Batman and The Case of the Stolen Story

 The Shadow of the Bat

Before Batman, before Superman, before comic books at all, there was The Shadow. And there were many pulp series, comprising text without illustration, publishing stories quite similar to those also heard on the radio. Some years back, the revelation broke that the very first Batman story, from Detective #27, borrowed – heavily, it turns out – from an earlier story featuring The Shadow. This was revealed by brief comments from the Batman story’s writer, Bill Finger, and then explored more deeply by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin in a special issue, The Shadow #9, back in 2008.

It’s worth beginning by making a careful distinction: Certainly many prior stories and ongoing serials helped inspire Batman as a character, as a concept. In the aforementioned issue of The Shadow, Murray and Tollin, in two separate essays, break this history down in impressive fashion, naming some obscure pulp stories that were available to Bill Finger and Bob Kane when Batman was being formulated as an idea. Murray and Tollin identify about six possible connections between certain 1930s pulp crime dramas and Batman; early Batman writer Jerry Robinson, penning a piece in the same volume, added more based on his in-person experience with the first years of Batman stories, and his knowledge of what he, Kane, and Finger had been reading.

It’s two different matters, though, to say that a character was inspired (or borrowed or stolen) versus to say that a story was inspired (or borrowed or stolen). In terms of defining the character either as we know him now, or even as readers knew him in the early 1940s, that first story isn’t particularly significant; it’s simply one story of many, and it easily could be shuffled into some other location in the first year’s worth of Batman stories, or omitted entirely, and the character doesn’t come across any differently. Without that first six-page story in 1939, Batman would still be Batman. So, we are not discussing here whether that story by itself robbed the entire idea of Batman from the creators behind The Shadow. The point under discussion here is if that particular story was lifted from an earlier story, and there is no need for the “if” – it certainly was.

Anyone who reads both of the stories will see the similarity; Murray and Tollin spend, combined, little more than a paragraph discussing the point. My ambition here is to flesh out the details and itemize exactly what was borrowed and what wasn’t. In doing so, we will find out, first, why the first Batman story creates such a strange and relatively insubstantial impression and, second, that perhaps the greatest thing borrowed from that Shadow story was not a few pages of Batman plot but some compelling details crucial in defining the Joker, who did not appear until nearly a year later.

A Tale of Two Tales

To lay out the basic facts, the 1939 Batman story “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (CCS, for short) obviously borrows from Theodore Tinsley’s 1936 The Shadow story “Partners of Peril” (POP); nobody could read both and fail to see the strong similarity. As Murray and Tollin note, POP even likens The Shadow – twice – to a bat. However, CCS is not simply a retelling of the entirely of POP, because that is not possible: POP is much longer than CCS, at about 60 pages of text as opposed to 6 of comic panels. POP has far more plot and detail than could conceivably be packed into the shorter format; POP has many more characters, many more scenes, and much more intricacy than CCS. And so, it’s not the case that CCS does or could contain all of the plot of POP; rather, essentially all of CCS is selected from the details of POP. Moreover, the selection of which details are borrowed and which are not was not very carefully made, and the comprehensibility CCS suffers considerably as a result.

That said, we may construct a breakdown of how closely CCS is borrowed from POP. CCS has a total of eight named characters, while five others (presuming that several brief appearances of a policeman represent the same policeman) have an extremely minimal quantity of dialogue. The eight with substantial presence are the following:

• Four businessmen

• Batman, appearing both in costume and as Bruce Wayne

• Commissioner Gordon

• The son of one businessman

• The assistant of one other businessman

This cast corresponds fairly well to the most prominent characters in POP, with some modifications: The “son” character in CCS belongs to the first businessman in the story, whereas the “son” in POP belongs to the third businessman we see. And, Gordon in CCS is a sort of amalgam of POP’s Commissioner Weston and a separate character, an ace detective of the police department named Joe Cardona. Some of the many additional characters in POP include a niece of one businessman, many faithful assistants to The Shadow, and an entire gang of armed thugs who participate in several action scenes that as part of a massive red herring of a side plot corresponding to nothing whatsoever found in CCS.

The plot of CCS boils down to this: Four businessmen are partners in the ownership of a chemical company. One of them decides that he can profit by killing the other three, eventually owning the entire company without needing to pay for the other three-quarter shares. In his effort to kill them one by one, he succeeds in killing the first two before Batman intercedes. In the end, Batman spares the life of the third partner, subdues the evil businessman’s assistant and a final struggle claims the life of the villain, who falls into a tank of acid. As far as that goes, it’s a simple plot, and a sensible one, as far as people who are willing to kill for large sums of money go. Nearly everything in this paragraph describes, equally well, POP, except that in POP, the assistant is killed, the evil businessman is arrested, and the hero is The Shadow rather than Batman. Moreover, the “son” in CCS is the son of the first businessman and is briefly put forth as a suspect for his father’s murder; the son in POP is the son of the third businessman and appears throughout the story, sometimes as a possible culprit and nearly becomes, more than once, a victim of the killers.

Batman explains the plot of Tinsley's story

Now, with the greater length of POP, we can imagine adding in the other elements of the plot, primarily the involvement of a gang who is trying to steal one of the products of the chemical company. While the story unfolds, the reader is uncertain if the murders were committed by the gang, who are in fact willing to kill if that helps them achieve their ends, but as it happens, they did not commit the two murders. The uncertainty the reader has throughout the story regarding the role of the gang, the involvement of one businessman’s niece, and many action sequences in which The Shadow and his helpers cross paths with the fourth businessman’s thugs and/or the gang is what makes POP a story that engages the reader for over an hour while CCS is a trifle that flits by in a few minutes.

This is the relationship between the two: A long story published in 1936 has a central plot and some side plots; a shorter story published in 1939 keeps the central plot, changing it only slightly, while eliminating the side plots. Case closed?

Left in the Shadow…

Around 2008, I read many comic book stories that had been published between 1935 and 1942. The first stories featuring Superman, Batman, and various members of the Justice Society were of great interest to me, and as “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” is such a quick read, and has such a central place in comics history, I read it many times. These readings left me with a minor but general sense of befuddlement that I might never have expressed if it weren’t for the fact that Grant Morrison put the same idea into writing. In their book Supergods, Morrison says of CCS that it has “a bizarrely complex plot…” “It’s not a great story, and no matter how often I read it, I’m still left slightly in the dark as to what it was about.”

Several Golden Age stories give me a similar impression, that the logic doesn’t quite hold up, and I suppose that when it comes down to brass tacks, the writers were poorly paid, probably hustling through a chore to get their rent money, and had a juvenile readership to entertain. With the artwork providing more of the entertainment than in all-text adventure stories, the comic book plots didn’t need to stand up to the scrutiny of academics with advanced degrees, so we can explain the confusion, perhaps, on writers who were simply careless and had no great incentive to be otherwise.

There are indeed gaping plot holes in CCS, as there are in other Golden Age comic book stories. That said, the extent of the plot holes and illogic in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” exceed even that which was normal at the time. To list just a few:

• The killer warns each victim, before the attempt on his life, with threats. There is no apparent reason to do this. The killer simply needs for the three men to be dead, and that could only be easier if there were no advance warning. Without such threats, the plan probably would have succeeded.

• Ordinarily, a series of murders that result in one person profiting would make the killer’s identity obvious, so the story asserts that the partnership was in fact secret, but offers no reason why it would have been secret.

• When Batman bursts into the lab where the third businessman is nearly killed, he enters a glass dome where the man is trapped, then plugs a vent through which gas escapes, then breaks the glass to free them. This is a strangely complicated death trap and it’s even stranger that Batman, who enters the room at the last moment, would understand the mechanism and how to defeat it.

• When the villain’s assistant subdues the third businessman, the assistant announces, “Soon, I’ll control everything!” It is unexplained why an assistant would believe that he would control everything, and this is at odds with the subsequent exposition indicating that the fourth businessman, the assistant’s boss, is the one who would control everything.

When one reads POP, one finds explanations for most of these plot holes.

Gas as a weapon doesn't even make sense here

• The contracts, in POP, stipulate that the fourth partner is buying the company from the other three over a period of ten years, but must pay the same total sum even if one or two of the three die during that time. Therefore, when there is a threat to any of the three, it makes the others who are being bought out the likely suspects. The fourth ends up expecting to profit only because all of the other three are to be killed. [Why anyone would agree to such a contract, that robs one’s heirs of the payments, is never explained in POP, and is seemingly present only to drive the plot forward.] Therefore, the death threats towards the first two businessmen direct suspicion, at least temporarily, to the third victim rather than to the actual killer. In POP, then, the death threats serve a purpose. In CCS, they are counterproductive.

• In POP, The Shadow is present, but hidden, during a very lengthy scene in which the assistant explains how the death trap works. This scene, and the poison gas in general, drive an aforementioned side plot involving poison gas being developed as a weapon for the military and a gang that wishes to steal its formula. Therefore, in POP, there is a reason for this complex apparatus to exist, and the Shadow knows how to deactivate it. Batman, barging in suddenly from outdoors, should not have that information. A fragmented description of the death trap is just a weird digression from the plot and the whole story would make more sense if the assistant or the fourth businessman simply tried to kill the third businessman by more conventional means.

• In POP, the assistant is for many pages offered as the most likely identity of the killer, and the reader is given reason to believe that the fourth businessman – the assistant’s boss – is to be yet another victim after the first three are killed. It’s a plot twist that comes after the assistant is dead when The Shadow reveals that the fourth businessman sought to frame his assistant as the killer of the other three. Therefore, the assistant has an important role in the narrative of POP, but in CCS is just a bizarre distraction.

Bill Finger not only took his plot from POP, but also took details indiscriminately from the longer story, which had lengthy exposition explaining some of its stranger aspects, such that Finger’s story, which includes certain details but no explanations, ends up almost nonsensical. In a better and tighter story, Finger could have kept the details of the contracts that offered a reason for the killer to issue threats to the businessmen. Further, he could have simplified the death threat to the third man from poison gas to something more conventional, and eliminated the assistant, who plays no useful purpose in the story that the villainous businessman himself couldn’t have performed. The haphazard inclusion of certain details from POP is precisely what makes the story, as Morrison notes, bizarrely complex, and hard to absorb. It certainly would be a better and tighter story with a few simplifications. We can say now with confidence that the eventual success of Batman was not hindered by the weakness of his first story, but this helps explain why that first story did not go on to become a staple for later writers to reference in loving homage.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

While the above lays out the relationship between POP and CCS, it was another observation, coming as early as POP’s first page, which struck me earlier, and has perhaps never been noted before. Perhaps the most vivid match between POP and a Batman story is not with May 1939’s Detective #27, but with 1940’s Batman #1, and this detail does not reside only in a Golden Age comic book, but was also adapted, as a significant piece of Batman lore, into a memorable scene in 2008’s The Dark Knight. In fact, the character whose schtick is most directly borrowed from POP is not Batman but the Joker.  While Anthony Tollin states, “there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Tinsley’s stories influenced the development of DC Comics’ Joker,” there is overwhelming evidence that the same story already discussed here influenced the first Joker story, if not the character’s overall concept. Less than a year after Finger borrowed extensively from Tinsley’s POP for the plot and many story elements for the first Batman story, he went on to borrow many plot elements for the first Joker story – more than could conceivably be a coincidence.

While Jerry Robinson was the creator of the Joker, and his comments printed in The Shadow #9 go into some detail about previous pulp stories that may have provided inspiration for Robinson, his own reflections indicate that he did not write the first Joker story. Instead, he conceived of the character, and then, to his disappointment, Bill Finger was given scripting duties for the first Joker story, which opened the series of stories that appeared in Batman #1. And we already know that Finger read POP and felt free to borrow from it without limitation.

Batman #1 contains both the first and second Joker stories, which also happen to be the second and fourth stories with Dick Grayson. (Hugo Strange and Catwoman serve as the villains in two stories that appear between the two Joker stories.) The first of those untitled Joker stories has the following plot: On three separate occasions, the Joker breaks into a public radio broadcast to issue a threat against a prominent man. In each case, the Joker names an exact time later the same evening at which the man will be killed. In the first two instances, the victim is a wealthy man and the threat also specifies a robbery that will take place; in the third case, the threat is leveled at a judge who had previously sent the Joker to prison. All three of these attacks proceed exactly as the Joker predicts, but he is followed by Batman and Robin after killing the judge. After tussles between the heroes and the villain prove inconclusive, the Joker heads off the same night to commit another robbery (apparently, he made this threat to Robin off-camera). During this fourth attempted crime, he is stopped and apprehended by Batman.

In its overarching structure, this story is only a little like POP: There are four prominent men, threats, and killings, but the main plot is different. Unlike in POP, there is no mystery regarding the identity of the culprit, and no major mystery regarding motive, as the robberies serve as their own motivation, and the Joker has a grievance against the judge. (There is no apparent motive for the Joker to kill the first two men aside from his twisted desire to kill.)

However, the first crime in the first Joker story is quite specifically similar to the first murder in POP. All of the following similarities apply:

1) The crime is threatened in advance.

2) The time named in the threat is midnight.

3) The victim is a wealthy man.

4) The victim goes to the police for protection.

5) The police go to the man’s home and provide what seems like overwhelming protection.

6) Nonetheless, the crime is committed at the threatened time.

7) The cause of death is poisoning, but there is no apparent source of poison.

8) In both cases, the poison was introduced to the home long in advance.

9) The poison causes the dead man’s face to contort horribly.

10) After the man is dead, the police open a safe in the room and find that something was stolen.

To be thorough, there are some differences between the two scenes.

1) POP is a whodunit; the Joker identifies himself (though with that alias) before the crime.

2) In POP, the weapon is a poisoned cigar which the killer is confident will be smoked just before midnight; the Joker poisoned the man directly (somehow) long before the threat and the poison (implausibly) acts only very suddenly after a delay with pinpoint precision.

3) In POP, the death is threatened by midnight and occurs two minutes beforehand.

4) The man’s disfigurement in POP is withered and grotesque; the Joker’s poison creates – here, for the absolute first time – a ghastly smile.

5) The motive for the killing is unclear in POP, which is essential to the criminal’s hope of evading suspicion. The Joker robs the man’s safe, and that also had been performed before the threat was made.

To put the whole matter in contrast, take a look at the first Sandman story from Adventure Comics #40, scripted by Gardner Fox in 1939. In this story, the Tarantula threatens to kidnap a wealthy actress, and her home receives heavy police protection, and yet the kidnapping takes place anyway, baffling the investigators. (Besides Wesley Dodds, who comes up with the correct explanation in a few seconds.) This story may also have been advised by knowledge of POP, as it matches similarities 1, 4, 5, and 6 from the above list. Then again, maybe some of those plot elements were tropes that had been floated about in the noir world of the time. It would take a lot more research to work that out. However, ten similarities are a lot more than four, and in my mind there’s no doubt that Finger lifted from Tinsley’s story again, when we already know that the author of the later story had previously done exactly that on another occasion.

In the initial Joker story, the similarities wane, though don’t end, after the first crime. One more detail perhaps also taken from POP, in that the weapons used in the Joker’s second crime included “a strange gas,” which is how the villains attempt the third murder in POP (after the second involves electrocution).

What binds the first Joker story and POP is not the overall structure so much as the motif presented during that first crime – a threat is made in advance, giving the villain an air of invincibility when the police are unable to prevent it despite the advance warning. Continuing throughout Finger’s first Joker story and into the second, this motif is repeated again and again, with the threat occurring in all nine of the Joker attacks in those two stories, and poisons leading to the distorted face occurring in all but the two of them that Batman prevents. These two motifs become almost definitional of the Joker not only in 1940 but to the present day, from the most obscure monthly comics of decades past to the global prominence of The Dark Knight movie and its billion-dollar earnings.

So, I would suggest that the most significant legacy of Bill Finger’s casual approach to lifting details from Theodore Tinsley’s "Partners of Peril" was in the creation of the Joker’s modus operandi, which established comics and movies created over the years right up to the present, and sure to continue onward, and not the previously-revealed theft of the threadbare plot of the six pages of CCS. A bit over a decade ago, comics historians and creators lobbied for Bill Finger to receive credit as at least a co-creator of Batman; however much this may be true for the concept of Batman, some stories themselves and the concept of the Joker owe more than a little to the ideas of Theodore Tinsley. And this closes the case of the stolen story.

Doomsday Clock: The Golden Age and The Metaverse

Doomsday Clock #10 mentions, a striking ten different times, the date April 18, 1938. This, it has been determined, was the date that Action Comics #1 went on sale. The title of the issue's story is "Action." The closing quotation is, "Every action has its pleasures and its price." We are both told of, then shown, the famous act from the cover of Action #1, Superman lifting a car full of wrongdoers over his head before smashing it into rocks. There is no light touch being employed here. DC #10 is about how the introduction of Superman changed everything. And then, how that event that changed everything was itself changed, or, using a term that emerged decades later, retconned, and how things followed from there.

There's something exciting, I find, in seeing artists with more modern and refined skills and color technologies revisit the classic moments and eras of comics. You see in in The Killing Joke, and in Tony Daniel's and Lee Garbett's work on Grant Morrison's Batman run. DC #10 lets Gary Frank redraw Superman's introduction to the world and there's something powerful and fresh in seeing his fine technique re-render Superman's smirk embodying a bold confidence that the "Boy Scout" Superman lacked in later renditions. The impact of that Superman is echoed when Johns and Frank re-present us with the origin of the Justice Society in (again, using the newsstand date from the real world) November 1940. The gathered heroes speak with reverence of Superman, the best of a remarkable lot, and they pause their meeting to wait for his arrival, an arrival that, a bit sadly, never occurs. The Flash, Jay Garrick, says that if the Justice Society is to work, that they need Superman. Green Lantern, Alan Scott, replies that Superman is a busy guy. Sadly, this is all correct. Superman does not make it to their meeting, and ultimately, the Justice Society does not succeed. But this is all a blend of two different things: What happened to the comics in the real world (the Justice Society went out of print after 11 years) and what happened in the comics (at the Justice Society's first meeting, it was asked why Superman wasn't showing up, and he never did).

This blend of the world within the comics and the historical – publication – history is fertile ground. Johns re-creates and gives new life to a special time when the DC Universe is born and the very first time when any of their characters speak of Superman. (In the Red Tornado's debut, with the cover date November 1940, Ma Hunkel makes DC's first cross-storyline reference to another superhero, Green Lantern.) There was a time, Johns reminds us, when the short but sensational first two and a half years of Superman inspired a colorful explosion of many other superheroes, and then it was all undone. Ultimately, DC un-did and re-told their own origins, but here, for the first time in years, Johns has DC reassert that first beginning as the true beginning. And he gives it back to us as something called the Metaverse. But even he changes it.

If you examine the JSA's first story, from All Star Comics #3, it goes a bit as Johns shows it to us in DC #10. He's got the right cast of characters and the round table. Johns and Frank pay attention to the details, many of the tiny details, like the order they sat in, and who has which hand on the table. Johns places Johnny Thunder and a camera in position to capture a photo with the cover/splash page art. (Johnny is himself present in the story but absent from that art.) With that sort of attention to detail, it's worth noting what Johns changed. In All Star #3, it is indeed pointed out that Superman is absent, and it is indeed observed that he is likely too busy to attend. Which of the superheroes has which lines is one thing Johns changes, but what I find most striking is who is left out. For in reproducing faithfully eight superheroes, plus Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt, plus the mention of Superman, Johns deletes, or skips, others. In All Star #3, the Atom asks about "Superman, Batman, and Robin." He also mentions the Red Tornado. In DC #10, the only absent hero named is Superman. Why skip Batman? Maybe Johns is making a dramatic cosmological decision here, one that will be examined in the remaining portion of the series. Maybe he is not so subtly amplifying Superman ("Why is he the center of this universe?") and quietly deemphasizing Batman, but in a re-creation so faithful that they pay attention to who has which hand on the table, I find the subtraction of Batman to be striking.

For the moment, though, we have another sort of subtraction presented to us. Superman, after being given to the world in 1938, is later subtracted from 1938 and reinserted with new origins, in 1956, 1985, 2011, 2016. If you look closely, you see the designs of the rocket change to that from Birthright and from Superman: Secret Origin. There are seven different Superman reboots here, Johns picking publication years to communicate years within his story.

DC has retold the story of how the superheroes began several times. If we reduce the matter just to Superman and Green Lantern, the major Earths and timelines in continuity have gone like this:

Golden Age: Superman, then Alan Scott

Silver Age Earth One: Superman, then Hal Jordan

Silver Age Earth Two: Superman, then Alan Scott

Post-COIE: Alan Scott, then Superman, then Hal Jordan

New 52: Superman, then Hal Jordan

If you get into the fine details, it's actually uncertain what, if anything, from DC's past retcons Johns is showing us when he shows the JSA origin suddenly shift from the approximate events of All Star Comics #3 to a reality without Superman. There was never a retcon in any "Earth" with a Justice Society that had Superman's debut shift from 1938 to 1956. If one returns to the strict details of 1985-1987, COIE did not produce a world without the 1938 debut of Kal-L, because Kal-L retained a memory of fighting with the JSA, noted in (among other places) the last issues of both COIE and Infinite Crisis, and even Power Girl retained this memory once events in Infinite Crisis reminded her of them. The 1956 debut of Superman seems to belong to the Silver Age Earth One continuity and the 1940 Superman-less debut of the Justice Society seems to belong to the Post-COIE continuity, which are different Earths and different timelines.

It seems possible that Johns is proposing a new cosmology, perhaps akin to Hypertime, in which all timelines and continuities are separate realities, not necessarily existing side by side on different Earths. It's also possible that we could think up details that Johns isn't even trying to raise, and so I'll pause before parsing the text of old retcons and DC #10 like a lawyer applying strict logic and the law to a case in order to determine what Johns means by the Metaverse. It is clear, though, that he sees a sort of hub-and-spoke nature to DC History: There is a main reality, and there are variations of it, and at the center of the main reality, there is Superman – and not Batman.

Whatever the rules of this cosmology, we can speak of the key players, and what DC #10 shows us is that, alongside other bad actors who have triggered changes in the Multiverse, Dr. Manhattan has caused one of the divergent realities, specifically creating the New 52 reality by allowing Alan Scott to die. As he himself now recognizes, he is one of the villains of DC (meta)history. We can expect Superman and other heroes to reverse the harm that Dr. Manhattan has done, and quite likely, we will see a Dr. Manhattan who has learned from the DC superheroes how to perform magic shift from "inaction" to "action" and, inspired by the hope that Superman provides, return to the Watchmen Universe and undo a nuclear war.

There's a bit more of a mystery story, though, still left in Doomsday Clock. We now have multiple pointers indicating a special role to be played by Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt. Dr. Manhattan killing Alan Scott in July 1940 would not seem to delete the JSA superheroes that had already debuted, such as Sandman, Hawkman, and the Flash. We know that Johnny Thunder, dispirited by the McCarthy hearing asked the Thunderbolt to protect the JSA, and this apparently hid them entirely from the timeline, perhaps as a second crucial step following Dr. Manhattan killing Alan Scott. Johns has called attention to Alan Scott being bold before the McCarthyites on a completely separate occasion, and perhaps without Alan Scott, the JSA hearing goes much worse, less heroically. Is it a coincidence that the last moment of the Justice Society meeting before the reboot occurs is when Johnny Thunder asks the Thunderbolt to interact with Superman, or is that event a trigger? (Incidentally, Johnny Thunder did indeed use the Thunderbolt to summon Superman in the final pages of All Star #7.)

Yet another striking moment in DC #10 shows Johnny Thunder on the set of Carver Colman's movie in 1954, as an errand boy: Just a random detail or a significant tie between Johnny Thunder and Dr. Manhattan? And, to the point, is the Thunderbolt actually Dr. Manhattan, or is the Thunderbolt simply a separate entity with powers that work a bit like Dr. Manhattan's? It is certain that the final two issues of Doomsday Clock are going to put both Dr. Manhattan and the Thunderbolt to work in setting things on a new path, and issue #10 begins to define the cosmology in which that path exists.

Doomsday Clock 3

Reading Doomsday Clock #3, like much of the earlier issues, is like examining a crime scene. Many things are out of place. The question is, why are those particular things out of place, and how did they get there? What are the rules of the game?

We get one direct answer when we see the Comedian get plucked, in mid-air, out of the fall that killed him before Watchmen #1, and teleported into a fall into water in the DC Universe. We know that Dr. Manhattan did this. We don't how – in terms of the sci fi nitty gritty details – this changed what we saw in Watchmen. One possibility would be that when Comedian has finished playing some role in the DCU, he will go back to his fall and then die. Or, perhaps he did die and Manhattan put the pieces back together. Or perhaps he made a duplicate. Or changed the timeline. The bigger question is really "Why?" Did Dr. Manhattan perform an act of mercy or does he simply need Comedian for a cold, utilitarian purpose? Some of the other events in the issue may indicate the answer.

And we face a lingering mystery from the end of DC #2, that the Mime's presumed-nonexistent lock pick worked. Sure, you can be crazy and imagine that you have invisible tools, but the Mime's seemed to have worked, and Marionette seemed to have expected it to. Or maybe he was able to pick a lock in some other way and pretending to have a tool was part of their shared gag. In #3, we get undeniable evidence that the Mime's (almost) invisible gun is real: People get shot and we see the light reflect off of it. And if an invisible gun is real, why not a lock pick? This says something about how illusion and reality are twisted around in this story. On a more pragmatic level, we might wonder what material those things are made of: Perhaps some unusually strong glass.

Glass and glass breaking are the overwhelming recurrent image in this issue. Mime's tools seem to belong to that. A broken bottle is on the cover. We find out inside the issue that it is the bottle from which Blake is drinking when Veidt assaults him. A few things are remarkable about the brand. First, this is Victory Gin, which is the brand from Orwell's "1984" and that is a work of yet another stature for Johns to tie in with his story. Presumably, we're not going to (nor legally could) see this story jump into the 1984 Universe, but it may provide a symbol of autocracy, particularly cogent given the Russia subplot in Doomsday Clock's moment in the DCU.

What's more important than the brand might be the drink. Linking Blake and gin makes four times in two issues that Doomsday Clock has referenced the same scene in Watchmen #2. In that scene, set in a bar in Vietnam in June 1971, Blake is told by a Vietnamese woman that she is pregnant with his child. He announces that he will leave her behind along with the country he disdains. She attacks his face with a glass bottle, giving him his trademark scar, and he shoots her dead while Dr. Manhattan looks on, and comments glumly. Blake points out that Manhattan could have stopped the violence by turning harmful objects into harmless ones, or that Manhattan "coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia." On that occasion, Victory in Vietnam Day, Blake is drinking bourbon but standing in front of a mirror advertising gin – thus "Victory Gin" is the setting of that scene. In DC #3, we also see a comedian hit in the face with broken glass – a subpar standup comedian in the bar full of Joker devotees. In DC #2, we saw Dr. Manhattan save the life of Marionette because she was pregnant, indicating a difference in his policies which is striking (thanks to Comic Book Resources poster robotman for calling attention to the scene for that connection). And DC #3 begins with Dr. Manhattan preventing/delaying violence to Blake by teleporting Blake to, metaphorically speaking, goddamn Australia: the DC Universe. That scene and the difference between Dr. Manhattan in 1971 Vietnam and Dr. Manhattan in Doomsday Clock is a tremendously important statement, but one that requires further clarification regarding timelines (is this the "now" Dr. Manhattan, or one stage, or some merciful Dr. Manhattan from some other slice of the timestream?) and motive (is he actually merciful or does he have some ulterior motive for saving Blake and Marionette, perhaps temporarily?).

The other big showdown in DC #3 is Batman and Rorschach, in which Batman gets the original Rorschach's journal and spends a long time reading it before deciding to leave the new Rorschach cooped up in Arkham. This is not such a surprising turn of events if one remembers how Geoff Johns wrote the encounter between Batman and an earnest visitor from another dimension back in Infinite Crisis, in which Batman took Kal-L's proposal for an alliance and friendship and responded with an (ineffective) attack using kryptonite. Rorschach, however, is not superpowered, and it looks like he's going to spend a little time in captivity. Remember, however, Arkham also contains Saturn Girl, who can read Rorschach's mind, and she can learn from him how important his and Veidt's mission is to save billions of lives, and facts necessary to carrying it out. I suspect that information is going to go from Rorschach to Saturn Girl to Superman and power the next part of our story. Meanwhile, we learn more about Rorschach's backstory: He is young, grew up poor, and lost his family in Veidt's New York attack. He is apparently nobody we saw in detail in Watchmen but is credibly the son or other relation of Rorschach's psychiatrist Dr. Malcolm Long (whose coffee cup read "DAD"). If so, Johns will likely use the generations to show the potential change between the Watchmen world's past and present.

There is a big subplot set in the DCU's past. Back in Rebirth, Wally West gave us some crib notes on a nefarious reality-bending plot that had changed the universe in a harmful way. As we've often been reminded since then, the difference may have been introduced with Flashpoint, but the timeline was changed at least as far back as 1938, with the Golden Age superheroes having vanished from prominence, but still they exist in other forms. We saw the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick in "The Button" and we see a Johnny Thunder who remembers his hero past. If we stick to the original timeline, Johnny Thunder would be approaching 100 years old now, and he mentions a great grandchild to that end. DC #3 gives us quite a bit of information, buried in Hollywood celebrity news from the 1950s, about some of those characters.

During the events of DC, a television station is playing a marathon of movies starring the deceased  Carver Coleman, an actor who played a detective named "Nathaniel Dusk" in several pictures before his untimely murder. The "DCU 1950s Hollywood" is a weird pastiche of the actual, real-world 1950s Hollywood, the post-Infinite Crisis timeline, and some unknown number of other fictional stories. The "Screenland Secrets" celeb gossip magazine excerpted in DC #3 mentions Norma Desmond, who was the fictional character at the center of Sunset Boulevard, as well as many real people and many DCU characters. Because of the timeline, we should expect this subplot to indicate how (and why) Dr. Manhattan removed the Golden Age superheroes from the post-Flashpoint timeline. Coleman's murder is a big clue: He was beaten to death with an award that had received. This is exactly how Hollis Mason dies in Watchmen #8. Here's the question: Is that similarity a creative act on Johns' part, or is it a creative act on Dr. Manhattan's part? Also, his watch was missing, and he had a secret roomful of clocks. At the end of DC Rebirth, we see someone examining a watch with a leather strap and inscribed, "Every second is a gift" on Mars. This once belonged to Wally West, having been given to him by his uncle and having been owned by generations before that. Is it Coleman's? Note the possible significance of the inscription, and the ambiguity of the word "second," and that Doomsday Clock is the second version of the Watchmen universe, and Wally West a second (at his time; overall, the third) version of the Flash. Either we have one watch or two; either way, they will turn out to be meaningful.

And what of the other Golden (or early Silver) Agers mentioned in "Screenland Secrets"?

• Rita Farr, here alleged to be the daughter of actor Frank Farr. Previously, the Doom Patrol's Elasti-Girl, debuting 1963, placing her birth in the Golden Age time frame.

• John Law, previously the All-Star Squadron's Tarantula, a writer in his day job.

• Frank Rock, Jackie Johnson, and Randy Booth, members of Easy Company. In his original bio, Johnson was a boxer, and Booth ("Tin Soldier") was an actor.

• Ted Grant, here on hand at Johnson's wedding. Previously, a boxer turned superhero as Wildcat of the Justice Society.

• Libby Lawrence, here Law's ex-wife. Previously athlete, turned superhero as Liberty Belle of the All-Star Squadron. In later incarnations, she married John Chambers ("Johnny Quick") and gave birth to the second Liberty Belle / Jesse Quick.

• Rachel Drake, here the actress who gave birth to Rita Farr. There is no Rachel Drake in DC continuity, but Rachel van Helsing was in a romance with Frank Drake, a direct descendant of Dracula, and it's possible that Rachel was or gave birth to the mother of Rita Farr.

Note that John Law's alibi for the murder of Coleman was his location across the city. That would hardly be an obstacle for many of the superpowered characters in our story, including Johnny Quick. Maybe the alibi only holds up because someone's superpowers are not taken into account, although Tarantula never possessed super speed.

If the Golden Age superheroes were removed from continuity but many of the individuals still lived, then there may be a backstory in which Dr. Manhattan or others connected to him arrived in the past and performed whatever actions necessary to prevent their lives as heroes. The ones mentioned in Doomsday Clock so far were born as normal people without superpowers. Perhaps a series of murders or other actions prevented the rise of the superheroes, one by one. For what it's worth, that was the subplot of a JLA/JSA crossover in which an evil Johnny Thunder on Earth One used the Thunderbolt to prevent the Justice League from existing. Controlling the existence/nonexistence of superheroes is also a theme in the Supermen Theory that's lurking offstage in Doomsday Clock, now seen to involve Metamorpho and Kirk Langstrom. Are the two subplots related?

And in our story? Old Johnny Thunder claims to have sent the Thunderbolt away. Why is he the face of the Justice Society in our story? It's worth pointing out two correspondences, perhaps meaningful. One, the original Charlton character upon whom Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias was based was nicknamed Thunderbolt. Two, Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt is one of the DC characters most similar to Dr. Manhattan in powers. It's likely that that similarity will play out. Did Dr. Manhattan take the place of the Thunderbolt? Did he sideline the Thunderbolt? Johnny Thunder was invented as a purely comic character in his original run, with Thunderbolt often having a laugh at Johnny's expense. If the Thunderbolt returns to challenge and defeat Dr. Manhattan in a head-to-head battle, that would be the ultimate victory of light-hearted storytelling over Alan Moore's grim vision in Watchmen. 

Retro Review: Seven Soldiers

Superman presents a certain kind of challenge that minor superheroes do not. That sentence describes an observation made by both the writer and the villains of Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers. A writer can change the small facts of the Man of Steel's life, place Superman in any of countless scenarios, put many words in his mouth, but the character must stay true to certain established truths, and there are limits to what a new story can get away with. A minor character, on the other hand, may be molded and manipulated to a far greater extent. That is what motivated Morrison to give the starring roles in his series to characters who had appeared in DC Comics before, but whose prominence ranged from second-tier (Zatanna) down to several tiers below that. Accordingly, Morrison was able to redefine the characters substantially, changing two of them from men to women, mutilating and killing another one, and so on.

The villains in the story, the murderous, gleefully corrupt Sheeda from Earth's future also decide not to include the leading figures of the Justice League in their plan. In a prequel printed in JLA Classified #1-3, the Sheeda attempt a frontal assault on the year 2005 and it does not go well. Neh-Buh-Loh, one of the Sheeda's warriors, stands atop a tall building and dares Earth to send its "world's finest" champions to fall at his feet, whereupon Superman flies out of the sky and effortlessly punches out Neh-Buh-Loh twice, unfazed by the villain's best blow. In response, the Sheeda retreat, with Neh-Buh-Loh warning "I have seen enough… I have tested my prey… When next my people come, it will be as whispers of death, unseen… goodbye, Superman…" This is, indeed, similar to the way Morrison kept the DC's heavy hitters out of his lineup, and it is more than that: Planned less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Seven Soldiers is the story of how a despicable enemy bent on the destruction of our civilization decides to strike by surprise in New York, wreaking havoc on the island of Manhattan. Sound familiar?

Seven Soldiers is thus a parable for our times, utilizing seven… actually, quite a bit more than seven… of DC's minor characters. The sprawling story is set in the DCU, uses DCU conventions, began with a prequel involving the DC's biggest stars, and has a menace that threatens the DC Universe, but with its focus on minor characters, was able to take risks that a series starring flagship characters could not. Morrison used that freedom with virtuoso skill, and crafted, in Seven Soldiers, one of the finest works that DC has ever published.

The structure is without an obvious peer. Morrison told the story in 30 issues consisting of single issues (Seven Soldiers #0 and #1) that bookend seven miniseries of four issues each. A reader may like one of these miniseries and dislike another, or like five and dislike two… but is likely to admire most of them and love some. Any of these miniseries can be read or re-read alone, but they are intertwined, and they work together to tell the story of one existential threat to the world.

Seven Soldiers and its various prequels present seven teams of seven: The original Seven Soldiers (1941), a Silver Age revival including Spider instead of Green Arrow, the Ultramarine Corps and the JLA in Morrison's JLA Confidential story, a lineup that fights and dies in Seven Soldiers #0, the Newsboy Army seen in flashbacks, and the lineup that defeats the Sheeda in Seven Soldiers #1. A shadowy group called the Time Tailors make an eighth group of seven – or group of eight – the number in these groups is also sometimes six, which is bad luck and portends defeat.

The fundamental inspiration for this series goes back to Mort Weisinger's introduction of the Seven Soldiers of Victory in Leading Comics #1, in 1941, when the seven heroes from five solo features joined forces to fight a master criminal named The Hand. A 1972 story in JLA #100-102 scripted by Len Wein revived the Seven Soldiers in a new battle against their first enemy, who, aided by a cosmic threat named the Nebula Man, made himself into a powerful force named the Iron Hand. Morrison pays homage to the original team by basing several members of his two lineups of Seven Soldiers upon the originals or their legacies. To complete the lineups, he uses or invents characters whose origins, in almost all cases, can be traced to other Golden Age characters or Jack Kirby inventions:

Seven Soldiers of Victory, 1941

Crimson Avenger

Shining Knight

The Vigilante

Green Arrow and Speedy

Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy

Seven Soldiers #0 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Vigilante (himself)

Gimmix (Star Spangled Kid's stepniece)

The Whip (The Whip's granddaughter)

I, Spyder (Spider's son)

Boy Blue (imitator)

Dyno-Mite Dan (imitator)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Seven Soldiers #1 team (Golden Age inspirations)

Shining Knight (retcon of original Shining Knight, now a woman)

Guardian (retcon of original)

Zatanna (daughter of Zatara)

Klarion (retcon of original)

Mister Miracle (successor to the original)

Bulleteer (imitator, not by choice)

Frankenstein (DC character adapted from the novel)

One immediately notices an overlap in the starring lineups – as Zatanna says, "it's like there's mystery string holding everything together." Greg "Vigilante" Saunders is a member of the original and SS #0 lineups, while Bulleteer is a member of the SS #0 lineup (though absent) and the SS #1 lineup. But there are also overlaps in the supporting casts. Many of these come from a group of child crimefighters called the Newsboy Army (patterned closely on Jack Kirby's Newsboy Legion). Their heyday was decades ago, but many of them survive and surface throughout Seven Soldiers, having aged enough that their reappearances as adults make the reveals of their identity surprising. Another form of string holding things together are cameos that the cast of one miniseries make in the others. This includes the stars, the bystanders, and especially the villains.

Morrison's villains, as in several of his other works, arrive via a time loop: From Earth's future, the Sheeda prey on their world's own past, targeting the best and most prosperous eras, using evil magic and science and mind control powers – tiny fairies who ride mosquitoes like winged horses, and attach to a good person's spine in order to turn them bad. We see them topple Camelot and make small raids on other times leading up to a full assault on 2005 and the era of superheroes. They use a giant spider as bait to attract one lineup of Seven Soldier to Miracle Mesa, Arizona, and then wipe out the group that Vigilante had recruited for the purpose. Aware that they cannot defeat the Justice League, the Sheeda plan a sneak attack on New York, and are on guard watching out for any group of seven heroes who might organize to stop them. Along the way, in the seven miniseries, we see how seven heroes – some of them old, some new, and many of them very unlikely – take their places in the battle to come.

Shining Knight is Ystina, a young woman posing as a male knight named Justin, who sees her Camelot in the final stages of its fall to the Sheeda. She enters their time machine, Castle Revolving, and in her escape, inadvertently ends up in modern-day Los Angeles. Don Vincenzo, a mob boss, who is one of the Newsboy Army grown up (and turned bad) ends up with Ystina's winged horse, Vanguard. At the end of her miniseries, she is in combat with the Sheeda queen, Gloriana Tenebrae, who does not fear Ystina because she is only one, and prophecy says that seven will defeat the Sheeda.

Jake Jordan is a "big, tough" former police officer who is haunted by a deadly mistake that he made on the job. He applies for a job as a hero/journalist (a la Clark Kent?) with the Manhattan Guardian newspaper, whose boss happens to be another of the Newsboy Army grown up (or, to be precise – grown old, but not "up"). Donning a costume and shield as the Manhattan Guardian, he soon finds himself fighting pirates who live in the tunnels under the New York subway system, and ends his miniseries protecting his boss from the Sheeda.

Zatanna is by far the most famous of the characters in this series. A former member of the Justice League, she is psychologically broken and lacks the confidence to use her spellcasting power. We see in flashbacks that she has killed several people close to her in a mystic miscalculation, and the guilt of her role in Identity Crisis is also haunting her. She acquires a young sidekick named Misty, who is as mysterious as her name indicates, and who proves to be, unwillingly, heir to the Sheeda throne. Zatanna is being stalked by a magical villain named Zor, a Golden Age villain powerful enough to challenge the Spectre ("he brags that he brought the wrath of God to its white and wobbly knees," a feat he achieved in More Fun Comics #55 way back in 1940). Zatanna overcomes Zor with cleverness and boldness, so she and Misty can prepare for their key roles in fighting the Sheeda.

Perhaps Morrison's greatest invention in Seven Soldiers is Limbo Town, the world of Klarion the Witch Boy, where an isolated, underground community displaying puritanical severity (and fashion) follows black magic instead of Christianity. They are the Lost Colony of Jamestown, whose mysterious word "Croatoan" scrawled on a tree is the name of their new god. In the centuries since their disappearance, they have lived and bred underground after an early generation was raped by the Sheeda king, Melmoth. In a stroke of brilliance, Morrison concocts an army of zombie laborers who are the revived ancestors of Limbo Town residents, called "grundies," and possessing the general traits of longtime DC villain Solomon Grundy. Klarion, the quintessential small-town boy dreaming of a larger world, escapes upwards from Limbo Town to the subways of New York, where he almost meets the Guardian, and then spends some time in the surface world, known as Blue Rafters to his people, attracting the attention of his ancestor Melmoth, and setting the stage for Klarion to join the battle against the Sheeda.

Mister Miracle, like the Guardian, is a Jack Kirby character whom Morrison recast with an African American man instead of a white man. Shilo Norman was a youth serving as a minor character in Kirby's original stories, but in Seven Soldiers has grown up to adopt the identity, not as a superhero, but as a super celebrity escape artist. We see him at the top of his fame and renown, making his greatest escape ever from a miniature black hole, before things start to go wrong. We learn, and then he learns, that the people around him are the living embodiments of Darkseid and his cronies, living on Earth in human bodies. Darkseid tries to break Shilo Norman, but finds it more difficult than he imagined, and Shilo is still intact, a few lifetimes in alternate timelines later, and ready to fight Darkseid and his allies, the Sheeda.

Of all the Seven Soldiers, none is less enthusiastic about being a superhero than Alix Harrower. At the age of 27, Alix found out the hard way that her husband was living – at least in his own mind – a double, or perhaps triple, life. His attempt to give himself superpowers cost him all three of those lives, and gave Alix a super-hard metallic coating that she didn't want and couldn't undo. Thus, her husband's dream of imitating the Golden Age's Bulletman and Bulletgirl left her an unhappy widow who had no choice, medically, financially, or spiritually, but to begin a new existence as Bulleteer. As her miniseries ends, she is driving with her husband's psychotic cyber-girlfriend, ostensibly to a hospital, but unbeknownst to her, right into the middle of the battle with the Sheeda.

Frankenstein – or rather, Frankenstein's monster – is a cultural icon greatly predating superheroes. Morrison's version of Frankenstein, however, is a gun-toting badass who has been fighting crime for over a century, and is soon recruited by S.H.A.D.E. to fight as a government operative. On Mars, Frankenstein learns that he is immortal because his blood contains the essence of Lord Melmoth, which makes him the third major character in the story to owe his life to that villain. Less than grateful to Melmoth, Frankenstein leaves him to be eaten by monsters and excreted, still sentient, as their dung. Then, sent by S.H.A.D.E. one billion years into the future, he attacks the Sheeda capital and goes into the series finale mid-battle with Gloriana Tenebrae.

Seven Soldiers borrows several elements from Wein's JLA #100-102, including the fact that someone among the heroes must die at the end – a promo line echoed at the end of each miniseries' issue #4. In Wein's story, Crimson Avenger's sidekick Wing had died in the past and Red Tornado dies in the present. In Morrison's epic, it's Mister Miracle who dies, being summarily executed by Boss Dark Side after giving his life to rescue the ancient superhero Aurakles – a clever fusion on Morrison's part of the cosmic being Oracle from Wein's story (Oracle being highly reminiscent of Marvel Comics' The Watcher) and Greek mythology's Hercules. Fortunately, being the greatest escape artist ever, Shilo Norman escapes from the grave just as readily as he did from the black hole, and he's alive again in Final Crisis; it fits his showman shtick that we have no idea how he performed either of those impossible escapes.

In the battle of Manhattan, every member of the Seven Soldiers plus an ally or two plays his or her part, even though they never meet together as a group of seven in one place and one time, which is what allows them to avoid being detected as a threat by the Sheeda. And this is the essential, ironic, and heroic triumph of the story: Just as the Sheeda can attack our civilization so effectively because they launch a sneak attack and thereby avoid the Justice League, so the Seven Soldiers can attack the Sheeda so effectively, because the Seven Soldiers launch a sneak counterattack against them! In the years soon after September 11, this is nice spiritual salve for having, ourselves, suffered a sneak attack.

The finale is beautiful, chaotic choreography. Some of the Seven Soldiers have weapons drawn, Zatanna casts a spell to unite their actions, many spring into action though they have little idea what they are doing, and finally, Bulleteer is a weapon, and the Sheeda are overthrown, saving the DCU from them, for now. Darkseid skulks away to launch the threat in Final Crisis, which preserves the essential dynamic that runs through Seven Soldiers – nothing is ever really over, and a mystery string unites one team and one battle and one enemy to the next. The Seven Soldiers move on, the Sheeda move on (now led by Klarion), and the stage is set for the next big story. Morrison gave his Mister Miracle and Frankenstein significant supporting roles in Final Crisis, and Zatanna retains her stature as a fan favorite, but otherwise, the Seven Soldiers have remained obscure.

The story has a higher level, seen at its beginning and end as well as in the Zatanna and Guardian miniseries. As a means of explaining the mystery string that ties everything together, Morrison shows us a group of seven Time Tailors, the Unknown Men of Slaughter Swamp. These are comic book writers, and putting the writers themselves into the story is something Morrison has done in Animal Man and elsewhere. Though they all look alike – somewhat like Morrison himself – they represent all the writers over the years, certainly including Len Wein, Jerry Siegel, Mort Weisinger, and all the rest who number far more than seven. Morrison shows the Time Tailors doing what writers usually do – using their godlike powers to change characters, often to the characters' dismay. They make I, Spyder more interesting for this story, but doom him to an unpleasant fate. They ruin the Newsboy Army, giving them adult vices and killing most of them off. Zatanna manages to pop out of the story to interact with them directly, which helps her orient correctly for her place in the final battle, and they reward her by disposing cruelly of Zor in the final issue – as it is explained that Zor's vast powers are because he is really one of them, a Time Tailor who exists in the story itself.

Seven Soldiers is a triumph because Morrison capitalizes on its characters' statures as characters that are interesting within the DCU, but are obscure enough that he could do just about whatever he wanted with them. He ties Golden Age stories together with current-day big-time events and works his post-modernist magic into a sprawling 30-issue epic that flies in many different directions before all coming together at the end. Most of these characters are unlikely to headline again on a front cover anytime soon, if ever, and seen in that respect, Seven Soldiers is an epic and a mini-universe that had a definite beginning, middle, and end and is now over and done with. It showed that a respectably large audience will pay attention to obscure characters if their story is handled with care, even if that is not a potential that has not been realized again in the decade since Seven Soldiers ended.