Friday Night Fights - A Guy can't catch a break

Guy Gardner, the "one true Green Lantern," makes the mistake of coming between an Element Man and his cub, and earns himself a 24-carat electroplated beatdown.
(from Justice League Europe #11, February 1990; by Giffen, Loebs, and Sears)
I have mixed feelings about the story arc in which this sequence appeared, as I do about most attempts to integrate Metamorpho and his supporting cast into the DC Universe proper. The original 60's stories bordered on outright parodies of the superhero genre, and few writers apart from creator Bob Haney have been able to capture the necessarily zany tone in regard to the character. The JLE two-parter, while enjoyable on a certain level, was positively grim, and featured creepy relationship issues, a tragically mutated child, and arms melting off.

It does prove that:

1. The Giffen Era Justice League was not a period of unbroken levity, as some fans misremember it as being.

2. The "dark" streak in DC's superheroic fare is not a new phenomenon that sprung fully formed from the collective mind of its current roster of creators.

There's a Year One miniseries slated for Metamorpho in the near future, but neither the creators involved nor the advance solicit ad copy for the series (which screams "unnecessary revision with nods to contemporary trends") fill me with confidence as to its potential quality.

(Bahlactus knows all, sees all.)

it's a gas to just imagine....

THE ISSUE

The issue of National Geographic sits moldering on a dusty pile of its brethren in the far corner of a Bay Area used book store. The magazine’s cover is partially obscured by a decades old coating of dust and rodent droppings, yet there’s something about it that beckons you to pick it up. The desiccated binding paste crackles as you flip through the pages. Images of a world that was flash by your eyes, until they settle on a single image from a feature on the petrified caveman found in Java.

It’s of a man in his mid-thirties, the rugged sort of adventurer-type long been supplanted as the architect of young boys’ dreams by the New Frontier stardust sprinkled about by John Glenn and NASA. Dressed in jodhpurs and a worn leather jacket, and radiating a casual confidence that could be mistaken for arrogance, the man bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Burt Lancaster. A pretty young blonde has her arms around his shoulders, and the juxtaposition between his rugged masculinity and her movie star beauty could not be more striking.

Something about the image feels familiar. I should know these people, you think, and check out the accompanying caption in an effort to make sense of the feeling. It reads:

(left) Adventurer Rex Mason and Stagg Industries heiress, Sapphire Stagg, at the expedition’s base camp.

The threads connecting this story of personal metamorphosis stretch not only from the Sumatran jungles to a chamber housing a radioactive meteorite in a lost Egyptian pyramid, but further back, to medieval alchemists and the writings of Franz Kafka in 1920’s Prague. It is a story of miraculous happenings and personal tragedy played out against the backdrop of disposable entertainment.

IT'S 1962

It’s 1962, and a brilliant, but disturbed young cyberneticist has embarked on a radical new voyage. Taking inspiration from both Asimov and Mendeleev, William Magnus finds a means of creating robotic avatars of various metallic elements. It is a quantum leap, yet it falls short of a revolutionary paradigm. Compartmentalized and hyper-specialized, limited to artificial beings, Magnus’s discovery must stop before the gates of a transformed world.

THREE YEARS LATER

Three years later, a strange being shapes his arm into a cobalt hammer. (Cobalt being derived from the German kobold, meaning “goblin,” referring to its toxic effects on miners.) His hairless face is corpse-white, echoing the effigies burned by Moravian heretics during medieval Nachthexen ceremonies. The rest of his body is quartered into gaudily colored, oddly textured sections, and flows and shifts with amazing rapidity. The Element Man has arrived, and the threshold forever denied to Magnus and his androids has been crossed decisively.

A simple utterance passes from his lips, and the entire world seems to pause for a moment, perhaps sensing that a strange new chapter in the eternal struggle between the individual and society has begun. “Holy blue Hannah!” says Metamorpho the Element Man, but the voice is that of Rex Mason.

Metamorpho Theme Song (from a Power Records 7”) – This track has made the rounds of several music and comics blogs already. If you happened to miss it then, here’s your chance to enjoy it in all its bizarre glory.

The Movin’ Morfomen – What’s Happened to Me? (from Flashbacks, 1997) – It’s very rare that I come across a track where both the band’s name and the song’s name match the chosen theme as perfectly as does in this bit of 60’s garage rock out of New Mexico. Ah, sweet synergy.

David Bowie – Changes (from Hunky Dory, 1971) – Part of my quixotic effort to erase this song’s association with a diaper commercial.

UK Decay – Battle of the Elements (from For Madmen Only, 1981) – Rex doesn’t strike me as the gothy type. I picture him as the sort of guy who’d hang out at the Playboy Mansion and swap stories with George Kennedy over shots of fine Kentucky bourbon. His one-time partner, Element Girl, did show up in an issue of Sandman, though, so I guess this track is tangentially fitting.

If you prefer to keep your bizarre 1960's DC comics reading separate from your social/musical history, here's where you can buy the two books that went into making this post:

Showcase Presents: Metamorpho, Vol. 1

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century

I give both my highest recommendation.

(Today's post inspired by this, this, and this.)