Superheroes Behaving Badly X: Obsidian

Some superheroes begin as foundlings, as Superman, in his original interpretation had. Others remain orphans, as the post-Marvel Revolution sought to cast realer people with realer problems in the role of the hero.

Yet others find themselves orphaned by stories, plots, and editorial restructurings that leave them without a place to operate or a reason for existing. Such applies to the Roy Thomas creation Obsidian; and might observe in his ruin the following of the only remaining path after writers closed off all others.

The Untimely End of Infinity, Inc.

In spite of the dubious name, Infinity, Inc. had enough of a following to retain loyalists fifteen years after it fell as a casualty of the superhero purges that accompanied the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Originally conceived as the eighties' answer to the Justice Society of America, and thus as Earth-II's answer to the Justice League of Earth-1, this body contained a number of second-generation superheroes connected obviously or obliquely to Golden Age antecedents. Wonder Woman, Hawkman, the Atom, and Green Lantern all contributed offspring through various channels to the original incarnation of the team, and later members would include a second-generation Hourman, the Star-Spangled Kid, a short-lived Mid-Nite, and even the children of the occasional villain (such as Brain Wave, Jr.).

For some readers, Crisis on Infinite Earths must have ushered in something like a comics Reign of Terror. Especially those fans who followed the characters DC had placed on the alternate earths it used to explain either retiring of DC concepts (those that had failed to survive the post-World War II contraction of the superhero comics market) or the acquisition of the properties of DC's Golden Age contemporaries (Fawcett, Quality, and others).

The cast of Infinity, Inc. mostly survived the consolidation and cleanup of DC's multiple comics histories, but their histories and origins did not. As such, these characters became Orphans of Retcon, without particularly good reasons for continuing to exist in a superheroic milieu where other, more tenured, characters held the roles they once had.

Revision had made them redundant, and DC still has problems finding a place for some of them. The problem worsens for characters already bordering on an outcast status before Crisis pulled the world from under their feet.

Obsidian, therefore, found himself orphaned on more than one level.

Growing up in Foster Homes

There, but for the grace of God, go I played an important role in the definition of Obsidian and his relationship with his sister, Jade. Born as fraternal twins, the pair nonetheless led extremely different early lives, with Jade finding a loving adoptive family even as Obsidian suffered through a series of inept and dysfunctional foster parents. While this left him a gloomy and moody character, it also meshed well with a compassionate undercurrent typical of his early depictions; Todd Rice might have regretted most of his life, but his sympathies spread beyond maudlin self-pity. Unlike a slightly younger generation of young people (whom one might cruelly label angstholes), Obsidian managed to become larger than the self-absorbed wreck that later writers would make him.

As it had for Peter Parker before him, the Obsidian's powers allowed him an opportunity to rise above his circumstances and become someone whose life meant something, the fundamental quandary that besets human beings in an era where individual people sometimes seem inherently obsolescent.

In the Mantle of an Infinitor

Todd's gloom, nonetheless, never left him as he stepped into the role of a superhero. An element of the tragic always attached to him, and in this Roy Thomas seemed a good ten years ahead of his time in his treatment of themes of fatherlessness.

One might observe, much to Roy Thomas' credit, that early Infinity, Inc. stories dealt with questions and problems that would not receive much shelf-space in self-help sections until the turn of the nineties, when social observers began to note the toll fatherlessness takes on young men in our culture. One sees in Todd's regret at the exaggerated reports of Alan Scott's death many of the resonances from works that deal with the subject: Todd dwells on the life he might have had and knows that his ability to define himself much depends on how he related, or failed to relate, to his father.

One might sneer at the hero who only chose to save the world while things went his way. Todd Rice demonstrated the side of heroism that moves human beings to exceptional efforts in spite of the misery that surrounds them; in this, he showed a type of heroism a little more relevant to real people.

Post-Crisis Homelessness

Crisis on Infinite Earths caused a number of heroes to vanish retroactively (for instance, the duplicate Superman and Robin) and a great many others to disperse to the four winds. Roy Thomas' creations fared particularly badly. Twenty years later, we might note the following: Jade had become a disposable girlfriend-du jour for the dubious superhero who currently wears the Green Lantern mantle; Silver Scarab had died; Fury and Northwind had essentially vanished from continuity; and Nuklon and Obsidian had become generally-unused characters who sometimes appeared as supporting heroes in variable-lineup team books like the multiple Justice League titles that franchise once enjoyed.

Some talents, once DC had pulled out their work from underneath them, never completely recovered from the impact. Sixties and seventies talents like Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman, to this day, remain on the fringes of the industry, where once they stood on the forefront of the business.

Such talents, with some justice, grumble about the fate of the product of their pens. When editorial decisions orphan concepts so severely, frequently little future exists for such characters except to play the role of pawn sacrifice in the summer's megacrossover event.

Obsidian, however, would enjoy an even dimmer future.

Marz and the Starheart

For Obsidian, Ron Marz' miniseries Green Lantern / Sentinel: Heart of Darkness would serve as a trial run for his future role as a villain.

Followers of the sometimes-tricky morass of revised Alan Scott history might recall that, after 1979, the original Green Lantern traced his powers to an object/being called the Starheart, a blob of magical energy connected with the Guardians and infused with magic but not within their control. This object provided the source of Alan Scott's power. When later stories made this item the remnant of a corrupted Green Lantern, it became inevitable that the Starheart would appear as a sentient entity.

Around the time of Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, then, the Starheart would manifest itself, and, in the process, provide Alan Scott with an age and costume makeover that lasted until the late 1990s.

Marz' miniseries attempted to clean up some loose ends remaining around the Starheart story and around Infinitors Brainwave, Jade, and Obsidian.

In a three-issue story (which had promise it failed to realize), Kyle Rayner and Alan Scott investigated the disappearance of Jade and found Obsidian under the mental control of his new "father," the Starheart. However, Jade, ransoming herself for her captive father, betrayed and destroyed the Starheart (no confirmed kill), and Obsidian escaped that being's influence.

DC, having suffered a very troubled Green Lantern franchise since 1994, might have decided it could resolve some problems by turning Obsidian into a villain more permanently.

JSA and Hitting Bottom

After becoming free of the influence of the Starheart, Obsidian still had some prospects of redemption. After all, superheroes get mind-controlled and do rotten things to each other all the time; only so many formulaic tools exist for making them fight each other, and mind-control provides one that allows the heroes to fight like mortal enemies yet fully escape the moral consequences of the worst they can muster against each other.

Instead, though, DC chose to explore the notion that Todd's connection with shadow and darkness amounted to an irresistible pull towards evil and had his shadow-body become a separated, yet controlling entity who directed this troubled youth. So, through early issues of JSA, the reader would follow short vignettes with Todd discussing things with the unidentified "Ian," who inclined him towards malfeasance. This continued until enough foreshadowing had passed to prepare the way for Obsidian to appear as a supernatural villain who sought to destroy the world by embedding it in shadow and nightmare.

The character doubtless deserves better treatment. However, if DC had bothered trying to place Obsidian back on the straight and narrow path, the old problems would have remained. DC didn't really have a place for him. Incarnations of the Justice League could host him at various times between 1989 and the mid-nineties; but after the Green Lantern / Sentinel miniseries, the Justice League one found had returned to a particular formula that mostly excluded second-tier heroes by definition.

The options for a hero in such straits tend to fall into three categories. You could a) kill him; b) ignore him; c) turn him into a villain. Singly and in groups, DC would do all three.

Ironically, though the new JSA title created a haven for refugees both from the Justice Society and from Infinity, Inc., the balance of characters didn't leave too many slots open for either after the title established its stable core lineup. Generally, an Infinitor might occupy a slot on that team as a legacy role for a deceased parent or mentor; hence, Sand and Atom-Smasher, wards of Sandman and the Atom, got in as legacies. Neither Obsidian nor Jade could qualify under this editorial arrangement, since their still-active father, Sentinel (Green Lantern) served as a member and doesn't seem inclined to keel over and die any time soon.

JSA therefore didn't feature a line-up that would use Obsidian as a member; yet much of what occurs in that title involves cleaning up incomplete or dangling plot threads, many of which depend from the ruin of the Infinity, Inc. title. So JSA was very likely to use the character while not having any open superhero slots he could fill. By elimination, he would have open only the role of the villain.

For some, the hero-turned-villain theme might seem compelling; however, a little goes a long way and went a long way the first dozen or so times it happened. One had reached the end of the line for the corrupt-superhero road, in my opinion, during Zero Hour, where numerous Evil Future Selves appeared, including the corrupted versions of Hawk, Green Lantern, and Cosmic Boy. By 2000, though, we might cautiously classify it with hopeless cliches. More new territory exists in heroes vying against each other because of philosophical differences (as in JLA: Superpower).

The whole thing, as we might predict, came out bad in the end for Obsidian. His father, a superhero drafted to replace the Golden Age Superman in post-Crisis continuity, enjoys enough power to defeat anyone that writers allow him to; he plausibly could confront the modern Superman himself without necessarily coming out the worse in the dispute.

Thus, the last lurid chapter ended with a showdown between father and son and an ending that suggested, but did not confirm, Obsidian's death, with that onetime hero's loyalties demonstrably still on the side of evil.

The sentiment Alan Scott expresses in the last illustration might well summarize the feelings Roy Thomas must currently entertain for a hero DC decided would better serve as a villain.