Superheroes Behaving Badly VI: Wonder Man

Wonder Man enjoys a convoluted history that ties him intimately to matters central to Marvel Comics' Avengers franchise, and managed to maintain a presence hovering over the team during the years between his first "death" in 1964 and his subsequent revival in 1975 that moved stories even as his own form lay lifeless on a slab somewhere.

His return to the superheroic mainstream in the seventies began with a series of syrupy mood-swings and personal crises of courage centered around his own faux death-trauma. Avengers writers of the Jim Shooter era, rather wisesly, disposed of the clutch-up-in-fear-of-death elements before the character became altogether insufferible, and recast him as a lighthearted adventurer who tended to blunder casually into crises that forced him to demonstrate his ionic muscle whether he cared to or not.

By the eighties, however, he began to engage in various nasty episodes, including spiteful little vignettes between himself and higher-ranking stalwarts with a more credible history within the Avengers. Nor did he distinguish himself with commitment to purpose, since every few issues or so he'd take off to go make movies or work out personal crises. Finally, toward the end of West Coast Avengers/Avengers West Coast, Wonder Man had seen two books that featured him - the Avengers book and his own, eponymous title - go down to cancellation. Marvel therefore predictably decided to off him in the first issue of its self-consciously Image-styled Force Works, a book that did not long survive.

Between his heyday in the hands of Shooter/Perez and Byrne/Stern in Avengers and his timely demise in Force Works #1, Wonder Man managed to acquire an unsavory history that provided material for comics critics to craft such pieces as the "Wonder Man Hall of Shame" and the "Anti-Wonder Man League (AWML)." While neither piece appears available through web searches as I write (in early December, 1999), the body of criticisms remains valid. Wonder Man spent roughly a decade, on and off, playing the arrogant jerk role in certain Marvel titles. Characters like Guy Gardner could at least create a following through various crass misdeeds, flavored by his own snide humor and complete lack of self-awareness. Wonder Man, on the other hand, endeared himself to no one with such antics, and still requires talents like theose of Kurt Busiek to make him palatable to readers.

Redemption and the First Death of Wonder Man

The first round of Wonder Man's misdeeds, back before his superheroic makeover, remain central to the premise of his origin and therefore don't properly belong in a gripe list about the character unless subsequent misdeeds make them seem relevant. The original Wonder Man story in Avengers #9 in 1964, after all, dealt with redemption rather than corruption: The disgraced industrialist Simon Williams, after all, rose above his circumstances and refused to allow his previous treacheries to result in the death of the Avengers. Instead, he chose to die himself to preserve their lives.

While comics stories had dealt with the traitor-turned-savior theme before and certainly would do so again, even within superhero comics, the death of a superhero represented something very unusual at the time, a rare moment of high drama in a medium that tended to end its stories with no enduring consequences to outlast the inevitable final panel where heroes would smile and gloat about their victories. Perhaps DC's Lightning Lad had died before. If another superhero had died before these two, I've never seen it mentioned.

Therefore, with a story breaking rules of the genre - specifically the "superheroes don't die and villains do, but they always come back" rule - this piece represented a significant dramatic moment. Writers with a vision would see in this something upon which to build, and these threads, laid down under writers Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart, would culminate in Wonder Man's ultimate return from the grave in the 1970s.

Ionic Muscles and Cringing Fear

This period of his history provides about half of the complaints voiced by comics readers who think like the departed "Anti-Wonder Man League." A fear of death, after all, seems more likely for a character who can't repel bullets with his bare chest and can't turn building-sized boulders to gravel with a few deft applications of his fists. Still, we shouldn't consider Wonder Man's initial apprehensions about risk-taking too harshly; a man who suffered a near-death experience doesn't necessarily want to repeat it. Too much of this stuff can undermine the heroic premise that underlies the formalized superhero, however. Who, after all, wants to read about a hero who shows less courage than folks who walk home at night in the dangerous neighborhoods of decaying cities?

With Wonder Man, the Avengers could have enjoyed a powerhouse without the attendant disadvantages like the unpredictability of Hercules or the temper of the Hulk. Nor should Wonder Man have to suffer from the cultural gap that separated Thor from the common man, nor the bizarre looks that occasionally make a pariah of the Thing. If Wonder Man did not enjoy quite the levels of strength associated with these other Marvel characters, consider that power enough to break into a bank vault generally serves for most purposes.

First, however, Marvel had to deal with the chutzpah problem, so, after his second costume (a Perez-era creation that lasted perhaps three issues of Avengers), Wonder Man received a makeover, both in tone and appearance.

The Lighter Approach

When a Wonder Man fan demonstrates nostalgia for the good old days of the character, he generally claims the days of the Wonder Man/Beast duo of late-seventies Avengers. Though the character took to wearing lame civilian clothes, he dispensed with much of the angsty posturing at the same time as he stepped outside the spandexed idiom of the costumed superhero. Simon began to realize some of his potential here, particularly with the Beast lightening the tone with humorous gestures here and quotes from Bullwinkle cartoons there.

Besides taking a lighter tack with the hero, this period of his history represents probably the last period where writers would portray the character as likeable. His subsequent history in West Coast Avengers / Avengers West Coast would invest him with a baggage of unpersonable character flaws and legitimate grievances against his behavior. He would, in the subsequent treatment, begin to assume the attributes that the "Anti-Wonder Man League" chose to recognize as his core character.

So, given that Wonder Man enjoyed some of his best art and writing during the Avengers #150-200, the best use of supporting characters, the least maudlin self-absorption, and the beginnings of a real heroic self-image, we can understand how the late seventies represented his glory days.

Hero, Avenger, Jerk

A new and increasingly toxic Wonder Man began to appear in the pages of West Coast Avengers. A confrontation with his brother the Grim Reaper in the early issues of this series led to a revelation from Wonder Man about his own guilty role in the embezzlements that led to his downfall; he, he admitted, and not Eric the Reaper, had engineered the thefts. To come clean about the matter and finally put it behind him, Wonder Man went on television to confess his misdeeds. Rather than receiving opprobrium, Wonder Man instead achieved something of a public realtions coup with this maneuver. He became a popular public figure, and this quickly went to his very inflatable head.

A real human being invested with the kind of power that many superheroes enjoy would not necessarily demonstrate a humility in proportion. We might expect to see such figures behave more like the worst incarnations of Guy Gardner or Wonder Man, rather than Superman, owing to the fact that powerful human beings often use this power to shield themselves from the disapproval their actions may entitle them to; in short, they could bully away criticism, and might forget it ever had a sound basis once enough people participated in the conspiracy of silence about their maltreatement of others. With a few exceptions, such superheroes do not endear themselves to readers.

Gardner could act like a jerk and become "the last wise guy in the DCU," but Simon Williams never really got beyond the "jerk" part during his snippy phase. His public relations coup having made him a recognized and liked figure, and his efforts in Hollywood making schlock formula action pictures having similarly inclined his self-critical faculties to go into a coma, Wonder Man began acting in a way that suggested he kept all his love to himself. He would snap at Iron Man for presuming to think that he had anything useful to contribute to Wonder Man's efforts to crack a couple of heads (West Coast Avengers #17). His self-importance cropped up with an unfortunate regularity throughout the issues in between, culminating in an egotistical snit in West Coast Avengers #24, when his fellow Avengers sorely wounded his pride by rescuing him when his flying harness failed, stranding him in space.

Some critical snubs toned Wonder Man down somewhat, and he put aside (for the time being) the notion of abandoning an Avengers career to devote himself to his bogus action flicks. If, however, he seemed to have overcome a fiery and passionate love of self, by West Coast Avengers #45, for reasons initially unclear, he refused to assist in the rebuilding of the Vision after an international intelligence cabal kidnaped, disassembled, and mind-wiped the android character. Engrams taken from Simon Williams provided the nucleus of Vision's personality, and Dr. Pym (Giant-Man, in his long period out of costume) recognized that no effort to reconstruct his identity would succeed without this implant. Yet Wonder Man refused, leaving the Vision as a high-grade but soulless artificial intelligence in a synthezoid body.

In the retitled Avengers West Coast #47, Wonder Man revealed his motives for refusing to help reconstruct the Vision's personality. He had developed a thing for the Scarlet Witch, the Vision's spouse. This put him in a moral territory roughly equivalent to a man who refuses to provide a blood transfusion because he wants someone to die so he can move in on the widow. Short of, say, killing all his friends and trying to destroy the universe, little Simon Williams could have done would ever endear him less as a character. By the time Wonder Man relented on this point (as a means toward helping the Scarlet Witch overcome the effects of the loss of her children that followed, in short order, the loss of her husband), the Vision did not wish to cooperate.

Perhaps some justice inspired the short sequence that followed in which an evil (and massively powered) Scarlet Witch slew Wonder Man. However, this death, like the previous two in Avengers, didn't take, and she, like Korvac before her, brought him back. As far as death comes into his history, Wonder Man seems to have a remarkable Teflon^TM coat.

Another false remission of Wonder Man's growing loathesomeness followed for a few issues, including a story thread where he dealt with his recurring enemy and tempter the Grim Reaper, with whom he cut a Faustian bargain (to allow him to continue killing victims if the Reaper would agree to help defeat Ultron) that he ultimately and nobly refused to honor. Echoing the behavior of Hawkeye in Avengers #110, Wonder Man decided to take his ball and go home when Wanda disavowed any romantic interest in him. Thereafter, he began to display a petulant shunning of the Scarlet Witch and began a shallow pursuit of whatever starlets the occasion permitted.

Perhaps an unwanted self-awareness finally reached Wonder Man, causing him to leave the West Coast Avengers indefinitely in the 90's of that title. He stated an intention to work out his personal problems, but the West Coast Avengers title would not last long enough to begin a decent start on such an ambitious program.

Back to His Coffin

A number of forces in comics brought about the cancellation of Avengers West Coast. Marvel Entertainment, in those days, saw much promise in the Iron Man franchise, particularly with the beginning of an Iron Man cartoon. Marvel, therefore, set its comics division to remaking the Avengers West Coast title into a better fit for the Iron Man - led team that would appear in the superhero cartoon. This team bore the name "Force Works," which became the title that absorbed some of the characters left homeless by the abrupt termination of the second Avengers title.

After getting rid of Roy Thomas, after a cheap and predictable disposal of Mockingbird through the cliched "This issue an Avenger DIES!" stunt in the last few months of Avengers West Coast," and after disbanding the team altogether, one might suspect that Marvel had propelled this concept to the bottom, but further depths remained to plumb, and plumb them Marvel did.

In Force Works #1, Marvel attempted to present its second-tier Avengers book in the trendy if disposable style of the commercially threatening "new comics." One may doubt that this had anything to do with what long-term Marvel readers wanted to see; instead, it represented an attempt by Marvel Comics to preempt publishers like Image Comics, who had come, in very short order, to threaten their market share. So this new book, consistent with its marketing-driven (rather than story-driven) concept, appropriated the clothing of the new pretenders to comics orthodoxy. Furthermore, very few issues since Marvel had pulled the tired old "Avenger DIES!" stunt in Avengers West Coast, with its very first issue, Force Works killed off Wonder Man. This character had already returned from the dead no less than three times, and a return from the dead represented a fundamental component of his origins, yet Marvel expected readers to buy his death yet again; as one might expect, though, he showed up again, with a slightly different set of powers and a greatly different look, in the volume three release of Avengers.

Bogus reasons propelled Marvel to kill Wonder Man again, but how many alternatives remained to them at this point? Piece by piece, beginning in the earliest Steve Englehart days of West Coast Avengers, Wonder Man began to lose the greatness of soul that defines characters like Captain America and Superman. He sank to lows that generally accompanied short-term or permanent conversions of superheroes into villains. Marvel may have taken a higher ground, here, than did DC when it dealt with an old character in 1994. Marvel just killed Wonder Man off again, rather than recasting him as the master villain behind the universal destruction brought on for the sake of a 1994 crossover event.

Busiek and the Return of Wonder Man

Given the awful character baggage that Wonder Man accumulated in the 1980s, Kurt Busiek deserves considerable credit for the audacity of his attempts to redeem the character. Using the powers of the Scarlet Witch (which expand to meet the current storytelling need), Busiek resurrected Wonder Man yet again, and cast him, albeit in a subdued fashion, back into the contraversies that surrounded the unresolved threads hanging over his character from two and three cancelled titles ago (Avengers West Coast, Wonder Man, and Force Works). Busiek so far has done little to rationalize Wonder Man's behavior, nor to argue it away as the persistent symptom of mind control or as an uncontrollable symptom of his powers, cheap escapes that a lesser writer might pursue. Instead, Busiek allowed the character a real gratitude for another chance at life, however implausible one may find the series of resurrections that clutter Wonder Man's history. In Avengers v. 3, #23, he scripted a confrontation between Wonder Man and the Vision, to whom his personality serves as a template, in which Wonder Man voices a sincere regret over the follies of his life; breaking from his now-typical cheerful demeanor, Simon Williams poured out a deep personal misery at the way the world failed to punish him for his many transgressions. The character seems, for the short term, to enjoy many of the symptoms of genuine repentance.

It falls to his future, whether in the Avengers title or the upcoming miniseries featuring himself and his onetime companion the Beast, to determine whether Wonder Man will actually reform substantially. Until Busiek (or the author(s) of the upcoming miniseries) redeems him fully, we can expect the sentiments which produced the "Anti-Wonder Man League" to survive.