Superheroes Behaving Badly IX: The Ray

The Golden Age superheroes, as filtered through the Silver Age, sometimes demonstrated a questionable type of parenting.

We see in DC's Golden Age Green Lantern - Alan Scott, who now works with the code name "Sentinel" - one such parent of dubious success, who, though absolved by a convenient history of mind control and amnesia, simply knew nothing about the two children he fathered by a woman other than his current wife.

However, to qualify as a Superhero Behaving Badly, some free will must enter into the equation. As far as this requirement goes, one Golden Ager excels in the art of bad parenting. The Ray, as a father, contrived to set his son up to live his first eighteen years in a lightless basement; convinced his own brother to masquerade as the father of the child; told the child his mother had died during childbirth and told the mother the child had died during childbirth; and became an intrusive and codependent busybody once the secrets began to out.

The Failure of Excuses

Christopher Priest brought about this sledgehammer recharacterization that knocks the original Ray from the heroic pedestal once typical of comic book heroes, in the process making the son more tragic and plausible in the context of the modern superheroic model.

Nonetheless, when superheroes go wrong, subsequent writers frequently contrive reasons to absolve them from the responsibility for their malfeasance. Happy Terrill, though, enjoyed no such reprieve.

The earliest issues of The Ray suggested that Happy Terrill's relationship with the "Light Entity," an energy being of peculiar consciousness that (evidently) served as the source of his powers, had somehow deranged that onetime forties stalwart into the aforementioned mistreatment of his surviving son. As the early series went on, however, it became clear that this behavior owed to Happy's character rather than circumstances. As the above panel demonstrates, no outside entity owed responsibility; true jerkiness must come from within.

All in all, Happy Terrill's abusive substitutes for legitimate fathering originated in the fear of the dangers that beset the superpowered offspring of superheroes. Given numerous opportunities to do the right thing, the original Ray instead chose cheap cop-outs and cowardly remedies instead of dealing directly with problems. Thus Priest showed how a man who could face death on a day-to-day basis as a superhero might still fail when confronted with the everyday choices that beset ordinary parents.

A Troubled Birth

Comics for over thirty years have dealt with the menacing side of the birth of a superhero's child. With the birth of Franklin Richards in Fantastic Four sometime around 1968, the prospect of superheroes generating monstrous or even earth-shatteringly dangerous offspring has recurred in various titles not confined to a particular publisher or a particular year.

Thus, the troubled emergence of Ray Terrill into the world did not occur as a milestone comics event. Nonetheless, the cascade of synergetically awful maladaption to circumstances made this particular episode of superheroic spawning become worse and worse as time progressed.

Enough superheroes have had troubles with their offspring to justify some initial concern. Ignoring that small subset of superheroes who spawn demons, gods, or their own lovers, since such stories have an unnecessarily traumatic effect on those unfortunate enough to read them, we can note the children of Marvel's Miss America / Whizzer marriage and those of the Invisible Woman / Mister Fantastic. In both cases, something exceptional and possibly unfortunate came of the specialness of their children.

Happy Terrill, however, entered panic mode on seeing the halo around his newborn son and never got over the panic in eighteen years of his son's early life. He left this child in the care of an uncle and nuns and simply left him in the dark.

Amateurish Damage Control

Those who think about the business of lying recognize one of its central drawbacks: A lie requires maintenance. To cover it up frequently requires subsequent lies, possibly involving a cycle that spirals larger and larger until the whole fabricated edifice collapses under its own weight.

Into such a cycle did Happy Terrill descend. He lied to his wife, saying that Ray had died in delivery, purportedly to spare her the ordeal of dealing with a special child but mainly to allow himself to distance himself from problems with which he seemed unable to admit that he couldn't cope.

He lied to his son through his proxy, the brother that Happy had assume the role of Ray's father, about where Ray came from. He lied again through the delivered claims of an imaginary health problem that required the young Ray to stay out of sunlight to prevent sickness and death.

Continued Lack of Nerve

Even where Ray Terrill seemed willing to allow bygones to go by, Happy could not force himself to the price his end of the commitment would entail. Thus, just when Ray seemed likely to have the mother he had lost to his father's loss of nerve, Happy failed to come through.

The reward due to a young man willing to forgive did not come, and he found himself essentially in the same place left by an earlier attempt to meet and reveal himself to his mother.

Refusal to Pay the Piper

Yet the outing of several of these truths, even after Happy's confession of much of his own malfeasance to his son by way of flashbacks (in which he used the dishonest device of making young Ray play his own role in order to elicit sympathy), the elder hero dared not admit to his wife the deception, showing where his concern lies: protecting himself.

After all, if his concern lay with her feelings, he might consider that taking the rap might spare her the burden of suffering that the loss of a wanted child can impose on a mother, even if such revelation might put him in the doghouse.

Bad Beyond Recovery?

Priest today enjoys among other epithets directed at him for controversial work the title "the man who destroyed the Ray" for this treatment, not so much because its lack of aesthetic validity (Priest took some chances in the portrayal of a Golden Age hero as such an unredeemably terrible parent) but because he backed a character into a corner from which other writers will find it difficult or impossible to extricate him.

That the corruption of an obscure Golden Age hero who himself lacked the appeal to support his own title should evoke some small outcry attests, at least in part, to the success of Priest's desire to create an effect and to demonstrate how a hero could excel in the outside world yet fail under almost every test imposed by domestic life. The anger represents the impact a writer could evoke with demonstrated callousness by a figure supposed to rise above human pettiness.