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The Menace of ... Mr. Nebula!

Back in the deep, dark days of the Giffen / DeMatteis Justice League, DC's foremost superhero team wallowed in absurdity and slapstick, producing a number of genuinely humorous moments amid disposable and predictable sight gags. Much of the humor owed to the the inability of the Leaguers of that era to get along with one another, particularly with the chronic irritation provided by Guy Gardner.

However, pie-in-the-face only goes so far; and Giffen, who enjoys moments of scathing insight, also dabbles occasionally in bona fide satire. A previous column in this series treats his sendup of the "Reign of the Superman" story arc, as Giffen viewed it, in Image Comics' Trencher (discussed here).

Satire, if seriously pursued, honors neither persons, nor titles, nor publishing companies. So, therefore, Giffen took on one of the most recognizeable of Marvel Comics' intellectual properties, both paying homage and sneering in a single stroke that confronted the assembled Leaguers with a doom of ugly ornaments, ill-considered color schemes, and grotesquely stylish conglomerations of kitsch.

Open Season on Galactus

Once upon a time, Jack Kirby's Galactus stood as a compelling and original menace representative of a vital era of virile storytelling much lamented since the passing of comics to another generation. However, like all godlike and presumably omnipotent characters, either hero or villain, he got old fast. By the seventies, very little new remained for writers to say or do with the character, but, unfortunately, he still keeps cropping up in stories.

In fact, Galactus, Eater of Worlds, has returned to haunt the Marvel Universe so many times that we can consider him more of a benchmark than a menace. Marvel shows the relative strengths or weaknesses of its first-tier characters by showing how easily or narrowly they deal with Galactus. The foregone conclusion of his defeat need no longer even trouble the storyteller. As early as 1983, in Bob Layton's Hercules: Prince of Power limited series, Galactus did little more than provide ironic observations and the occasional straight line to a Hercules somewhat akin to the version from Marvel's comics in the sixties and somewhat akin to a tradition of massively muscled but stupid superheroes like Wonder Wart-Hog, Megaton Man, and the Tick.

Galactus became a cliche, and rather an annoying one. Such weakness attracts parody as blood attracts sharks, and Keith Giffen sometimes gets his fangs out when the opportunity seems particularly ripe.

The Cosmic Interior Decorator

Justice League Quarterly #2, from Spring 1991, began with the passing of Mr. Nebula through a defenseless solar system. He waved one gigantic hand, and then, in the words of the book, "What was once a world like any other becomes -- TACKY, TACKY, TACKY!" Dismissing the groans of the miserable denizens of the planet he has just redecorated, Mr. Nebula retired to his ship and vowed to impose good taste on the universe even unto redecorating every planet in existence. Then he recalled that his herald (the "Scarlet Skier," whomever that may suggest) had not yet returned with the location of the next world to redeem through decor.

Nebula's soliloquy resonated with both one-liners and overtones of the moody musings of the incurable Galactus from the heyday of Marvel's Fantastic Four. As he launched a probe into space to locate his wayward herald / flunky / gofer, the scene shifted to the next target in Mr. Nebula's unending rampage of desolation through color scheme, our own fragilely hospitable earth.

Already, at this early stage in the story, Giffen and DeMatteis (but probably mostly Giffen) took Marvel to task for a history of voluminous and flatulent outpourings of hyperloquacious melodramatic angst. The hunger that drives Galactus to eat worlds like popcorn across the aisle reappered in Mr. Nebula as a self-indulgent vanity and compulsion to extort external validation and recognition for his efforts to drape the universe in fuscia, mauve, teal, and lavender. Had either Stan Lee or Jack Kirby seen this piece, one could predict the reactions that would have followed: from Lee, silent bewilderment from a man who seldom stops talking; and from Kirby, either purple-faced wrath or a deafening barrage of uncontrolled laughter when he saw the justice to the barb. More likely, though, both men had reached a point perhaps twenty years previously where their skins would have thickened enough to repel the stray inconvenient bullet.

Yet the satire marched proactively onward. In Justice League headquarters, from a day when the League headquartered on earth and contained a varying cast of fifteenth-stringers who seldom qualified for distinct footnotes, the Red Skier and his companion/nuisance, A Green Lantern named G'Nort (who mostly resembled an anthropomorphic Schnauzer in the Haight-Ashbury version of a Green Lantern uniform) discussed the unease shown by the red-skinned alien.

Through the Skier, the story set its barbs against the excesses of the Silver Surfer book of the 1960s. The Skier morbidly dwells, at great verbal lengths, over the spaceways he can no longer travel. He suffers through oratory, citing the windbag disciplines he learned as a student of the "Manga Khan School of Melodrama." Then, rather than paralleling the story of Norrin Radd's abandonment to a terrestrial existence, the Skier reproached G'Nort for his role in stranding the Skier on the earth. G'Nort, whose efforts at heroism frequently left a higher casualty count among his allies than his enemies, had destroyed the Skier's extraplanetary drive components from his space-ski harness.

Tribute and foreshadowing having consumed as much of the page count as story pacing would allow, the Skier observed Mr. Nebula's probe device approaching him through the skies outside the window by which he spewed his ceaseless chatterings of hystrionic self-pity. Although either superhero had what it took to fail miserably at whatever he chose to attempt, they find that together they fail to contain the probe even more effiently than they might have acting solo. The Scarlet Skier realizes that now, Nebula's probe having signaled him about the location of both the Skier and new lands to decorate, that the interior decorator of the cosmos must soon come to earth, as surely as your favorite comics titles get canceled.

Mr. Nebula nodded with recognition as he traced the probe back to earth. That "dismal" planet, he murmured to himself, required his newest and most extreme experiments. This, to him, represented aesthetic destiny for a world of such questionable artistic merit. "Look at that sky!" Nebula observed. "The sickest shad of blue I've ever laid eyes on!"

The Making of Mr. Nebula

Having taken on both Galactus and the Silver Surfer - and to hell with the Geneva Convention - Giffen (and DeMatteis) persisted in their onslaught of the edifice of the Galactus mythos. Nil inultum remanebit, one might observe: In the end, nothing will remain unscathed. So, therefore, the narrative called for a description of the origins of Mr. Nebula, just as the recurrent intrusions of Galactus had invited the creation of an origin story for him.

Therefore, the Skier explains to the Leaguers the nature of the threat they face. It came about because of the incidents on the planet Kvetch in the Kvell star system. Two Lords of Order, named St'nn and Jakk, decided to go slumming among the natives that inhabited Kvetch, a humanoid species called Shiksas. Said Lords of Order, having consumed way too much local booze, decided to clear their heads in a local temple.

A presumptuous and arrogant priest named Kirtann-Rodd attempted to eject the two Lords of Order, not desiring that anyone see his efforts to redecorate their temple. However, Jakk and St'nn had already seen the results of Rodd's incomplete decoration, and cared neither for it nor his hospitality; the angry St'nn, tiring of his sass, blasted him with beams from his eyes to send him to hell. Having disposed of the insubordinate decorator, Jakk and St'nn therewith stomped away to experiment somewhere else in universe-creation, forgetting altogether about the fate of the unfortunate victim of St'nn's wrath.

Meanwhile, Kirtann-Rodd found himself in a classic Silver Age Steve Ditko swirly-space. Rodd entered "a dimension of unconnectedness, of enformed madness, of swirling, garish colors and unbelievable, outrageous forms!" This unbelievable ugliness struck him as a theophany, since the aesthetic atrocities of this place seemed to confirm a lifetime of atrocities against taste he had perpetrated as a designer. An immeasurable span of time passed, and Rodd witnessed a rip between realities that let him see into our own, bland universe.

At that point, he knew he had a destiny. He would remake the gray dullness of our universe according to his uncompromising (and bad) tastes. Eons away from material reality had reshaped his being, making him godlike and probably mad; and Mr. Nebula emerged into our universe to infect it with the colorful landscapes that previously existed only within his damaged psyche.

Nebula's Rampage

In rapid succession, the influential figures of the Justice League grumbled about possible avoidance strategies. Batman eavesdropped and wisely departed, eager to leave this absurd problem in the hands of an absurd Justice League that probably deserved this kind of abuse. First sighting, therefore, fell to a Russian submarine crew that encountered an enormous pair of legs standing on the ocean floor.

Beginning at random with land masses he created for the occasion, and reworking the stray aircraft unfortunate enough to enter his field of vision, Mr. Nebula moved toward more fertile horizons to redecorate. He made landfall at the Brooklyn Bridge, attended by the army, the Justice League of America, and what members of Justice League International that could cross the Atlantic in time for the confrontation. With a gesture, Nebula turned Brooklyn lavender as onlookers gasped in disgust; and a heedless G'Nort, convinced that a simple solution would contain the intruder, froze the river, sending Mr. Nebula on a massive pratfall.

While the overburdened Leaguers attempted to contain the resulting tidal wave, Nebula reworked the Brooklyn Bridge as a massive flowered arch. But Silver Fox and Ice took matters into their own hands, invading Nebula's ear canal in order to assault his inner ear. The resulting festival of da-glo emesis threatened to submerge portions of New York waist-deep, but did serve to slow Mr. Nebula long enough for the Martian Manhunter to attempt to reason with the deranged extradimensional intruder.

Vegas as Salvation

Stories featuring the Martian Manhunter often achieve resolution through his mental powers, which allow him an insight that cuts the Gordian knot of the perpetual superheroic slugfest. In this tale, we have such an example, for the Martian's probes into the mind of the Scarlet Skier provided him with a hunch he played upon in his conversation with the temporarily distracted (and post-emetic) Mr. Nebula.

The Manhunter chose to feed Nebula's ego, saying that on earth, uniquely among the worlds that Nebula had visited and distressed with his handiwork, people had recognized his greatness. On their own, he said, humanity had attempted to realize Mr. Nebula's aesthetic vision in its architecture in one small location; but the decorator's intervention might destroy this emerging culture in the womb if he did not allow it to develop. Therefore, the Martian led Mr. Nebula out into the desert to show him this seed of a vision he claimed humanity and Nebula shared.

Mr. Nebula spied the vista of Las Vegas and erupted in tears, realizing at that moment that his dream represented something worthwhile; that somewhere his work meant something and the locals appreciated his grandeur; and that the seed he had spent ages planting had taken root in terrestrial soil. Vegas validated him, redeeming his mission, and a cheerful Nebula returned to the stars, leaving humanity to its mission of correcting the bland and dreadful landscapes that crassly infested its surface.

In Defense of Silliness

Disposable escapism? Perhaps. The whole "comedy Justice League" notion has fallen into a rather humorless disrepute, and a lot of folks would prefer to avoid talking about this period of the book altogether. However, in an age when comics had begun taking itself seriously enough to describe itself as capital-c "Comics," in an age of countless self-important pretenses, comics needs the occasional jester to shake off the calcified self-importance.

While this kind of self-parody may not represent a commercially viable option for comics in the long run - and JLA would likely continue this approach if the receipts justified it - it does provide an antidote to an age of high seriousness. Forget salvation through the Source, disregard redemption through connection to the comic-book equivalent of divine powers. To straighten things out, sometimes it takes Vegas.