Walking the Shadowline part 3: Critical Mass

This post will not be opening with a Marvel Age comic!

It's interesting that, though the main series' were cancelled due to low sales, the Shadowline was granted a prestige-format 7-issue series to finish out the first big storyline that had been building through the first 8 issues. I don't know much about the production side of comics, but I would guess that this single large-format issue on a monthly basis was less expensive than bi-monthly single issues. However, given that each issue is basically 2 issues of the previous series', meaning the same amount of scripting and art, it could only have been on actual physical production costs that any money was saved. Regardless, I'm glad they managed to give us at least one epic (pun intended) storyline before the characters (well, most of them) descended into limbo.

What's more interesting, though, is that in this format, the Shadowline Saga really finds its footing. The story is far more coherent, in that shared universe manner, than the previous issues, and we're treated to short interludes between chapters that highlight some of the minor characters to whom we've been introduced over the past year and a half of stories. These interludes come to be fundamental to the overall cohesion of the shared universe. With something like the Marvel U, or the DCU, there are enough titles that one can get both the superheroic and the mundane in large portions, enough to sketch, or sculpt, a believable fictional world. With only three titles, the Shadowline often had the feeling of taking place only around the main protagonists. The interludes in Critical Mass remind us that not only do the actions of the main characters have ramifications, but also that the minor characters have relatively vibrant lives of their own. Something like this could certainly have been incorporated into the main titles, but to have them right there, sandwiched between the larger chapters, makes those events far more immediate and important, rather than simply seeming to be a back-up feature.

With regard to the style of the stories, not much changes from the independent series to this anthologized one. The world is a grim place, and it only grows grimmer as Henry Clerk returns from the lobotomization to which Dr. Zero subjected him, and decides to destroy the United States. But for, y'know, the purpose of forcing Darwinian survival traits on the population. What I am quite curious about is whether or not the way this series plays out is how things would have played out if a) the comics had remained discrete entities, and b) if the Shadowline had somehow been able to continue, whether through large-scale events like this one or through smaller monthly comics. The status quo at the series end is slightly, but only slightly, different. Zero is still Zero, though we see a more human side of him (a statement he'd almost certainly take as a great insult), Michael Devlin is far more comfortable with his role as the Knight, and Lenore and Victor are more comfortable with their public Powerline personas. Where would they all go from here? We'll never know, I guess.

One last thing really struck me about the final parts of this story. There is a scene on board a cargo plane where the main characters are all gathered for the first time. Lenore has some vague recollections of having met Zero in the Black Forest in Germany, and she stumbles upon him changing into his costume just before the climactic confrontation. They flirt, and that's that. Now, each story, since their beginnings, has been narrated in the caption boxes in the first person, so we get not only the interactions, but the internalities, of each character. This same scene is told three times, each time from a different focal point. And, surprisingly since Chichester and Clark scripted all of them, the dialogue is different depending on which focal character we're witnessing the scene through. And the art is different too. Not just in that it's different stylistically, but also in the composition of the scene. In one version a character is present, in another that same character is not. Think about this for a second. Does this mean that not only the captioned dialogue, but also the visual-linguistic elements of the panels is parsed through a particular focal character? Are we not only getting their point of view in their words, but also in what is represented visually? Like we're seeing a memory that is not quite perfect? I love this idea, which also kind of hints that the whole story is being told from some future point by each of the narrative voices in each of the series. It gives me, at the very least, another perspective from which to read the stories next time I go back.

That's about it for the Shadowline. A comment from reader Brad in part 2 of this series alerted me to the fact that the Shadows will be showing up in the Squadron Sinister series spinning out of Secret Wars this summer, so I'm pretty excited for that. The hope, of course, is that all kinds of people will want to know who those characters are, and what their stories are, and we'll see a reprint of all of the issues, and maybe a continuation of the Shadowline Saga. Until then, if you have friends who want to know who they are, and what they do, send them over.

Walking the Shadowline part 2: Into the Night

This installment begins with another issue of Marvel Age, though this time the larger-format annual version of the news magazine. The annuals of this publication are occasionally worth a look, as they'll often include exclusive comics content. Such is the case with MAA #4, in which we're presented with a recap story of sorts by Chichester, Clark, and Cowan. Whether or not the Shadowline series were suffering low sales, and thus deemed in need of a boost in a more public forum, or if it was just enthusiasm for the line that prompted this little comic is hard to say. And, to be honest, not much is added to the overall story by this little interjection. I can only imagine that it was intended to drum up interest in the three main titles.

I don't think it worked, unfortunately.

With issue #5, both Doctor Zero and Powerline underwent shifts in artist. DZ lost Denys Cowan, who was replaced variously with Brett Ewins, Dan Spiegle, and Gary Kwapisz, where as the Powerline team lost David Ross and gained Gray Morrow. The quality of art doesn't change, to be fair. But one of the troubles comics face, especially comics such as these that do not feature well-known characters, is the loss of readers through an inability to follow a story because of inconsistent art. 

 

Let me explain: though the costumes are quite iconic, in the pages of each issue, the main characters wear their costumes only seldom. Thus it's vital that there be consistency in their non-costumed appearances in order that one know who a given character is at a given time. Of course, context explains much, but not all, especially in a visual medium like comics. Add to this the characters that move from series to series who are also victim to this inconsistency, and the comics become a bit confusing. Even on this read through, easily my fourth or fifth since they were published, there were some characters that I couldn't immediately identify, though from the context it was clear that I was supposed to.

But, again, what of the actual stories. In this run (really a run-up to the solicited "Critical Mass" crossover), we see the various heroes taking on challenges inherent in the clash between humans and shadows. Michael Deviln takes his powered armour back to a village in Nicaragua in which he preached, and takes on guerillas while searching for his predecessor as Knight of St. George. The Powerline team takes on strange cases across the country, all the while trying to figure out how to take vengeance on the Ravenscore family for their brutal slaying of both Victor and Lenore's families. And Doctor Zero encounters a covert military group nicknamed "The Merchants," who manage to capture him and begin to analyze him before he escapes and makes known that The Merchants have joined Henry Clerk as enemies of "The Dragon." So the story is moving along, and has veered a bit from the thoroughly conjoined feel of the previous four issues. I think this was a wise move. With the bi-monthly publishing schedule, we'd basically been given 9 months of world-building with the first 4 issues of each series. Not to say that there weren't stories and plots interwoven through that world-building, but the establishment of the connectedness of the titles was obviously on the minds of the creators. The subsequent issues loosen that connection (but only a bit) and allow the characters, and by proxy the readers, to explore the world a little more, to build a sense of there being events taking place on this version of Earth (Earth 88194, according to the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe) that don't all revolve around the conflicts between the orders and families of Shadows to whom we've been introduced.

With issue #8 of each series, however, things change. The regular writers and artists disappear, and we have what can only be described as fill-in issues, but these are fill-ins with the words "Final Issue" plastered on the covers. The text within tells the tale: "Due to dropping sales, it has become necessary to cancel Epic's Shadowline titles."

The news, however, is not all bad. Instead of continuing as three separate series, the storylines within each series are to be picked up and published in a monthly single volume entitled Critical Mass. It is to this epic (see what I did there?) story we'll move in the next installment. I'll consider what works and what doesn't, and what the ramifications of this kind of concurrent publishing for a crossover story might be for the mainstream crossovers that flood the market nowadays. Critical Mass is not a crossover series in the way that something like Secret Invasion or the current Secret Wars, but is instead the individual series taking part in the crossover published under a single title. I'll get into it more next time.

Walking the Shadowline part 1: Into the Light

The last piece of Shadowline ephemera I acquired was only recently, at the amazing Purple Gorilla Comics at the Crossroads Market here in Calgary. It's issue #62 of Marvel Age, the Marvel Comics news organ of the eighties and nineties.

I have to admit, I was pretty excited to get it. I'd recently finished reading the Critical Mass series, had discovered a short story in a Marvel Age Annual, and found that this was one of the only other comics that somehow featured these characters. I'd hoped for a brief glimpse at the universe prior to the events of Doctor Zero #1, but alas, the only related content is an interview with some of the writers and editors behind the line. The cover's pretty great, though.

The cover of Doctor Zero #1 is beautiful. Anyone familiar with Bill Sienciewicz's work on The New Mutants wasn't surprised at the gorgeous covers of the first three Shadow Line books.

(A quick note on "Shadow" and "Line." In some cases, i.e., the header of the first issue of Doctor Zero, the words Shadow and Line are separated. Once we get to Critical Mass, the two are on separate lines but are linked with a hyphen. In the interest of the ambiguity of whether it's "Shadowline or "Shadow Line," I'll be fluctuating between the two, depending on my understanding of how the term is used.)

These first four issues of each series give us our introductions not only to the main characters, but to the world they inhabit. Right from the beginning, Chichester and Clark are not shy about showing off the fact that these books are deeply interconnected. Lenore, Victor, and Ripley, the main cast of Powerline appear at the very end of Doctor Zero #1, and Michael Deviln, of St. George makes a brief appearance in Powerline #1. There are constant references to characters and events that cross from one title to another. In fact, the only real constants of each book are the main characters themselves. Their world shifts around them, issue to issue, title to title, but they remain constant, the lens of our focalization.

As such, each book has a decidedly different character. I was chatting with a friend about these titles the other day, and I'd suggested them as something that could be considered part of the legacy of Watchmen. The Shadow Line comics are terse, bleak, political thrillers that are firmly grounded in the strange world of Reagan-era politics in much the same way Watchmen was mired in Thatcher's Britain. The characters are not perfect specimens of hyper-masculinity. Granted, Doctor Zero manages to pass himself off as this, but his ironic distance from it is makes it disturbing and charming. There's something a bit metatextual about Doctor Zero. He passes himself off as a hero in order to manipulate world events. Dressed up in superheroic fiction, he runs the planet. I think that the place where these books fail where Watchmen succeeded is in the sense of wonder that is attached to the superhero genre. Watchmen is the bleakest of the bleak, but there are still moments of wonder. Dr. Manhattan's clockwork palace rising out of the Martian desert is pretty spectacular. It never forgets it's a superhero comic. The Shadowline comics work to deny the superheroic tropes, which is fine, but let's note that generic tropes become generic tropes because they're somehow definitionary of a particular genre.
So that's the character they have in common, then, this crushing bleakness without any glimmers of hope, or even of momentary escape. To me, this is the major flaw that likely led to their cancellation. I'm pretty sure even at 14 I knew there was such a thing as too much angst. And I'd read The Dark Knight Returns.

But the individual atmospheres of the three titles are really pretty great. Zero is solid, paranoid Cold War discourse. In Zero and his antagonist Henry Clerk we have two extremes of right-wing politics fighting to determine the fate of the world. I'm not sure of the politics of the Epic editorial offices at the time, but that's a pretty great metaphor for the politics of the time. The Cowan/Sienkiewicz artwork is jagged and jarring, but suits the tone perfectly. Sienkiewicz's inks are shadowy and menacing, and the surreality of the images mirrors exquisitely the surreality of the stage upon which Zero's adventures take place. As we come to understand more about Zero, the weight of time that rests on him, the scope of his narrative becomes even more surreal. These first four issues are the only ones that have the Cowan/Sienkiewicz team-up, unfortunately. Which brings me to the second major flaw of the line as a whole.

Midway through it's first year, the artistic teams on all the books shifted. I'm unsure of why this was. Perhaps the revenue coming back from the line wasn't up to paying top tier artists. Whatever happened, the shift threw off the coherence of the line as a whole. Ostensibly, when searching for artists for the three books, the editors would have looked for art styles that complimented one another. The initial teams did, but I think that when the teams shifted, there wasn't enough time to put together that coherent a team. And as such, the coherence of the books deteriorates.

But what about the books themselves?

 As I've noted, Doctor Zero is a helter-skelter of Cold War political gamesmanship, and it largely succeeds at what it attempts. Zero is an awful creature, but he displays the occasional redeeming quality that gives one hope that somewhere beneath that callous, unfathomably ancient shell there beats a heart that cares and pities. And that's exactly what Zero wants you to think. I think of all the Shadow Line characters, Zero's design is the best. But that's because, in the first issue, we see the steps Zero himself goes through, the design teams and focus groups to carefully craft an image that he can present to the common mass of humanity.
Zero works best when we have the juxtaposition panels, where he is performing some feat of heroism and at the same time, in his captions, decrying the very people he saves. Zero is an asshole who has you fooled into thinking there's a core of gold in him.

Sometimes heroes. Often Monsters.

Powerline, on the other hand, is meant to offer us the opposite of Doctor Zero, Shadows who perform feats for the common good from an altruistic point of view. This too, however, is shown to be a sham, a performance that the two members of the group, Lenore Castle and Victor Guilliermos, have trouble adapting to. Couple with this that in Powerline we get that most famous of superheroic tropes, the orphaned hero, further coupled with the fact that this trope plays out over the course of the whole series, and the bright light that was meant to shine out of the shadows looks every bit as contrived as Zero's. I also have to note that the two main characters of Powerline are the characters I have the least investment in in this universe. Again, I wonder if it's because the book goes out of its way to eschew the sorts of stories we might see in The New Mutants or The New Teen Titans, and thus misses some of the useful metaphors for adolescence that the superheroic tale can provide. Ostensibly the most interesting character in this series is the third "member" of the group, ex-pro wrestler Ripley Weaver. It's his idea to set up the kids as Powerline, and he who wrestles with what he's doing to them and why.

Rounding out the titles is a series starring a human, rather than a shadow, the conflicted priest Michael Devlin, who dons the mantle of the Knight of St. George. Deviln's story is, of all the pseudo-separate narratives in the Shadow Line, the most cohesive. Indeed, he is gifted with the final words in Critical Mass, and his arc describes the journey not simply of a man coming to terms with a previously unknown reality existing next to his own, but also with his own crisis of faith. Devlin's recruitment by the Order of St. George also closes a loop we begin to witness in the final pages of Doctor Zero #1. Zero murders Deviln's predecessor, thus opening the way for this knight. The intertextuality of the three series is emblematized by this movement of environment amongst the three first issues, and though it waxes and wanes depending on the individual stories, it is never far from the surface.

All this said, then, what are the first issues actually like?

Unsurprisingly, they're comics still trying to find their voices. We could make the argument that, really, they never do find it, hence the cancellation of the line, but I'm not sure that's a claim that I wish to make. The way we should look at these first 12 issues is that they are attempting something unattempted (as far as I can tell) in superhero comics up to this point: the creation out of whole cloth of a shared narrative superhero universe. By the time these comics were published, the shared universes of Marvel and DC had, at the very least, about 35 years of intertextual history. Bear in mind that the Shadowline appears after the conclusions of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars, the major crossover texts of the eighties, and well before such shared superhero stories as the Image or Valiant universes. So the initial issues are not only attempting to establish characters, but also continuity. Not an easy prospect, and it comes through in the first few issues of each title. Secondary characters are introduced who move between titles, and often more time is spent setting a scene than might happen in a mainstream comic of the same era. It is for this reason that when I re-read these series I read them in publication order. For the year and a half of their original run the order of series ran Doctor Zero, Powerline, St. George. While one was certainly not expected to read them this way, and the narratives are, for the most part, nicely self-enclosed, treating them as individual chapters in a larger story, and reading them in chapter order, so to speak, demonstrated more than each individual series was capable of the way in which this larger universe was constructed.

But that's enough for now. We'll see how this "chaptering" of each series plays out in Critical Mass, but there's the second half of each series to deal with first. As the Shadows walk into the light, the best question to ask is what does it illuminate, both about them, and about us?

Walking the Shadowline Introduction: Out of the Darkness

The Shadow Dwellers
"They were almost human.
Their evolution paralleled ours, though they evolved swifter and a great deal better.
Individually, they were superior but they were no match for the great tide of humankind that came in time to rule the Earth.
So they became a shadow race, living among us, speaking our languages, but secretly, eternally apart. Sometimes as protectors, sometimes as predators.

Over the centuries, they became the stuff of our legends and our myths. Sometimes heroes. Often monsters.

But as the Twentieth Century moved nearer and nearer its close, the world had shrunk to the point that there was little room for living in secret and the power of humankind had grown to doomsday proportions. There was a more pressing need than ever to emerge, to make themselves felt; to influence, to control the destiny of the planet they shared with us.Scattered over the Earth, separated from each other by centuries of secrecy and hiding, torn by their own feuds and personal strife, the need to emerge was answered in ways as varied as the people of the shadows themselves varied. But it was answered. Cautiously, recklessly, with responsibility and without, they entered into the mainstream of human life.

Sometimes heroes. Often monsters."

April 1988 saw the publication of the first title in Epic Comics' short-lived "Shadow Line Saga." Written by D.G. Chichester and Margaret Clark, the inside cover, quoted in full above, left no doubt in anyone's mind that this was going to be a very dark look at the superhero. I was 14 when it came out. I'd never read Watchmen, though vaguely knew of it. I'd read the first issue of The Dark Knight Returns, but never bothered getting the rest. In '88, I was reading The Uncanny X-Men, The Avengers, The New Mutants. Good comics, but certainly not serious. But there was always something to the idea of being one of the first people to read a particular hero, as there must have been for the likes of Superman, or Spider-Man. I'd tried it a couple of years before, with Marvel's "New Universe," but there were a lot of comics in that line, and I just couldn't keep up. And, to be honest, some of them really weren't great. Here were four (maybe five) heroes, only three titles, and, from the get-go, intimate intertwining in each others' stories. It also came out bi-monthly, so it wasn't a huge financial burden.

And did I mention how dark it was?

And I'll be perfectly up front about my reasons for posting about the Shadow Line right now, and that's that they've shown up on a preview of the cover of the upcoming Marvel mega-event, or whatever they're calling it, "Secret Wars." Right down the center, Zero, Powerline, St. George. And I think that's Nightmask I see near them. Cool. But if I hadn't seen that picture, it might have been years, or decades, before I came back to them.

So what went wrong? Each of the Shadow Line titles lasted only 8 issues, though given their bi-monthly schedule, that stretched over a year and a half from April 1988 to August 1989. There had been teases in the later issues for an upcoming event, "Critical Mass," but then issue #8 of Doctor Zero shipped with the words "Final Issue" emblazoned on the front. Inside was an editorial citing dwindling sales as having caused the cancellation of each title. But all was not lost. The aforementioned "Critical Mass" was instead going to become the series Critical Mass. Published monthly from January to July, 1990, the series, which I'll talk about in a subsequent post, consisted of two chapters, each devoted to one of the main characters (Zero, Powerline, St. George), and shorter "forewords" or "interludes," devoted to a minor character from another series.

And then they disappeared. Back into the shadows.

So what happened? They are, as you can see from these covers, very stylish. The five main characters across the series (Doctor  Zero; Lenore Castle, Victor Guilliermos, Ripley Weaver [Powerline]; Michael Devlin [St. George]) are engaging, very different from the superheroic norm at that time. Vertigo Comics was still 5 years off when the Shadow Line started. There really was nothing like it coming from a major publisher at the time. But until a couple of weeks ago, I would not have been able to tell you the proper names of any of the main characters, nor really what happens to them over the course of their adventures. I stopped buying them at the age of 15, with the final issue of St. George in 1989, and only ever thought fleetingly about Critical Mass, and what might have happened to those characters. Two years ago, having moved to Calgary, I found a great warehouse-style comic store (the sadly defunct Dark Phoenix Comics retail location) and came across all seven issues of Critical Mass. I immediately bought them, thought for a while about reading them, and then filed them in my collection. Until that picture.

They are dated. Let's make no mistake about that. They are mired in Reagan-era politics, Nicaragua, characters whose inner-monologues are short, chopped sentences. Very grim.

But they're also very good. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to talk a bit about the good, the bad, and the simply inscrutable. The next two posts will look at half a year each of the original run. Though going through some jarring artistic changes, the vision of the entire line is very clear. After that I'll look at the Critical Mass series, and talk about where our heroes(?) end up, and what the change to prestige format may have helped and hindered with the series. In the interim I'd urge anyone intrigued by who those characters were on the "Secret Wars" preview picture, or anyone who likes obscure little corners of the superhero field, to seek these out and give them a read.