With its emaciated incarnations of Dreams and Death, complete with chalk-white skin, tattered black clothes, dishevelled back­combed hair, and undulating black speech balloons, a collection of Sandman graphic novels was an indispensible cornerstone of the identity of the 1990s goth, and by the end of its run, the se­ries had launched an entire imprint called Vertigo and was out­selling Superman and Batman.  So who could be Marvel’s Sand­man?  Were there any dark characters from the 1970s kicking around who could be pressed into service as the star of a gritty, atmospheric series about the occult?  Well, how about this guy?

It didn’t really work; the Hellstorm series only lasted twenty-one issues.  But when I saw that my MCU list was up to a TV series called Helstrom, I thought, oof, now I gotta sit through ten hours adapting the mid-’90s Son of Satan revival, much of which had been penned by Warren Ellis when he was still in Ruins mode and not yet capable of writing something like Karnak.  What else would it be?  Yes, “Helstrom” isn’t identical to “Hellstorm”, but that was probably just because, as usual, the creators were em­barrassed by the source material.  Remember, in Jessica Jones not only did they not call Zebediah Killgrave “the Purple Man”, but they also removed an L from his surname!  And sure enough, I fired up the first episode and there was the MCU version of Dai­mon Hellstrom.  All right, I thought, it’s not like I have nothing to look forward to here.  Maybe in episode eight or so they’ll have a guest appearance by his sister.

Because the same year Marvel introduced the Son of Satan also saw the debut of the similarly alliterative Devil’s Daughter.  The idea was simple.  The Son of Satan needed an arch-enemy.  Why not posit that Satan had actually sired two children upon poor Victoria Hellstrom?  Daimon could be the one raised by their human mother, and thus identify with that half of his heritage… while his little sister Satana would be raised by their father, and identify as a princess of Hell?  Poof, a classic conflict!  The hero’s nemesis as his own dark reflection!  Except it didn’t work.  “Little sister” and “arch-enemy” are concepts that fight against each other.  And the four-page story in which Roy Thomas and John Romita Sr. introduced Satana?  It’s the classic “turn the tables on the baddie in a dark alley” trope from the era when the murder rate in New York City had tripled over the course of a decade.  Except the guy who accosts a frightened-looking young woman in this dark alley isn’t a murderer⁠—he’s a rapist.  “Now don’t you worry your pretty head none, miss,” he says, looking like he just shambled off a pirate ship after six months at sea.  “I ain’t gonna hurt you… much.”  He corners her.  “No screams, right?” he growls.  “’Cause if’n ya screamed⁠—well, then I would haveta hurt ya some.”  He starts tearing off her clothes, and is pleasantly surprised to find a daringly cut, skin-tight costume beneath her demure outer garb.  “Hey now! Lookit you!” he exclaims.  “This’s gonna be more fun than… the others.”  He leans in to have his way with her⁠—only for her to pull him in for a kiss, a kiss that reduces him to a desiccated corpse.  She reaches into his mouth, and pulls out his soul in the form of a small butterfly.  “There won’t be a ‘next time’ for you, little man,” she tells his decom­posing form.  “But if there were… I’d advise you not to pick on Satana… the Devil’s Daughter.”  Thus did Marvel premiere the soul-collecting succubus who was supposed to be their next big villain: in a vignette that surely had the vast majority of readers cheering her on.

You might say, wait⁠—maybe the Comics Code had been loosened up a bit, but surely not to the point that it would let an attemp­ted rape scene fly!  Not in 1973!  And you would be correct.  Be­cause Satana’s first appearance did not take place in a comic book, but rather in Vampire Tales #2, one of Marvel’s black-and-white magazines that were not subject to the Comics Code.  This means that while Daimon’s first appearances looked like this:

Satana’s looked like this:

But Marvel’s black-and-white horror magazines, with their more sophisticated artwork, ceased publication in 1975, and Chris Claremont was given the assignment to bring Satana over to the four-color world.  In Marvel Spotlight #24, he tried to set her up as Daimon’s nemesis by positing that she could resurrect herself, but that each time, she was a degree more demonic; after two such resurrections, she slaps away Daimon’s extended hand, snarling, “We chose our destinies long ago, brother… you the right-hand path of good and I the left, and we’ll walk those roads until we die. Still, we might have been friends… once! But no more! Cross my path again, brother, and I’ll look on you and see a cringing, shivering, pitiful little mortal man… I’ll look on you… and I will take… your… SOUL! And laugh at the taking of it!” But she just wouldn’t stick as an unambiguous villain.  Just two months later, in Marvel Premiere #27, Claremont had Satana battling an evil demon⁠—and, yes, taking the souls of some yokels who were trying to burn a young woman as a witch, but even that places her closer to the Punisher than to someone like Me­phisto.  In a final black-and-white appearance, Claremont defined Satana as “part of Earth and part of Hell, who acknowledges both and swears allegiance to neither”, as “first and foremost, now and forever, mistress of her own destiny”.  But then a few more years passed, and Jim Shooter was in charge and the 1980s were on the horizon, and pitching a character as the ultimate chaotic neutral was not in keeping with the tenor of the times.  So in her next appearance, Claremont killed Satana off⁠—turning her into an unequivocal hero by having her sacrifice her life to save the soul of Doctor Strange.  Of course, death in comics is rarely more than a brief timeout.  But Satana stayed dead for quite a while.  She did not make a single appearance in the 1980s.

When she finally did return, in Hellstorm #10, she was much the same character who’d been kicking around the horror books in the ’70s; Hellstorm being the grim-n-gritty version of the Son of Satan and his milieu, Warren Ellis pushed her a little further in the evil direction, having her turn an abandoned church into a “body orchard” where she subjects the men she preys upon to protracted torment, gnawing at their souls and letting them regenerate, over and over, instead of just consuming them once and for all.  And then Hellstorm ended and Satana disappeared for another ten years.  In fact, the writer of her next appearance seemed to be unaware that Hellstorm had revived her, because the big reveal at the end of the first issue of the 2004 limited series Witches was that Doctor Strange had resurrected Satana⁠—taking it as a given that she’d been dead since 1979.  This version was a new interpretation of the character: Witches was about three college-age magic users gathered together to serve as Doc­tor Strange’s version of Charlie’s Angels, and Satana was the sassy one.  But this team, and this version of Satana, didn’t out­last the limited series.  The same could not be said for the main character of a limited series that had run a couple of years ear­lier: Brian K. Vaughan, one of the very few writers willing to create original properties on a work-for-hire basis⁠—he also gave Marvel the Runaways⁠—had created a new villain for Marvel’s adults-only MAX line called the Hood, a low-level criminal named Parker Robbins who comes into possession of an enchanted cloak and boots that draw upon the power of Doctor Strange’s ultimate Big Bad, the dread Dormammu.  Dwayne McDuffie picked up the character for his non-MAX series Beyond!, and then Brian Ben­dis got hold of him and made him a major Avengers villain.  And then, in 2009, writer Jeff Parker got a Hood limited series of his own.  In it, Robbins⁠—who, again, is just a small-time crook who doesn’t understand the black magic behind his new powers⁠—agrees to be mentored by someone wiser in the ways of the oc­cult, and this would all be quite irrelevant if that mentor weren’t Satana.  Two months after his Hood miniseries wrapped up, Parker took over the writing chores on Thunderbolts, a team of supervillains acting as the good guys⁠—some because they genu­inely want to reform, some for their own purposes.  His first issue was #138.  By #155, events had made it clear that the team need­ed someone with some expertise in the dark arts.  And that was when I, nearly thirty years after I had started collecting comics, finally read a comic book with Satana in it.

And she was delightful.  I have virtually no interest in the horror or sorcery corners of the Marvel Universe, so I was expecting her to be tiresome, but she very quickly became one of my favorite Marvel characters, full stop.  Parker’s take on the character was that not only is she an authority on black magic, but she’s a total geek about it⁠—she lights up the book with her enthusiasm.  She’s a succubus who’ll gleefully seduce you and eat your soul⁠—re­gardless of your sex, now that it’s the 21st century⁠—and her chief project at the moment is to build a hell dimension to her own specifications and lord over it… but she’ll drop everything to learn something new.  After Doctor Strange overcomes a gantlet of mystical defenses to capture her in the enchanted Himalayan valley where she’s been hiding out, at first she fumes and cur­ses⁠—but upon discovering that the swamp creature known as the Man-Thing is a Thunderbolt, she abruptly changes her tune.  “The Vagornus Koth…?! Why didn’t you say it was on your team before? I would have turned myself in!”  An issue later:

There are so many ways a writer could play the devil’s daughter, but “brimming with joie de vivre” is an offbeat choice, and it’s completely brilliant.  Satana spent roughly the same amount of time with the Thunderbolts as her brother spent with the De­fenders, then moved on.  In later years, I happened across her in an issue of Doctor Strange, back to building a hell dimension for herself, and in a couple of issues of Strikeforce, in which she was running a club in Las Vegas.  These stories didn’t present quite the same Satana as Thunderbolts, but she was still a lot of fun.  I just had to hope that when the creators of Helstrom were doing their research, they thought the same way.

So as I was saying, I fired up the first episode and there was the MCU version of Daimon Hellstrom.  They seemed to be playing him as the MCU’s answer to House the Medical Doctor: thin, bearded, grouchy, trying to figure out what’s wrong with some­one in distress, deciding that the “patient” is lying, etc.  Okay, I thought, I can watch ten hours of the Son of Satan transformed into House the Medical Doctor⁠—could be worse.  And then the show cut away to a tall woman at an auction of pricey historical artifacts.  Afterward, we see her on the roof, talking intimately with a tech billionaire who bought one of them… whispering that she knows his secret, touching his chest, and seeing visions of him strangling women to death… then draining his soul from his body and tossing him off the roof.  All right, then!  Episode one and Satana’s already in the show!  Nice!  And then… the show kept cutting back to her.  And she had her own supporting cast.  And then I moved on to episode two, and I realized: the opening credits don’t start with the actor playing Daimon.  They start with two names, in that “upper right, lower left” configuration used in the credits of Cloak & Dagger, meant to indicate that the actors share equal billing.  Holy hell!  This wasn’t called Helstrom just because the creators were embarrassed by the title “Hell­storm”!  It’s called Helstrom because that surname is shared by both Daimon and Satana⁠—this show is about both of them!  This is fifty percent a Satana show!  Hot diggity!

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, this Satana⁠—just plain “Ana”, here⁠—is much closer to the magazine version than to the Thun­derbolts version.  MCU TV shows are generally dour, and Hel­strom is no exception, so an effervescent Satana would have made for a tonal clash.  She’s… I was going to say “sarcastic”, but really I think the same adjective I used for Daimon also applies here: she’s grouchy.  She also doesn’t look like any Satana I know, and they had a lot of looks to choose from.  In the ’70s she had long red hair and weird eyebrows, often drawn almost as anten­nae; in the ’00s her red hair was cut short, sometimes with a couple of locks sticking up to suggest horns; in the Thunderbolts her hair was long and dark, and she had no physical character­istics to suggest she was anything other than baseline human, except when she transformed into a full-on devil with bright red skin and pointed teeth, cackling as she blasted fire at her foes; nowadays she’s generally depicted with white hair and ram’s horns, as seen in the corner box at the top right, three miles up.  The TV folks give her no non-human signifiers, just an awful flapper-era pixie cut and wardrobe; meanwhile, Daimon’s main visual distinction from House the Medical Doctor is the penta­gram scar on his chest, which for some reason has been left incomplete.  It made me wonder⁠—was the fact that it’s a penta­gram supposed to be a surprise revelation later on?  The same way that “Ana”’s name is incomplete⁠—both her names are, really⁠—and we’re supposed to be shocked when, midway through the series, it is revealed that she’s Satan-a Hell-strom?

Because the show sure seems to skirt around the notion that it’s about the Son of Satan and the Devil’s Daughter.  Their father keeps getting referred to as “a serial killer”, and I kept waiting for the show to finally reveal that he is much more… but right up to the end, it’s nothing but hints.  Meanwhile, the main action involves Daimon and Ana trying to exorcise the demon Kthara (from Marvel Spotlight #24, 1975) from their mother Victoria, aided by allies Gabriella Rosetti (a sex-swapped version of “Gabriel: Devil-Hunter” from Haunt of Horror and Hellstorm), Louise Hastings (mostly from a 1990s horror series called Darkhold), and Caretaker of the Blood (mostly from the ’90s version of Ghost Rider).  None of this is anything I’d read before or of much interest to me, but ultimately even a version of Satana distant from her Thunderbolts incar­nation was better than nothing, and the brother-sister bonding arc worked for me well enough that I liked the show more than I didn’t.

The only other event in the MCU during the lockdown year was the conclusion of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after seven seasons.  This season sends the cast on a tour of the 20th century, from the ’30s to the ’50s to the ’70s to the ’80s, where they stay for a while and cross paths with young versions of the Hydra guys and Inhumans from early seasons⁠—you know, back when the show was doing bricolage with Marvel stories and characters rather than some sort of warmed-over Star Trek.  This season, like the two before it, had more misses than hits: the “Chronicoms” were less than compelling villains, the sudden emphasis on a brand new and fairly annoying character named Kora was a bad move, and you know the rot has begun to set in when alternate time­lines start cropping up.  Still, there were some hits.  I’ve grum­bled about the way Agent Phil sticks around even after getting killed off multiple times, to the point that by this season Clark Gregg is playing a digital copy of Agent Phil’s consciousness… but it pays off.  What happens to Agent Phil when he gets to the ’80s made me want to applaud.

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