We're all pollution-breathing monsters now.
As a once and former Marvel Zombie, I've been struck at various points over the last three or four years at how Timely (bad comic geek pun; sorry) some of Marvel Comics' storylines from the early-to-mid-1970s are today.
The early 1970s can be characterized as the period of "relevance" in mainstream American superhero comics, when the Big Two comic book companies, Marvel and DC, flush with their successful challenges to the self-censoring body that U.S. comic book publishers formed in the 1950s to calm the anti-comic book hysteria sparked by Dr. Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, the Comics Code Authority (the CCA or "the Code" to comic pros and fans), sought to tie their superhero comics (and, to a certain extent, their horror, fantasy and sci-fi titles as well) closer to the real world by incorporating themes or story elements borrowed, if not ripped, from then-current headlines. Marvel published two nearly contemporaneous storylines -- in Captain America and the Falcon and Daredevil, The Man Without Fear! -- involving nefarious no-goodniks who came within a whisker's breadth of stealing the White House, written by their duo of Stunning Steves, namely Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart. (Readers were given to understand in the letter column of Captain America -- the title written by Steve Englehart -- that the anonymous, "highly placed Washington official" who was actually the head of the then-latest iteration of the subversive group calling itself the Secret Empire and who committed suicide in front of a horrified Cap, prompting him to renounce his identity as Captain America and become, briefly, the Nomad, as the Secret Empire's Number One made him feel like a man without a country, could've been anyone from Henry Kissinger to Richard M. Nixon, but was most probably Nixon's former vice president, Spiro Agnew.) It should be noted that these story arcs concluded a couple of months before "Tricky Dick" tendered his resignation from the Oval Office, to prevent him from becoming the first American president to be successfully impeached. (The Secret Empire/Committee to Regain America's Principles [whose acronym is, it should be noted, CRAP; the similarity to "Tricky Dick's" Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, was purely intentional] arc ended in Captain America Vol. 1, #175, while the Black Sceptre storyline in Daredevil concluded with DD Vol. 1, #112; these issues are dated July 1974 and August 1974, respectively: Marvel's titles generally hit the stands about two months before their cover dates, while The Colossus of Yorba Linda resigned on 8 August 1974.)
Steve Gerber generally wrote tales that were wilder and woolier than anyone else's at the Marvel Bullpen; that he was willing to throw in so many weird, odd, offbeat, and flat-out crazy elements into his stories at the risk of creating something that would alienate readers or, worse, fail utterly due to their incomprehensibility and unbelievability (yes, there are some things that even a superhero comic geek won't buy) is a tribute to his writerly courage and the editors and publishers at Marvel, who seemed to have been, on the whole, more concerned with turning out interesting comics that people might actually want to read than multi-title crossovers, a bewildering array of limited series, alternate covers, foil, holographic or die-cut covers (or some combination thereof), merchandising and licensing fees. (You've heard of Howard the Duck? He's Gerber's baby, and was once so popular that he merited his own syndicated, dumbed-down newspaper cartoon strip.)
"Dubya's" administration has reminded me at various points of the arc that Steve Gerber wrote immediately after his Black Sceptre storyline in Daredevil: one involving a guest appearance of one of the most offbeat Marvel characters to be given his own title, the macabre Man-Thing. Before Marvel's "Ultimates" line, the Man-Thing was a hapless scientist named Ted Sallis who had developed either a super-soldier serum (in an attempt to duplicate the long-lost formula that turned sickly Steve Rogers into the über-Olympic athlete Captain America) or a serum that would turn people into "pollution-breathing monsters" so that Big Business didn't have to comply with pesky environmental laws and could keep on making money until the U.S. made Charles Dickens's London and Elizabeth Gaskell's Manchester look like veritable Edens by comparison: Marvel waffled between the two origins. At all events, Sallis was pursued by enemy agents, either of a hostile power (the U.S.S.R. would be the likely candidate) or of one of the many hi-tech paramilitary subversive groups which infested the Marvel Universe like crotch rot; desperate to keep his formula from their vile clutches, he injected himself with it in the hopes of gaining the ability to give them a richly deserved beat-down. He crashed his car somewhere in the Florida Everglades (a spot that would later be revealed as one of the Nexuses of All Realities), and, as all but the most naïve reader might expect, something went wrong, and Sallis was transmogrified into a mindless, boneless, ten foot tall (or thereabouts) mute muck monster who is attracted to human emotions: positive ones make him tag along like a faithful puppy; negative ones agitate him and make him violent. And, to recite the tag-line from Manny's own title, "Whosoever knows fear...BURNS at the touch of the Man-Thing!" (As an Andy Rooney look-alike noted in the first issue of the two issue limited series World's Worst Comics, "Funny: my mother always told me that I'd go blind if I touched my man-thing...")
The three-issue storyline in Daredevil Vol. 1, #113-115 involved a new (later revealed to be an old, at the start of Frank Miller's first stint as an artist on DD) baddie named Death Stalker and his hired stooge, long-time Hornhead foe the Gladiator, kidnapping the sister of Daredevil/Matt Murdock's college roommate and law partner, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Candace, a strawberry blonde knock-out who unearthed proof of the U.S. government's funding of Ted Sallis's serum to enable humans to survive in a massively polluted environment during the course of her college journalism project: Death Stalker reasoned that many parties, governmental or otherwise, would pay a handsome fee to obtain Sallis's long-thought-lost formula; if he could persuade the idealistic young Candace Nelson to help him trace the missing Ted Sallis, he felt certain that he could extract said formula from him as well. Naturally the feds are also keenly interested in the whereabouts of Candy, if only so that she may be arrested and charged for violating national security; many of the cast of characters end up in the patch of the Everglades where Sallis was last seen (by enemy agents, no less; just who were those guys -- and gal -- working for anyway, hmm?), only to find the Man-Thing instead of Sallis (no one knows that Sallis is -- or, more properly speaking, was, since he can't change back -- the Man-Thing). The "pollution-breathing monster" formula is discovered in Sallis's cabin, but, thankfully, Daredevil manages to destroy it before Death Stalker can sell it to the highest bidder.
(Comic geek aside here: why did Frank Miller feel it necessary to turn the entire Nelson family into a bunch of nincompoops? Not only did he dumb down Foggy Nelson -- who, no matter how ridiculous he looked when he tried to convince Karen Page that he was Daredevil, was, while serving as the Marvel Universe's district attorney for New York City, seriously considered for membership on the executive committee of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- he turned a delightfully normal, whip-smart young woman into a bimbette even less memorable than, say, Brie Daniels, one of Tony Stark's [Iron Man] ill-advised paramours. Frank Miller doesn't seem to think that a woman can be strong unless she's barely clad in skin-tight leather and/or spandex, is a world-class martial artist-cum-gymnast-cum-acrobat, and/or is armed with an assortment of edged weaponry and/or automatic firearms.)
What prompted, you might ask, this lengthy excursion into the comic geek ghetto? Well, I'll tell you.
This did: the interview that WBUR-FM's Tom Ashbrook, host of the National Public Radio news/talk programme On Point, had during said programme's first hour yesterday (Friday, 3 February 2006) with Dr. James Hansen, NASA's foremost climate scientist and director of their Godard Institute for Space Studies. Andrew Revkin published an article in the New York Times on Sunday, 29 January, reporting that NASA's public affairs flak George Deutsch rejected NPR's request to interview Dr. Hansen on-air. As Ashbrook revealed near the start of this programme, said request was for the benefit of none other than On Point; Dr. Hansen had to make clear that he was speaking on behalf of himself and not on behalf of NASA or any other department or branch of the federal government.
Dr. Hansen believes that the only question about global warming now is whether the human race will be able to blunt its effects enough to prevent the rising mean temperature from turning This Island Earth into a different planet. The phrase "different planet" was conspicuously used a handful of times during the show; Juliet Eilperin wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday, 29 January that Dr. Hansen had confirmed the previous week that:
"...2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years...and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would 'imply changes that constitute practically a different planet.
"'It's not something you can adapt to,' Hansen said in an interview. 'We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something.'
"Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.
"While both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets as a whole are gaining some mass in their cold interiors because of increasing snowfall, they are losing ice along their peripheries. That indicates that scientists may have underestimated the rate of disintegration they face in the future, Oppenheimer said. Greenland's current net ice loss is equivalent to an annual 0.008 inch sea level rise.
"The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be 'huge,' Oppenheimer said. 'Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there's really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever.'"
And yet "the Ooze Brothers" -- "Dubya," Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense "Rummy," Secretary of State "Condi," former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and former New Jersey governor and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Christine Todd Whitman all ran, helped run, or had significant investments in oil companies -- uniformly disdain the very idea of global warming; "Dubya's" favorite tactic is to point to a rogues gallery of anti-global warming cranks who make Neal Adams's geological theories (brilliantly lampooned by John Byrne in Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #263-64 [the Feb. and Mar. 1984 issues]) look positively inspired. No surprises there: an admission that global warming is a real and imminent danger unless the human race goes balls-out on a crash course to drastically reduce its effects would perforce curtail the oil companies' profits, unless they were able to adapt to the need for alternate sources of energy.
What gave me a shiver of dread is the point so nicely raised by the last caller, a self-identified astronomer named Roanek (SP??) from Boston, who asked Dr. Hansen:
ROANEK (SP?): ...when you think of the science you do...[when] you think of the people who are some of the biggest supporters of this current administration, do you really think, in your honest opinion, that a socially conservative president, some of whose biggest supporters are social conservatives, don't believe that the universe is older than six thousand years, and reject even a lot of the scientific findings about evolution, Big Bang Theory...do you really think that you're gonna get the kind of support from this government, from this administration, that you really need?
TOM ASHBROOK: Roanek (SP?), it's a big question; Jim Hansen?
DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, uhm, you know, there are some people whom you'll never have an influence on, but then there are sss -- the way a democracy works, there's a fff -- a fraction in the middle, and they're the ones that, uh, can, can make a difference. And I think that even within this administration that there are people who recognize that maybe our automobile industry would be healthier and better off if they, uh, made some fundamental changes.
Dr. Hansen concluded his non-response by saying that we shouldn't stop trying to change people's minds about the reality of global warming. D'accord. But I still think that the caller had a valid point: how, ultimately, can you live with a powerfully influential group of folks who are actuated not merely by near-sighted cupidity but by a chiliastic desire to hasten the decline and fall of Life As We Know It in anticipation of a supernaturally blissful Life Everlasting at the side of their deity?
Greed and selfishness would be easier to sway: I daresay that the vast majority of greedy and selfish folks want to keep on living in reasonably good health, thank you very much, even if they don't particularly care about the status of most of their fellow beings or those portions of the globe that they don't inhabit or visit. But people who want to die, who want everyone to die in order to hasten the coming of a divine Kingdom..? If you can't change their minds -- if you can't at least convince them to not to try to goose their God in the Ass to prompt Him to hurry the hell up with His millenarian Designs -- what then?
The answers are not comfortable ones; but, given this country's power and status in the world, they are no less pertinent than the many questions of "Whither Islam?" that are being voiced by anxious pundits around the world.
In the meantime, one can only wonder, half humorously and half nervously, if some of this administration's "good science" involves trying to discover a way to let Americans to stop worrying and learn to love the greenhouse effect. Perhaps the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu are more closely linked than one might at first suppose....
The early 1970s can be characterized as the period of "relevance" in mainstream American superhero comics, when the Big Two comic book companies, Marvel and DC, flush with their successful challenges to the self-censoring body that U.S. comic book publishers formed in the 1950s to calm the anti-comic book hysteria sparked by Dr. Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, the Comics Code Authority (the CCA or "the Code" to comic pros and fans), sought to tie their superhero comics (and, to a certain extent, their horror, fantasy and sci-fi titles as well) closer to the real world by incorporating themes or story elements borrowed, if not ripped, from then-current headlines. Marvel published two nearly contemporaneous storylines -- in Captain America and the Falcon and Daredevil, The Man Without Fear! -- involving nefarious no-goodniks who came within a whisker's breadth of stealing the White House, written by their duo of Stunning Steves, namely Steve Gerber and Steve Englehart. (Readers were given to understand in the letter column of Captain America -- the title written by Steve Englehart -- that the anonymous, "highly placed Washington official" who was actually the head of the then-latest iteration of the subversive group calling itself the Secret Empire and who committed suicide in front of a horrified Cap, prompting him to renounce his identity as Captain America and become, briefly, the Nomad, as the Secret Empire's Number One made him feel like a man without a country, could've been anyone from Henry Kissinger to Richard M. Nixon, but was most probably Nixon's former vice president, Spiro Agnew.) It should be noted that these story arcs concluded a couple of months before "Tricky Dick" tendered his resignation from the Oval Office, to prevent him from becoming the first American president to be successfully impeached. (The Secret Empire/Committee to Regain America's Principles [whose acronym is, it should be noted, CRAP; the similarity to "Tricky Dick's" Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, was purely intentional] arc ended in Captain America Vol. 1, #175, while the Black Sceptre storyline in Daredevil concluded with DD Vol. 1, #112; these issues are dated July 1974 and August 1974, respectively: Marvel's titles generally hit the stands about two months before their cover dates, while The Colossus of Yorba Linda resigned on 8 August 1974.)
Steve Gerber generally wrote tales that were wilder and woolier than anyone else's at the Marvel Bullpen; that he was willing to throw in so many weird, odd, offbeat, and flat-out crazy elements into his stories at the risk of creating something that would alienate readers or, worse, fail utterly due to their incomprehensibility and unbelievability (yes, there are some things that even a superhero comic geek won't buy) is a tribute to his writerly courage and the editors and publishers at Marvel, who seemed to have been, on the whole, more concerned with turning out interesting comics that people might actually want to read than multi-title crossovers, a bewildering array of limited series, alternate covers, foil, holographic or die-cut covers (or some combination thereof), merchandising and licensing fees. (You've heard of Howard the Duck? He's Gerber's baby, and was once so popular that he merited his own syndicated, dumbed-down newspaper cartoon strip.)
"Dubya's" administration has reminded me at various points of the arc that Steve Gerber wrote immediately after his Black Sceptre storyline in Daredevil: one involving a guest appearance of one of the most offbeat Marvel characters to be given his own title, the macabre Man-Thing. Before Marvel's "Ultimates" line, the Man-Thing was a hapless scientist named Ted Sallis who had developed either a super-soldier serum (in an attempt to duplicate the long-lost formula that turned sickly Steve Rogers into the über-Olympic athlete Captain America) or a serum that would turn people into "pollution-breathing monsters" so that Big Business didn't have to comply with pesky environmental laws and could keep on making money until the U.S. made Charles Dickens's London and Elizabeth Gaskell's Manchester look like veritable Edens by comparison: Marvel waffled between the two origins. At all events, Sallis was pursued by enemy agents, either of a hostile power (the U.S.S.R. would be the likely candidate) or of one of the many hi-tech paramilitary subversive groups which infested the Marvel Universe like crotch rot; desperate to keep his formula from their vile clutches, he injected himself with it in the hopes of gaining the ability to give them a richly deserved beat-down. He crashed his car somewhere in the Florida Everglades (a spot that would later be revealed as one of the Nexuses of All Realities), and, as all but the most naïve reader might expect, something went wrong, and Sallis was transmogrified into a mindless, boneless, ten foot tall (or thereabouts) mute muck monster who is attracted to human emotions: positive ones make him tag along like a faithful puppy; negative ones agitate him and make him violent. And, to recite the tag-line from Manny's own title, "Whosoever knows fear...BURNS at the touch of the Man-Thing!" (As an Andy Rooney look-alike noted in the first issue of the two issue limited series World's Worst Comics, "Funny: my mother always told me that I'd go blind if I touched my man-thing...")
The three-issue storyline in Daredevil Vol. 1, #113-115 involved a new (later revealed to be an old, at the start of Frank Miller's first stint as an artist on DD) baddie named Death Stalker and his hired stooge, long-time Hornhead foe the Gladiator, kidnapping the sister of Daredevil/Matt Murdock's college roommate and law partner, Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Candace, a strawberry blonde knock-out who unearthed proof of the U.S. government's funding of Ted Sallis's serum to enable humans to survive in a massively polluted environment during the course of her college journalism project: Death Stalker reasoned that many parties, governmental or otherwise, would pay a handsome fee to obtain Sallis's long-thought-lost formula; if he could persuade the idealistic young Candace Nelson to help him trace the missing Ted Sallis, he felt certain that he could extract said formula from him as well. Naturally the feds are also keenly interested in the whereabouts of Candy, if only so that she may be arrested and charged for violating national security; many of the cast of characters end up in the patch of the Everglades where Sallis was last seen (by enemy agents, no less; just who were those guys -- and gal -- working for anyway, hmm?), only to find the Man-Thing instead of Sallis (no one knows that Sallis is -- or, more properly speaking, was, since he can't change back -- the Man-Thing). The "pollution-breathing monster" formula is discovered in Sallis's cabin, but, thankfully, Daredevil manages to destroy it before Death Stalker can sell it to the highest bidder.
(Comic geek aside here: why did Frank Miller feel it necessary to turn the entire Nelson family into a bunch of nincompoops? Not only did he dumb down Foggy Nelson -- who, no matter how ridiculous he looked when he tried to convince Karen Page that he was Daredevil, was, while serving as the Marvel Universe's district attorney for New York City, seriously considered for membership on the executive committee of S.H.I.E.L.D. -- he turned a delightfully normal, whip-smart young woman into a bimbette even less memorable than, say, Brie Daniels, one of Tony Stark's [Iron Man] ill-advised paramours. Frank Miller doesn't seem to think that a woman can be strong unless she's barely clad in skin-tight leather and/or spandex, is a world-class martial artist-cum-gymnast-cum-acrobat, and/or is armed with an assortment of edged weaponry and/or automatic firearms.)
What prompted, you might ask, this lengthy excursion into the comic geek ghetto? Well, I'll tell you.
This did: the interview that WBUR-FM's Tom Ashbrook, host of the National Public Radio news/talk programme On Point, had during said programme's first hour yesterday (Friday, 3 February 2006) with Dr. James Hansen, NASA's foremost climate scientist and director of their Godard Institute for Space Studies. Andrew Revkin published an article in the New York Times on Sunday, 29 January, reporting that NASA's public affairs flak George Deutsch rejected NPR's request to interview Dr. Hansen on-air. As Ashbrook revealed near the start of this programme, said request was for the benefit of none other than On Point; Dr. Hansen had to make clear that he was speaking on behalf of himself and not on behalf of NASA or any other department or branch of the federal government.
Dr. Hansen believes that the only question about global warming now is whether the human race will be able to blunt its effects enough to prevent the rising mean temperature from turning This Island Earth into a different planet. The phrase "different planet" was conspicuously used a handful of times during the show; Juliet Eilperin wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday, 29 January that Dr. Hansen had confirmed the previous week that:
"...2005 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998. Earth's average temperature has risen nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 30 years...and another increase of about 4 degrees over the next century would 'imply changes that constitute practically a different planet.
"'It's not something you can adapt to,' Hansen said in an interview. 'We can't let it go on another 10 years like this. We've got to do something.'
"Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer, who also advises the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said one of the greatest dangers lies in the disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold about 20 percent of the fresh water on the planet. If either of the two sheets disintegrates, sea level could rise nearly 20 feet in the course of a couple of centuries, swamping the southern third of Florida and Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village.
"While both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets as a whole are gaining some mass in their cold interiors because of increasing snowfall, they are losing ice along their peripheries. That indicates that scientists may have underestimated the rate of disintegration they face in the future, Oppenheimer said. Greenland's current net ice loss is equivalent to an annual 0.008 inch sea level rise.
"The effects of the collapse of either ice sheet would be 'huge,' Oppenheimer said. 'Once you lost one of these ice sheets, there's really no putting it back for thousands of years, if ever.'"
And yet "the Ooze Brothers" -- "Dubya," Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense "Rummy," Secretary of State "Condi," former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and former New Jersey governor and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Christine Todd Whitman all ran, helped run, or had significant investments in oil companies -- uniformly disdain the very idea of global warming; "Dubya's" favorite tactic is to point to a rogues gallery of anti-global warming cranks who make Neal Adams's geological theories (brilliantly lampooned by John Byrne in Fantastic Four Vol. 1, #263-64 [the Feb. and Mar. 1984 issues]) look positively inspired. No surprises there: an admission that global warming is a real and imminent danger unless the human race goes balls-out on a crash course to drastically reduce its effects would perforce curtail the oil companies' profits, unless they were able to adapt to the need for alternate sources of energy.
What gave me a shiver of dread is the point so nicely raised by the last caller, a self-identified astronomer named Roanek (SP??) from Boston, who asked Dr. Hansen:
ROANEK (SP?): ...when you think of the science you do...[when] you think of the people who are some of the biggest supporters of this current administration, do you really think, in your honest opinion, that a socially conservative president, some of whose biggest supporters are social conservatives, don't believe that the universe is older than six thousand years, and reject even a lot of the scientific findings about evolution, Big Bang Theory...do you really think that you're gonna get the kind of support from this government, from this administration, that you really need?
TOM ASHBROOK: Roanek (SP?), it's a big question; Jim Hansen?
DR. JAMES HANSEN: Well, uhm, you know, there are some people whom you'll never have an influence on, but then there are sss -- the way a democracy works, there's a fff -- a fraction in the middle, and they're the ones that, uh, can, can make a difference. And I think that even within this administration that there are people who recognize that maybe our automobile industry would be healthier and better off if they, uh, made some fundamental changes.
Dr. Hansen concluded his non-response by saying that we shouldn't stop trying to change people's minds about the reality of global warming. D'accord. But I still think that the caller had a valid point: how, ultimately, can you live with a powerfully influential group of folks who are actuated not merely by near-sighted cupidity but by a chiliastic desire to hasten the decline and fall of Life As We Know It in anticipation of a supernaturally blissful Life Everlasting at the side of their deity?
Greed and selfishness would be easier to sway: I daresay that the vast majority of greedy and selfish folks want to keep on living in reasonably good health, thank you very much, even if they don't particularly care about the status of most of their fellow beings or those portions of the globe that they don't inhabit or visit. But people who want to die, who want everyone to die in order to hasten the coming of a divine Kingdom..? If you can't change their minds -- if you can't at least convince them to not to try to goose their God in the Ass to prompt Him to hurry the hell up with His millenarian Designs -- what then?
The answers are not comfortable ones; but, given this country's power and status in the world, they are no less pertinent than the many questions of "Whither Islam?" that are being voiced by anxious pundits around the world.
In the meantime, one can only wonder, half humorously and half nervously, if some of this administration's "good science" involves trying to discover a way to let Americans to stop worrying and learn to love the greenhouse effect. Perhaps the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu are more closely linked than one might at first suppose....