The Kids in the Hell

Brat Pack, written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1990-91; this edition 2005): When Veitch started work on Brat Pack back in late 1989, DC's ridiculous phone-in campaign to determine whether Robin would live or die was fresh in everyone's memories. Of course, this wasn't the Dick Grayson Robin, but Robin II, Jason Todd, who'd been rewritten after the company-wide Crisis on Infinite Earths to be a maladjusted teen-aged jerk...almost as if killing Robin was always on someone's mind (his original origin was pretty much the same as Dick Grayson's -- circus performer, daredevil, nice kid; after the Crisis, he was a street punk whom Batman selected to be Robin because...wait for it...Jason Todd stole the wheels off the Batmobile).

Kid sidekicks sorta worked in the 1940's, when child labour was still at least partially acceptable in the U.S., and when superhero comic books didn't strive for quasi-realism. Ostensibly, child sidekicks (Robin seemed to be about 10 at the beginning) worked as wish-fulfillment/identification figures for the child readers of superhero comics, though great American cartoonist (and once-upon-a-time comic-book sweatshop artist) Jules Feiffer once noted that he never met anyone, including himself, who identified with Robin -- kids want to be Batman.

In any case, kid sidekicks proliferated once Robin was introduced into the Batman canon in 1940; the most notable were Green Arrow's Speedy, Captain America's Bucky and, much later, Wonder Woman's Wonder Girl and the Flash's Kid Flash, though the latter two generally appeared on their own or with other teen superheroes, only teaming up rarely with their mentors (ditto for Supergirl). The first kid sidekick to die in action was Bucky, as revealed in Captain America's return to comic-book action in the early 1960's, though more than 40 years later Bucky would (like most comic-book characters) un-die.

Brat Pack meditates, sometimes horrifically, sometimes offensively, on both sidekicks and their changing meanings within comic books and the culture at large. 1950's psychologist Frederic Wertham saw in Batman and Robin an offensive homosexual couple (yeah, I know -- technically Batman would be a pedophile, given Robin's apparent age, but Wertham, like a lot of later bigots, doesn't differentiate); in Wonder Woman, a lesbian bondage queen; in superheroes an endless parade of offense to the morals and minds of America's youth. Oh, Wertham.

Veitch's thorniest problem lies in his characterization of Batman stand-in Midnight Mink as Wertham's version of Batman. Many critics characterized this as homophobia, missing the point, I think -- Veitch's commentary is on just that sort of thinking applied to children's books by adults. There's also a strong sense of disgust at how the adultification of superheroes in the 1970's and 1980's made child sidekicks logically untenable but commercially ever-necessary: corporations almost never willingly lay down a copyrighted character so long as there may be more money to be made.

Even the Robin phone-in is thrown in, as the citizen's of Veitch's Slumburg phone in to a radio show to voice their desire to see the kid sidekicks of Slumburg's four remaining major superheroes die (Superman-alike Maximortal left ten years earlier, plunging the city and the world into a crime-filled depression that they've never recovered from, and causing the remaining superheroes to become debased, ultraviolent parodies of themselves. Yep, just like mainstream superhero comics in the 1980's!).

And so another blisteringly satiric ride through superhero tropes and histories begins, along with a climax that crosses over into Maximortal. This is great, angry work. Highly recommended.

Superman's Dead

Maximortal, written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1992-93; this edition 2005): Rick Veitch may have the most underground comix-like mentality of any writer/artist to periodically create comics for the major mainstream publishers. His work can be scabrously vicious in its satire, but that's often balanced by the sentiment his stories show for the true underdogs. Maximortal is, on its surface, Veitch's wildly revisionist take on both Superman and the history of Superman as both a concept and a comic-book character. But it's also a wild ride through history, and not just comic-book history. That one of its fundamental elements is a misreading of Nietzsche may irk the philosophically inclined. Or maybe not.

Maximortal is a nightmarish, exhilirating ride through the history of the Golden Age of the American comic-book industry, which began with the appearance of Superman in 1938. In the real world, Superman's creators -- Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster -- got royally screwed by their publisher, giving up rights to their character from the get-go because they were kids who wanted to get their creation into print after it had been rejected by every comic-strip syndicate for the past five years. The shameful treatment of Siegel, Shuster and their heirs continues to the present day -- Google 'Joanne Siegel last letter Time Warner.'

Veitch replaces Superman with True-man the Maximortal, and Siegel and Shuster with two similar creators whose travails echo not only those of Superman's creators, but also those of Bill Finger (co-creator of Batman who, thanks to co-creator Bob Kane's business acumen, cannot legally be referred to as such by DC/Time Warner to this day; Finger died an alcoholic in near-poverty in the early 1970's; Kane died a rich man in the 1990's) and a host of others. Running parallel to this story (or more accurately, interwoven with this story) is the tale of the 'real' Maximortal, discovered by a childless couple in 1918 and subsequently kept under wraps by the U.S. government.

And then there's a seemingly timeless Maximortal, constantly thwarted in his/hers/its attempts to free itself from the chains of linear time by a magician called El Guano, who uses seemingly magical human feces (dubbed 'Craptonite') to harm the Maximortal. Analogues for various historical figures, including Einstein, Oppenheimer, comic-book legends Will Eisner and Jack Kirby, President Truman, and doomed TV Superman George Reeves appear. Maximortal's creators are ground down by the comics industry. Will truth and justice prevail? That's a good question.

Maximortal is supposed to be part of a five-volume series by Veitch collectively entitled the 'King Hell Heroica,' of which only this volume and the earlier Brat Pack have appeared. The story here doesn't really end (indeed, the 'climax' only makes complete sense if one has already read Brat Pack...and vice versa). Actually, the story really begins at the ending.

In any case, this is a brilliant, brutal book. Its revisionist take on what superheroes might really be like will probably seem familar by now, with two decades of such takes -- often in the mainstream -- behind us, but its horrified, Juvenalian scream at the horrors of history, and of comic-book history, remains fresh and startling and bracing. Highly recommended.