Jim Starlin's 1975 Warlock series

I thought I would make my recent twitter posts on Warlock into a proper post.

Mitch -- a commenter, guest-blogger, and blog-reader turned real life New York City friend -- lent me 13 issues of Jim Starlin's Warlock run: Strange Tales (Featuring Warlock) 178-181, Warlock (basically the new name of Strange Tales) 9-15, Avengers Annual 7, and Marvel Two-in-One Presents Thing and Spiderman Annual 2. It has been an eye opening read -- as you may have noticed from my twitter comments about it.

For one thing, we are deep in Grant Morrison territory. I hardly keep up with all of Grant Morrison's many interviews or critical coverage, but I feel like the Warlock influence kind of fell off the radar a bit. One amazing thing about the comic book industry is that powerful creators have an amazing ability to control how we see what they are influenced by because so much is out of print and there seems to be some unspoken rules about how DC and Marvel behave toward each other. DC Comics will put out Batman: The Black Casebook which will give readers a chance to see all those Batman stories referenced in his Batman run, or they will put out Kirby's New Gods Omnibi right before Final Crisis, but I wonder what happens to those influences that are repressed for whatever psychological or financial reasons; I wish Marvel could have called me to write an intro to a collection of Starlin's Warlock when the Invisibles was coming out so I could have pointed out all the parallels. Would that have made them money, cashing in on Morrison's fame, or been promoting a DC book at Marvel? I read New Gods to get a sense of where Morrison was coming from on books like Final Crisis, but -- while I enjoyed the Kirby in its own right -- Warlock seemed to strike more to the heart of what makes Morrison tick, in part because of the way it filters the New Gods.

Starlin's Thanos is Darkseid -- Thanos actually refers to himself as "THE DARK SIDE", and Warlock accuses a cosmic being of being a force of "anti-life" as opposed to the life Warlock is fighting for. As often as possible Warlock visually and tonally invokes the Silver Surfer -- floating the space, a poor man's Space Hamlet, dealing with his own sense of self doubt and the meaninglessness of existence, but it is the New Gods that it really wants to revise, as if to reclaim Kirby back at Marvel. 

On my Facebook feed Joe Johnson Turner points out that

By the time Morrison's JLA run, Darkseid's appearance has become far more Starlin-esque than Kirby-esque. In fact, the more that I think of it, Darkseid could not become so integral to the DC Universe until filtered through Thanos. Just as one cannot read Machen's "Great God Pan" or "Novel of the Black Seal" without the filter of Lovecraft, we cannot approach Darkseid except through the eyes of Starlin.

I will be honest here and say that while I was aware of Thanos, I have not actually read much with him in it (though I will order Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet stuff soon). I DID notice at several points in Kirby's New Gods his Darkseid felt inauthentic to me, introduced to the character via Morrison and JLA cartoons. Kirby's Darkseid laughs, which does not seems quite right, and at one point is shown wearing a disguise, which seems beneath his majesty. There is also an origin story showing him rising to power from a whelp, which just goes against Morrisons very persuasive "DARKESIED IS" rhetoric. Darkseid is better I think as a force of nature rather than a guy with a story I think. I am very curious to track the progression Turner describes.

Kirby's machinery, exuberance, and structures run all through Morrison -- and specific characters, like the Lump (which Morrison uses in his Batman run) -- set the stage for say, The Shining Knight vs Guilt or something equally internal. But it feels to me like Morrison is getting a lot of his content from Warlock. "I'm here to commit COSMIC SUICIDE!" says Warlock: just the kind of gorgeous sci-fi nonsense Morrison loves so much, as for example, he describes a creature are rising from "beneath the universe" in his JLA run. It is the little twists on old phrases, something weird added that makes it seem more impressive but does not really make any sense when you stop and think about it, but there is the fun.

Characters like Warlock's "In-Betweener! His realm, that space between fact and fantasy!" -- who is on his way toward Warlock because he has been bathed in a specific radiation which calls the InBetweener by his enemy -- who will drive Warlock to being evil by submerging him in the forces of Order and Chaos, such inclusive forces as I am made to think that this is all a fancy way of saying Warlock will become evil by going though LIFE, like you do, just sort of sped up. This character has a lot on common with, say, the Archon's in the Invisibles -- Morrison, you will notice is obsessed with the "in-between" spaces of anything, cracks in the cosmic structure or whatever, things neither here nor there. Starlin's In-Betweener -- a checkerboard of black and white -- even looks like the Archon spaces, always only black and white. This he did not get from Kirby who carves up the cosmic world into the stark binaries of New Genesis and Apocalypse: characters may be exchanged between those worlds, as Scott Free and Orion are, but the structure remains the same. Kirby explored ambiguity on the human level, in say, The Glory Boat, but Morrison takes that through Starlin to make his cosmic spaces deeply ambiguous and weird. Kirby wanted to do the comic book thing and raise human conflict to the cosmic scale. Morrison does the same, but refuses to keep them so seperate: the cosmic stories keep threating to become literal expansions of his characters very human lives (The Phoenix burns away 150 years of rotten but amazing future so her widowed husband can get laid again). Warlock literalizes the "villain is a reflection of the hero thing" in a huge way, as Warlock's bad guy, the Magus is literally his evil future self. The whole book thus becomes a psychomachia Carl Jung would have a field day with -- Warlock must confront his evil self, but they cant kill each other because the destruction of one is the destruction of both. One of the recurring patterns in the art is to have Warlock's face split down the middle and then, nearby, sometimes right next to it, Magus's face split showing the other half. 

(This image is not from Warlock but is from a Starlin comic and is the kind of thing I am thinking of)

Magus tries to get Warlock to follow the path that will create the Magus, and ultimately he ends up absorbing a good deal of the Magus and confronting another version of himself, in the stunning The Strange Death of Adam Warlock, a book that I loved reading and am having a hard time summarizing now. 

It made me feel the way I did as a kid watching Clark Kent and Superman fighting in Superman 3: I knew it was a big deal, didn't exactly get it, and LOVED it. Warlock also has a soul gem -- a kind of evil vampire force he is bonded to -- that sucks the life out of people who then sort of live inside Warlock. In other words -- a mechanism for making any external conflict INTO an internal one. He eventually goes into HIS OWN SOUL GEM where he is reborn.

Or, as in the end of the Invisibles, characters themselves find out about the metaphor. Archons? No, that was all a ruse -- it is really a story about saving people from the barriers the put on themselves, as embodied by Archons. Warlock does this kind of meta-thing too. The pit of despair (run by an evil clown) is called "The Land of the Way it Is" which is the kind of abstract made concrete Morrison loves, but, as Mitch pointed out, the brainwashing space Warlock is in is supposed to recall the Marvel bullpen, as cued by the head clown using the phrase "true believer." It should be a more scary place but Warlock's mind is so powerful he is refiguring his tormenters as clowns. One of Morrison's great contributions to comics is to make semi-serious sci-fi stuff out of editors retooling universes as characters in the comics. It used to be funny to do a meta-thing with Spiderman bumping into Marvel comics or whatever, but Morrison gives us the Terrible Time Tailor in Seven Soldiers, among many others, men who "weave the tapestry of the universe" or whatever, forces of terror, regulating continuity and destroying joyful silliness like Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew, who struggle to get back to visibility. Morrison's rhetoric is from Warlock and Kirby "The way it is" is fused with Anti-life in Morrison to be combatted by Morrison's principle of Imagination (fused with Kirby's Free Will).

A few odds and ends worth rounding up.

Warlock 181 credits read "Len Wein: Editing. Al Milgrom: Inking. Tom Orzechowski: Lettering. Jim Starlin: Insanity."

Very subtle, but one panel of Warlock has the panel itself breaking apart like Quitely did in All Star Superman.

Matt Fraction on his blog years ago pointed out that a key image in Casanova 4 came from Strange Tales 178 [EDIT] -- this parallel was unintended: Fraction discovered it after the fact.

In conclusion, if you like Morrison and Kirby, you will love Warlock. 

(I do not any critic has improved on the conclusions of the Reading Rainbow Reviews)