About time I got to this one, right?
If you've read any of this blog, it's no big surprise that I consider superheroes to be another iteration of the kinds of stories from which grow our traditional mythologies and religions. They are our heroes, our gods, our devils, and our angels, though all with a touch more humanity than the creatures of the Judeo-Christian myths that inspired them. So to see the Avengers, a team that, unlike the JLA, tends to steer clear of deification, go up against actual gods, of the Greco-Roman variety, is a very interesting story indeed.
Hercules, as we know, was beaten very badly during the siege of the Masters of Evil. While lying comatose in a hospital bed, he is whisked away to Mount Olympus where his father decides that it must be the fault of Hercules's teammates that he is in the condition he's in. Some garbled ravings from the comatose and brain damaged demi-god only serves to further convince Zeus of this. So he kidnaps the Avengers and condemns them to torment in the depths of Hades.
The Avengers, unsurprisingly, are having none of it.
The thing that I've found fascinating about this story is the pitting of contemporary (well, sort of) mythic figures against traditional mythic figures. We can see parallels in some of the characters. The Black Knight, a scientist stands in contrast to Hephaestus, God of the Forge. Thor, himself a storm deity, stands in opposition to Zeus himself. But these are actually exceptions to the rule - none of the other Avengers really resemble traditional mythic figures in the way that we might offer such correspondences with the JLA. Marvel's aesthetic has always been to be a bit more grounded than their distinguished competition, but this grounding doesn't dissipate the mythic nature of the characters completely. I seem to recall, in a previous post somewhere, thinking about Cyclops in this manner, though now the irony of that occurs to me. I'd suggested that the Marvel heroes look toward new archetypal representations, rather than embodying the older ones that, again, the DC heroes gravitate toward. Is She-Hulk a representation of both the strength of empowered womanhood and, in her Jennifer Walters identity, the ramifications of the oppression of the feminine? Captain America is pretty obviously a personification not of America itself, but the idealized vision of that country that we know is, unfortunately, only myth. So what is the significance of pitting these new myths against the old ones?
There's a temptation to think it's a way of thinking through replacement of old gods, and their attendant ideas, with new gods and new ideas. These gods, the superheroes, are, of course, ourselves, much as any old god is, but have the added bonus of being seen as completely fictional. Their relative youth gives them flexibility, takes them out of a more binaristic way of thinking about gods and embraces the notions of plurality that often represent the best of humanity. Zeus is king of the Greco-Roman gods, and a storm god. It would be difficult for us to start telling stories of him as anything other than that since that's what he's been in our literature, and more subtly in our belief structures, for a few millennia. His fictional/mythic potential has fossilized over time. By pitting new, more fluid, deific figures against solidified older ones, Stern and Buscema suggest to us that there may be more use in putting belief and myth and archetype into vessels that are more easily manipulable, that haven't solidified quite so much.
The Avengers triumph eventually, of course. Zeus is humbled, and concedes that he made a mistake in blaming the heroes for his son's own bad judgment. This show of humility from one of the oldest and proudest mythic figures in the Western literary tradition is nothing to take lightly. It's almost, as Zeus forbays any Olympian from further stepping foot on Earth, a passing of the torch, an acknowledgment that the Avengers and their ilk are better representatives of the beliefs of humankind than Zeus and his children. And it's a very convincing argument, really. No wonder DC didn't want Rick Veitch having Swamp Thing meet Christ. Can you imagine the uproar if old Swampy somehow trumped the founder of Christianity?
Tomorrow we get on to Ralph Macchio's short run on Avengers, working, at least for a couple of issues, from plots by Stern. My understanding is that it's not a great run, but Walt Simonson comes along not to much later, and he's always entertaining. I'm very curious, as I've said, to see how the dynamic of the series changes. Will the female characters, and most especially Captain Marvel, retain the strength and depth that Stern has given them? Will the balance of action and soap opera be retained? I'm actually kind of excited to find out.
To be continued.
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