Cloak & Dagger (season 2)
Bill Mantlo, Ed Hannigan, [Chris Claremont, Terry Kavanaugh,] and Joe
Pokaski, 2019
Batman was easy to adapt into a TV series, and later into multiple sets of movies, because he has so many iconic villains: thanks to the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, the Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, the Scarecrow, R’as al Ghul, Bane, etc., etc., creators could keep churning out content without risk of hitting bottom. Spider-Man’s another example: just flip through the beginning of his series and you see how Stan Lee rolls out the Chameleon, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus, the Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, Mysterio, the Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter—and that’s only reading up through issue #15! But that’s rare. Paul O’Brien recently started up a series about Daredevil villains to “find out what the hell he’s been doing all these years when he wasn’t fighting the Hand or the Kingpin”. And yeah—the natural response to that might be to object, what about Bullseye, Typhoid Mary, Elektra… but Bullseye and Typhoid Mary work for the Kingpin, and Elektra was trained by the Hand. Leave those two orbits and you’re left with the likes of Stilt-Man and the Owl. Still, the core villains plus the Punisher were enough to get a Daredevil series through three seasons (with a little left over to lend out to Iron Fist). But Cloak and Dagger don’t really have any core villains. They’ve had their own series a time or six, but they started off as Spider-Man guest stars and that role sort of seems baked into the characters. They’ll show up to help out Power Pack or the Runaways, but on their own time, they’re just fighting generic drug dealers and child traffickers, not name villains. Terry Austin tried to give them an arch-nemesis in Mister Jip, but he appeared in a grand total of one storyline and never returned. And, like… surely the point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is to bring the highlights of over half a century of Marvel comics to the screen. On the TV side, I’d expect Daredevil’s “Born Again” story arc, or the Marvel Knights Inhumans, or Jessica Jones vs. the Purple Man. I would not expect Cloak and Dagger vs. Mister Jip. That’s way too obscure, right?
Apparently the Cloak & Dagger team thought it was insufficiently obscure, because for season two’s Big Bad, they turn not to Mister Jip but to… well, let me set the table a bit. So Cloak and Dagger were created by Bill Mantlo, who wrote their first two series—but when it came to establishing the characters, just as important as the scripts was the distinctive look of their stories, and every member of the team that created that look was crucial: penciler Rick Leonardi, inker Terry Austin, colorist Glynis Oliver, and even letterer Ken Bruzenak. So when Mantlo finally stopped writing the duo to focus on his career as a lawyer, it made sense that the reins would be handed to Austin, a member of that team. It also made sense that when Austin departed after three years, the editor would hire writer Steve Gerber to take over; though Gerber had no previous connection to the characters, he was known for working in offbeat corners of the Marvel Universe (e.g., he is probably most famous for creating Howard the Duck). And when Gerber left after writing two issues and plotting a third, it even made sense that the series would be handed to Terry Kavanagh, an editor with little writing experience—I gather that the company just needed someone to bang out the final few issues that had already been solicited, and this guy was already in the building. What makes less sense is that this rando would be permitted to use the final issue of the series to rewrite Cloak and Dagger’s origin. Kavanagh—who would go on to be the lead architect of a couple of the most disastrous storylines in Marvel history, the “Clone Saga” and “The Crossing”—posits that the origin established by Mantlo was actually the work of an old Man-Thing villain, a demonic “Fear Lord” with the unfortunate name of “D’Spayre”. Without his machinations, D’Spayre chortles, Ty and Tandy’s natural mutant abilities would have manifested like this:
The TV series spares us the ludicrous Ty-as-Dagger costume, but yeah, our Big Bad for season two is D’Spayre. He’s been reimagined as a jazz musician who cures his crippling headaches by draining the hope from people—specifically, from the troubled women in his support group who then become prostitutes working in his motel. He’s also tied into all the voodoo stuff that I thought was a mistake to introduce in the first season. Meanwhile, this season also introduces the MCU version of Cloak and Dagger’s chief supporting character, Brigid O’Reilly’s alter ego Mayhem. In the comics, O’Reilly was an honest cop killed by her corrupt fellow officers, then reanimated as a sort of green wraith who flies around in a cloud of poisonous gas that exudes from her pores. On the TV show, she’s just a standard-issue Hyde to O’Reilly’s Jekyll. Maybe the gas cloud was a bit beyond the effects budget of a TV show made for something called the Freeform network. But I guess that brings me to the main thing I wanted to say about this season. Up above I spent a lot of pixels doing setup for a simple remark: “Ha ha, Cloak and Dagger don’t have any core villains so the show went with frickin’ D’Spayre from that infamous Terry Kavanagh story”. But as I said above, even more than most superheroes, Cloak and Dagger are about their visuals more than their plots. In the first season, they were only just beginning to get a handle on their powers. They had a long way to go until they could match the illustrations I posted in my first article, with Dagger leaping out of Cloak’s darkness firing spears of light. Season two shows them getting closer to their power set from the comics—Cloak able to teleport others as well as himself, Dagger able to create great flashes of light in addition to the knives—but they don’t Do The Thing until it’s time to take out the Big Bad. That is what this whole series was building up to, and:
…yeah, you know what? My inner eleven-year-old will take it!
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (season 6)
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, [Brian Bendis,] Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon,
and Joss Whedon, 2019
Most of these MCU articles are about the way the creators adapted their source material for the screen, because I found that sort of thing interesting even before I spent the better part of a decade doing it for a living. But at this point, despite the title, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not really an adaptation of the S.H.I.E.L.D. from the comics. I said that season five made me think of it as a Secret Warriors series, with Daisy Johnson and Yo-Yo Rodriguez from that team as the superpowered members of this one, but those characters are so far removed from their comics counterparts that at this point this show is pretty much its own thing. And as I suggested above, that strikes me as kind of weird. Like, sure, hooray for originality, but why use the S.H.I.E.L.D. name if you’re going to write your own stuff? Why not take credit for your original material? Is it really just that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. can get made and Agents of the Whedonverse can’t?
Anyway, this was one of the weaker seasons. S.H.I.E.L.D., once a global intelligence and security organization under whose auspices the Avengers operated, now consists of Daisy, Yo-Yo, a couple of fighters, a couple of scientists, and about a dozen redshirts. And while I just typed “redshirts” as a generic term for “throwaway character put into the story so that there can be casualties without eliminating any of the major characters”, the term derives from Star Trek, and this season did have a Trek feel to it. Lots of time spent in windowless rooms that we are told are compartments of a spaceship or indoor locales on distant planets. And again, fair enough, but if you want to do Star Trek, I’m not sure a S.H.I.E.L.D. series is the most fitting venue. It was hard for me to shake the feeling that, if you were to ask the writers why these storylines are on a S.H.I.E.L.D. show, the answer would be “because this is the show we happened to get hired to write”. If they were still doing Buffy the Vampire Slayer then it would’ve been Buffy in space. And in fact there are a lot of echoes of Buffy here. The baddies are not Marvel characters but extradimensional entities with the names of Incan and Mayan gods, reminiscent of Glory, the Big Bad from Buffy’s fifth season. One of the supporting characters introduced in this season of S.H.I.E.L.D. is very much a store-brand Drusilla. And they wrap up by wheeling out an Agent Phil Buffy-bot—after thirteen episodes of an Agent Phil duplicate from space. And—
—yeah, I couldn’t help but be annoyed at the way major plot elements seemed to rely on factors from outside the world of the narrative. This has happened before: the bad guy from seasons one and two finally gets killed in season three… only for his body to be possessed by another evil entity, allowing the same actor to be the bad guy of season three even though he’s supposedly portraying a different intelligence in that form. Now we see the same thing with Agent Phil. Oh no! Agent Phil died! And we can’t really bring him back, because season one was to a great extent about how Agent Phil was resurrected after the first Avengers movie! So… here’s a new character who happens to look exactly like Agent Phil, sending the other characters into a tizzy trying to figure out why he looks exactly like Agent Phil. When of course the real answer is that the actor with top billing needs to stay on screen somehow. It’s sort of the flip side of the way that Mockingbird was abruptly dropped from the show, not for plot reasons but apparently because the actress took on another project. (I’d say that in comics you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing… but look up the story of Charcoal from the Thunderbolts sometime.)
Jessica Jones (season 3)
Brian Bendis, Stan Lee, [Stuart Little, Steve Englehart, Chris
Claremont, Roger Stern, David Kraft, Ed Hannigan, Marv Wolfman,] and
Melissa Rosenberg, 2019
And speaking of Buffy echoes, here’s a rehash of Buffy season six. Initially—oh, spoilers from twenty-two years ago—it seemed like the Big Bad of that season would be “the Trio”, three nerds who used their knowledge of tech and the occult to torment Buffy and the Scoobies. But then Trio leader Warren killed Tara, the lover of Buffy’s main sidekick, Willow. Willow, who had become a powerful witch over the course of the previous seasons, went berserk and used black magic to flay Warren alive, then proved to be the actual Big Bad of the season, as she attempted to destroy the world in her grief. So here’s Jessica Jones, and once again, we have a superheroine whose sidekick has recently developed her own powers. This is Patsy Walker, and as I noted the last time I wrote about this show:
In the Marvel Universe, she’s Hellcat, once a mainstay of the Defenders. I had been wondering whether she would be powered up in the MCU. There were a number of possible answers:
No
Yes, but with generic toughness rather than becoming Hellcat in particular
Yes, but it goes wrong and she dies
Yes, but she becomes the big bad of that season
Yes, and she joins the Defenders
Well, here we are in the third season, and they went with option
four.
In place of Warren we get the Foolkiller, though he never gets called
that on the show.
In the comics he’s Greg Salinger, a psycho who has no powers but
nevertheless puts on a costume (complete with
flamboyant hat)
and sets out to kill all those he deems fools.
He has no connection to Jessica Jones that I’m aware of, but he
did tangle with Hellcat in Defenders #75 back
in 1979.
On the show they’ve given his surname an extra
L—possibly the one they purloined when they changed
Killgrave to “Kilgrave” in the first season—and
have reimagined him as a street-clothes serial killer whose gimmick is
photographing his victims while torturing them to try to “capture
their truth” or whatever.
This brings him to the attention of a psychic called Erik
Gelden—known in the comics as Mind-Wave, though not called
that on the show—who tries to blackmail him.
When Jessica hooks up with Gelden, “Sallinger” stabs her,
and soon has not only Jessica and Mind-Wave after him, but Hellcat as
well, as Patsy has decided to use her new powers to wage a one-woman
war on crime.
Taking the role of Tara in this Buffy remix is
Patsy’s mother Dorothy, tortured and killed by Sallinger; like
Willow, Patsy is pushed over the edge, and decides that her modus
operandi will henceforth be less Daredevil and more Punisher.
She kills a bunch of murderers Gelden locates, culminating in her
brutal execution of Warren Sallinger.
Jessica then hunts Patsy down and turns her over to the cops to be put
in supervillain jail; we are told that this proves her heroism, even
though elsewhere in Netflixland the Punisher is fêted, and even
though the previous two seasons of this show had shown that
Jessica’s initial refusal to kill the Purple Man and her mother
the rage monster had gotten lots more innocent people killed.
I dunno. Street-level superhero comics are about the fantasy that someone with the power to protect the innocent from crime actually does so. Jessica Jones seems to want to serve as a corrective to this fantasy, reminding the audience that in real life a superhero would be a vigilante, but while the show trots out countless scenes of characters arguing about that, after running around in lugubrious circles for hour after hour it doesn’t actually end up having anything particularly edifying to say about vigilantism. My big takeaway from the Netflix corner of the MCU will be just how joyless it is. Each show is more miserable than the last. Like I said last time, in the comics, it is meant to be exhilarating when Patsy becomes—
—while on this show we are meant to take it, pretty explicitly, as the equivalent of watching someone shoot up heroin for the first time. Except, of course, on the show she never actually calls herself Hellcat, and when she finds the Hellcat costume she does the de rigueur Netflix thing of shaking her head in disgust and barking “Hell no!” at it—channeling the writers’ embarrassment at finding themselves writing a superhero in a superhero universe. Maybe next time the writing chores should go to people who like this stuff?
A couple of postscripts. Dorothy Walker was a pretty major character on this show, and yet I never saw Rebecca De Mornay’s name in the opening credits. She was always stuck in the end credits along with “Cashier” and “Reporter #2”. What’s up with that? I mean, Rebecca De Mornay is a big get—wouldn’t you want to make a bigger deal out of the fact that she’s featured on your show? I dunno, maybe I have an outsized sense of how big a star Rebecca De Mornay is since I’m from Orange County, where she is famous both as an actress and as Wally George’s biological daughter. Still—Carrie-Anne Moss gets a featured credit and nothin’ for R.De.M.?
You know who did make it into the opening credits? The dudes playing Foolkiller and Mind-Wave. Now, I must confess that while I had heard of both those characters by their supervillain names, I did not know their civilian identities off the top of my head, and so this show’s insistence on only using legal names meant that I didn’t initially make the connections. And the fact that the writers changed the spelling of Greg Salinger’s complicated my attempt to do research. So I started with Mind-Wave, and what a story this is. It’s 1975, and Marvel chairman emeritus Stan Lee calls editor-in-chief Marv Wolfman up to his office and tells him that he needs to work Uri Geller, of all people, into a comic. Geller had recently shot to fame for his claims that his stage magic tricks were actually accomplished via real psychic powers. Stage magic experts such as James Randi demonstrated how Geller’s tricks were done, and in an infamous appearance on The Tonight Show in which Geller wasn’t permitted to doctor the props, Geller proved unable to perform any of his usual feats—but, human nature being what it is, his failure won him legions of believers. So Stan sends this charlatan to do a private show for Wolfman, and Wolfman is totally taken in. He decides to write the story himself, which becomes Daredevil #133. In it, Daredevil plays second fiddle to Uri Geller, whose telepathic and telekinetic abilities are depicted as on par with Jean Grey’s. And for the sake of symmetry, Wolfman supplies Geller with an opposite number whose powers are also mental: Mind-Wave, a bank robber who knows Daredevil’s moves in advance by eavesdropping on his thoughts. Now, I didn’t read Daredevil #133 when it came out. At the time I wasn’t reading much more than the labels on baby food jars. But I did read Mind-Wave’s second appearance. A little more table-setting…
…jump to 1985. In all sorts of different Marvel books, an obscure villain appears for a page or two—only to be gunned down by a disguised vigilante who shouts, “Justice is served!” This is the Scourge of the Underworld, created by Mark Gruenwald. Gruenwald was the editor of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, and apparently he resented having so many minor villains kicking around to catalogue. Gruenwald also wrote Captain America, and in issue #319, he had the Scourge kill no fewer than eighteen supervillains at “The Bar With No Name”—meaning that Gruenwald had to comb through Marvel history looking for the eighteen most disposable supervillains he could find. It is probably no surprise that Mind-Wave, arch-nemesis of (ahem) Uri Geller, made the list. And I own Captain America #319: not only is it a famous Scourge issue, but it’s also the first extended interaction between Cap and my beloved Diamondback. So I was re-reading it to see whether I could find any more information about Mind-Wave, and I get to page nine, and here’s Cap at a mental hospital asking “if you could take me to see this Greg Salinger.” Completely accidental jackpot! Cap reveals that Salinger is the second Foolkiller, and from there I could do the rest of my research.
And fuck, I just realized that “Erik Gelden” is just a slight variation on “Uri Geller”. It never appears in the stories; it was just something whipped up for the Official Handbook. Little did Mark Gruenwald (or one of his staffers) suspect that thirty-some years later that joke name would be repeated over and over again on a TV show…!
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