Mind Candy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  In fact, it seems clear that for a time the TV series was driving the comics—hardly an unheard-of situation, as any Batman fan knows. For a few issues the storyline shifted back to World War II, as that was when the TV show was set in its first season. When the show changed networks and moved back to the present, a change probably driven largely by the higher production costs of a period piece, the comics also returned to the present day.

  So it seems quite reasonable to assume it was the impending launch of the TV version that put an end to the “new Wonder Woman” and brought back the original.

  Was that a good thing? Probably—it’s doubtful whether even the possibility of relinquishing the character to the Marston family could have kept the comics alive indefinitely if the TV series had not stirred new interest and introduced the Amazon princess to an entire new generation. Underoos and lunchboxes featuring Lynda Carter undoubtedly brought in more money than the comic books throughout the late 1970s, and that income ensured that DC would not risk losing the character.

  After the TV show ended sales slumped again, and Wonder Woman has been revamped and relaunched repeatedly since 1986, trying to find a steady audience—but she’s generally been relaunched in the brightly-colored and highly marketable super-hero costume, and even when that’s been altered, no one has suggested bringing back the karate-chopping woman in go-go boots. Merchandising rights are far more important now than they were in 1968.

  But—well, in April 2006 DC did a major promotional stunt, relaunching several titles “One Year Later.” The storylines all skipped forward a year in time, and a special weekly series called 52 was begun to cover, week by week, what had happened during the “lost” year. About the only thing we readers knew about that year, initially, was that Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman had all been missing during that time, and had been out of public view somewhere.

  A new Wonder Woman title premiered as part of the “One Year Later” project, nominally monthly but actually only appearing very erratically. In the first issue we see that Diana’s “sister,” Donna Troy, has taken on the role of “Wonder Woman”—but on the last page we see Diana Prince, now a jumpsuit-clad agent of the Department of Metahuman Affairs. And in 52 #18, we learn that detective Tim Trench has apparently just died horribly while wearing Dr. Fate’s helmet.

  Also, at the end of the previous big event, “Infinite Crisis,” Paradise Island (known as Themyscira in the present version) had retreated into an alternate dimension to escape Brother Eye’s OMAC units.

  Okay, there’s way too much back-story to explain what all that means, but the short version is that DC has deliberately recreated several of the less-stupid elements of the ’60s revamp in a new context. Wonder Woman’s home island is inaccessible in another dimension. Tim Trench existed. Diana Prince is a super-agent, rather than a gaudily-clad superhero—she spent her year in exile reinventing herself.

  It’s not all the changes restored, by any means—Steve Trevor was alive and well, for one thing, and there’s no sign (thank heavens!) of I Ching.

  And it was only temporary, merely a nod to that long-lost continuity—regardless of what happened in her solo title, in the new Justice League of America Diana Prince was back in the classic Wonder Woman role, pretty much unchanged. The other bits were apparently just an acknowledgment that yes, that stuff happened, it’s part of the character’s history.

  There have been at least two more revamps since then (yes, there were three complete revamps in less than six years) that did not include any of the super-spy stuff, but still, I thought the 2006 version’s use of those elements was a nice gesture, a nod to that strange interlude when Diana Prince had no Amazon powers.

  So were there good things about that period? Did we lose anything when DC brought back the new original Wonder Woman?

  Well, when I first saw the revamped version as a teenager in 1968, I thought it was pretty cool. I hadn’t been reading Wonder Woman before that because frankly, the stories were stupid—over the years DC had leached out everything that had made the 1940s version interesting. Even my sisters, feminist as their attitudes were, all preferred reading the adventures of Superboy or Green Arrow to the dreary pap of the early-60s Wonder Woman. The new version was at least different, and I appreciated that. It was an attempt to do something a little more realistic, a little less mired in DC’s standard super-hero mold. Mike Sekowsky’s art, while it doesn’t look that great now, was better than what had gone before. I had high hopes for the series.

  But I gave up on it a dozen issues in, even before DC did; the stories were still stupid, just in a different way. The art was rushed, the coloring dreadful.

  Looking back at it now, and comparing it with some the far superior versions we’ve seen since, I’d have to say that it’s just as well that revamp failed. The idea of a strong female character fighting crime without the aid of super-powers is not a novelty these days, and there’s nothing in the “new Wonder Woman” that isn’t being done at least as well in modern titles like Birds of Prey. We don’t need it.

  The revamped version was very much a product of the 1960s, with Diana’s “mod” clothes and the presence of the absurd I Ching. It’s not as downright embarrassing in retrospect as some of the “trendy” stuff DC published at the time, such as Brother Power the Geek, but it’s very dated. It’s hard to imagine any way it could have held up through the eighties and nineties and into the twenty-first century. There just wasn’t enough to it to sustain it.

  Wonder Woman was created to be a feminist icon, an empowering symbol for growing girls, a fantasy they could aspire to, and a boutique-owning counter-spy with a male mentor just doesn’t cut it in that role. Super-powers granted by the Greek pantheon may be silly wish-fulfillment, but they’re still more satisfying than martial arts. Bouncing bullets off your bracelets is just cooler than kicking a gunman in the knee. And who wants a mysterious Oriental mentor telling her what to do?

  But most importantly, even though they may have given her the same name, and explained how the transformation came about, even though they incorporated some of the details into later versions, and even though she was sometimes an interesting character in her own right, when I look back at those old comics I have to admit that despite the title, despite the name Diana Prince…

  She wasn’t really Wonder Woman at all.

  How To Write Like Stan Lee

  Marvel Comics as we know it today is largely the product of what Stan Lee did in the sixties. Not to slight the other fine creators—Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and all the rest—but it was Stan who ran the place, Stan who edited all the superhero books.

  It was also Stan Lee who wrote most of them, at least in the sense of providing the dialogue. Many old-time Marvel fans credit Stan Lee with being one of the all-time great writers.

  Was he really?

  Well, after reading lots of those old comics, I don’t think he was. He was a fast writer, able to churn stuff out on short notice. He stole ideas right and left (or “borrowed,” if you prefer). He had a sense of humor and never took himself too seriously. He had what SF author Frederik Pohl calls “monkey tricks of style and plot” that made him look like a better writer than he was.

  If you doubt my opinion of his writing, go back and re-read something like Tales of Suspense, and think about what these people are actually saying. Try reading the dialogue aloud. Try analyzing the action, instead of letting it speed past so fast you don’t notice the stupidity of it all.

  Fact is, I think that just about anyone can write a circa-1965 Stan Lee story, if he or she knows the formula.

  First off, write fast. Keep the story going so fast that no one has time to notice holes in the plot or stupid mistakes. If anyone does notice, that’s one place where a sense of humor comes in—it can cover a lot of sloppiness. Stan Lee talked about how nutty he and the other people at Marvel were at least as far back as Sgt. Fury #1. By all accounts, the Marvel bullpen has been prone to hijinks at least since the early 50s;
that started getting into the mags once Atlas became Marvel, and Stan made good use of it. Letter columns used it as an excuse for stupid mistakes—“Hey, so we said Tony Stark was Japanese, what do you expect from guys as crazy as we are?”

  As for plotting those fast-paced epics, the standard Stan Lee story fell into one of two categories, depending on whether the hero used muscles (Hulk, Thing, Thor, etc.) or brains (Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Dr. Strange). In the first category, the story consists of the two antagonists alternately pounding on each other. Let’s say it’s Hulk and Thor. Thor whacks Hulk with Mjolnir. Hulk is staggered, falls through side of building, and it looks like Thor has won. Then Hulk gets up, to everyone’s surprise, saying something like “It’ll take more than that to stop the Hulk!”, and punches Thor through the side of a bigger building. It looks dark for our hero, but then Thor digs his way out of the rubble saying, “By Odin’s beard! What manner of mortal is this? Methinks I must draw upon all my strength to defeat such a foe!” And he wallops the Hulk. And so on, for eight pages.

  The different styles of dialogue constitute most of the story’s characterization.

  The reason this sold comics is because first, the tide of battle is constantly shifting back and forth, which keeps the reader’s interest, and second, the characters come off as just stinking of determination and guts.

  The second category of story was the gadget story, epitomized by Iron Man vs. Titanium Man, where each character, instead of punching the other through a wall, keeps pulling new gadgets out of his hat. “What? You withstood the full blast of my Bifurcated Invertebrator! Well, it will do you no good, because I have yet in reserve my dreaded Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum!”

  “Gasp! A Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum! I have but seconds to counter its attack, and my armor is at its lowest ebb, but if I can just reach this switch—yes! I’ve done it! I’ve activated the Cosmic Dehumidifier!”

  Notice that this last speech could be in either a speech balloon or a thought balloon. The line between dialogue and thought is pretty vague in these stories; Stan Lee’s characters are always muttering or exclaiming to themselves about what’s happening.

  With Dr. Strange, the characters used spells instead of gadgets, but the principle is the same as with the gadget heroes.

  Mixed battles are possible, of course. When pitting a gadget hero against a muscle villain, the villain smashes gadget after gadget until finally the hero tries the right one. When pitting muscle hero against gadget villain, the hero just keeps punching until the villain can’t believe he’s still coming, and finally the good guy lands a punch on the villain’s jaw before collapsing in utter exhaustion.

  Right there, you have the essence of Stan Lee’s writing. The reason it worked is because he buried that basic plot under so much heavy emotion (“But I can’t waste time to brawl with this bruiser! I must deliver Aunt May’s chocolates or her birthday will be ruined!”) that nobody ever noticed just how simple and stupid the stories were.

  I’m not saying that he never did other, more original plots, just that he used these most of the time. Anyone who wants to plot a Stan Lee story need only pick hero and villain, coin lots of names for silly gadgets, figure out what the combatants can hit each other with, and throw in some emotional complication to give the fight importance—the villain killed the hero’s buddy, or the fight is distracting the hero from something important, or the hero is too busy worrying about some mundane problem to pay attention to the guy trying to clobber him.

  As for dialogue, mix and match your cliches.

  I like to think that standards are a bit higher today, and that you couldn’t get away with this sort of story too often—but I’m not sure.

  Here’s a quick example of how a Stan Lee story might go. Pick a hero: Spider-Man. Pick a villain: The Mandarin. (I don’t think this match-up ever happened, but what the heck, let’s try it.) Add a problem: Aunt May is dying again, and Pete needs to deliver her botulism antidote.

  We need to get the hero and villain together, of course, so we contrive something.

  New York’s in the middle of a transit strike, so Pete suits up, and Spidey starts swinging across the rooftops, precious vial in hand.

  The Mandarin engineered the strike to disrupt the city while he stole something he needed from a midtown laboratory—let’s say it’s a tailored microbe that he plans to use to infect the U.S. Army with lackadaisicality.

  Spidey swings across that particular lab’s rooftop just as the Mandarin prepares to blast his way in, and Mandy assumes it’s intentional.

  “So, arachnid!” (Villains never call heroes by their official names; union rules, I guess.) “I don’t know how you learned of my scheme, but it will do you no good! Such as you cannot stop the might of the Mandarin!” (Villains also like to refer to themselves in the third person and equate the part to the whole—there’s a fancy term for that that I don’t remember, and since I’m playing Stan Lee I don’t take time to look it up.)

  Spidey thinks, “Oh, no! I can’t waste time here, but if I don’t stop this fiend millions could die!”

  The Mandarin shoots something at Spidey from a ring, saying, “My electron beam will reduce you to atoms!” Spidey dodges and throws a punch. His fist bounces off a force-field.

  The Mandarin shoots something at Spidey from a ring, saying, “My proton beam will teach you who is the master here!” Spidey dodges and throws another, harder punch. His fist bounces off the force-field.

  Time for more dialogue: “What am I hitting? What will it take to stop this joker? How will I reach Aunt May in time?”

  The Mandarin shoots something at Spidey from a ring, saying, “You cannot dodge forever, fool! My positronic ray will obliterate you!” Spidey dodges and knocks a chimney on top of him. It bounces off the force-field.

  The Mandarin shoots something at Spidey from a ring, saying, “Die, fool! You cannot escape my interdimensional crevice tool!” Spidey fails to dodge, and is flattened, but forces himself to get up again, thinking, “I can’t fail now! Aunt May needs me!”

  “And still you persist! Your stamina is beyond comprehension!” The Mandarin shoots something at Spidey from a ring.

  Spidey struggles to his feet and throws a punch, with some comment like, “Got to put everything I have into this, make this one count!”

  So powerful is the blow that the Mandarin is staggered, even through his force-field. Fear shows on his face.

  “You have hurt me, insect! And you show no signs of yielding! I cannot spare the time to give you the thrashing you deserve! We will meet again another day!”

  He teleports away, and a badly-injured Spidey limps on toward the hospital, thinking, “Will I be in time?”

  Continued next month.

  Now, if this was to be a multi-part series, Spidey and the Mandarin would have accidentally exchanged vials, leaving Pete with the lackadaisical microbe and Mandy with the botulism serum, requiring them to hunt each other down. In all likelihood, lackadaisicality would turn out to be a previously-undiscovered cure for botulism.

  Of course, I’ve skimped on the dialogue, since this is just an outline; the final story would have lots more pomposity from the Mandarin and worry from Spidey.

  See how easy it is? Feel free to try this at home, kiddies—anyone can do it. It took me twenty minutes to write this outline. Now you know how Stan Lee could find time to write all those stories!

  Mix ’n’ Match Superheroes

  Excerpted from a column in Comics Buyer’s Guide

  Ever notice the parallels between heroes at different companies? The suspicious similarities? Of course you have! The publishers haven’t made any real attempt to hide them, after all. Right from the start, superheroes have tended to fall into categories.

  For example, underwater types. Timely/Marvel had Sub-Mariner, DC/National had Aquaman, and wasn’t there a Hydroman somewhere?

  Battling bowmen—Hawkeye, Green Arrow.

  Speedsters—The Flash, the Whizzer (a na
me that cracks me up whenever I think about it funny), Quicksilver, Johnny Quick, and so forth.

  Shrinkers—Doll Man, the Atom, Ant-Man.

  Magicians—Zatara, Dr. Strange, Monako, Dr. Fate, Yarko, Mandrake…this list could go on for pages, as it was one of the most popular categories in the early days.

  Creatures of the night—Batman, Moon Knight, the Shadow, and the Spirit started out as one but didn’t stay that way.

  Stretching sleuths—Plastic Man, Mister Fantastic, Elongated Man, Elastic Lad.

  Patriotic heroes—Captain America, the Shield, the Patriot, Mr. America (who became the Americommando), Miss Liberty, Miss America, Uncle Sam, and scads of others—not to mention the recent spate of non-U.S. ones, mostly from Marvel, such as the Red Guardian, Captain Canuck, Captain Britain, Union Jack, and turkeys like the Arabian Knight.

  Wielders of talismans—Green Lantern, Starman, Dial H for Hero, whoever’s got the Cosmic Cube this month.

  There are even the super-fatties—Bouncing Boy, Fatman the Human Flying Saucer, DC’s Fatman (Mr. America’s sidekick), and so forth.

  And of course, all-around powerhouses—Superman, Captain Marvel (the original Big Red Cheese), Hyperion, Thor, and so forth.

  I’m sure I’ve missed examples of each category, and probably forgotten entire categories, for that matter. Corrections and additions are welcome.

  Obviously, these duplications come about because coming up with a truly original superhero is tough. Coming up with a truly original anything is tough; that’s why the government grants patents and copyrights, to encourage people to come up with original stuff. People faced with deadlines and/or grouchy editors who need a new hero fast are much more likely to swipe an idea that worked for someone else than to invent something new. It’s safer, for one thing.