Rise and Fall of the Roamin’ Empyre
Three years ago, I made a terrible decision. High on youthful exuberance, and unwilling to dip my toe back into the world of comics except in the most obsessively completist way imaginable, I decided to read every Marvel comic published since 1961. Not just the big ones: everything. Milly the Model? That’s amateur hour. Crystar: The Crystal Warrior? Getting more obscure, but I’ve got you covered. Issues of the U.K. Dr. Who Weekly that can never be republished, and whose price on eBay I would really rather not discuss under any circumstance? Let’s just move on.
But the important part of that enormous life mistake is this: I love Marvel history. I love the tapestry of it. I love the way that creators today selectively draw from it, get inspired by books they read as kids, and put new spins on old Marvel history in a way that no other long-running imaginary universe really even attempts. And that’s what this column is about. Each week, we’re going to look back at a story from Marvel’s past, and see how it informs, complicates, contradicts, or inadvertently makes ridiculous a story from right now. And we’re going to start by taking a trip to the past and present to check in with two comics meant to shake up the Marvel cosmos:
Giant-Size Avengers #4 (1975): Steve Englehart (script), Don Heck (pencils), John Tartag (inks), P. Goldberg (colors)
Empyre #2 (2020): Al Ewing (story/script), Dan Slott (story), Valerio Schiti (art), Marte Gracia (colors)
Travel back with me to beige-tinted days of 1975. Post-Nixon malaise floated over the nation, Jaws was in theaters, and Marvel Comics was knee-deep in perhaps the oddest period of experimentation in the company’s history. A combination of sagging sales and a bare-bones staff meant that creators were given an extraordinary amount of leeway to pursue their own visions. Much of the time, the results were uninspiring (that Werewolf by Night ran for more than 40 consecutive issues is a mystery that will never be sufficiently explained by science). But every so often, a spark of strange brilliance could leap through. This was the year that Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, and Chris Claremont launched a new team of all-new, all-different X-Men, and Jim Starlin embarked on the trippy, philosophical, surrealistic climax of his Thanos saga. And in the pages of Avengers, Steve Englehart was trying to create a magnum opus of his own.
To understand Englehart’s ambitions, we need to first understand the character of Mantis. Originally introduced in Avengers #112, Mantis was really little more than a sexually-themed plot device, meant to seize something of the erotic zeitgeist of the early ‘70’s in ways the Comics Code would plausibly tolerate. As Englehart told Comic Book Artist in 2013, “My original idea was that Mantis was going to come in and just be a femme fatale. She was going to come in and seduce every male Avenger and cause problems among the group members.” In Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, he put it even more bluntly: “She was introduced to be a slut.” Not content with a healthy dose of low-key sexual stereotyping, Mantis was an ethnic stereotype to boot: a Vietnamese war orphan trained by priests to be a master of martial arts, she spent time as a prostitute before becoming the lover of the seemingly-reformed villain The Swordsman. She was, in other words, an unliberated white man’s vision of the exotic, liberated woman. The Yoko Ono to the Avengers’ Beatles.
But as sometimes happens, the story began to take on a life of its own, and what began as a one-note contrivance gradually evolved into something bigger, more ambitious, and unimaginably stranger than Englehart or his readers could have expected. Over the course of a story spanning a year and change, Mantis was revealed to be chosen as something called the Celestial Madonna – and understanding that concept is a wild ride, so try to sit tight. A nutshell summary runs as follows: many millennia ago, the planet Hala was inhabited by two races, the barbaric Kree, and the peaceful plant-people called the Cotati. A series of Skrull-orchestrated contrivances resulted in the Kree slaughtering most of the Cotati, but a small group of pacifist Kree refugees spread throughout the galaxy, biding their time, and keeping with them the remaining seeds of the Cotati race. Along with them came a mysterious prophecy: that a woman on the Avengers would someday enter into a marriage that would produce the most powerful entity in the universe.
Thus begins the action of Giant-Size Avengers #4, and the first thing to understand about the plot of this issue is that it is unutterably bizarre. Kang the Conqueror, having heard of the prophecy from his perch in the far future, arrives to kidnap Mantis in order to become her consort, and thereby hijack the future of the universe. Swordsman, in a moment of redemptive heroism, dies to save her, only to be reanimated (now in a neon green paint scheme!) with the soul of a Cotati plant-sage. And it’s here, in a monologue that goes on for extended length, that we learn the full origin of Mantis at last. The Vietnamese priests who raised her, it is revealed, were a pacifist Kree sleeper cult. Their mission was to identify the one woman throughout the galaxy whose purity and strength of will equipped her to mother the Celestial Messiah: perfect being in all the universe, who would provide the redemption of all the species he touched. Having learned all of this, and fought off yet another intervention from various forms of Kang, Mantis proceeds to marry the revived pseudo-Swordsman, and jets off into space to fulfill her destiny.
Deep breath now. On an intellectual level, I think I can understand what Englehart was trying to accomplish here. In uniting the human Mantis with the rigid Kree culture on one hand and the organic, peaceful Cotati on the other, the story tries to make a statement about the power of love and procreation to transcend the divisions of nationality and race. Tellingly, the issue makes a point of contrasting Mantis with Moondragon, another candidate trained for Madonna-hood who was ultimately rejected. Specifically, it was because of Mantis’s earthy (read: incredibly raunchy) connection to human flesh that she was selected over the more cerebral alternative. Englehart is trying, at least in theory, to reimagine Mantis’s sexuality and emotion as a strength rather than a weakness: only by bringing together the human body and the Cotati spirit can our species really ascend.
But let’s not kid around here: for a reader looking at this issue now (or, frankly, looking at it with anything more than completely glazed eyes in 1975), the Celestial Madonna Saga reads like one wince-inducing moment after another. Over and over again, Mantis, the ostensible heroine of the story, is bounced around by a succession of men: orphaned by U.S. soldiers, reduced to poverty and prostitution by colonial oppressors, kidnapped by Kang, rescued by her male colleagues. Even her marriage to pseudo-Swordsman (PlantsMan?) is unfathomably odd on any number of levels. Putting aside the weirdness of an entirely new soul in her dead lover’s body, it’s said explicitly that Mantis was raised and trained from childhood to marry and breed the Celestial Messiah. Is her marriage, when you think about it for any length of time, even a genuine choice, or just the final stage in a lifetime of unexamined manipulation? Given the Avengers’ later track record when it comes to unwanted marriages inflicted on their women members, the implications are unsettling. It all feels disquieting when it should feel triumphant. Is the best humanity can look forward to the dehumanization of its most important woman?
Which brings us, at last, to this week’s Empyre #2. Following the twist ending of the first issue in this series, in which young Quoi, the Celestial Messiah himself was revealed to be a stealth conqueror instead of the victimized leader of an oppressed people, much has been made of the story’s politically iffy standpoint. Critics (many more wise and thoughtful than this particular Marvel-reading dope) have pointed out, not without good cause, that the plot turn feeds into a stereotypical “oppressed become the oppressors” cliché, positioning the evil of the Cotati as coequal with the evil of the bullying Kree and Skrulls.
This isn’t wrong, really, and it’s impossible to say how right it might be without seeing how Ewing and Slott ultimately bring this story to a close. But I do think that viewing these events in the light of Englehart’s original saga gives a different cast to them. The Celestial Messiah was never imagined, after all, as solely a victim: he was a self-consciously godlike figure, who was supposed to guide broken humanity into a new era of perfection. But at the same time, his birth was the product of a deeply (if inadvertently) warped union: the son of a mother manipulated and abandoned by her friends, who absorbed and multiplied the worst aspects of those who raised him. Quoi even says as much when he discusses his father in this issue: “My father’s template was a human. He knew the depths such animals could sink to.” This Messiah might be a god, but, like a few other Messiahs here and there, is also a man. And, brought up by other men, he has become a broken reflection of both the best and worst aspects of their own character. Be careful with the gods you worship, especially when you create them yourself.
Which makes me think, at long last, of a brief scene at the very start of this issue. A mysterious, helmeted figure flies in a spaceship toward the Earth system – a place, they inform their computer, with which they are familiar because “I was born here.”
Only a fool would speculate in public about what revelation Ewing and Slott might have in store for this figure. But nobody ever accused me of being bright. So let’s imagine, for the sake of this article, that the person coming home at last is none other than Mantis. No Celestial Madonna, no elevated symbol of transcendent worship, but something much simpler: a woman who, at long last, is taking control of her world and her destiny. How is that for something to set the cosmos on fire?
Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.
