought I’d point out that it’s senseless to number them, because their number is greater than the number of numbers that we have available to count them with. So give up on “Earth-616”, is I guess what I’m saying: in numerical terms, the designation’s useless. Nonsensical. Of course you can call a universe whatever you want, you can call it “616” or you can call it “Fred”…but the thing to remember is, calling it Fred is the same as calling it 616.

I don’t know, though…it’s fun, isn’t it? Wacky, to imagine that the number of universes can be numbered. Now that’s an exciting flight of fancy!

How do they come up with this stuff?!

But in any case, the point is: if you imagine Aleph-0 as a number line, an infinitely-long yardstick, then (as Rudy Rucker suggests) you might imagine Aleph-1 as a book with an infinite number of pages. You read one page and then turn it…but if you try to turn it back, you don’t get the same page again, but instead you get a new page you’ve never seen before, that lies between the page you started on and the page you turned to. And if you try to flip forward again, the same thing happens: caught between the numbers, you descend through all the fractions, and you never stop falling. So if it is the case that Limbo is a kind of place that never repeats itself, then it would be like that book: Immortus leaves his castle to fight the Avengers, and then he returns, but not to the same castle…merely to a castle “between”, that looks just like it. And where there’s no difference to be told between two things, then there’s obviously no reason to say they’re different…if the measurements are all exactly the same then the thing must be the same as well…so in the end it may not matter and I can’t prove that it does matter, but I just thought you should bear it in mind, that it might be this way…

And, see? I mentioned Immortus again!

We’re getting closer…

But first, I should just say a word about those universes.

You know how everyone complains that all the stories in What If? either show that Peter Parker must become Spider-Man, or that if he doesn’t then the universe is destoyed and everybody dies? It is annoying, to just see nothing but arm-twisting arguments for the status quo…but it’s also kind of interesting, because it may also show how the status quo gets constructed. This is real physics again, about that business with the photon having a certain inclination to take any old path from A to B, and not necessarily the straight one. You see, it all begins with the immortal James Clerk Maxwell, and his little doodles about electromagnetism — they showed how you would go about counting all the different places an electron could be, and from this figure out why it happens to be just where it is. Later on, Richard Feynman made his famous “Feynman Diagrams”, that showed (among other things) how we get straight lines from light even though light doesn’t have to go in straight lines. This is fun stuff to play with, especially in time-travel stories! Because there are all these different ways the light might go, but some of those ways cancel one another out, and others reinforce the ones next to them. Take the path that goes from the emitter at A, then through every other coordinate point in the universe, and then finally to the receiver at B. Well, but there is also another path light might take, that’s just like that one except it goes in the reverse order! So this would mean that the odds of light taking the first path would be cancelled out by the equal odds of light taking the reverse path. So it takes neither path.

You’ll forgive me for speaking in really loose terms about this stuff, but…that’s the gist.

But then there are all the possible paths that go straight, or nearly straight, or straight but with a kink in the middle, or curved the same way on either side of “straight”…and there are a whole lot of paths like this that are nearly the same, they’re not outliers like the one-and-only “all the way clockwise around the universe” path, or its similarly one-and-only “all the way but counterclockwise this time” path, but there is just a huge bundle of them and they make up a large number of the possible paths and they’re close…so they don’t “cancel”, they amplify, and when you take all the paths together and you, er, “calculate them out”, what you end up with is a straight path in the end. Basically you just count everything you can possibly count, and then what you end up with after the counting tells you why you see what you see, instead of seeing something else. Just like Maxwell. So these different light-paths, they’re not really “real”, obviously…the light doesn’t actually go all these different ways only to then sit down with pencil and paper and figure out which way it should’ve gone, but we say there’s a special kind of “space” where these path-potentials live, and that’s where the “calculation” happens. We can totally screw with that calculation if we want to, by the way! Yes. Call it (again, shamefully loose speech, here) a “diffraction grating”, it’s a thing where if you just prune some of the possible paths, if you make it so they don’t factor into the calculation, then the path the light takes might be a bit curved, or something. It isn’t easy!

You can’t get massive effects out of it!

But it can in actual fact be done, and this too will be of some importance later. Not very much later, now! But first, let’s just finish off the Watcher. Yes, the Watcher, because in What If? he is looking into that “special space” where the calculations of different paths happen, and isn’t it fascinating how what he shows us is always just those two complementary status-quo preserving types of event-chains? The nearly-straight lines, where the answer to “What If…Someone Other Than Peter Parker Had Been Bitten By The Radioactive Spider?” is always “then Peter Parker would have eventually become Spider-Man”…and the outliers, where the answer to “What If…The Avengers Had Lost The Evolutionary War?” is always something weirdly specific and totally wrong and dumb, like “then Wolverine leads humanity into the Cosmic All-Mind of Superhumans and the universe ceases to be.” Note that the Watcher always presents these alternative event-chains as absolutely deterministic except for the one little change, right? If this happened then this other thing WOULD HAPPEN, no question about it…!

But, it’s all just because there are only so many ways to count things. The Watcher is just basically factoring all the different kinds of universes there can be, you know? The mainline MU’s events form the trunk of the tree…one little deviation and you get a branch. Well, but aren’t there any divergent universes where there’s more than one deviation? Sure, of course there must be…in fact it might even be kind of silly to say that there could “really” be any universes where total determinism rules, because if one thing changed then it might spawn many other changes, but if we have to COUNT the different ways things might have gone, then we have to be a bit efficient about it, so lets’s just make a tree. Trunk, branches…then other branches, then twigs. Beneath “What If Somebody Else Had Been Spider-Man” must be a bunch of other little branch-lets labelled “What If Someone Else Had Been Spider-Man AND Then Norman Osborn Had Lived”, and in fact we know these kinds of branch-lets are there because sometimes they’re included in the story the Watcher tells…in fact, every branching must terminate in a twig somehow, right?…and below “What If The Avengers Had Lost The Evolutionary War” there must be a sub-branch that appends “…And Wolverine Died”, so whatever, it’s a good counting method but that’s all it is…and that’s not nothing, but it’s also not everything.

Except there’s a problem. Because this is comics, to all appearances it seems as though the divergent universes share an ontological status with the mainline universe, within the MU’s fictional reality…to us, of course, they totally do, because they’re all just marks on paper anyhow…and so the Watcher’s “dimensional viewer” we could certainly explain as a machine that makes it so you can look into Hilbert Space just as though the things in it were “really happening”, and we could even go so far as to say “sure, you could visit these places, why not”…but the fact is, that isn’t how these divergent spaces are being treated, and if they aren’t treated that way then we get some peculiar things coming out of them. Maxwell’s equations and Feynman’s diagrams work because they’re counting up things that AREN’T, to explain why we see what IS…and why “what is” isn’t something different. But a divergent What If? factor tree that counts things that ARE, though at first it seems to give a good explanation analogous to Maxwell’s and Feynman’s, on just a bit closer inspection starts to give more and more freaky explanations, because the graph collapses instead of continuing to expand outward. Somewhere way down the branches, in a divergent universe the Watcher isn’t bothering to show us, the Spider-Man story and the Evolutionary War story fuse together…as something Flash Thompson did causes the Avengers to lose, and suddenly the straight-line paths start blending into the loopy outlier paths, and at a certain level somewhere down the tree there are divergent universes that fuse everything together, and do every possible thing, and invalidate the trunk itself. Somewhere way down there is a Zombie Watcher holding the Ultimate Nullifier, you know? And looking back at our Watcher and cackling as he pushes the lever all the way forward. It’s already happened, if it’s even possible.

Therefore…and I hope my logic is half-decent here, or we’re all in terrible trouble…it must not be possible.

The divergent universes must not share an ontological status with the mainline MU.

So…

If all that’s true, then what exactly is Immortus doing, in Avengers Forever?

Well…

What indeed?

…the Legion of Super-Heroes, post cancellation?

Our host Nathan graciously invited me to share my thoughts about How to Fix the Legion of Super-Heroes as part of the discussion following this article. In case you don’t know me, I regularly hold forth on the Legion over at Legion Abstract, but I’ve never specifically answered this question before. It takes on added weight, though, now that the comic book has actually been cancelled (which happened after I finished the first draft of this article) as of August.

But you know the real problem with the Legion?

It’s not broken.

There’s nothing to fix.

Okay, good article! Thanks, Nathan! See you ’round! That was easy!

Or perhaps I will elaborate. See, here’s the thing. With most superhero teams, we have some idea of the rules for how to tell good stories about those teams. For instance: in a Justice League comic, we want a membership that includes at least some of DC’s most famous and powerful heroes, working together against a large-scale threat. Well, DC’s writers have, over the years, developed some highly identifiable rules for how to get the Legion right:

1. The Legion is a group of superheroes.
2. There are many Legionnaires.
3. Being a Legionnaire is a special thing.
4. Legionnaires don’t all have overwhelming superpowers, but combine their more modest talents through teamwork to be effective.
5. The Legionnaires started their heroic careers as teenagers.
6. The Legion lives in the distant future.
7. The future setting of the Legion is an optimistic one, and so is the Legion’s outlook.
8. The future setting of the Legion is one in which space travel is common and there is abundant life on other planets.
9. The Legionnaires were the best friends of Clark Kent when he was a teenager, and helped him learn how to be a superhero.
10. Either directly or indirectly, the Legion represents the legacy of Superman ten centuries in the future.
11. The Legionnaires are the champions of diversity, and against xenophobia, in their society.
12. In Legion comics, characters can experience permanent change.

It’s hard to mess up this recipe, and in fact there aren’t a lot of examples of Legion comics where it did get messed up. The incumbent Legion writer is Paul Levitz, who knows how to get the Legion right arguably better than anybody else does, and who might be the most beloved of all Legion writers (unless Jim Shooter is).

So everything must be fine! Right? But no. Because:

1. While Levitz is indisputably competent at writing the Legion, most of his recent output has lacked what one might call the fire (with the exception of the last few issues, which benefited from the contributions of another guy who knows how to get the Legion right, Keith Giffen). It just hasn’t been all that interesting.
2. There’s a perception among comics fans that Legion comics are, because of the large cast and long, convoluted continuity, impenetrable to new readers.
3. Sales are low.

The fix for 1. is easy to describe, but difficult to accomplish in practice: replace Levitz with another writer, one who is good, has some star power, and who has something to say about the Legion. The fix for 2. is very tricky, because, while it’s true that there is a lot of convoluted continuity in the Legion’s past (which we don’t need to go into here!), in practice that continuity does not get in the way or make the comic books hard to read. In particular, Paul Levitz has bent over backwards to make this version of the Legion extremely new-reader-friendly. He provided a lot of introductory material, back in Adventure Comics before it was cancelled, and in the Legion: Secret Origins miniseries. He’s shaved down the cast of characters a little bit. He’s provided some new Legionnaires to act as viewpoint characters for new readers. But the perception remains.

It would be nice to believe that, if DC could solve problems 1. and 2., that problem 3. would go away along with them. I don’t know if it’s true, though. I don’t know if there are enough people out there who want to read about the Legion of Super-Heroes.

A few years ago, the prescription would have been obvious. Remember the period of time from, I’m going to say, about 2000 through 2006, when Legion comics featured the reboot, or “post-Zero-Hour”, Legion, and then after that the threeboot, or “Waid-and-Kitson” Legion? Many fans spoke loud and clear: they wanted the original Legion back. They didn’t love these new versions the way they loved the ones they had grown up with. If DC wanted to make a big success out of the Legion, they would have to bring back the version of the team that Paul Levitz wrote about back in the ’80s.

And DC brought them back (or, at least, they brought back a version that was close enough to the ’80s version that most readers accepted them as such). And, eventually, Paul Levitz stepped down as publisher to write the comic again. The nostalgic faction of fans had been given exactly what they wanted.

Except, once they saw it, it turned out they didn’t want it that much, and DC eventually pulled the plug on the title. So where do you go from there? You’re not gonna get many old readers back by bringing in the reboot and threeboot Legions, I know that much (Some, yes, some of us would love it; I’d love it). And it won’t attract new readers either.

Is it, then, time for DC to give up on the Legion?

I’m going to say “no”, and here’s why.

First, DC doesn’t have so many properties that are as potentially successful as the Legion that they can afford to let one lie fallow.

Second, the Legion is a big property. We’re talking about an entire setting, with about a hundred notable characters, that have been featured in half a century’s worth of stories. That’s too much intellectual property to basically abandon.

Third, and this is one that I’m not sure about, but it sounds plausible, the word “superhero” appears in the title, and DC needs to publish something at least every now and then with the word “superhero” in the title in order to hang on to their (jointly held with Marvel) trademark on the word “superhero”. I have heard that this is true; I do not know that it is true.

Fine, then, we’ll save it.

(I’ve seen the idea in more than one place that the Legion needs some time off. That DC should just leave it alone for a few years, so when they bring it back, the new version will get a real fresh start and the audience won’t bring the baggage of the previous series to it. I can see the sense of this. But… I for one don’t need to take a break, and if the Legion was gone for a few years I would miss them like hell. That’s just me, though.)

There is, of course, one simple fix that would solve everything immediately. We could just turn the whole enterprise over to Art Baltazar and Franco. (For that matter, Christopher Bird has his own thoughts on what should be done, and we could do worse than to give him a shot.) Or maybe we could move the Legion franchise from regular DC to Vertigo; I could see that working.

Whichever lucky writer gets tagged in to make this comic book work, they’d be well advised to follow these constraints.

1. This is in part a science fiction comic book. It’s not just superhero space opera. Science fiction elements are both appropriate and welcome in Legion comics.

2. The Legion roster needs to be both large and diverse. Male and female Legionnaires, Legionnaires of any and every race, Legionnaires who are straight and gay and everything else, Legionnaires who are human and humanoid and nonhuman and noncorporeal and artificial. There’s no excuse for not doing this; it’s a basic necessity of the premise of the Legion.

3. Now, you don’t have to put all these characters in the spotlight. Pick maybe four or five Legionnaires to focus on, and have the others be supporting or walk-on characters. Background. This is not the way Legion comics have been done in the past, and some longtime fans may be ticked off about it, but in the interests of accessibility I think it’s the way to go.

4. I think it’d also be advisable to provide some kind of inflection point in the story, so that what comes after is clearly distinguishable from what came before. (The way Giffen and the Bierbaums separated off their Five Years Later run.) Not a reboot, you understand, just a clear boundary.

5. As it happens, I have an idea for this inflection point. This is just what I’d do, you understand; any other writer might have a different scheme. My idea is the advent of the megaverse. The megaverse is all parallel dimensions existing as one. So the Legion’s future merges with all the other possible futures of the DC universe into one big future, one which contains dozens of versions of the Legion itself, some new and some old. So, all previous continuity is true, whether it’s contradictory or not, and the potential cast of characters is huge (but see points 2 and 3).

6. Superboy (or Superman) and Supergirl should play a real but limited role in this comic book. That connection to Superboy is important to a lot of readers, and it’s also one that works well for the Legion, in small doses. (Making Bart Allen a Legionnaire is also not a bad idea. Plus I’d love it if you could use Jordana Gardner, the Teen Lantern, from that one issue of the cartoon-tie-in comic Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st Century.)

7. Accessibility to new readers is going to be the most important thing, so all of this continuity that’s available to us should be strongly strongly deemphasized. No dwelling on the past; no revisiting previous plotlines; no nostalgia. You can keep old fans happy by portraying the characters well and giving them good stories to be in.

8. Again, to aid accessibility, for the first year or two of this new Legion era, all of the stories will be done-in-one. No huge arcs to make it hard for fans to jump on. Each individual issue will be a complete Legion of Super-Heroes story. This does not preclude subplots that build over several issues, but a reader should be able to pick up any comic book and read it without needing a previous comic to explain what’s going on, and enjoy it, and…

9. DC should make it crystal-pepsi-clear to everyone in the world that this comic book is new-reader-friendly. The cover of the first issue should be nothing but a big caption that says, “You Don’t Need to Have Ever Read A Legion Comic in Your Life to be Able to Understand This One”, or something along those lines. And maybe use that same sentence as a banner on all future covers, and at the top and bottom of every page of every comic. With luck, the message will get through to at least some of the readers.

10. There are ways DC could help support this new Legion comic. They could
a) release one of their direct-to-DVD features starring the Legion
b) give them their own TV show again (the previous TV version of the Legion being an acceptable proof-of-concept)
c) have a big crossover event where the characters from other DC titles are unexpectedly flung into the 31st-century megaverse and interact with the Legion.
In all of these cases, of course, you’d have to use basically the same version of the Legion that you’re using in the main Legion comic. It’d just be confusing otherwise, and against the spirit of the enterprise. And, of course, you have to make it good; there’s no substitute for that.

And let’s not ignore the art. The Legion has usually had excellent artists over the years. But some have been more successful than others at portraying the future, and only a few have really been able to put across their own vision of what the future looks like (I’m thinking of Dave Cockrum, Keith Giffen, Barry Kitson, and maybe Olivier Coipel). It would be strongly advisable to find another artist who could do that, and if the artist is already famous, and has an existing fan following, so much the better.

I guess what I’m really saying is this. DC doesn’t need to fix the Legion. What they need to do is stop fixing it and start selling it.