FOREWORD: this blog carries on from my old connection with comics, and I will start with an article on a remarkable but underrated period in the long history of Captain America, which I published long ago in a tiny fanzine of mine before I ever entered the Internet. I think it's a good article and I don't think it has aged that much. In the future I may discuss more recent issues - or not.
Mark Gruenwald's Captain America was never a best-selling title. But then Captain America is a book everybody knows and nobody reads, one of the last first-generation Marvel characters to get his ten-page feature in Tales of Suspense (nor did Lee ever seem to know what to do with the character) and his own title, which, in turn, has practically always been a poor seller.
Gruenwald, though, used to have some devoted followers, of which I was one. I think he was a better Cap writer than anyone since the seventies; not so big a claim as it sounds, as, after Kirby's removal, only two writers, Roger Stern (with John Byrne as an anything but silent partner) and J.M. de Matteis, made any impression on the book, and both were flawed. de Matteis made some fantastic errors of judgement. He gave the Cap/Red Skull conflict an irrelevant Catholic subtext (Mother Night and her evil nunnery) and made Rogers a second-generation Irish immigrant, as if Cap could ever be anything but WASP. Kirby made him not only WASP but of ancient New England descent - C.A.#200, 27-31. That "Madbomb" story may not have been to everyone's taste, but the WASP pedigree in it depended not on Cap's unreliable memory, but on the testimony of an independent character, the villain William Taurey. To reject it means to excise the Madbomb story from Marvel continuity, which is not only absurd (some post-Kirby stories depended on it) but against every Marvel continuity rule. de Matteis, whose name is Italian, did not respect the title's spirit, but imposed on it the personal hang-ups that Anglo-Saxon culture insists Catholics lads should suffer; alas, the rewarmed cliché soup of Catholic guilt did not make for very good stories either. (If you want the real thing, read Lee Kennedy.)
As for Roger Stern, his stories, while not uninteresting, were in the end either obvious (Cap being nominated for the Presidency and turning it down; how much more daring it would have been had he accepted) or gratuitous (Cap fighting Dragon Man, Machinesmith and Mr.Hyde, old and rather generic Marvel villains). Gruenwald also uses villains (and heroes) from other titles, but makes them a telling part of the Captain's image. He is at the centre of his world; it's simply natural that he should turn up in Cleveland, where he had never been, to beat Blacklash, whom he had never fought; Blacklash's gripe (#319) only makes this clearer. Stern might perhaps have reached a similar picture, but the eleven Stern & Byrne issues are too few for a consistent run. We are not free of the suspicion that Steve Rogers is just a coathanger to hang stories on.
The following letter, by one John Jackson Miller, describes Gruenwald's Cap very well. "His ability to act as a catalyst around others cannot be underestimated. Living in a world in which super-powered characters seem to be the norm, he commands such a presence he often seems to be the only one wearing a costume... after years of asking what it's like to be a legend, mr.Gruenwald is showing us what it's like to live in a world that has such a legend in it. It's sort of like trying to get started as a playwright in Shakespeare's London. No one can measure up. Not the Falcon. Not Nomad. Not Diamondback. Not John Walker. The pressure has got to be incredible..." (#381; Gruenwald's run on the book consistently featured one of Marvel's best lettercols, with lengthy and intelligent missives)
I have little to add. Time and again, Rogers' supremacy is quietly driven home. Paladin, a formidable fighter, is jumped by Cobra; his mind is elsewhere (on Cobra's female prisoners), Cobra seizes him in a death-grip, and the battle is lost almost as soon as started (#381). Equally in sight of Cobra's hostages, Cap is also jumped; but his guard is up, he reacts before the villain can get a death-grip, pounds him till Cobra has to resort to threatening Cap's hostage girlfriend Diamondback, and then suckers him into fleeing the room while he can free the girls. Cap was more involved with the hostages; one of whom was his girlfriend, than Paladin, who didn't know them at all. Yet he kept his mind clear and his eyes open.
The point is made a dozen ways. Both Englehart and Gruenwald made someone else (the fifties Captain America, the three replacements when Steve Rogers became Nomad, John Walker) take on uniform and shield and come to grief because they lacked Steve Rogers' distinctive qualities. Englehart disabled two of the pretenders, killed one (the boy Roscoe), and returned one (the fifties Captain) to a drugged sleep; Gruenwald, more sympathetic and humane, showed that John Walker was only unsuitable as long as he tried to be Captain America. The role didn't fit him, but when he took on another - the USAgent - he worked out, despite a lot of rough edges. (Later Gruenwald added irony: a new Super-Patriot tried to discredit the hero only to find that whatever he did while wearing a false uniform and shield redounded to Cap's glory.) When the professional villain Water Wizard discovers the bodies of fifteen slaughtered colleagues, it is to Cap he resorts, nor does the hero fail him (#318). The villain Jack o' Lantern, laying a trap for him, remarks that he "owes" him, to which Crossbones replies, "who doesn't?" (#409)
(Sometimes Cap's potency is pushed too far. On the AIM island episode (#s 411-414), the Captain survives the assault of literally hundreds of massed villains; although they are disarmed, many of them have inborn superpowers and it seems absurd he could have lasted more than a few minutes. But by this time, as we will see, the book was in terminal decline.)
Not that he is invincible; nor does he act as if he thought he was. Long used to working in teams, he has no qualms about taking whatever help he can. When about to be walled alive in a snake-pit (#361), he seizes Diamondback's bravely offered hand. He is not too proud to call in Thor when overmatched; in fact, that is the first thing he does (#384). At the same time, he is thoroughly aware of his capacities, and because of this awareness he risks what seem tremendous odds, taking on the Serpent Society single-handed more than once. And nearly every time, events prove him right.
Keeping up with him can be devastating: when a lovesick Diamondback tries to follow on one of his international jaunts, she has to parachute (which she hates), is painfully snarled up in a tree, nearly bursts her lungs running behind him, is poisoned with curare, stabbed, almost drowned, gets her shoulder dislocated in a brave and successful effort to save Cap from a snake pit, and finally is beaten unconscious and kidnapped by Crossbones (#s 357-362). Many of these things also happen to Cap, but he can cope with most of them (Crossbones wouldn't have discomposed him) and avoid those he can't.
With his mental toughness goes a natural sensitivity. When Diamondback offers him her hand to jump out of that snake pit, he knows he is too heavy for her, especially as she is wounded. But he also knows that he has only that chance to get out. She offered her hand of her own free will; better two people alive, one with a dislocated arm, than only one, with no dislocated arm. He jumps; his weight wrenches her shoulder; she holds on, screaming with pain; he climbs out; he puts her shoulder back into place, and she faints. Only at that point does he allow himself to feel for her pain and courage, bending protectively over her with an expression on his face that speaks volumes; until then, he was absolutely focussed on getting out.
This is a terrific scene, excellently drawn by Kieron Dwyer, one of the few decent Cap artists of recent years; but above all a brilliant example of how a capable writer can show as much about the characters, relationships and moral qualities of his protagonists in an "action" scene as in five pages of talking heads. Nothing of what I described is described verbally in the story: we are shown the events as they happen, and left to draw our own conclusions. The fact is that there is no contradiction between "action" and "characterization" with someone like Gruenwald at the wheel. This is the key to the kind of pleasure Cap fans found in his writing. None of the points I made are written out in long captions or cumulo-nimbus thought balloons; plot and action bring out the characters of the Captain and the people around him. Gruenwald knew how each of his characters would act in a given circumstance, and this gave him a lot of scope for dramatic invention.
Gruenwald's Captain is thoroughly individual. His qualities, though imposing, cannot be reduced to a set of clichés. It is not Captain America storming and winning through battle after battle that impresses the denizens of his world; in person, as soon as met, he is striking and impressive. He needs no more than to walk into a suburban living room to dominate it (#313, page 10).
But he isn't a sort of isolated, unchallenged monolith. He is often surrounded by devoted friends, attracted by his sensitivity, impressed by his authority, and inspired by his moral stature; he is the centre if not the founder of the Avengers, even taking on himself to form a new Avengers when the old team is temporarily broken up (#349), in the full confidence that he has the legal and moral right to do so. Soon after, four more-or-less costumed adventurers, the Falcon, D-Man, Nomad and Vagabond, became almost a personal superhero squad (although to call the plucky but inexperienced Vagabond a superheroine would be pushing it). This group broke up under the pressure of Government hostility, personality clashes (in which Steve Rogers played no part) and the supposed death of one member, D-Man, but its place was taken by the most important single supporting character in Gruenwald's Captain America: Rachel Leighton, or Diamondback.
Introduced to Captain America only two issues after Gruenwald took it over (#310), together with the new Serpent Society (an excellent concept, whose internecine conflicts and affairs have been worth dozens of issues of continuity), Diamondback was the only Serpent he invented ex novo, all the others coming from more or less obscure old stories (a game Gruenwald was fond of playing). This suggests he had plans for her. Her first appearance of any length (the hunt for Modok, #313) shows her to be fearless, efficient (a quality Gruenwald values as much as courage) and a team player, saving her partner Bushmaster's life; she plays a central part in Modok's destruction.
The same issue introduces her infatuation for Captain America. At first it seems purely physical - he's such a hunk! - but already in #315 there is a significant variation: Diamondback holds back from killing Cap (as she thinks - in fact, he has set up a trap) not because he is a "hunk", but because he is so "manly" - it would be such a waste! This is a shadowy but important semantic difference: a "hunk" is a big slab of beefcake, but "manly" implies strength of personality, forceful presence, impressiveness. It is not just the masked Steve Rogers' undoubted physical attraction that has stricken the young woman, but his tremendous character, a personality whose rare and arresting strength struck her even from a distance. She doesn't realize what is happening to her - one doubts she would have the words to express it - but she is half-way to falling in love.
Having made her stand out with only a few lines, Gruenwald does not allow his readers to forget Diamondback. Only four issues later, he brings her back (#319). A member of the Serpent Society is found murdered, and she is prominent in the hunt for his killer. The opening subtly contrasts her with the rest of the Society as individual against group: having been on a solo mission, it is Diamondback who needs to be told what happened; the very mention of a "solo mission", although we know that Serpents often go out in small teams or alone, singles her out, and, killing two birds with one stone, it also provides the necessary summary and set-up.
The next stop is an asylum, where Cap, investigating the same murders, finds her following up a clue he had just looked up (this once more impresses on us the efficiency of the Serpent Society in general and Diamondback in particular); caught climbing the walls, she coolly dives straight into his arms, trusting him to catch her (he does), and starts flirting outrageously - not neglecting, however, to brief him on her mission, which has nothing criminal about it, so they can compare notes. She tries hard, and rather childishly, to impress him: "I'm a great pilot. In fact I do everything great, in case you hadn't noticed". She may hope the obvious innuendo will embarass him, but reckons without Captain America's formidable powers of concentration: her aggressive suggestions have no effect - water off a duck's back. He is busy with the mission, and won't take the time to be outraged at her antics.
Still he is intrigued enough to ask her about herself, under the guise of a general inquiry, which of course is just what she wanted. She tells him of being born on the wrong side of the tracks, a high school dropout who learned early to con and pick pockets, sister of a juvenile petty criminal shot dead by the police. This is true as far as it goes, but we will find out that it leaves important facts unsaid, and lays a lot of stress on her unfortunate background, with an implied suggestion that none of it is really her fault. This is not likely to impress Captain America, who - as we are to find out - was born a few blocks away and came from a similar background (as revealed in #371, five years later, when Gruenwald awards them their first date.)
She concludes her apologia pro vita sua with an outright let's-go-to-bed; to which the Captain's answer is - obviously - that he doesn't take that sort of thing lightly. She angrily turns off the engine of the aircraft on which they are flying and declares that either they spend the night together, or they crash. This fit of pique loses her the game: not only does Cap coldly reply that he does not think she will throw her life away for a few moments of pleasure, but also that that little stunt had convinced him he could not trust her enough to work together.
She lands the plane; he leaves, and she, desperate to stay with him, wildly offers to betray the Serpent Society. "I only work with people I can trust", he repeats, and jogs off down a deserted country lane. In the time Diamondback takes to make up her mind to follow him, he is almost gone; she starts running after him - a shot echoes in the night, and she falls with rifle shot in her arm. Captain America captures the gunman, who turns out to be a farmer who thought he had bagged a Martian! When Cap turns to Diamondback, she tries to beg one last kiss, only to be told she has nothing worse than a flesh wound and is nowhere near death. Many readers will sympathize with her rejoinder: "You are impossible, you know that?".
Having made sure, then, that the girl with throwing diamonds, magenta hair and impulsive lusts has registered herself on our memory as an individual, Gruenwald brings the action to a natural and entirely credible impasse. The lady is neither sufficiently mature, nor clear enough about her own feelings, to be able to deal with Captain America; as for him, what is she to him, and why should he be more concerned abut her than about any other of the dozens costumed characters who swarm about him - more than one of whom, surely, wouldn't mind his company for the night either? Except for a cameo next issue, exit Diamondback; it is to be two years, and twenty-two more issues, before she re-enters Steve Rogers' life and ours.
It says something for the clarity and deliberation with which Mark Gruenwald approached the writing of Captain America that he was disposed to plan so long in advance, to patiently wait and keep his readers waiting until the development should come as part of the natural course of events. I have seen more than one writer rush into all the developments they want for a title at once, only to subside into repetition when this first heat of invention runs out; but Gruenwald, though he always intended to bring Rachel Leighton to Steve Rogers' arms, left her out of the strip for two years. Nor, indeed, did he write Steve's old girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal out until several issues had passed, and then only provisionally; she was to return regularly, and remain an important supporting character whose unexpected friendship with her supplanter Rachel produced some interesting situations.
Diamondback re-enters the strip only in #342, not of her own free will. The Serpent Society is under assault by a rebel faction led by the Viper, and Diamondback, like other professional villains before her, can think of no resort but Cap. As soon as she sees, him, however, the old flutter in the diaphragm comes back with a vengeance. Surrounded by his band of devoted friends, giving orders and being obeyed, the Captain towers over events like a giant, and his new black uniform, worn to signify his independence from interfering Washington bureaucrats (who turn out to be manipulated by his old enemy the Red Skull) only draw more attention to his confidence, skill, power and authority: things that depend on no mask. Herself no mean athlete, she admires his tremendous agility and strength (as she watches him negotiate an obstacle he had never seen before, "what great gymnastics", she thinks with more than a hint of double entendre, "we could perform together!"). Common understanding of the fighting trade, shared danger, and a common enemy, put her on surprisingly good terms with Cap's friends Nomad and Falcon; especially Nomad, whose shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later style appeals to the unreformed professional criminal she still is. She gets a frightening lesson when she and Nomad, overriding D-Man's doubts, fire heat-seeking missiles at the Viper's aircraft, only to find the Captain was on board.
Her resistance to the Viper defines her character, and has - at first - little to do with her attraction to Cap. The Viper is supported by many of the original Serpent Society and some new henchmen she herself brought in. The deciding factor was her ruthless and magnetic personality, to which Sidewinder, a balding costumed businessman whose only concern was keeping a steady ship, had no answer. The few who rejected her - Sidewinder himself, Diamondback, her friends Asp and Black Mamba, and the deformed Bushmaster - did so out of loyalty, or through an instinctive reaction to the Viper's savagery and the bootlicking abjection of her cohorts; either way, out of an instinctive moral rejection of what Viper could be perceived - even knowing nothing of her plans - to be and stand for.
Diamondback was the bravest and most effective of this party, while the Cobra, who had excellent reason to know what kind of monster the Viper was, was too cowed to resist her until it was too late. Perhaps unaware himself of what he meant to do, he was caught between the opposing forces, and the shot meant to kill the Viper was deflected by Nomad's disc and freed her instead, with terrible results. He finally stopped and turned her in; but the events say a lot about his cowardice, which was to have heavy consequences for Cap and Diamondback over forty issues later (again that long-term thinking of Gruenwald's is to the fore).
Washington is burning. Cap orders Diamondback to watch the wounded D-Man and two prisoners, an important but unglamorous job; she desperately wants to go fighting with him, and cannot cope with being left behind. Showing a growing understanding of what buttons to push with her, he intimates, "If you want to earn my trust, stay here". She, however, can hardly understand this as anything but a rejection. To an old partner like the Falcon or Nomad, a few hours less with their friend would be no dreadful loss; Cap could have trusted them to stand guard when needed. But to Diamondback his company is new and precious. She is being denied those few precious hours together, the first in many months, in which they, as fighting people, might well reach as much understanding as in any long conversation - communicating through the motion of their bodies, their plans, their reactions, their fighting habits. Irresponsibly, she all but asks the unfit D-Man to tell her that he can cope, suits up, and leaves him with the prisoners - only to run straight into the new Captain America (John Walker, the bureaucrats' replacement) and be beaten unconscious, which does her love no good and herself lots of harm.
But this, while in itself useless and damaging, is a part of what is, in the end, lovable about her: she is no good being left behind - she needs to be in the thick of it, side by side with the man she loves; and nobody can tell her what to do when it is love that drives her. Gruenwald's judgement in developping this relationship was, except for the last few years, brilliant. Diamondback had shown, 1) that her feelings for the man whose real ID she still didn't know had become serious, 2) that she still was not mature enough for him, and, 3) that beneath it all there was something else, the thing has made her the most memorable of all his women. She will not fit in - not in Sidewinder's plans, not in Cap's, not in anyone's.
Again she vanishes from the continuity, but this time for less; by #352 there were letters asking to see "more of" her - a sign that the writer had done his job - and the editor was able to truthfully promise she would be back by summer. In #s 357-362, she got what she wanted, a long and harrowing adventure with the man of her dreams. Wounded, poisoned, rushed around unmercifully, exposed to the most hideous danger, she "so conducts herself", as Churchill would have said, as to deserve Captain America's tight-lipped compliment, "we make a pretty good team". If you asked her, she'd probably tell you she was never happier in her life.
When she vanishes at the end of the story (Crossbones, who followed them and their enemies through the whole adventure unnoticed, kidnaps her), Cap leaves word at Avengers HQ to let him know if anything is heard; this might be normal concern for a mysteriously vanished person - or not. When he hears from her kidnapper, he rushes off in the middle of the night and puts himself through great danger to rescue her; run of the mill stuff, of course, but it is possible to feel he was a shade less than his usual alert self when he twice blundered into Crossbones' traps.
Diamondback completes her ennoblement in the eyes of Captain America and every reader by freeing herself against all odds, so that when Cap himself finally wiggles out of Crossbones' deadliest trap yet, she is more or less there waiting for him. When she asks him whether this can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, there cannot be a single reader who doesn't want him to answer in the positive; and when, in the next issue, Cap dismisses her as soon as they are back in New York, there can be very few who do not feel he was unduly harsh.
The writer gave him a very good reason to be short-tempered: his home on Avengers Island had sunk. Nevertheless Gruenwald and his artist - Kieron Dwyer, shortly to give way to the awful Ron Lim - made damned sure that we felt for Diamondback, striding away in tears, ragged, angry, abandoned, and shattered, as well as for the weary, homeless, and, after all, unmistakably upright Captain. (One of the great things about Gruenwald's writing is his understanding of the "reasons of others": the relatively honourable villainy of Sidewinder, the amoral but likeable attitudes of Black Mamba and Asp; even the understandable emotional turmoil of such a despicable person as the Cobra, even the complexity of the Red Skull.) Not much later, Gruenwald gives us, in two words, the exact state of Cap's feelings for Diamondback: he locates one of her Serpent Society allies, the Asp, and gives her a message for Diamondback (which the Asp, quite ignorant of her friend's feelings, takes for a trap), and goes away wondering where "the little troublemaker" is. "The little troublemaker": an exasperating individual, an individual who keeps forcing herself unasked on his consciousness, but who he is at some level quite fond of, and who at any rate he cannot erase from his mind. She is becoming a part of his life.
The development of the series reflects this. Diamondback returns more and more often. 32 issues intervened between her first serious encounter with Cap (#319) and her second (#342); 13 between that and the Bloodstone quest (#357); only 3 between her angry and silent farewell on New York pier (#365) and her dramatic return to Steve Rogers' life in the sewers of Manhattan (#369). Equally important, the time they spend together grow at the same rate as the intervals shrink: Diamondback sees the Captain for only a few panels in #313; she takes part in several pages of battle against him and the Porcupine in #315; her meeting with him forms the central part of #319, but is not central to the plot; in #s 342-344 they are in close contact for much of the action, three issues in a row, but not through most of the story; in #s 357-362 (six issues) they are hardly ever apart until Crossbones kidnaps her - which Gruenwald does not allow to drag for more than one issue; from #369 on she is a permanent fixture and a major plot element. Gruenwald underlines Cap's growing familiarity with her in many ways: by #369, he is calling her not "Diamondback" but "Diamond", and in #370 he answers a quip of hers with "No, silly", as if she was an old friend.
By this time, a clarification is more than on the cards. They have gone much too far together for him to dismiss her with a casual "see you around"; in #370, she has forced herself into a clash with no less an enemy than the Red Skull, striding wilfully into a situation that must have been for her like a legend taking flesh. Fighting the Red Skull alongside Captain America must be like playing It's all over now, baby blue with Bob Dylan on vocals. Quite rightly, having taken a share in his legend (and in one of his most dreadful secrets - that the real Red Skull is alive) she is in no mood to be left behind; and Cap is suddenly brought up, to his vast surprise, against that unmanageable wilfulness of hers, her refusal to fit into anyone else's plans. He half-heartedly argues, he tries to wiggle out; but he is no match for a woman in love. A date is made for him (#371).
A delightful touch is that, until they are actually about to go out on the town together, Steve Rogers and Rachel Leighton don't know each other's names. Even when Diamondback is actually arguing him into coming, kicking and screaming, on a date, neither of them actually thought of doing something so obvious as exchange names; and it is not till the fair-haired giant actually knocks at her door that evening, that he announces himself as "your date... uh... Steve". "Please, tonight I'm Rachel" says she; and this is their formal introduction.
This is part of the iron control that Gruenwald has on his characters; there can hardly be another mainstream writer whose characterizations are so subtly consistent and glitch-free. When in #370 Colonel John Jameson, left in an unlucky moment to play poker with Diamondback while Cap was called elsewhere, holds his and complains that "your friend here is a card-sharp!", how many readers remember that, in #319, Diamondback told Cap she had learned early to do con jobs? Some of the subtleties are amazing. In #343, Diamondback flirts with Nomad so far that he feels she "reeks of availability", but in #371 her friend Tanya (Black Mamba of the Serpent Society) remembers her as the girl who used to tell every single Society member who came on to her to take a hike. Is this contradictory? No. In #382, to teach Cap a lesson, Diamondback takes Paladin out on a date, though we know that she cares nothing for him; and it is Black Mamba herself who, reading the situation at a glance, gives us the key - "Oh, Rachel, you're such a tease!". No doubt, had Nomad tried to take the banter any further, he would have met with a response no less firm than all those male Serpents. And one wonders whether the cruel kiss that the Cobra steals from a dying Diamondback, poisoned by his order (#382) is not a typically cowardly revenge for similar treatment? In #320 he called her "the most delectable member of the team".
The relationship did not stop growing with that first date; they still had much to learn about each other. When the Serpent Society discovers who Diamondback's boyfriend is, they kidnap and try to kill her; saved by her friends Asp and Black Mamba, who are captured in her place, she runs to Cap to break the Society up and save them, and he, to her great anger, does not immediately promise immunity to them. She storms off and hires Paladin, leaving the hero to follow them alone and save the day. Then (here's the punchline) she is left wondering why Cap, having captured the whole Serpent Society, quietly lets Asp and Black Mamba fade into the background while the law carries the others off; "why did he make such a big deal about not guaranteeing their freedom last night, I wonder?" But the night before Cap had been talking about principle, without knowing the whole situation; and Diamondback does not yet understand him enough to know that men of principle are often ready to give a great deal of leeway in practice, once principle as such is recognized. He, in turn, had failed to reckon with her fiery nature and her passionate loyalty to those she loves - the very forces that had driven her to his arms. For both of them, it is no mean or strange feature that provokes the spat; it is the best side of both, just those that each loves in the other - his principled steadfastness, her passionate loyalty.
From here on, however, the series deteriorated - as though, having shown the difficulties two human beings have in understanding each other even in the things they love, Gruenwald could not deal with the relationship he had created. The reason for my title, A Necessary Rachel, is that Rachel was necessary to the book's quality; every time she was taken off the roster or mistreated, the quality plummeted.
This began with The Superia Stragem, and went on with occasional intervals until the end of Gruenwald's tenure; the last years, really, being so painful that I only occasionally read the book. Something like Man and Wolf is in my view an obvious case of filling in time, waiting for our magenta-haired beauty to solve her personal problems. (It has another significance, to which I will get in a minute; but as a story it clearly gets nowhere very slowly.) Unlike practically everything that had gone on before, it did not in any way advance or alter our perception of the characters; except for John Jameson leaving (and that was bound up with Rachel too) the whole thing might as well not have happened.
I think the series plummeted when Gruenwald lost his hold on Diamondback. After years of excellence, and despite having its best art team in years in Levins/Bulanadi, he made a rod for his own back by ruining Cap's woman, turning her first into a coward, then into a slave, and then into a killer. The greatest writer would have found this theme hard to handle; but, what's worse, I'm not sure the story was conceived rationally, as the ultimate moral dilemma, rather than arise from Gruenwald's own unresolved psychic problems. With The Superia Stratagem, a strange irrational wrong-headedness enters and poisons the book. The character of Superia is terrible. America's feminist movement is certainly no loveable object, but Superia bears the hallmark of irrational, unconquerable prejudice; she is one of the most lifeless villains in the whole Marvel menagerie, and I can't explain her unique hollowness other than as the result of pathological aversion.
In fact, this has really litle to do with feminism. The story is full of transsexual and transvestite imagery: Superia and Nightshade nearly turn Cap and the arch-chauvinist Paladin into women; then, as if in an attenuated fulfilment of that plan, the heroes must wear Asp and Black Mamba's costumes amidst the girls' gales of laughter and transvestite jokes; finally, the Captain has to put on the very figure of Superia. There is much here that suggests a psychological fear: not of castration but of the loss of identity, of the turning of male into female, of the drowning of maleness into a world of dangerously dominant women. Male identity is almost literally drowned: Nightshade uses a liquid medium like a glass womb to carry out her super-fast sex-change operation. And I am very mistaken if Cap's final out-bluffing of Superia does not convey a crowing message of male self-reassurance.
In this explosion of irrational fears, Diamondback suddenly ceases to have any positive force; her charming image is shattered and Gruenwald's iron control of the characters flies to pieces. It is on Superia's new Noah's Ark, a highly symbolic ship carrying the first-fruits of her new humanity to her garden of Eden where she is creating a new heaven and a new earth (she intends to use the sky itself to steal the future from the male sex) that Snapdragon almost murders her. A psychologist could read a lot in this: at the moment that this irrational fear of the armoured, organized, separatist, conquering Woman, bent on polluting the very sky, burst with no warning into the world of Captain America, the character of Rachel Leighton, tender yet tough, independent yet loving, young, bright, and brave, collapses first into irrational submissiveness and then into equally irrational viciousness. For a long time she exists either as a slave or as an obsessive murderer. Nothing we know of her justifies any of this: she's risked her life before and faced genuine horrors like the Viper and the Red Skull without flinching.
The second Crossbones kidnapping is my least favourite episode in the entire run, worthless in itself, and stretched and padded to a scandalous length - more than two years. To quote only one piece of rubbish: Rachel has the chance to crush her tormentor's head in with a chunk of concrete (#400) - and she does not, because Cap would not like it!! This is nonsense not once but twice over, because even if this consideration had any force to an abducted, raped, abused and starved woman, she could still make him helpless by breaking his legs (a curable injury). The degeneration of Diamondback from charming and capable partner to pathologically helpless victim of violence is as irrational as the hate and fear shown in Gruenwald's depiction of Superia.
Now apart from anything else the notion of the world's biggest square in love with a murderess is one that - as I said - requires writing talent of an exceptional order; more, it requires control. It requires the ability to make sense of an exceptionally painful and intricate tragedy, to find a pattern in it, a hint of a view of the world. But far from doing so, Gruenwald produced a situation to which no solution was possible. He even made Diamondback murder her enemy on AIM island, and as Bernie Rosenthal, Attorney-at-law, points out, this makes it impossible for the case to be settled in court. All development is blocked, and the only option is to write the most vital and central character of the strip out of it altogether.
The last few years show Gruenwald at an impasse, his usual lucid control gone, using obscure aspects of Marvel continuity not, as usual, to broaden the landscape of the series, but to disguise a lack of ideas. The Savage Land series is the worst, and there is no doubt in my mind that its lifelessness is a reflection of Gruenwald's embarrassment. In the end, having boxed himself in from all sides, he proceeded to use the oldest and most discredited of all ploys for attention: Cap D*I*E*S. And in the run-up to the supposed death, deprived of Diamondback, he is pushed to a ridiculous pitch of fighting obstinacy, becoming a one-dimensional fight-fight-fight character, deliberately placed against absurd odds - the Cobra and Mr.Hyde, together again for the first time (since the last). Dave Hoover's contemptible attempt at sub-Image drawings, that make Ron Lim look talented, do not help either; but in the early days, Gruenwald had survived Paul Neary pencils!
Why, then, does Diamondback so collapse in front of our eyes, just as Gruenwald's irrational fears are suddenly seizing hold of his imagination? Because, as Cap was increasingly defined by his relationship with her, so she was defined from the beginning by her relationship with him. They exist in each other's orbit; they are, in fact, a peculiarly satisfactory image of the archetypal couple, a man and a woman, a woman and a man. But, psychologically speaking, where the male image is feeble and endangered, the female part of the archetype also collapses. The cult-like male therapy groups that indulge in the kind of animal mysticism that inspired Man and Wolf are a typically American response to the crisis of male identity; their goal is to affirm it by recovering its most feral aspects. That Man and Wolf comes shortly after the crisis of The Superia Stratagem is significant - though it makes an awful story. "Fight for the right to roam free", indeed!
The notion that what makes artists great is their ability to be in touch with their subconscious is wrong, even granting that such a thing as the subconscious actually exists. As we see here, when unconscious forces take control of the thread of an artist's work, the result is not great art, but tosh. And the reason is that art only works when it holds together, not in terms of the artist's inner content, but in terms of the work of art's inner contents; it is to itself that the work of art must be true. Irrational elements coming from fault lines in the author's own psyche (like Gruenwald's enfeebled sense of identity) always interfere with the wholeness of the work, because they blind the artist to aspects of reality. I believe that those authors whose work shows a consistent perversity of badness, whose work goes wrong along consistent lines, whose work consistently does not hold together - I am thinking of Gerry Conway or Chris Claremont - are bad because of some unrealized fault line in their psychology. They seem unable to learn from experience (Gerry Conway's Father Dowling scripts were as bad, and in the same ways, as his Spider-Man scripts twenty years earlier); they cling to a way to do things that simply prevents them from producing acceptable work.
John Lee Hooker sang that "blues is the healer - it healed me, it can heal you too"; I would say that art as a whole is the healer, and it only works so far as it heals. Great art supplies a balanced experience, an experience that hangs together, that is like life - that is itself life - that tells you no lies. It only arises when the artist's inner contents can deal with the outside world, when they are reconciled with it. Or, to reverse the point, the sudden collapse of the female image just as the male image is under extreme threat makes excellent psychological sense, but a terrible story. It simply disturbs the integrity of a person we have come to know as Rachel Leighton, Diamondback, that should not be disturbed by whatever nerve-storm may be disturbing the author.
Of course we all are affected by the fears and tensions in our minds. But great authors can work their own griefs and fears into a strong artistic pattern. Above all, they have a basic respect for the reasons of others that never fails. A classic case is that of one of the great Carl Barks' greatest stories, Back to the Klondike. Written as he was going through a traumatic divorce, the bitter relationship between his hero Scrooge and female lead Glittering Goldie clearly reflects his own rage and grief. But the final effect of the story is one of sympathy for both characters, despite the harm they have done to each other, and a tender, almost impossible reconciliation. Art like this can heal us; it can make real for us the suffering and anger of the other person, of the one who hurt us. Now compare this with the picture of "the-other-who-can-hurt-us", Superia, in Captain America! Superia, like Goldie, is the sexual antagonist; but Goldie, first and last, good and bad, is a person - and, good and bad, she is loved. Superia is - nothing, and nothing can be felt for her. Gruenwald has not even tried to make sense of the things that frightened him; Barks has done nothing else. I said that one of the best aspects of Gruenwald'swriting was his understanding of the reasons of others; but here it fails - just as we are getting to the core of Cap's and Diamondback's personality, and to the most central of human relationships (why are most of the world's songs and poems about love?).
The result is that children and adults will be reading Back to the Klondike, and be the better for it, when The Superia Stratagem is forgotten; alas for talent, and for hard work, and for insight, that would not look closely enough into his own motives. It is not in talent, or hard work, or insight ("creativity" if you will) that Gruenwald is inferior to Barks, or Kirby, or any other real great; but in the kind of clarity that comes from moral courage. That, not anything innate, is the difference between talent and genius.
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