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Hellcat: the Maudlin Lazarus

Some superheroes have died and returned amidst much hoopla, followed by some short-term soul-searching and a rapid return to normalcy. Consider, for instance, the death and return of Superman, whom no one believed DC intended to stay dead.

A superhero's place in the pecking order, perhaps, determines the poignancy of the story which returns him or her from the afterlife, with increasingly obscure characters receiving increasingly trivial treatment. Thus, Hellcat - resurrected for Steve Engelhart to write in a recent Marvel Comics series - reappears to no particular purpose and with noticeably inadequate explanation.

The transition back to the living from her dubious place in a cartoon version of hell rests on fairly flimsy grounds; and the nature of her book, as a figure returned from hell to fight creatures in hell, reflects the difficulties a writer must face in a continuity-heavy editorial model when resurrecting dead superheroes.

Obsolescence and Death

Superhero comics have a problem that centers around a glut of superheroes. Both DC and Marvel Comics have stables of superheroes including more colorful characters than the market can use; one could conservatively estimate that Marvel has ten superheroes for every one that it uses in print, and DC may have three (or more) times that number.

What, though, can writers do with these characters? Some of them become the supporting cast of other books - which happened to Green Lanterns Guy Gardner and John Stewart; some of them make occasional and fleeting appearances in the annual megacrossover event - which happened to Firestorm and Outsiders remnants Geo-Force and Katana - and others play the role of pawn sacrifice when a story needs a cheap way to crank up the pathos.

For some, events like the death of the Red Bee in All-Star Squadron may seem like moving moments. But in the absence of any connection to or interest in the character, such as a reader might develop through reading previous stories with the figure in them, one sees here much the same phenomenon as the death of the red-shirted crew members of the Enterprise when they unwisely joined a mission to beam to the surface. The writers took a disposable character and, needing to demonstrate something with a death, killed him. But the anonymity or obscurity of these figures stripped the event of real pathos.

The Essential Scenario

In the Age of Grim and Gritty - sometimes described as the Age of Depressing and Unreadable Comics - Marvel Comics took some of its leftover properties, characters who couldn't maintain their own titles nor hang on to connections in group books for second-stringers, and made them a couple.

Back in the seventies, both Hellcat and the character-in-dubious-taste Damien Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, did time as members of the Defenders, a non-team composed of a shifting membership of characters. Perhaps a third of its membership belonged to the Avengers at one time or another; another third came from titles that had failed or tryouts that never caught on; and some belonged to the team as the only venue where they ever had appeared.

Since stories don't happen if things don't happen, sometimes writers do things just to create some motion, and these things don't have any independent logical reason to happen. I would describe the marriage of Patsy Walker, the Hellcat, to Damien Hellstrom, a rather inexplicable event - do guys with burning pentagrams on their chests turn her on, or did she just hope to marry up because he could provide some very prominent in-laws?

Regardless of why such a marriage might take place, Hellcat married Son of Satan, and, by the early nineties, Hellstrom began more and more to display his demonic heritage. At one particularly low point, he appeared as a scratchily-depicted stereotypical demon - goats' legs, horns, and all. Hellcat, for her part, did not cope particularly well with this; she stopped adventuring, went insane, started hearing voices, killed herself, and went to some comic book version of hell.

This created a difficult position for anyone who wanted to undo this unspeakably bad turn of events for the character. Even in comics, death can represent an obstacle; it took something like five and a half years, for instance, for DC to consider some kind of return for its Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. However, the dilution of death (and resurrection) through overuse would ultimately make it a trifling matter for Steve Englehart, the centrally interested party for this character, to have her back for a new series.

Almost casually, in a Thunderbolts book, Hawkeye and the Thunderbolts stole Hellcat back from hell. From there, she would go on to her own series - by Steve Englehart and Norm Breyfogle - where she became a demon fighter. But something about it defies any sense of plausibility...and how can a reader relate?

A Caricature of Soap-Opera Comics

For spawning a model of superhero comics as soap opera, Stan Lee still sometimes receives criticism, and sometimes receives analyses that sound more like abuse. Indeed, in the earliest days of his redefinition of the superhero comic's editorial model, one can see occasional - or frequent - excesses. The early years of Amazing Spider-Man provide a body of examples.

If having superheroes deal or fail to deal with the same sort of emotional crises that beset real people (or even soap opera characters) represents an unwelcome intrusion into a body of literature dealing with concepts like ingenuity and determination, what can we call having superheroes return from the dead and obsess about it?

In Hellcat's case the problem becomes even more bizarre than for other characters. Marvel (in an earlier incarnation) created her as Patsy Walker, a character for an altogether different genre of comics, then, in some quirky twist of Steve Englehart's tenure as the writer on Avengers, drafted her into the role of a superheroine. She took this role on the ashes of another failed character, "The Cat," who would become Tigra, a fusion that suggests the modern, even more bizarre syncresis of Hal Jordan and the Spectre.

That Hellcat got a few years of service between Avengers and Defenders attests somewhat to the determination of authors to use the character rather than the real appeal of the character. Marvel had tried and failed with a number of female characters (some of whom would ultimately enjoy better or worse treatment) in the seventies, including "Ms. Marvel," the "She-Hulk," "Spider-Woman" (3 versions and counting). Hellcat had to compete in an environment glutted already with more characters than Marvel could use.

Now, again, they return with her, which could become something good or could achieve about the same results as diving into an empty swimming pool: A quick sense of motion followed rapidly by impact with a solid, immovable surface. The amount of on-panel time the character spends in morbid self-obsession does not bode well for the future of the concept.

Precedents and Fatigue

Mythical cycles dating from Homeric times do contain tales of heroes rescuing the fallen from the underworld. Robert Graves, noting how commonly such stories appeared in the received religious literature of ancient cultures, saw in the hero the role of Harrower of Hell, a role not lost to modern religions.

However, compared to comic books, ancient religions and mythos tended to have a smaller cast and generally did not have to spike monthly sales figures with the gimmicky death of a hero. The role of the deity or hero that returned from the dead - such as Osiris, or Dionysus, or Adonis - remained rightly limited to very few episodes and very few decedents. Furthermore, a god or hero that returned from the dead generally did so in connection with the annual cycle of seasons, rising and failing in parallel either with the sun or with foliage.

Comic-book resurrections tend to become less and less meaningful as time goes on, however.

The more it happens, the cheaper it seems to get. So by the time we reach 2000 AD, all it really takes in a superhero comic to return someone from the dead is that someone go to the next world - even axiomatically inescapable places like hell - and haul out who they want back. The process has become simple enough that even Hawkeye can do it; this raises questions about that character's future, since Hawkeye lost a spouse some years back, and may decide to take a subway or taxicab to hell sometime and collect her back.

At this point, one need look at death in comics no more seriously than (say) a misdemeanor arrest - just show up with the bail and the prisoner can leave.

Odin as Policy Wonk

One may ask about the dubious and off-topic looking heading above. Nonetheless, I consider the policies of Marvel's Odin generally relevant here. Occasionally Thor whines to his father about some deserving hero, heroine, or love interest he would like to return from the clutches of Hela (or, as we might say, from death).

Odin, however, becomes philosophical about the balance of life and death and the domains which belong to Odin and those that do not, and fairly consistently declines to intervene in matters already decided in Death's favor.

If Odin recognizes his own limitations - including their moral aspect - regarding the theft of the dead, how cheesy must it appear when a nonsuper costumed adventurer like Hawkeye can just waltz into hell and bring people back?

Comics about resurrections used to involve some peculiar set of circumstances, or some universe (or multiverse) shaking cataclysm that turned the formalized Laws of Sane Reality and Disciplined Geometry upside down long enough for irrevocable changes to overturn. But now, if this story serves as a precedent, we only need send someone in a costume to duke it out with some cartoon demon, rescue whomever they want from death, and find some way back.

Death as an Editorial Problem

Once upon a time, comics did not allow things like death to happen to superheroes, partially because such things would cast a despondent pall on a formalistically optimistic medium. Those sub-genres that ignored this principal mostly withered under the restraints of the early Comics Code Authority. However, in a later, post-Stan Lee editorial model, one that attempted to connect superheroes more soundly to "reality," death became a real consequence.

Except, of course, that it didn't. The never-ending quest for interest-generating stunts, the long-term consequences of the continuity model, the demands of fans to revoke decisions to kill characters, and the real danger of a body count absorbing some of the better pieces in a company's stable of superheroes all act together to incline decisions where superheroes come back from the dead. It has become common - too common - so common that heroes can undo death simply by the deft administration of fisticuffs to whatever warden happened to guard the immortal remains of the deceased.

One inclines to ask "What does death really mean?" in the context of comics, particularly when the ability to breach that impermeable barrier becomes more and more frequent in comics stories. To a previous generation of writers it meant that a character went away and never came back, not later, not ever; but in modern superhero comics, the consequences of death seem similar to taking an unpleasant vacation. You go, you return, you complain, and the consequence ends there.