The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1949: Vertigo Visions: The Geek - Corruption of the Innocent, 1993

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I've written of today's featured creator, the fantastic Ms. Rachel Pollack. I've always said her run on Doom Patrol is severely underrated, and the fact of her being a major creator during the early Vertigo years and also being a trans woman working in comics at that time is one of the more significant moments, to me, in the history of our beloved medium.

That said, and as I noted when I read Ms. Pollack's other entry into the Vertigo Visions series, I wasn't a huge fan of this story. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I enjoyed the story - it's a hallucinatory and twisting tale of Brother Power and his corruption by ever more brutal media, and is perhaps slightly dated in that it was written before the explosion of new media in our culture. Though in some ways that also serves the story of Brother Power, who was created as a weird hippy superhero in 1968, and who was virtually absent from the DCU in the intervening 30ish years. What I think is the problem is that it's a difficult story, as is Tomahawk, and difficult stories need to be re-read. Mike Allred is a master of metaphorical storytelling, as evidenced in his adaptation of The Golden Plates, and Ms. Pollack's deep understanding of Tarot and the way images can shape our futures combines with her expression of transness in her work to produce something remarkable. But definitely not something easy.

Vertigo, more and more, is proving itself an imprint to which one needs to come back, over and over. There was really some very sophisticated storytelling going on, especially in the somewhat heady early days. These are very weird comics, and very important.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

Vertigo Comics were one of the reason I got back into comics. I think their early period is really some of the absolute best comics gets.

Doom Patrol: The Case of Kate Godwin and Rachel Pollack

Every year, around the end of August, Calgary prepares for the long, grey Winter by sprouting rainbows. The city's annual Pride March takes place on the Labour Day Weekend, and, speaking as a Calgarian, it really is the last hurrah before the leaves turn, fall, and, to quote a recent Autumn hashtag, cronch beneath our feet. During this festive season, I've had the privilege the last few years to give a talk at the Memorial library about queerness in mainstream comics. I look forward to it every year.

This year, I had some wonderful conversations with some wonderful people and ended up promising to expand on some of the topics I introduced in a series of blog posts. But 2019 turned out to be a difficult year for me, and some things, sadly, fell by the wayside.

But no longer, I say!

Welcome to the first in a series that will cover some of the topics I touch on in the talk, and will (hopefully) spark some new ideas and conversations. One of the things I was constantly told while pursuing my PhD at the U of C is that mainstream comics aren't important. They're not worth the time and rigour of academic inquiry. I tried very hard to fight that attitude, but was ultimately unsuccessful. This is where I will prove those voices wrong. Don't worry, this won't become hardcore academic criticism (though I do love some of that), but I'll demonstrate some of the ways that I see that mainstream comics are deeply and profoundly connected to our culture.

Enough of that. On to Ms. Pollack and Ms. Godwin.

Rachel Pollack, a novelist and tarot expert, took over scripting of the DC Comics series Doom Patrol with Issue #64 in April 1993*, replacing outgoing writer Grant Morrison, and inaugurating the title into DC's highly-successful Vertigo imprint. Morrison's run was, and still is, lauded for its complexity and maturity, and has gone on to be the paragon by which all subsquent, and antecedant, runs have been measured. By many, anyway. Regardless, this was a huge pair of shoes to fill, and Ms. Pollack, as the legend goes, won the job through a tireless process of letter-writing to the editorial staff. She obviously had a story she wanted to tell.

Her run, until the series' end with #87 is not the most popular of the team's incarnations, though there are subtle references to her stories in the new DC Universe Doom Patrol television series. Who is the fox indeed, Cliff? The conclusion I find myself coming to about the run is that it is a series of stories that are too far ahead of their time. Ms. Pollack and company are telling stories in these 20-ish issues that are charting waters only now being dipped into by mainstream comics.

I should, perhaps, mention that Rachel Pollack is a transwoman.

Writing mainstream superhero comics.

In the early 90s.

Her stories delve into sexuality and femininity, moving Dorothy Spinner into the foreground, but most importantly, to me, they introduce a character who is, as far as I'm aware, the first transgender superhero in a mainstream superhero universe. And I mean without all of the retcons to historical stories. I mean from a creative point of view, the first. That's a big deal. And Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, is just the best. Her origin ties intimately (in two senses) to the Doom Patrol, Kate gaining her powers after a sexual liaison with Rebis, the intersex negative being from the Patrol's previous incarnation. She has the power to fuse or to dissolve anything, and her first foray with the Doom Patrol involves a paragon of toxic masculinity in super villain form, the Codpiece. I recently read an article calling for the Codpiece to be introduced into the television series, and if they can make Beard Hunter work, they can make anything work as far as I'm concerned.

So just to recap, we've got a trans writer creating the first trans superhero in the oldest continuous mainstream superhero universe.

Kate's relationship with Cliff continues an arc for his character coming to terms with what exactly gender is, in that he has no secondary sexual characteristics, just the memory of them. These sorts of issues of gender and sexuality might be becoming commonplace in superhero comics these days, but  27 years ago, that was certainly not the case. Later story arcs delve into Tarot and the Kabbalah, preceding Alan Moore's mainstream treatment of those topics early in Promethea in the 21st century. It is, perhaps, her affinity for the Tarot that gave her run on Doom Patrol a kind of comic book prescience. And if you want to know where your queer superheroes come from, you can't forget Kate Godwin.

 

Kate's story does not, however, have a particularly spectacular end. In a later incarnation of the title by writer John Arcudi, it is revealed that Kate was killed during a camping trip by Dorothy Spinner's out of control powers. She has never, as far as I know, been brought back in any of the subsequent DC universal reboots. Fingers crossed for next time.

The Pollack run has never been collected, but, honestly, it's not hard to find and usually quite cheap. There was supposed to be a compilation of it in 2018, but it was cancelled without any excuse. With the TV show's success, that might not be the case any longer, but I honestly can't imagine them delving into that era anytime soon. Then again, I never expected them to actually do the De-Creator and Danny the Street stories either, but they did, and they did them spectacularly. Perhaps some bandage ghosts, ice box Niles, and even Kate herself could be on the way.

Ms. Pollack continues to write in comics, recently with Ahoy Comics, and wrote some other mainstream titles for DC, including a run on The New Gods with co-writer Tom Peyer, another favourite of mine. That one's proving a bit more difficult to track down, but that's what collecting is all about!

Some further reading and links:

Rachel Pollack’s Influence on DC Comics is Still Being Felt Today

DOOM PATROL, New Gods, Old Gods, & A FISSURE KING: The RACHEL POLLACK Interview

Rachel Pollack at the Grand Comics Database

 

*comic publication dates are often 3 months ahead of the actual publication date, harkening back as far as I know to the date on the comic actually being when a news agent was supposed to remove the issue from the racks.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1220: Vertigo Visions - Tomahawk, July 1998

I realized, with only a couple of days to go, that I hadn't really had a look at the creators involved in many of these comics. Or, rather, since it's Pride Month, I probably should highlight a few queer creators.

Rachel Pollack is 100% one of the most interesting figures in early 90s comics, and in queer comics specifically. A prodigous writer on the Tarot and the Kabbalah, Ms. Pollack gained some prominence as the writer who took over Doom Patrol when Grant Morrison wrapped his run. Not an easy task, as I still contend that the end of Morrison's Doom Patrol was just about one of the most perfect endings to a story that I've ever seen. Much as I love those characters, if that had been that last I'd seen of them, I'd have been happy. So Ms. Pollack's DP takes a little while to get going, but once we hit the Bandage People and Coagula, it's clear we're in a very different place. And it's so, so queer.

The other stand-out thing about Ms. Pollack is that she's trans. Just let that sink in a moment. In the early 90s, a major mainstream publisher, and remember that this is the heyday of Vertigo comics while Sandman was still a going concern, was employing an openly transgender writer, and letting her tell stories that dealt (and deal) with some of the things trans people experience. The aforementioned Coagula in Doom Patrol is, as far as I know, the first major trans character published in mainstream comics. That's important. But that's well down the pipeline in my Doom Patrol read-through. We've a ways to go yet.

But what about Tomahawk?
This was a very strange comic. It's certainly critical of the treatment of Indigenous Peoples in Revolution-era America. But there's also this strange awakening happening in the main character. Let me try to explain it as I understood it: Thomas Hawke considers the native people to be "savages," but he's not thrilled with the idea of killing them. Certain experiences lead him to be stranded in the wild, where he is taken in by a tribe who basically do to him in order to acculturate to their ways what was done to native peoples: torture, starvation, degradation. He, of course, capitulates and in the end has a spiritual awakening in the forest. It seems that the spirits have dictated that this man should be kept alive, that he is important somehow. He meets Mother Wolf, but very explicitly still sees her through the lens of Christianity. And, in some ways, he still sees himself as superior to the people who took him in. It was a difficult story, and I wonder if it would have made more sense if I had some awareness of who the character of Tomahawk was before this Vertigo re-envisioning. But I couldn't get away from that White Saviour trope, and I was trying to see the story as being critical of it somehow, but I'm not sure I got it.

An interesting comparison that we might make is that Tomahawk cannot fit back into White culture after his transformation - is this perhaps an articulation of the severity of stripping someone of their culture by force, that it's not necessarily something that can be put back together? Now I think I should go back and read it from that perspective.

More to come...