Casualties of Editorial Malpractice III: The Infinitors

In the previous installment of "Casualties of Editorial Malpractice" (here), I noted how bad editorial decisions had done damage to the concept and franchise of the Justice Society of America on more than one occasion. We might expect, from such problems, that other superheroes with strong connections to the Justice Society might inherit troubles inflicted upon them. In the case of Infinity, Incorporated, however, writers and editors did them mayhem much more actively than their relationship to a Golden Age team of superheroes might imply.

A group of young superheroes from the early eighties has endured such long-term and pervasive mistreatment that they could make an excellent case, in some imaginary court, for a class action suit against editors who allowed (or required) stories and changes that would make them increasingly unworkable and sometimes actually impossible to use in stories. The luckiest of these heroes enjoyed mere debasement. The least fortunate spent (or continue to spend) time as unpersons, erased as surely as undesirables in Orwell's 1984.

To follow these youth heroes - an attempt to breach the gap between young-hero concepts like the X-Men and the Teen Titans and the Golden Age franchise(s) DC Comics had created, inherited, and purchased into its own control - involves considerable research across not only titles but DC's sub-genres. And, in the confusion that defined most of these characters in the aftermath of DC's recreation of its own cosmos, one might wonder why, if the owners of these intellectual properties had no further use for them, that they even tried things like shoehorning them into other books.

That some writers would retain a loyalty to the concepts even after DC had tossed them away in a campaign of editorial triage just barely allowed some of these figures to hold on to a tenuous kind of existence as ill-defined younger heroes with no particular role or place. But in their new place as half-abandoned, half-retained superheroes we must see, again, another set of casualties of editorial malpractice.

The Original Concept

At the turn of the eighties, DC Comics more or less turned over its stable of "Earth-Two" Golden Age characters - some of whom DC had purchased from other companies over the years - to Roy Thomas, who used them in context in All-Star Squadron. From this platform, he also followed the implications of his revisionist stories set in the forties into the present, and asked himself the question: What would become of children of the JSA, particularly those who might have inherited super-powers?

For the early eighties, then, "Earth-Two" would enjoy as its primary superhero team not the Justice Society nor the Justice League, but the Thomas - Ordway team dysphoniously named "Infinity, Inc." This lineup included Silver Scarab, or Hector Hall, connected to Hawkman and Hawkwoman; Northwind, a godson of Hawkman; Fury, a daughter of Wonder Woman; Nuklon, connected to the Atom and to a revisionist character called Cyclotron; Jade and Obsidian, the lost children of Green Lantern through a liaison he did not remember; and the occasional other who connected better to this group by youth than to the semiretired Justice Society.

The Crisis Crisis

The Infinitors moved in a scenario where they, as second-generation heroes, stepped up to fill a void created by the general retirement of the original superhero team, the Justice Society of America. The generational aspect remained a central premise not only to their original lineup, but to the new additions that would come later in the series, such as new versions of Hourman, Dr. Mid-Nite, and possibly others.

Unfortunately, DC eventually decided to eliminate the stage upon which they played out their stories. With Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC combined its various "Earth-Insertnumber" franchises into a single overarching entity.

To consider what this would mean for various superheroes, consider a metaphor from commerce. Take a chain store like K-Mart as an example. Should business not justify having 20 such stores open in a specific region, the corporation that administers these stores might choose to consolidate a few of them and eliminate others. Employees in the outlying regions, where sales perhaps failed to justify keeping the stores open, would find their jobs eliminated. Other employees, through conspicuous service, internal connections in the organization, or contractual obligations, might retain their positions, but only in the context of relocating to a combined facility. And a great many employees might suddenly become redundant.

DC's handling of the consolidation of a bushel-load of superhero universes essentially worked this way, with many superhero worlds altogether eliminated (stores closed and all employees terminated), others moved around into positions of varying importance (DC's Golden Age superheroes) and others mostly demoted but still retained by the company (many of the creations that DC had lured Roy Thomas to their company to integrate and manage in the Earth-2 franchise they ultimately consolidated and eliminated).

Thus, the Infinitors as a whole suddenly became redundant. With a newly-amalgamated world in which the Justice League arose to replace the departed Justice Society, no gap existed for second-generation superheroes to fill. The best DC could offer them involved playing second-banana roles across various books, in positions that ranged from disposable courtesan to throwaway goon to altogether absent.

Whatever Happened to... Jade?

The character Jade endures accumulating indignities to her person. First, she had the Earth-Two rug pulled out from under her, though she came out on the other side of that event somewhat intact, still playing the role of daughter to the Golden Age Green Lantern.

DC Comics chose, for whatever reason, to insult the character ways. First, by making her the girlfriend of a third-generation Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner). Second, by inserting her into a costume most fit for dancing on tables (compared to the rather modest outfit she originally wore). Thirdly, by taking away her powers altogether; and fourthly, though somewhat logically, by having her walk out on her hapless and pointless beau after a few years of a go-nowhere relationship. This left her tainted with the stigmata of the bimbo, something the character never deserved; useless as a superheroine until someone gives her some powers back; and without a book in which she can appear, since she burned her bridges in Green Lantern and doesn't really have a place in JSA.

The character can work in another context, as Waid and Ross demonstrated in Kingdom Come. First, however, she would require some editorial rehabilitation to restore her dignity, her powers, and her place within a community of superheroes.

To some extent, within the pages of Green Lantern, writer Judd Winnick seems inclined to redeem the character, albeit in a second-banana role. She has returned to the ring-wielding beau she abandoned (for what seemed like excellent reasons) and might, should current developments in that title continue, become another Green Lantern.

Whatever Happened to... Obsidian?

If Jade suffered from an increasingly lurid and superfluous role within DC Comics, Obsidian truly got a steamroller treatment. Mostly ignored post-Crisis, he would reappear here and there between 1985 and 1998.

DC did not really know what to do with the character, and generally didn't, though, at one point, it seemed on the brink of making him gay, either as an attempt to give him a personality trait that nineties writers thought they could more easily work with than the original, troubled character that Thomas and Ordway gave him in the beginning, or because of DC's onetime campaign to win awards for producing homosexual-friendly comics (an award DC consistently lost to Lynn Johnston's daily comic strip). DC, however, decided to take another tack.

As a trial balloon, DC had Obsidian appear as a villain in Green Lantern / Sentinel: Heart of Darkness, a three-issue mini that could just as well have run in the pages of Green Lantern. This story had the Starheart, the sentient but malign force from which the Golden Age Green Lantern draws his power, take over Obsidian and use him as an instrument to attempt to consume Alan Scott. However, Jade, another involved party in the Starheart's scheme, defeated the Starheart at the cost of her own powers.

DC must have liked the whole hero-gone-bad notion. It certainly uses it often enough. In JSA, then, within two years of the aforementioned story, Obsidian would reappear, consumed by a dark entity his powers evidently manifested. He would confront the JSA, come within a hair's breadth of destroying the city (or world, or whatever), and face defeat at the hands of his father, ending the tale with his evident demise, but in a fashion that left no body.

Given these facts, we can expect him to return, just like any disposable super-villain. Readers who want him to return as a hero, however, remain in the kind of limbo that Hal Jordan fans entered after that hero became the overpowered and underconceived villain "Parallax."

Whatever Happened to... Nuklon?

Nuklon, of all the Infinitors, seems to have fared the best. Though an infrequent player in superhero stories - for instance, his role as one of two possessed superheroes in The Weird by Jim Starlin and Berni Wrightson - Al Rothstein has eluded the kind of wholesale character destruction that mark his peer Obsidian.

The most drastic changes to the character, apart from the loss of the universe that spawned him, seem related to costume and grooming. Since he had an unremarkable original costume and a haircut best left unmentioned in polite company, neither of these changes detract.

In the guise of "Atom-Smasher," a redesign that originated in Kingdom Come, he became one of the principal players in the early JSA title, though events after #15 suggest he may become inactive or leave the team altogether. However, his presence in this latest incarnation of DC's oldest tenured superhero team did much to give it balance, both in variety of powers and in the membership ratios of second-generation JSA-themed superheroes.

All in all, Nuklon / Atom Smasher seems to have avoided the bullet of editorial malpractice that took down the balance of his peers.

Whatever Happened to... Northwind?

Northwind remains absent from DC Comics. He might have failed to appear since Crisis - research has yet to reveal a post-Crisis appearance. While absence of evidence doesn't, in a rigorous forensic model, mean the same thing as absence of evidence, nonetheless DC's failure to allow this character to crop up somewhere - perhaps in a radically redesigned, and therefore somewhat endurable, look - does suggest that no one in DC either wants to or can figure out how to do something with this character.

One need not imagine to wildly to figure out the problems DC must face with the character. Begin with an unflattering physical design: a head with feathers and a finlike crest and a costume that doesn't do much for the eye. Then continue with a difficult concept: the adopted ward of an alternate-universe version of a second-tier superhero who, himself, can't keep a book in print despite various attempts by DC to do so (and possibly another in the near future).

Combine this with his link to an obscure Golden Age tale that probably no one but Roy Thomas remembered when he mined it for Northwind's origin, and we can understand where a combination of lack of fan interest and a newly-hostile setting in the form of an amalgamation of various shared superhero universes could make it difficult for DC Comics to use the character.

In some ways, he also brings to mind an objection I've heard about the casting on the television show "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Some observers claim (with some justice, based on empirical analysis) that Black actors could only get a place on the show if it involved having something ugly sticking out of the top of their heads or something ridiculous worn on their faces. While we can debate the problematic nature of defining a character as "Black" based solely on artist-provided attributes when his concept defines him as an avian humanoid, we can nonetheless look at the scanned image, above, and see something that seems to demonstrate both of the objections I just mentioned.

On the other hand, writers with the vision, enthusiasm, and opportunity (at such rare times as the three come together in a single moment) have redeemed scores of listless, uninteresting, difficult, obscure, or peculiar characters from editorial oblivion. To some extent, the Vertigo imprint made this its entire business. Therefore, we should not consider oblivion as an inevitability for this or any other character; the matter generally rests in the hands of writers, artists, editors, and, of course, fans.

Whatever Happened to... Fury?

Fury, when the Crisis smoke had cleared, didn't initially have a place. Then, when DC confronted the problems presented by removing the Golden Age Wonder Woman from continuity, Fury, a character of another generation altogether, became her understudy in retconned Justice Society stories.

However, subsequent retroactive continuity changes would replace the Golden Age Wonder Woman in the JSA with a more likely proxy, her mother Hippolyta - Fury's grandmother. This represented one of the sounder revisions that John Byrne has accomplished since his work (under Marv Wolfman's guidance) on Superman in the eighties.

Nonetheless, it left Lyta without her original context - an alternate earth that now "never existed" - and without her new one as well. Lyta had disappeared from continuity.

If not for Vertigo books - especially Sandman - DC might not even have left a back-door to reintroduce the character. However, within the pages of Gaiman's accoladed Vertigo piece, she appeared as a captive of a local dreamworld created by two demonic denizens of Morpheus out to recreate the world of dreams in miniature in the context of an abused boy's mind. These spirits or powers saw fit to shanghai Lyta and her husband into this artificial dream-space.

As of this writing, events in JSA suggest that she has reappeared, in some form or another, and, as yet, without real explanations beyond her stay in the miniature dreamworld. So we would do wrong to consider her future in comics altogether foreclosed.

Whatever Happened to... Silver Scarab?

Silver Scarab would enjoy a bizarre and convoluted history after the abandonment of DC's Earth-Two franchise. In the Vertigo books of the late eighties, he would reappear as Sandman. Though the Vertigo line did not necessarily belong "in continuity" - meaning that made-up stories didn't happen really so that they don't affect other made-up stories - DC would evidently allow his career as Sandman to bleed over into their main continuity, including his death in that guise.

The character therefore began as the son of two Golden Age superheroes, took up an identity that only marginally reflected this heritage, and then took on the role of another Golden Age superhero before dying. With some superheroes, we can suspect problems in their concept based on the "reasonable reader's ability to define the character in less than a page" standard. While the principal player in works with considerable appeal and recognized merit, we might nonetheless note that Scarab may have suffered some editorial malpractice independent of the fate that befell the other Infinitors, at least as far as acquiring an unnecessarily convoluted history goes.

From there, however, Hector Hall need not have worried about coming to the end of his superheroic career. In comics, don't forget, one suffers more lasting consequences from a common cold than from dying. Therefore, not long after death had taken him in the guise of one version of Sandman, he reappeared in the guise of another Sandman in the pages of Vertigo's Sandman. If that confuses, consider that Gaiman probably intended it to; imagine, for clarity, Hector Hall's ghost, clad as the Kirby Sandman of the seventies, as Lyta's husband and the protector of the dream world in the miniature dream cosmos mentioned in the previous section about Fury.

Morpheus, the white-faced Sandman who starred in the Vertigo title, undid the miniature realm of dreams and returned Hector to the world of the dead, to much protest from his pregnant widow. But hope need not vanish forever. Hall eventually reappeared in the early issues of JSA, where he resurfaced in the guise of yet another early DC hero: Doctor Fate.

In a sense, Silver Scarab has become much like a Captain Action doll of the sixties. This doll sold with the option to purchase a number of outfits for it to convert it to (say) the Phantom or to the Lone Ranger, playing heavily to the notion that it could become someone besides Captain Action. For a toy, this represents an interesting gimmick; for a superhero, this suggests some trouble in the concept.

In this case, though, we can trace the trouble not to the limitations of the original conception. Nothing about Silver Scarab in his original form required him to play musical chairs with identities. Editorial malpractice squeezed him out of his original place in such a way that dressing him up as other characters offered more opportunities than using him as designed.

This character, through the sometimes-annoying, sometimes-baffling attempts to detail his history, nonetheless also demonstrates the positive, redemptive side of the creative imagination; where someone saw a character exhausted or rendered obsolete, on no less than two occasions other writers saw a manner to reinvent the character and bring him to a new prominence. Both in Sandman Mystery Theater and JSA, this troubled superhero with diverse connections to Golden Age heroes nonetheless manages to reappear. Perhaps this time the character will enjoy a stable characterization for a few years through the vehicle of the Justice Society's current title.

A Long-Term Prognosis

Given the preceding descriptions of superheroes sent to wrack and ruin through editorial decisions that pulled their setting out from under them, one might expect that I might claim doom and gloom await these characters in all possible futures. However, in the very recent past we have a) the return and redemption of Hall as Fate; b) the possible rediscovery of Fury; c) Nuklon / Atom-Smasher as a founder of the new JSA, albeit currently in absentia; d) Jade possibly to marry and become a Green Lantern in the short term.

All these things suggest a positive future. On the other side of the ledger, not much suggests otherwise: One character has, perhaps temporarily, assumed the mantle of a supervillain, and another remains AWOL in a manner that does not necessarily foreclose a future somewhere in the DC Universe.

The whole matter of their futures, singly and collectively, seem to depend upon the enthusiasms of writers. Where the right writers with the appropriate enthusiasms appear, we can expect these characters to reassume more prominent places in the shared-universe DC superhero mythos; it might take no more than the necessary time for such writers to appear on the right projects to make it happen.

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Column 237. Completed 11-Mar-2001.