Marvel’s Legacy Heroes

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, DC Comics has taken some ideas from its rival, Marvel Comics, when it came to enhancing the quality of their brand–in this case, incorporating all of their heroes into one shared universe.

But as you can see in the latest from the Washington Post, Marvel isn’t above swiping a good idea when it sees one, either:

According to Marvel News and the Washington Post, in 2009 the Black Panther will be a woman.

That’s right — T’Challa of Wakanda will be the Black Panther no more, with an unknown woman taking his place as his country’s sacred protector. While details are scarce, writer Reginald Hudlin and Marvel EIC Joe Quesada seem enthusiastic about the series’ direction. “Our characters reflect the real world,” Quesada told WashPost. “To me, he’s the leader of the pack when it comes to that sort of stuff.”

Yet this is far from the first time that Marvel has introduced a legacy hero to its ranks. In comic geekspeak, a legacy hero is typically an associate, lover, or sidekick of a popular hero who assumes the hero’s mantle if they fall in battle. DC, with it’s dramatic reimagining of its lineup, has long had legacy heroes, beginning with Barry Allen in 1961. This, however, cuts both ways: while some can argue Marvel trumps DC with a user-friendly universe, others can argue legacy heroes give a franchise prestige by adding a generational tone to it.

Perhaps the first legacy hero of the Marvel Universe would be Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. One of Marvel’s first heroes (he shares that distinction with Namor, the Sub-Mariner), the Human Torch was such a dramatic visual that Stan Lee reimagined the character as a member of the Fantastic Four. Of course, while his looks were identical to his Golden Age predecessor, Storm had an enormous ego that set him apart. However, because there was no connection given to the original, android Human Torch, the legacy hero aspect of the character was lost. Indeed, when the android returned from the grave, the conflict came within the pages of West Coast Avengers, where the team thought he was the forebearer of the android known as The Vision.

One of the main reasons for legacy heroes is not only to give a launchpad for a brand new design or powerset, but also to replace aging heroes with a set of relatable younger ones. (DC did this successfully with the replacement of Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Oliver Queen with twenty-something protagonists Kyle Rayner and Connor Hawke.) Furthermore, legacy heroes can branch off into their own deep mythologies, such as DC’s Teen Titans and Outsiders franchises. In a team setting, Marvel managed to emulate this with the X-Men, replacing the stodgy original X-Men with the All-New, All-Different X-Men (which introduced Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, and Nightcrawler to the masses). With the idea of “there must always be a team of X-Men,” the X-Men had finally struck gold, with its next spin-off, The New Mutants, gaining incredible popularity as it eventually grew into the mutant strike team X-Force.

The mutant phenomenon exploded in the pages of Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May. 1975)

However, its attempts to do this on an individual scale resulted in disastrous consequences. In response to DC’s high-selling story arcs “The Death of Superman” and “Knightfall,” Marvel wanted to do something similarly controversial with Spider-Man. Furthermore, since the character had been married to his sweetheart Mary-Jane Watson in 1987, Marvel editors were concerned about the character’s apparent age, and how a married hero would resonate with young readers. The Clone Saga was born.

Spider vs. Spider: Web of Spider-Man #117 (Oct. 1994) kicked off a web of confusion and spectacle that nearly tanked a franchise.

To explain the Clone Saga is to delve into the murkier waters of Spider-Man lore. In 1973, writer Gerry Conway killed off Peter’s then-girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, having her neck broken as Peter Parker tried to catch her from a fall off the Brooklyn Bridge. However, Peter wasn’t the only one to mourn her: their biology professor, Miles Warren, was so wracked with grief he adopted a villainous persona known as the Jackal, and created a clone of the winsome Ms. Stacy. But the Jackal would not stop there–he also created a clone of Parker himself. The problem? Neither Spider-Man knew which one was the original. Conway wiggled his way out of this corner by killing one of them off, with the surviving Parker (and the reader) assuming he was real.

In 1994, however, Marvel brought the spectre of doubt back in a story arc that lasted nearly half a decade. By this time, Peter had suffered a nervous breakdown when his Aunt May had suffered a stroke and fallen into a coma. Hearing the news, Peter isn’t the only one to visit her–his clone had returned after five years on the road, now calling himself Ben Reilly. The doubt sparked conflict, and this conflict sparked sales.

However, soon thereafter, Marvel’s stock plummeted, and Editor-in-Chief Tom DeFalco was replaced by five  editors. Frantic for ideas to keep the cash cow milking, the editors extended the Clone Saga to epic lengths, delving into minutia such as the method of cloning or whether or not both Peter and Ben (now called the Scarlet Spider) were clones. Nearly three years later, the bombshell was finally dropped: Peter Parker, the hero readers had kept up with since 1962, was the clone, and Ben Reilly was the real one. Fan outcry was so fierce that despite a short stint of Ben taking Peter’s place with a new Spider-Man costume, Ben was killed off by a resurrected Norman Osborn, and Peter was put back into the spotlight as the one, true Spider-Man.

For years after that, the idea of legacy heroes at Marvel was avoided, with new imprints (such as Heroes Reborn and the Ultimate line) filling that need with varying levels of success. Three writers in particular, however, have bucked Marvel’s previous batting average with the legacy hero: Allan Heinberg, Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction. Heinberg, then the white-hot writer behind The O.C., headed the book Young Avengers in 2004, which spun off of the Avengers: Disassembled by introducing younger incarnations of classic Avengers known as Patriot, Hulkling, Asgardian, Iron Lad, and Hawkeye (based on Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and the recently-deceased Hawkeye), Heinberg was able to establish the Avengers as an ideal. Yet Heinberg did not completely embrace the legacy hero ideal, as the Young Avengers had their own internal struggles, including what to do when their founding member Iron Lad is actually a younger version of the time-travelling villain Kang the Conquerer, whose absence from evil would actually destroy the world. Despite Heinberg’s delayed scheduling–indeed, following issue #12, there hasn’t been another regular series with the characters, and the writer would later go on to do the same with Wonder Woman–sales showed that the legacy hero, when done right, could succeed at Marvel.

Meanwhile, Brubaker and Fraction, in their run of the Immortal Iron Fist, established a retroactive legacy for the Iron Fist mythos by creating Orson Randall, an Iron Fist who left the shining city of K’un L’un after World War I. The series was a complete success, and gave the main protagonist, Danny Rand, a new direction as well as a broader array of powers.

Danny Rand meets his match in Iron Fist #4

Brubaker continued the legacy hero tradition in his run of Captain America, which made national headlines for killing off its title character during the fallout of the summer blockbuster Civil War. Yet Brubaker had a plan–Cap’s one-time sidekick Bucky Barnes, recently resurrected as the murderous Winter Soldier during the beginning of Brubaker’s run, was tapped as the new Captain America, who would battle his own inner demons and doubt while trying to rout a conspiracy from Steve Rogers’ archnemesis, the Red Skull.

Indeed, with Heinberg, Brubaker, and Fraction’s contributions, Marvel’s legacy heroes are now in plentiful supply. The only question is: can Hudlin manage to A) give the original character a meaningful exit, and B) give this newcomer a three-dimensional and, most importantly, sympathetic take? Only time will tell.

Marc Andreyko is a funny, funny man.

Via Facebook:

Oh, you funny, funny man.

Thoughts on Final Crisis

Upon reading the news on Comic Book Resources that fan-favorite artist J.G. Jones (of Wanted and Marvel Boy fame) will not be working on the last issue of Final Crisis, many fans have unsheathed their claws.

The cover to Final Crisis #7, in which J.G. Jones will not be penciller.

It’s DC’s fault for awarding him an assignment that, based on past experience, he couldn’t complete.

What a joke! Another sign that DC is heading towards the iceberg.

Pathetic. DC editorial has been a real mess under Didio and things continue to get worse.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb here — I disagree. There are plenty of cogs in this machine, and hating on the editors seems foolish. In the end, they’ve got two extremes to osscilate between: how popular the talent is (usually measured by fan press as well as how many of his books or, more importantly, trades will readers pick up), and how well will they are with deadlines (usually measured by how many other projects they’re working on, their average speed [difficult to determine for an up-and-coming guy], as well as them out-and-out saying, “no worries, this is a synch, it’ll be done in a month, tops”). I would think if Talent A is “popular” enough (using my earlier criteria), they’ll suck up a goodly amount of Quantity B (the possibility of being late).

And the sales support it. Especially at the trade level, where a growing number of sales are being reaped.

Sadly, while there are plenty of great artists who work at insane speeds (here’s looking at you, Marc Bagley! And you, too, John Romita, Jr!), there are many more (Frank Quitely, John Cassady, J.H. Williams III, and the aforementioned Jones) who are incredibly iconic, but work much more slowly. But so long as the momentum behind the talent is still there, editors are probably right to wait a bit. Remember, this is a business — if 40,000 people will wait for Frank Quitely art (and you’re used to getting maybe 20,000 in sales otherwise), you wait for it. Fan press is secondary to sales. Always.

Art from Jonah Hex #35, by J.H. Williams III. Pretty, isn't it? But it doesn't come quickly.

There’s also the element of mind-reading. And how that only works in comic books, not in comic publishing.

Now, I could be completely off-base (as I wasn’t there in the inner sanctum when Final Crisis was hammered out), but I bet you the conversation went something like, “J.G. It’s been awhile since you’ve done a monthly. But the last one you did [Wanted] was so freakin’ successful, it got made into a movie in less than five years. We have a big project coming up, and Grant Morrison wants you on board. Are you interested?” “Yeah, totally, I’m on that.” “Are you sure? Are you positive it can get done on time?” “Oh, yeah, totally. It’s my only project right now. I promise.”

If you learn nothing else from this post, it’s this: freelancers are lying sacks. They lie for a living. They’re lovable, wonderful people, but sometimes they deserve to be shot. And so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that the editors said, “all right, well, he says he’ll do it, and he’s got months and months to do it, and he says its his only project… maybe he’ll do it.” Of course, here we are, and obviously the pages were so late that it passed the point of no return, and Doug Mahnke (having a nice resurgence with Superman: Beyond!) is put in the unenviable position of taking over for the star quarterback when the coach pulls him out of the game.

But the blame isn’t on Jones alone. This ties into two other cogs in the great comic book creating machine — I’m not talkin’ magic elves, I’m talkin’ writers and inkers. I’ll start with the inkers first. You might think (and a lot of people probably think) that when the penciller is done, it’s ready for press. Just need about 20 minutes of work from that one guy–what’s his name again? Oh, yeah, the tracer. Except an inker’s job is a lot harder than tracing. Like the linked clip says, inkers are sort of the second set of hands on the art — oftentimes, the awesome little details that you see in your art (ie, the buildings and rubble in Final Crisis #3) are NOT drawn by the penciller, but added in by the inker. Inkers will also correct mistakes in the penciller’s designs, and occasionally add in whole new images on top of the previously drawn art. (Karl Kesel, for example, would assume foot-drawing chores from penciller Rob Liefeld.) If an editor can make a hack journalist’s prose sing, use that same analogy for an inker and a penciller.

The other thing — which can save something or screw something up more than anything else — is the writer. Writers are particularly finicky creatures (I been there), who like to fiddle with everything that can be fiddled with, inevitably pushing things to the very utmost by way of deadline (been there, too). The higher on the totem pole they get, the more they can get away with it — this all ties back to sales. And there isn’t anybody higher on the totem pole than Grant Morrison. So when he says, “I want J.G. Jones involved,” it’s pretty hard to tell your Number One writer no — especially if he’s saying he plans to stop writing for the DCU almost entirely after this project is out. So it hurts the argument “well, they should have known and said no.” If your writer trumps your artist, and both your artist and your writer attract thousands of readers, you basically say, “this is a problem for future me.”

However, there’s more — the pushing of the deadlines. Remember how I mentioned all those other cogs in the machine (not counting balloon placement, coloring, lettering, and — wait for it — actual editing)? The later the script gets in, for whatever persnickity reason, it makes everything else come out that much later. Look at Allan Heinberg’s revamp of Wonder Woman if you need an example: the scripts were so late coming in that the point of no return was crossed again, with a fill-in arc put in its place and the original story concluded in an annual. Remember how I said artists lie? Writers do the same. (Not many of them, but enough to give everyone a bad name.) And it’s easier for editors to believe that if they have nine months to get a 22-page script in… they’d actually have it done. C’est la vie.

In short, there’s a reason why artists get paid more than writers — it takes them a lot longer to do their job, and it’s arguably a lot more demanding. Writers have the easy job, and get all the credit. But because of the fan base that is willing to follow them — even through delays — editors will give them the benefit of the doubt. As for the editors? I doubt they’re just sitting back and doing nothing. The problem is: what can they do? When their bread-and-butter (who is on contract, no less, to get a certain amount of work from DC regularly) is running late, they’re probably calling… and calling… and calling.

Is the talent picking up?

Infinite Crisis vs. Civil War, Part Two

So as I discussed in an earlier post, DC and Marvel had very different goals in mind with their 2006 blockbuster crossovers Infinite Crisis and Civil War: Marvel wanted to shake things up. DC wanted to clean house.

This, of course, was not the first time DC had tried. Their attempts to keep both their older franchises as well as their Silver Age descendants resulted in the creation of the Multiverse, a series of parallel earths that would keep the heroes from stepping on each others’ toes. Dawning outright in the seminal story “The Flashes of Two Worlds,” DC could have its cake and eat it, too — all the heroes operated in their own adventures, but there was still the possiility of team-ups. Earth-One’s Barry Allen teamed up with Earth-Two’s Jay Garrick — and soon enough, the Justice League of Earth-One would fight side-by-side with their forebearers from the Second World War, Earth-Two’s Justice Society.

A new age dawns in the famous story "Flash of Two Worlds," printed in The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961)

But this soon became a devil’s bargain. New companies were acquired, so that franchises such as Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel, and Uncle Sam were shunted into their own parallel worlds. Then a villainous mirror world was created on Earth-3. While Marvel successfully aped the Multiverse concept in later years to explain time travel, interdimensional incursions, as well as its “What If” series, for DC, the whole concept of the Multiverse became so integral to the mythos — with returning readers and new readers alike being confused by the multiple earths — that by 1985, characters were so bogged down in idiosyncratic continuity (as well as the camp inspired by the 1960s Batman TV show that had infected and tarnished most of DC’s lineup at one point or another) that it became a chore to make sense of them.

And so — they had the Crisis.

To make a long story short, in 1985, Marv Wolfman and George Perez wrote Crisis on Infinite Earths, a 12-issue supersaga that assembled all the heroes of the sprawling multiverse, and banded them together against a common threat: the Anti-Monitor, whose wave of antimatter energy was destroying these parallel universes one by one. The story was integral for several reasons: amongst the deaths in battle were Kara Zor-El — also known as the first Supergirl — as well as the hero who kick-started the Silver Age: the Flash. Others were simply written out: Earth-2’s older Superman (DC’s attempt to give Superman to the World War II audience that grew up with him as well as a new generation), as well as Earth-Prime’s Superboy were shunted into a “paradise dimension,” where they could no longer cause continuity headaches. As the battle concluded, the Multiverse shook and crumbled, and finally, five worlds were combined into one, with DC finally achieving the one world that Marvel had so long enjoyed. With reboots of the Superman and Wonder Woman franchises by John Byrne and George Perez, as wel as a return to the darker side of Batman following Frank Miller’s megahits Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, the modern DCU had arrived.

That said, there were some flaws in this new world. Hawkman was perhaps the most egregious problem — presented with multiple origins, one could argue that he was an archeologist… or an Egyptian prince… or a space cop (or spy) from the planet Thanagar. Even characters like Superman had their continuity retroactively changed (a retcon, in comicspeak), giving him a whole new origin story Birthright, as well as other stories muddying the waters — at on point, the planet Krypton temporarily being able to visit in the Phantom Zone. The Flash, meanwhile, was saddled with a wife and two kids. Meanwhile, the wide stable of the DCU was coming up stagnant, crushed under the weight of continuity. Something had to give — and by 2006, it did.

Marvel, meanwhile, had typically aschewed the intercompany crossover, with its few attempts — Secret Wars and its successor, Secret Wars II — seeming less like character-driven stories and more like action figure battles. However, by the mid-2000s, Marvel — led by Brian Michael Bendis, the writer of the unexpected megahit Ultimate Spider-Man — decided to deconstruct the Marvel Universe from the top down. During Avengers: Disassembled, the reality-altering Scarlet Witch lost control of her senses, killing key Avengers such as Hawkeye, Thor, the Vision, and Ant-Man, discrediting others like Iron Man and She-Hulk, and blowing up the Avenger’s mansion before ending her rampage. Disheartened, the Avengers broke up.

Disassembled: Captain America mourns the loss of the team that rescued him in Avengers #503 (November 2004)

While this crossover being Marvel’s most successful — and controversial, considering the Scarlet Witch’s abrupt change — in years, Marvel was determined to recreate the spark. The Avengers were never really gone — only changed. By the end of the year, a new series had come out, with a cast of Avengers unlike any that had been seen before: instead of the mix of big-name characters and B- and C-listers, this was a star-studded team comprised of Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Luke Cage. Despite this cast, however, the spark never really seemed to catch — instead of fighting gods and monsters, these New Avengers fought ninjas. Bendis’ trademark decompressed storytelling, perfect for cerebral heroes like Spider-Man, felt somewhat unsubstantial for the rock stars of the Marvel pantheon. It didn’t help that Bendis’ later crossovers, such as Secret War and House of M, also felt thin. While the goals of the series — the ousting of Nick Fury, Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. after the events of Secret War, and the depowering of 90% of the world’s mutants by the Scarlet Witch in House of M — were met, the stories themselves seemed mainly forgettable.

But each of these companies had a plan to clean house, expand their playgrounds, and shake up their core books. But these individual histories would greatly inform how they would do so. Next post!

Zod for President? Yes We Can

Well, now he’s got my vote.

Infinite Crisis vs. Civil War, Part One

As the summer blockbusters from Marvel and DC are in full swing with Secret Invasion and Final Crisis, it’s actually a good time to go back to the summer of 2006, the last time the Big Two went head-to-head with high-concept company crossovers: Infinite Crisis and Civil War.

When you compare the two crossovers, the first thing that comes to mind is the overall motivation (besides sales, clearly) behind them. For Marvel, the purpose was simple: to shake up the fairly stable Marvel Universe. Meanwhile, for DC, the purpose of Infinite Crisis — built up by four simultaneous disasters in the different segments of the DCU — was a bit more utilitarian: to clean up cluttered continuity.

There’s a reason for this–unlike Marvel, DC has had an additional 20-or-so years of continuity to take into account, with Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman being continually de-aged to stay at their prime for new audiences. The JSA, for example, would never have come out without Superman paving the way, yet they are currently the elder statesmen of the DCU. Indeed, many of DC’s current properties (Green Lantern, Blue Beetle, Captain Marvel) came from mergers with other companies. As the Silver Age of Comics dawned, DC began a strong reimagining of its stable with Carmine Infantino’s sci-fi-influenced overhaul of the Flash, with Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, and the Martian Manhunter following suit, culminating in the Magnificent Seven (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter) forming the Justice League of America.

The Justice League of America debuts in The Brave and the Bold #28 (February-March 1960)

This would have gone over almost flawlessly–except that DC couldn’t find it within themselves to forget the originators of these franchises. Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, and the Justice Society of America had all come and gone in the early 1940s, but DC felt they had no choice but to incorporate them, somehow. And to do it without having their current superstar heroes tripping over their original forebearers. And to keep the JSA from being incredibly old compared to these young turks. The solution was actually pretty forward-thinking in theory while being clunky in practice, a solution that lasted for decades: a number of parallel worlds, later known as the Multiverse. (More on this in the next post.)

Marvel, on the other hand, had it easier: while they were financially much less stable than the old powerhouse of DC (at one point, DC was in charge of printing Marvel’s books!), they had natural continuity in the form of Stan Lee. There’s a reason they call him the father of modern comics: in response to the immense popularity of the Justice League, Lee created, wrote, and/or edited nearly all of the major Marvel heroes we read today (Spider-Man, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men) — and perhaps even more surprisingly, did much of this within a five-year period. But what is important is that with few exceptions, nearly ALL of Marvel’s pre-1960 heroes were jettisoned.

Because Lee had gained seniority within the company — in addition to the loose scripting he used, which came to be known as the Marvel Method — it was pretty easy to mix and match heroes. One easy example is the return of Captain America, a character that had reached Superman-level status during World War II, in the pages of the Avengers: unlike DC’s “move along, nothing to see here” approach to ignoring the Golden Age characters, Marvel embraced the time-lost conceit of Captain America, arming the character with a far more resonant theme of nobility and perserverance of days gone by. It would also be used to give a shot in the arm to ailing titles (which is why we now currently see Wolverine in every four Marvel books): within the first ten issues of the then-floundering title X-Men, they squared off against the Avengers.

As the runt of the star-studded litter, the X-Men battle the Avengers in X-Men #9 (Jan. 1965)

In short, all the characters lived in the same world, but in different sectors of the public: Cap, the Avengers and Fantastic Four were seen as the shining heroes, while Spider-Man and the X-Men were seen as outlaws.  They could team up or be apart — it was the same sort of structure as DC’s universe, but with much less artifice. But the important thing was that only three heroes from the Golden Age were allowed to grow older into the Silver Age as World War II vets (Cap, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and Nick Fury), with only ONE reimagining of Golden Age properties: the Human Torch (Marvel’s first superhero, along with Namor), who was incorporated as a new character in the Fantastic Four. All the rest was jettisoned — Marvel moved forward to mine its stories, whereas DC drew more and more upon its richer history.

Whew. So what does this have to do with Infinite Crisis and Civil War? Well, just about everything. Next post!

Manhunter is Dead…Long Live Manhunter

So I read on scans_daily today about Manhunter being cancelled at issue #38.

R.I.P.: Kate Spencer, aka "Manhunter VI"

This marks the third death sentence on this particular series, which has been granted reprieves twice before due to massive fan outcry. That said, in this game, three strikes are far more than most batters get, and the axe might actually drop this time.

But what I think is really important about this announcement is that it heralds the end of the last great revamp of DC Comics, where many second- and third-tier characters (starting with Firestorm and Manhunter in 2004 and continuing through to The Atom, Blue Beetle, and Checkmate in 2006) received some truly bold and well-intended, if not always commercially successful, facelifts. In my mind, while these titles didn’t necessarily stick — indeed, ol’ Jaime Reyes is the only one still standing, and even that is pretty precarious despite the book’s top-notch characterization — the fact that DC had the guts to reboot what had previously been dead space into something new and different was really something special, not to mention a necessary, forward-thinking counterbalance to much of the self-reflective (although good) Silver Age-inspired stories that capture the hearts of the fan press and thus get so many readers. In order to be able to look back, one must look ahead, and these titles did that in spades.

Which brings me to the question: why was Manhunter so popular? To be honest, I’m not 100% on that myself, as it was a title that never really grabbed me. Although that said, let’s recap to where we came from with the Manhunter franchise:

– Big game hunter Paul Kirk is killed by an elephant while on safari. Yet following his demise, he is resurrected as an assassin for the shadowy group known as the Council. Several clones are made of Kirk by the group, and when he refuses to kill for them, they sic the clones on him.

That’s one hell of an origin story, right? Safari Man is killed by Mr. Snuffleupagus. It’s like the Bionic Man tripping on acid. But what made things a bit weirder was that there was already a Manhunter group — they were a race of robot predecessesors to the Green Lantern Corps, who were subsequently cast out when they malfunctioned and killed a group of people. In an attempt to marry the two concepts, we had several reboots to the franchise, involving robots, a personality called the Wild Huntsman, a musician turned serial killer, and a clone who joins a group called the Power Company (not to be confused with the award-winning childrens’ program the Electric Company).

In 2004, we were introduced to a new Manhunter, with a bit of a more down-to-earth take on the mythos: Kate Spencer, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, decides to take justice into her own hands when a cannibalistic supercriminal known as Copperhead escapes while en route to the penitentary. In what I feel was the most interesting conceit of the series (one I wish was played up more, sadly), Kate then broke into an evidence locker, stole the most powerful weaponry she could find — in this case, a Darkstar uniform, Azrael’s gauntlets, and a Manhunter energy staff — and went on the hunt. Yet unlike the cleaner heroes, Kate had zero qualms about taking that staff and using it to blow Copperhead’s head clean off.

But wait — doesn’t this sound familiar? And perhaps a decade too late? The violence-for-great-justice hook came and went with the Punisher by the middle of the ’90s. That said, the thing that distinguishes Manhunter from those is her home life. Kate is a divorcee, but in an interesting inversion, she’s the one who comes off like a deadbeat when it comes to caring for her son Ramsey. Indeed, the title really pops when the little tyke nearly vaporizes himself with Kate’s energy staff, putting him in the hospital while Kate tries not to have a heart attack or lose any semblance of custody for the kid. The main conflict of this piece happens to be Kate’s slow self-destruction, of her frustration with her life that infects everything else and adds fuel to the ferocity vented out by crime-fighting. As Stephen O’ Blenis states on Amazon.com:

We have an outwardly hostile, mean-hearted character who’s very different on the inside. And now that she has the mask and the identity, she’s going much further than she ever has before. In this scenario, she’s driven by noble motivations, but doesn’t seem to realize how she’s already dangerously close to losing control.

But this sort of strategem only works for the long-term, something Manhunter doesn’t have. Perhaps they needed more action? Perhaps the sequences were too cerebral, not hitting readers over the head enough? Perhaps it was too subtle?

Sadly, we’ll never know.