PicoBlog

Sticking here with comics still for this column for now. I just happened to re-read a number of appearances of these DC Comics characters over the past week, so they were on my mind a bit. I think in some ways they’re a great example of how the long-running serial nature of comics allows individual writers and artists to do great work in service to a failed concept. To some extent, comic publishers just lack the focus and staying power required to build the potential of secondary characters that an individual creator introduces on their behalf. Almost every successful super-hero character is in this sense an accident, an accretion of creative mass that gets large enough to have a gravitational pull even in lean times. Wonder Woman, for example, just got to the point where she was conceptually necessary for DC Comics even though she’s only been a sporadically successful character in her own title.

The Omega Men were created by Marv Wolfman, who was a durable writer in a kind of neo-Silver Age mode: corny, sentimental, simplistic, teenage-boyish, but generally readable and with a good sense of what made characters appealing. Perhaps most famously, he and George Perez saw what Chris Claremont was doing with the X-Men in the late 1970s and cannily proposed that DC relaunch the Teen Titans with something of the same soap-operatic feel, which met with great success.

Around the same time, Wolfman argued that DC’s world-building had generally suffered compared to Marvel’s because of a lack of consistency within its universe. (He kept at this point all the way into Crisis on Infinite Earths, whose central raison d’etre was to streamline DC’s supposedly confusing continuity in favor of a more integrative and centrally planned ‘Marvel-style’ continuity, which proved to an amusingly unreachable goal.) One of Wolfman’s major points at the time was that DC did not have consistent aliens despite having numerous characters who travelled in space, that each story set on an alien world featured an ad hoc species or setting, with a handful of exceptions (Adam Strange’s Rann, Hawkman’s Thanagar, the Guardians of the Universe on Oa). Even alien villains like Kanjar Ro, Despero, Hyathis and Mongul were effectively one-offs with no people or homeworld. He pointed to Marvel’s Skrulls and Kree as examples of what he had in mind.

So Wolfman introduced a set of characters called the Omega Men, who appeared in Green Lantern and then in a Superman storyline, who were part of the backstory of the New Teen Titan character Starfire. The Omega Men came from Vega, as did several alien species who were their adversaries: the Branx, who were brutal warriors; the Gordanians, a reptilian group of slave traders; and the aliens of the Citadel, who were portrayed largely as monosyllabic idiots but who also maintained a sophisticated military infrastructure that kept much of Vega under their rule. In addition, Wolfman introduced the Psions, a race of cruel scientists who were not in Vega but who were heavily involved in its affairs.

Part of the reason the entire project never really worked is that Wolfman didn’t really nail down Vega itself. He did introduce three other consistent elements: the Okarrans, who were weapons-masters who trained many of the warriors of various Vegan species; the Tamaraneans, who were Starfire’s people, and the goddess X’Hal, worshipped by most of the species of Vega. But the issue was Vega itself: it was variously described as a single solar system with 23 worlds, as a region of space with multiple solar systems, and occasionally as a galaxy. Wolfman (like a lot of comics writers) didn’t have a very good grasp of the distinction between these concepts (hey, this is the guy who had a spaceship three times the size of Saturn entering into Earth orbit in the first issue of Nova, without anyone noticing or that having any effect, and only a few issues later he had the titular character racing through the ship’s corridors in a battle with his enemies. I think a ship three times the size of Saturn would have a lot of corridors). The problem with Vega was that you never got any sense of finite scope to it as a distinctive story-telling platform. The rest of the Omega Men didn’t seem to come from a planet with a distinctive species or culture except for the human-looking Kalista and Primus, who came from Euphorix, an aristocratic monarchy that was protected by a forcefield. New aliens who were from Vega appeared all the time and were then never seen again: it was the same issue that had motivated Wolfman to make the characters in the first place.

Eventually, DC gave the Omega Men their own comic, written by Keith Giffen and Roger Slifer. I’ve written before about my dislike of Giffen’s writing (as opposed to his early style of art, which I quite liked) but Giffen and Slifer at least moved quickly to try and establish a distinctive tone for these characters and their setting compared to how Wolfman had handled them. For one, they did try to detail some new specific planets in Vega and their cultures, most memorably the Changralyns, the homeworld of the Omega Man known as Broot. (Surprise: he’s huge, strong and aggressive.) The Changralyns, it turns out, are rigid pacifists who are willing to surrender their children as slaves to the Gordanians in order to avoid violence; Broot turns out to be a despised heretic. For another, they dramatically ramped up the violent mood of the series and took the unexpected step of having a conflict over leadership culminate in the more cautious and peaceful Primus being nearly killed and replace by his aggressive rival Tigorr. (Imagine if in those early Claremont issues Wolverine had actually nearly killed Cyclops and taken over as the leader of the X-Men.) They similarly disposed quickly of a blatantly treacherous character named Demonia—the Omega Men were a group of rebels involved in a military struggle, so the writers plainly figured they wouldn’t put up with that kind of thing. Giffen and Slifer also introduced a bounty hunter named Lobo, who ultimately became a much more successful DC character than either the Omega Men or anything else associated with Vega, though he’s not much like his later appearances in this early manifestation.

Slifer eventually took over sole writing duties and set out to continue the contrarian mood the first six issues established. I really did appreciate what he was trying to do, which was to deepen and complicate Vega as a place within the wider DC universe and to give each of the characters some richer background. Unfortunately from my perspective, he did it in a way that I found really off-putting back then and today I can barely stand to re-read. He took Wolfman’s X’Hal, the goddess of Vega, who had originally been a fierce warrior who resisted the Psions who was then killed by them and became an unstable goddess when she was resurrected by a Psion experiment, and changed her origin. Now she was an innocent from a purely benign species who was abducted by the Psions, who then put her into confinement with a Branx warrior with the intention of having her serially raped to test whether benevolence or violence would prove stronger. It’s a really awful story that ends up in almost the same place as Wolfman’s (she is killed after having two children, one evil and one good, is resurrected and becomes a mentally unstable goddess).

Slifer wrote about another year’s worth of issues and then left comics to work in animation. Later writers steered clear of retelling the story but basically accepted the revision. Slifer tried to quickly end the war between the Citadel and the Omega Men but it was quickly re-established (with the Citadel peculiarly under the command of a human character named Harry Hokum). The Omega Men continued in their own title for quite a while, with some really interesting issues later on being written by Todd Klein, including a substantial attempt to re-situate the characters on a single planet in part to avoid the mess that Vega had become as a location (not to mention the general mess of DC continuity). There was some good character development, but overall, they just didn’t stick, and Klein’s new set-up was never fleshed out. I enjoy re-reading Klein’s issues when I come across them in my boxes.

From that point on, the Omega Men made occasional appearances in “space-oriented” stories, including a good Adam Strange series written by Andy Diggle in the early 2000s. They generally were cut loose from Vega and were often reduced to a small remnant set of characters, mostly as “flavor elements” in stories. I have no idea what their reintroduction in DC’s New 52 relaunch looked like—I stopped following DC at that point for the most part.

But I have read Tom King’s recent 2015 revised version of the characters, which is very…Tom King. It’s very characteristic of King’s take on DC’s properties, which generally consists of two simultaneous moves: 1) psychological realism, particularly in thinking about the consequences of violence, combat and trauma for mental health and 2) situational realism, e.g., thinking more deeply about the implications and history of a particular setting or set of characters. He often tries to find a twist that will revitalize characters in a manner a bit like Alan Moore’s work for DC, but usually his take is less metafictional and also not infrequently King complicatedly actually makes the characters less available than before once he’s done.

None of King’s revisionary works are exactly what I’d call fun, but they’re thought-provoking. For example, his recent take on Adam Strange basically proceeds from the imperialism and racism embedded inside of Strange’s clear inspiration, which is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars. I generally really appreciate what King does, but his take on Omega Men is only intellectually interesting—the situation is so steeped in a kind of punishing realism that it raises questions about whether this is a useful thing to do with characters who started as a bunch of colorful comic-book cliches. In King’s revision, the Omega Men are once again a cell of resistance fighters fighting an oppressive power, but the conflict is real-world awful and the Omega Men live in the same space of moral ambiguity as all insurgents do. When they get called terrorists, it’s at least arguably accurate. It’s also more plodding than some of King’s other work. Certainly it doesn’t leave the characters in a usable situation, though I doubt anyone was particularly chomping at the bit to do anything else with them.

It’s strange to re-read something as creatively fragmented and ultimately kind of wasted as the Omega Men both in their own title and across many other comics, but it’s helpful too: the contingency of serial fiction, including comics, comes through loud and clear, the zigs and zags that successive writers and artists take in an effort to keep a particular property afloat and viable. I suppose I kept track of the characters because it always felt to me as if the might be one zig or zag away from really taking off.

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