Absent Without Leave

Although the Golden Age of comics had ended in a whimper, with title after title vanishing into the Great Beyond, the Silver Age created a new interest in the superhero medium and provided previously nonviable properties a second chance to appear within the four-color newsprint pages they once peopled in great numbers.

Realizing that new comics readers might enjoy seeing some of the originals of the genre, both DC and Marvel took to reviving the Golden Age characters who had begun dying as early as 1944. Depending upon their original commercial success and the amount of interest editors, writers, and artists expressed for the original superhero stable of a bygone age, a number of superheroes did return, singly and in groups, to print in a process that culminated in the encyclopedic All-Star Squadron, a work that tried to handle all the wartime creations of all the companies whose properties DC had acquired over the decades.

Comics writers thought of various ingenious ways to explain where the old heroes had gone and why it had taken them so long to come back. Until the eighties and nineties, these explanations almost never included "he got old and retired;" no, less probable, and sometimes less satisfying, explanations had to suffice for the absenting of the old stalwarts of comics.

Comics provided some pretty stupid explanations of the disappearance of the Golden Age heroes just in time for the hard continuity / shared universe idea of the Silver Age to demand that all stories "happen" and remain to pollute the future stories of all the characters involved.

Of course, these retroactive continuity changes don't all stand in their original form. Retroactive continuity, after all, can retcon even retcons. These, however, represent the retcons used to place these characters into then-current continuity.

Captain America

The Red Skull launched a rocket; Cap and Bucky, trying to stop it, got launched with it; Bucky died, and Cap somehow got frozen in a block of ice, which some Innuit people found and worshiped as a god until the Avengers melted him out of the ice and revived him.

This improbable story would inflict upon Captain America a death trauma around the person of his teenaged sidekick, Bucky Barnes, and a very sixties anomie resulting from his displacement in time. Said displacement began, according to the Avengers story, in 1945, even though Captain America had appeared in later comics; this would lead to other waves of revisionist stories.

For instance, 1973 would see a story where Captain America had to battle the "Captain America of the 1950s," a figure both addicted to a variant super soldier serum and thoroughly insane. The lefty comics values of the day, after all, would not allow the portrayal of a man who had fought communists as other than a paranoid racist. Such self-serving and politically fashionable revisionism seemed to ignore the phase of Silver Age Marvel comics where the heroes did, indeed, fight communist supervillains like the Red Ghost and the Crimson Dynamo.

Marvel, fortunately, does little to follow up these unfortunate strains of Captain America revisionism. Revisionism causes problems when used to patch up continuity; but to use it to impose fashionable political postures on characters creates some truly rancid stories. Had no one considered that some communists really needed Captain America to play a knuckle symphony on their noses? Or had the legend of McCarthy blinded writers to names like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot?

For whatever reason, by the time Marvel completed revising the Captain America canon (whose last pieces included a What If? story uncharacteristically in canon), it had become un-American to judge communists by the same standards as fascists; Captain America had entered the era of anti-anticommunism, and it had changed him.

Sub-Mariner

He somehow lost his memory, stopped cutting his hair, and ended up a shaggy bum in a flophouse until the Johnny Storm Human Torch recognized him and accidentally restored his memory.

Though suffering from the improbable amnesia premise that would save storytellers the necessity of explaining anything at all about his whereabouts since Stan Lee had become old enough to buy booze, this story did at least avoid attempting some improbably major revision of the character's history. It did not attempt to redefine when the Sub-Mariner disappeared from comics; did not attempt to relate this disappearance to Senator Joseph McCarthy or Dr. Frederick Wertham; and did not attempt to remake his personality. Here one may credit Kirby and Lee, who had worked in comics during the Golden Age, for not painting go-faster stripes on the character of another era.

The Sub-Mariner originally came up from within the ocean to rumble with the surface dwellers because he hated them, and Lee and Kirby brought back just that man. The sixties treatment of the character merely added depth in a way that did not compromise the concept.

Human Torch

The original Human Torch disappeared as one in an army of casualties to poor sales. In a sense, the onset of peace killed the Golden Age superhero, since the United States government had, so some stories say, provided soldiers with comic books; if so, these government sales provided a reliable income for the industry in its formative years, and a return to the free market resulted in an implosion in sales figures which ultimately killed off most of the DC heroes and all of the Timely heroes.

Lee and Kirby reworked the character as one member of its original superhero team, the Fantastic Four. Here a character with the same name and powers but a different origin, identity, and personality acted as one leg of a team of four superheroes.

When by early issues of the Fantastic Four and Avengers, Marvel experimented with bringing back old Timely heroes (Captain America and the Sub-Mariner), but faced an obstacle in the case of the original Human Torch: they had already recycled the character.

Therefore, they waded into difficult waters by having him appear in a one-shot story where a Fantastic Four villain (probably the Mad Thinker) found and revived the original Human Torch as a weapon against the Silver Age Torch. This required a story explaining what had happened to him, so Marvel officially ended the original Torch's Golden Age career by having said hero lose control of his powers and go out in the desert to burn out, where he might hurt nobody. Then, it involved little trouble to have the Mad Thinker find, reprogram, and revive the non-human Human Torch long enough for the younger Torch to fight and beat him. (Q. Who wins a fight? A. Whose comic still appears on newsstands?)

Roy Thomas disposed of the body of the lifeless Torch when he recycled the Golden Age character the Vision, whom he originally conceived as a retrofitted Human Torch with a different look and different powers and no memory of his earlier incarnation. This story would persist until the 1980s, when the Vision proved to have different origins, although subsequent stories still hint at a mystery involving the original Human Torch and the Vision's first body, which seem to represent an almost-identical manufacture on the schematic level.

With this mystery established, and the Vision no longer enjoying the dubious status of resident in the body of a dead man (or android), the original Human Torch became a short-term member of the West Coast Avengers, but Marvel again decided that the original Torch meant one too many and stripped him of his powers.

The character subsequently became the head of "Heroes for Hire," a contract agency that did work for a company owned by the Sub-Mariner. The Human Torch assumed his Jim Hammond identity again and took to an altogether different, though interesting, persona than any he had employed in previous stories.

The entire original Human Torch business demonstrates a difference between DC and Marvel; DC never had a problem with 3600 Silver Age Green Lanterns, plus one Golden Age Green Lantern, plus one Green Lantern-powered daughter of the Golden Age character, at the same time. A smaller, but still large, number of Flashes, near-Flashes, and Flash-kin proliferated over the years, rather than suffering the elimination of redundant superheroes.

Flash and the Justice Society

DC faced a storytelling problem when it decided to publish a story where its refurbished Flash - the Barry Allen version from 1956 - met the original Jay Garrick Flash from the forties. Earlier Allen-Flash stories had established that the Silver Age character had read the adventures of the Golden Age Flash, who existed only as a comic-book character; Allen modeled his superheroic persona upon this four-color prototype.

How, then, could DC reconcile what the earlier story said with a story in which the Flashes met? Some too-clever person might say "ignore the stupid story about the comic book," but that would not fit with sixties editorial standards that began the formation of the monolithic continuity that haunts comics today. Nor did, or do, comics writers worry much about subjecting plots to Occam's Razor; the best story does not necessarily mean the simplest story that fits the facts. Comics writers often take the Rube Goldberg's Bludgeon approach instead.

Therefore, relying on the science-fiction emphasis common to comics of the Silver Age, the writer (almost certainly Gardner Fox) postulated a parallel-universe model to explain the discrepancy and had the two Flashes meet when the latter-day figure somehow breached the barrier that separates "parallel worlds." On the other side, the new Flash found a place that contained the DC characters of the Silver Age, minus those who had remained in print continuously since that day; remade characters like Green Lantern and the Atom had versions in Earth-2 from the beginning. Later on, writers added DC's earliest creations, the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman of Earth-2, perhaps to avoid having to convolute the story further by explaining their absence.

With these premises given as an explanation that would, indeed, explain why the Justice Society did not appear in the comics of the fifties and later, DC might have let the matter rest, but they ultimately had to contrive a reason that the Justice Society did not appear throughout the fifties anyway.

Therefore, in the high tradition of bad historical revisionism in comics, DC chose to blame it all on the late Senator McCarthy. DC created an incident in which a senate committee on superheroes demanded that the Justice Society provide the government with information about their secret identities. In a typical demonstration of anachronistic values, all of the superheroes (to the last man, woman, and other) refused, walked (or teleported) out, and went into retirement.

Yes, this story does invite ridicule. But in the eighties, DC explained the matter that way. Since previous stories established that the JSA operated again in time for the first Justice League / Justice Society team-up in the early sixties, we can assume that the Justice Society got over it somehow (perhaps the results of the 1960 presidential election made them decide the world had become good again and deserved their services).

The Earth-2 premise presented other problems, independent of the improbable events of the Senate committee explanation. While it explained away about seven years of stories since 1956, it meant that DC had to maintain (at least) two separate continuities. This meant a biography for two Supermen, two Batmen, two Wonder Women, two Green Arrows, two Robins, plus the biographies of different characters with the same names. Marvel, more cautious about Golden Age revivals, managed to avoid the Earth-2 problem and must have laughed about it for over twenty years.

Captain Marvel

According to the retcon canon, Captain Marvel and his cast of regulars spent twenty years locked in a sphere of "suspendium," a big green bubble that stopped the passage of time until it popped.

When the suspendium popped, of course, everyone resumed, in mid-sentence, conversations halted in 1953 or 1954, but soon adapted to the world of the early 1970s.

DC had planned for a year or so to release the Fawcett Marvel characters from a doom imposed upon them by a 1950s lawsuit that had destroyed Fawcett Comics forever and had made all of their creations DC property. Thus, in a Superman story prior to the suspendium story, Superman fought with a "Captain Thunder," whose costume, powers, and origin reeked of the Fawcett character (and even bore the alter ego of "Willie Fawcett" instead of "Billy Batson."

Unfortunately, the revival could not keep Captain Marvel viable and the title Shazam! would not endure long; nor would its revival as The Power of Shazam! in the 1990s survive. Perhaps DC doesn't have room for a second Superman.

Manhunter

Manhunter, in his original forties appearances, represented one of a number of costumed adventurers without superpowers of a particular school either created or improved by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the creators of Captain America. Trivia buffs might note that he appeared perhaps twenty times before vanishing into an oblivion that consumed more well-known characters like the Guardian and the Sandman.

However, his return involved a turning point in comics stylings, bringing together a number of elements that would appear in the Marvel anti-heroes of the mid-seventies and later. Escaping the fate of Sandman (consignment to the Golden Age ghetto of "Earth-2") and of the Guardian (remanufacture as a new Guardian cloned from the original), Manhunter managed to reappear, in the flesh, in a seminal work by Walt Simonson and Archie Goodwin. This work appeared as a back-up series in Detective Comics, although it deserved separate treatment; in 1973, the age of the miniseries had not yet come.

Plastic Man

One day, suffering amnesia and wearing a trenchcoat, Plastic Man showed up in a Brave and the Bold story with Batman and Metamorpho. The story did not confirm or deny if Plastic Man wore the same overcoat in which the Sub-Mariner had infested the flophouses of Manhattan during his own amnesiac phase. The inevitable fistfight occurred, but everything worked out with everyone friends in the end. This story did not clarify if Plastic Man had wandered around in the trenchcoat since the cancellation of his DC comic in the sixties or since the cancellation of his original title for his original company.

Fortunately, Plastic Man's disappearance from comic books and his reappearance did not initially entail any kind of opinion-editorial piece about McCarthyism or anticommunism; DC has subsequently portrayed the character as strange enough that fashionable anti-anticommunism might not mean anything to him.

Captain Comet

Captain Comet, from his inception in the fifties to his inclusion in Kingdom Come, has occupied an obscure role as a third-tier DC character. He doesn't even qualify as a Golden Age character, deriving from the science fiction comics of the fifties; his place as a Silver Age character remains problematic. However, I include him in this list because DC explained his departure from over twenty years of comics and his subsequent return in a completely unconventional manner.

In Secret Society of Super-Villains, Captain Comet simply returned from a long trip into deep space. He did not rely on amnesia (Plastic Man; Sub-Mariner), going into a coma or suspended animation (Captain America; Captain Marvel; Manhunter; Human Torch), or an alternate universe (the Justice Society; the Quality heroes) to explain his absence.

Think about that. He went away, then he came back. It seems positively elegant in its simplicity. It would explain his disappearance better than many more complicated scenarios. Should DC and Marvel have thought like this from the beginning?