Hitting the Wall V: Adam Warlock

A character can take a single, but very potent, wrong turn early in his career as a comics property that may condemn him to a future that does not hold a place for him. This happened with the character "Him," who would become "Warlock" and then "Adam Warlock." From beginnings as the first of a new, artificial race intended to make mankind obsolescent, Warlock would drift from inappropriate role to inappropriate role, only enjoying a high point when he sank to his lowest.

Warlock could have become a Bronze Age great, but for the early mistake of trying to make him a superheroic messiah in his premiere appearances in Power of Warlock.

Warlock as "Him"

Reworkings of Warlock have almost completely effaced his original nature as a Lee-Kirby character that erupted from the pages of Fantastic Four in the sixties. As a personification of the menace of science misused, and further as a walking representative of the ever-present danger of human obsolescence, Warlock first burst from his cocoon as "Him," an avatar of an artificial type of human who might play a role as the first of a new post-human race.

The concept of "man-of-the-future" can lead a number of places. Some treatments depict this new man as a rival who threatens the place mankind holds in the world; some interpretations cast this new man as a persecuted innocent; and yet others view him as messianic. Warlock, since the days where he bore the epithet "Him," has played each of these roles, sometimes involving more than one role at a time. However, the greatest potential for abuse lay in the messianic interpretation of the Man Beyond Man.

Marvel Comics, directed by urges perhaps not comprehensible to outsiders, took the messianic aspect of Warlock's nature and from there pilfered material from the New Testament, playing Warlock as a Savior with a capital 'S.'

Warlock as Jesus

The pretentions of comics creators can boggle the mind, but Marvel Comics has not, in the long run, acted as the worst offender in this regard. For that title, we must look across the aisle to DC Comics, which occasionally dabbles with the notion of Superman as messiah and patriarch. Sometimes the recognition of Superman's iconic character goes well beyond anything that hero's popularity merits.

Nonetheless, at an early period in the 1970s - indeed, right at the passing of the Silver Age - Marvel Comics attempted to enact the Passion, substituting Adam Warlock for Jesus Christ, and the approach with which they attempted to carry off this pilferage suggests that they didn't really expect anyone to recognize that they had lifted the tale or from where they had taken it. If hundreds of millions of people worldwide take this particular story very seriously, Marvel seems to have seen it merely as suggestive source material from which to craft a superhero story.

People who tend to think about such things too much could find, in this wholesale appropriation of religious imagery for the subject matter of throwaway storytelling, something to insult even those who snicker at the Bible.

When Jim Starlin attempted to handle the character, just a few years down the road, he understood the damage that this kind of treatment could do to a character, and he figured a way to undo it: by turning the entire mess of messianic pretentions on their head and making them go terribly, terribly wrong.

Warlock as the Bad Shepherd

When Adam Warlock trod the road to ruin, when his life and self-esteem crumbled to nothing, when he saw his lowest ebb, at that point did he present a formidable front to the reader.

One occasionally sees drastic remakings of characters, including reversals of viewpoints (for instance, the Gold Key hero Magnus, Robot Fighter, who ultimately reappeared in Valiant Comics as the protector of the same autonomous robots that once he hunted). However, comics seldom hosts a corruption as extreme as that of the onetime savior Warlock, who fell, in Starlin's hands, from his role as prophet and perfect sacrifice to that of an utterly corrupt, albeit incredibly powerful, mortal whom fate forced to embrace evil to offset an even greater evil.

In some ways, nonetheless, Warlock remained messianic even in the depths of his corruption. For, in Starlin's immortal tale, Warlock confronted a future in which he would reappear as a diabolical patriarch - a kind of Antichrist called the Magus - and, to prevent the great harm the Magus would do to the universe, took his own life and sucked his own soul into the vampiric soul gem.

I believe that Jim Starlin and Marvel's editors agreed and intended to leave Warlock dead after his decline and death within the pages of Strange Tales, Warlock, and Avengers Annual #7. The story completes too perfectly; the resolution ties up things too well; and one gives back-door credit to that piece of work by the degree to which he becomes annoyed at reading something like Warlock's return in Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity Watch.

Warlock as Perennial Irritant

If returns from the dead cheapen the notion of death in comics, they cheapen the characters who return even more, with only very rare exceptions.

Infinity Gauntlet serves as a textbook for a number of the aesthetic violations that form the megacrossover formula, but I found most annoying the way that, by his simple reappearance, Adam Warlock completely shattered the potency of his death. If what made the character unworkable to the point that Marvel Comics would allow Starlin to kill him off in the first place had never found resolution (except in his death), undoing that death brought back the bad with the good - and that in the context of the "cosmic" scale of heroes, which tends to detach characters from the human scale that once defined Marvel Comics as different and better than what anyone else had to offer.

In some cases, you can tell something about what a character lacks by attempting to define him. With Warlock, such an attempt may return a biography, or a description of his creators, but not a true definition of the concept. "Failed messiah?" "Man of the future?" "Defier of causality?" These concepts all apply, but they don't suggest much to someone not already familiar with Warlock's peculiar history.

How can one describe Adam Warlock? I can't come up with much better than "perennial irritant." No particular reason compels his return - he already appeared in the best stories that anyone would likely ever write about him before the end of the 1970s. No ongoing developments make him the most likely hero to serve a cause. To use him, in fact, generally involves dredging Thanos out of storage and somehow giving him some new way to threaten the universe that has enough firepower to blast past all his previous defeats. Yet Thanos, post-1977, remains a very limited and flawed villain. Marvel has played the "Courtier of Death" piece far further than its inherent strengths merit.

As with other limited superheroes, Warlock owes a great deal of his definition to the villains he strives against, and these became trite long ago. As their antonym, Warlock need only differ from them in a single property - he plays the role of "good guy" to theirs of "bad guy." However, as these villains become trite, overused, and cliched, so too must Warlock suffer; he neatly reflects the exhaustion of his enemies.

Like them, when he appears, one can almost hear the sighs of readers who say, "Oh, no...not again."