"There Could Be Survivors"

“I see the structure! I see it all!”

That’s Trish Starr, in Steve Gerber’s very last issue of Defenders.

Oh, who’s Trish Starr?

…You know, in a weird way I’m not sure I really want to tell you who she is. Not comprehensively, anyway – you see, I’ve just been thinking today about what a great comic Giant-Size Defenders #4 is, and how it’s almost like the Big Bang of Gerber’s Defenders run, the one indispensible piece of the puzzle that makes the whole thing hang together and make sense. Maybe that’s just my personal preference talking, but still…I can’t help thinking how nice and cute it would be to just leave GSD #4 out of this great big Defenders project completely, letting it remain forever essential, because forever mysterious…

I think I will do that, in fact. That doesn’t mean I require anyone else to shy away from it, understand! And it doesn’t mean I won’t tell you who Trish is, either.

As we’ve learned (or will learn, probably) from Ed, Kyle Richmond’s life as a hero is really rooted in a terrible car accident that happened years ago, when he was still in college – an accident that claimed both the life of his girlfriend, and his own chance at a sheltered, inconsequential future. So then Kyle becomes the Nighthawk of Roy Thomas’ Avengers, the posturing, villainous, degraded copy of Batman, the dissipated and unworthy foe of Daredevil…until he’s redeemed in the pages of The Defenders by (I think it was, yes of course it was) Len Wein. And then he wants to be a superhero, and change his life, thereby wiping away all his past guilt and self-loathing. Yes: forget that he was in the Squadron Sinister, forget that the college girlfriend died, forget that he was an immature profligacy who liked to play at importance…the new Kyle saw the altruism of superheroics as his salvation. The dashing costumes, the code-names, the special vehicles, the public respect…

Well…

Understand that Kyle is not a bad guy at this point, but a good guy. He really is. And he is altruistic. But he’s still got some growing up to do, anyway; as much as he’s successfully changed his spots – and he has, I’ll just stress that once again – he still isn’t too good at responsibility. He’s still only playing the part of new, serious Kyle, you see: the superhero costume and the happy-go-lucky banter and the pride in doing good are still only replacement-actions, shadow-play, substitutes for self-examination. Or even, possibly, for self-recrimination? Hmm…maybe because it seems like the universe has forgiven him, that means he’s relieved of the burden of facing and judging himself…could be. But as he’ll discover, such things can’t really be run away from…

Well, things go all right, for a while. Happy in the Defenders, wearing his new mask and costume, Kyle also finds luck in his reacquaintance with an old flame: Trish Starr, model, is fitting arm-candy for Kyle Richmond, playboy, but to the new Kyle she’s more than that, too…she’s hope, that his new life as a hero might also merit him a hero's reward: the potential for romantic happiness. So Trish is sort of a walking climax for Kyle, if you’ll pardon the expression – she represents a culmination, a completion, a pardon absolute…a paradise, that he might be permitted to simply step into…

A happy ending, naturally.

Well, we’ve all been there, so we know that things don’t usually work out that way…but Kyle doesn’t know this yet, and there’s the tragedy. Well, kind of. There’s another layer to this too, but…

Anyway…

Kyle and Trish are getting into a limousine on a glittering New York high-society evening, and it blows up. A bomb! Well, this is the world of comic books, the world where every meaning begins as an action…so of course it’s a bomb, instead of a teary talk about their relationship. Trish loses an arm. Kyle is more seriously injured, only saved by the fact that, as Nighthawk, his strength is doubled when the sun goes down. Yes, and it’s worth thinking about that it’s the Grandmaster’s magic potion that saved him, there… Still, he isn’t quite out of the woods yet: he’s in rough enough shape that it takes Dr. Strange to step in and save him for real (this sequence, in which Doc has to don a surgeon’s gown again for the first time since his spiritual awakening, is worth the whole price of admission itself – Gerber hits a lot of birds with a single stone here, in brief and expert strokes making Doc’s character absolutely come to life even as he uses it to echo Kyle’s own internal/external struggle, and at the same time demonstrating that it is really loyalty and friendship that binds the Defenders together, and not emergency after all), and when that’s all done with, the Defenders are together, and ready to track down the true villain of the piece, better known to you and I as the past…but then even the past can’t escape the past, you see, so that’s a point in our heroes’ favour: the cosmic force of Contingency (that we sometimes call Irony, or more simply even than that, time and space) is mighty indeed, in these situations, and the villains can control it no better than the heroes can… and here’s an audacious beginning to the conversation about difference and separation and marginality that will run through the Sons of the Serpent arc, in which it is changes of state that determine outcomes (rather than simple calculations of force and counterforce), and where true power consists not in plans, but in the ability to take advantage of the inevitability of accident and eventuation…

But, I digress. We were talking about Trish Starr, weren’t we? So let’s get back to her. In the end, as I’ve quoted before, “there was nothing [Kyle] could say that would induce her to stay”, and the reason for this is Contingency, too: having plunged into his past again, Kyle finds that in actuality he isn’t yet the “new Kyle” who can walk off into the sunset with his perfect fulfillment…and Trish, having been equally so plunged, finds that she’s equally unsuited for such happily-ever-afters – what she needs is not the illusion of safety and completion, but the fact of life and living, which is the confrontation with reality. And what she says to Kyle about this might be put into some very familiar shorthand: she needs time. She needs space.

So she takes it.

And, maybe she gives it, too? Well, Kyle starts changing pretty fast, after this, and really changing…the “high-flying Nighthawk” he definitely isn’t, anymore. Pretty soon he’s deeply involved with his own conscience, with the consequences of action and inaction, with Headmen and baby deer, and ultimately with both truth, and responsibility. Kyle grows up; he undergoes a true awakening of the spirit (and remember, in comic books that doesn’t just mean having a little epiphany while sitting on the toilet, but actually physically duking it out with God, Death, and the forces of profundity and absurdity – Nighthawk dies a hundred times over the course of his life, and is reborn each time, both literally and figuratively, which if you think about it is an odd thing for a hero to do, even if he was once a villain), and eventually through his association with The Defenders he enters full adulthood for the first time.

Whereupon he finds Trish again, just when the reader has almost completely forgotten about her. And naturally she’s not a model anymore, just as he isn’t a playboy; those innocent days are over, for both of them. Instead, out in the desert (where things happen, don’tcha know), Trish has made a frustrated little utopian commune of hippie-holdouts work, and be successful. She’s found talents and enthusiasms she never knew she had, and pursued them, and even overtaken them; in short, she’s become independent, and real. But unfortunately, along with becoming real, she too has had a spiritual awakening in the comic-book sense, and it’s put her in danger: during their long separation, Trish has dabbled with magic and other dimensions no less than her old potential happily-ever-after has, but she hasn’t found the same thing.

Well, admittedly she hasn’t needed to. Kyle’s our hero, after all; Trish may be unique among a standard hero’s female accoutrements, in that she rejects her status of casualty of story, casualty of plot, but it’s Kyle’s journey that’s supposed to range through various concretizations of the psychology, and not Trish’s. She doesn’t wear her underwear on the outside! In fact, if you think about it, that’s why she leaves…but even as real as she is, as she seeks to become through leaving, the cosmic forces of absurdity the Defenders are so frequently arrayed against can still reach out and touch her, so she can always end up needing to be saved, anyway, despite her rejection of superheroic arm-candy-dom…well, hell, she’s just lucky she didn’t used to date Richard Rory, if you think about it…

And: is this sexism, perhaps? I’ll say no…actually I’d say “wait and see how this last issue works out”, except this is Steve Gerber, and sexism is something he’s really not too good at. Exploration of sex roles, yes: his typically realistic, independently-minded women usually must make us think about how paper-thin the characterizations of men are, when these women aren’t around…think Omega, people…and in this light it’s notable how often Gerber’s women end up departing from the boy’s-own narrative they start out in, because they’re too well-drawn to find it worth staying in. Here (I submit) is your adolescent male ineptitude, solipsistic pining, latency, whatever you want to call it, writ large and comicky in the same mode as a guy named Being beating up a guy named Becoming – and if its effect is to make the heroes see “their” women as enigmatic, unwinnable soul-objects, it still isn’t literary sexism, but it’s a social critique of literary sexism. Because it isn’t just that Trish leaves Kyle after being maimed, it’s that through Pro-Rata and the Human Turnip and Dr. Bong – even Winky-Man, god bless ‘im – still the only “man” Beverly wants to stay with is Howard, because Howard is a person just as she is…and so it’s Howard that takes her away from all those other distortedly “heroic” male protagonists-in-their-own-minds that would otherwise wish to make her into their own paper-thin arm candy – or even, let’s just go a step further down this road, it’s that Ted Sallis’ own distorted superhero story takes him away from Sainte-Cloud, the evanescent embodiment of a real woman, and a real relationship, that he can never have. Hey, if you want to really stretch the point you could even say it’s that Val is as utterly unconscious of Kyle’s initial attraction to her, as she is hostile to Jack Norriss’…but mostly there’s no need to stretch the point so far, because it isn’t that this is film noir or anything, and likewise it isn’t that Gerber’s women are all too pure and good for this world, it’s just that comic-book men don’t really live in the world, or they don’t want to, or they don't know how to, and so they always have to lose the girl because in the end they can’t understand her…even when she’s just their symbolic anima they lose her, for God’s sake, they give her up as an offering to their stunted psychological plot just like that, so how much more likely are they to lose her if she’s a real character…?

Well, it’s the same in life, of course; make no mistake, these are real-world issues, and if one wishes to get through them it's necessary to throw the stunted psychological plots all away. Which is harder than it sounds! Here's Kyle, just after insulting one of Trish's pet hippies:

KYLE: I meant it, Doc – the apology to that junior-grade Ben Cartwright --

DOC: Perhaps. And yet --

KYLE: It came out sounding like another attack, I know! It's Trish! Any mention of her --

DOC: -- Triggers an habitual cynical response in you. [...] The pattern is no longer useful to you, Kyle --

Truer words, of course, and we might almost do without the superheroic window-dressing completely here...however why just tell, when we can also show? The Kyle-and-Trish story is all about walls and boundaries already, so it's only natural that Doc and Kyle crash into one, Trish breaks through one, and Shazana, our villain, tunnels out of one. And we'll get right back to that, but first...

Shazana? Yes, it's Shazana of all people, last seen way back in Strange Tales or something, a fill-in villain in Lee and Ditko’s epic Mordo/Dormammu/Eternity storyline, which oddly enough was named by Steven Grant (was it Steven Grant?) as his pick for being the first graphic novel in comics…which assertion subsequently sparked my thought that Gerber’s Defenders was the longest graphic novel in comics…

Weird, huh?

Anyway, Shazana. There’s some interesting stuff here. Under attack from the tremendous power of Dormammu way back in Strange Tales number whatever, Doc flees this dimension rather than face annihilation, his flight being driven along by that same force that would otherwise have destroyed him. Ah, Doc and his magic Judo all the time! It’s great. Anyway, the effect is, he gets lost beyond the villains’ ability to find him: basically by the time the power of Dormammu’s “I-Hate-Doctor-Strange” spell is used up, it’s thrown Doc completely out of the usual dimensional neighbourhood, all the way out to the…

Well, do I really have to say it, at this point?

Doc lands in a faraway dimension – maybe the furthest dimension, for all we know – in a highly weakened state, and is captured by its evil queen-who’s-usurped-her-good-sister’s-kingdom…this is Shazana, a man-eating virago whose magical power is stolen, counterfeit, the product of an artifact concealed within her throne. So we know what she is right away, don’t we? She’s the dragon that keeps its heart in a jar; she’s the Wagnerian villain who trades love for the object of power; she’s the unbalanced force of the unconscious that’s always hungry no matter how much it eats, because it’s cut off from itself. Lee and Ditko do these utterly power-obsessed characters very well, chiefly because they treat them simply, I think: like Mordo, there’s nothing particularly psychologically deep about Shazana. She just lusts after power, and that’s it. She has no other feelings, and basically she’s irredeemable because she's one-dimensional. To put it succinctly: she’s a femme fatale. And so naturally she (I think!) tries to co-opt Doc, maybe tries to talk him into being her consort, and together they’ll rule the universe or somesuch…I actually don’t remember if she does that, isn’t that terrible? But at least we can probably be fairly sure that she means to subsume Doc in some way – he ends up in a dungeon until she can find a way to use him.

Where in a little while he recovers his strength, and then trounces Shazana: he sucks up her concealed mystic heart into his all-seeing amulet (awfully Freudian in here suddenly – better go put on a sweater), leaving her completely shattered…then he puts the good sister on the throne, and takes off back to the main action. Oh, using the energy of the dragon’s heart artifact for propulsion, of course…

Yikes. How simple it all is.

But then now here is Shazana again, after all this time, having hated Doc for just ages and ages…and she’s studied hard, and learned her own tricks: no more dragon’s heart for her! Instead, by possessing Trish, she's put her heart in a jar...except of course it isn't a matter of “putting” at all, is it? Because as Trish has ever-more-assiduously pursued her own identity out in the hippie desert, she's ever-more-thoroughly isolated herself, too...and Shazana can use Trish as a conduit to get from her world to ours precisely because she embodies the end-point of that isolation, of that endless and fruitless pursuit, when it no longer even matters what one is pursuing. But though Trish may have gotten lost in search of herself, and gone into dark places, she hasn't given up: to keep Shazana from using her successfully, she's put herself into a mystical coma-state, and so closed the door on the unbalanced, subconscious invader. Yeah, subconscious: because structurally you could certainly argue that Shazana and Trish have been through exactly the same thing in terms of being dealt with offhandedly by the heroic plot points of another’s story...tragic girlfriend or femme fatale, it’s all the same anyway, just another way of saying victim, casualty…so Shazana is Trish's natural dark side in this sense, the side that gravitates more to hatred than to growth, more to revenge than to reconciliation. It is, perhaps, a necessary implication: back in GSD #4, we saw how the situations of Doc and Kyle were each used to explain one another, to explain different ways in which escape from the past is impossible...so should it surprise us to see this again, upon revisiting that story's biggest loose end? But of course we've also been seeing this all along: to take just one example, in MTIO we also saw Ben and Val commiserating with each other over the problem of how to let the implications of the past go…and soon, I’m sure, we’ll see a couple more Defenders enlarging on each other’s experience, for the edification of the readers…you know, when I can just get around to that…

But now we're back, we're back, we're back, so let's move along to the next part of the story, where Doc and Kyle slam into a mystic barrier, and Doc zaps them into their hero-clothes, because (he even says so) those are the identities that are needed now. And Kyle's expression betrays a certain – what? Distaste? – at having to turn into Nighthawk instead of remaining as himself, but Doc's righter than he knows: we've reached a point where the underwear absolutely must go back on the outside, or nothing about how distasteful that is can be worked through. Doc frees Trish from her self-sacrificing mystic coma, and is surprised by Shazana's appearance, and then Kyle and Doc and Trish are all captured, and put into a box-like mystical cage created from their own life-forces…so if they shatter the cage, they die. Nasty! Well, we’ve seen roughly this kind of thing before, in the pages of the Headmen/Nebulon arc, where Plant-Man traps the Defenders in similar fashion, but it’s turned around a bit, here. Turned around and pointed, if you will…because Doc and Kyle are each dressed in their typical superhero get-up, the meaning is pretty clear: this is where their “life-forces” are truly located, in these costumes and masks and paraphenalia.

At least, is this not how Trish and Shazana must see it?

But of course that isn’t right: we’ve gotten to the point now where Doc and Kyle are as much themselves to us when they’re wearing regular clothes and eating hot dogs, as when they’re all zipped up and punching out the Wrecking Crew. Well, they aren’t even superheroes anymore, really, if you think about it…and besides, the whole point about Trish is that she wasn’t a casualty of plot back in GSD #4. Maybe she was “supposed” to be, but she wasn’t…and by the same token neither is she (by any stretch) the “good girl” that Shazana's sister was, so that particular dichotomy of acceptable/unacceptable femaleness doesn't apply here, and so...and so...something’s up, it seems. Something (you might say) doesn’t quite fit into this pattern…this pathologically repetitive old pattern, that's no longer useful to you, Kyle…

We'll see it break down in just a moment. Back at Doc's sanctum, the rest of the Defenders (Hulk, Val, Clea, the Red Guardian, and Jack Norriss) are hanging out...Jack is even on the phone, answering a wrong number.

JACK: The guy wanted the NYC Tourist Bureau – he was lost somewhere in the Bronx. He sounded so pitiful, I hadda give him directions myself, or --

Yes, Jack? “Or” what? You couldn't live with yourself otherwise? How things have changed, here. What a world of implication lies in this casually responsible act of Jack's, hanging on the phone, giving some lost out-of-towner directions...

And then suddenly Clea gets a brainflash: it's Doc, using Trish's mental link with Shazana as a relay to contact his comrades. In a flash, Shazana has Trish out of the magic box, ready to chop off her head in order to sever that last link with life...but also in a flash, the other Defenders are there to stop her. Well, great! But the most interesting thing for us must be what happens to the life-force prison that Doc and Kyle are still inside of. There they are, imprisoned within the four walls of their own roles and stories, and to break free of that confinement is death. Well, it might’ve worked on the Avengers! But it doesn’t work here, because the Defenders aren’t exactly what they appear to be, and haven’t been so for some time. As in the Sons of the Serpent arc, Clea makes contact with Doc’s mind…and the thing so hard to understand in the ordinary superhero sense, here, is that Clea is a Defender too. Not an ex-Defender being brought in to save the rest of the team as The Old Order Changeth – not “once an Avenger, always an Avenger” – but still and constantly a Defender, a Defender right now, just because she is. Because she happens to be. And in fact a lot of people “happen to be” Defenders, all the time, continuously: the Defenders have no edge to them. How could they, when out on the edge is the very place they live? Four walls and a floor and a ceiling in Shazana’s trap, but the Defenders are more amorphous, more many-sided, more no-sided than that…a non-team with no membership list, where everyone’s a supernumerary, they can’t be contained in four walls: why for God's sake they even spend their time giving directions to turned-around tourists! Why, they aren't superheroes or costumes or signal devices at all! They're something else, instead – people – and in the end this unexpected fact is what saves them. Shazana’s neatly-designed Defender-identity trap tries to expand to include Clea, as un-superheroic a superhero as has ever existed, in fact she has never even been one, she is a female accoutrement of heroism too, but not in The Defenders she isn’t, where people change, and women count…and of course the cage hasn’t been built to take her in, so it can’t; it just isn’t flexible like that. It can’t take in new ideas, or ideas that don’t fit the way it thinks they should. So it falls apart. And then our heroes save the day, disarm Shazana’s otherdimensional army, return all to normal. And Trish is fine, recovered from her possession.

Or, is she fine?

Would you be fine?

Hmm. Well, maybe “fine” is overrated, that is if it ever even exists in the first place. Because doesn't “fine” just mean “happy”, in this sense? And what in the hell is happy, to a living and breathing human being? Kyle and Trish walk off into the desert to spend some time together, which is nice. They certainly deserve it. After all, they’ve both made mistakes, they’ve both been disillusioned, they’ve both been used…they’ve both been good and bad and purposeless and driven, and they’ve even both died, for heaven’s sake, or at least symbolically died, in the name of the plot…and they’ve both seen things they shouldn’t have, in esoteric locations, only to find that the things seen in the esoteric locations are no more terrifying than the things seen in the mundane ones, because chance and Contingency and absurdity and horror and the past enter into all things…

Which may just leave us back where we started, with the useful little moral that says even if victims remain victims no matter what they do, anyway they don’t have to be casualties. But I ask you, is this not a moral particularly well-taken in the context of an exploration of sex roles? The puerile plots of romantic wish-fulfillment are really only made to be broken, in life just as much as in comic books, and not just because a relationship founded on solipsism, objectification, and artificial roles and expectations won't work, but because ultimately (just as the old storybook line seems to tell us) to wish to be happy is to wish to come to an end, and to wish to cease making human value out of experience. Nietzsche said (at least I think it was Nietzsche), “I don’t want to be happy; I want to be alive, and active,” and that's a very interesting distinction for us to bear in mind: Jack is answering phones instead of trying to get his marriage back, and feeling like a fool while he does it; Tania Belinski is carrying on in the footsteps of her late husband, and bearing up under extraordinary tensions; Kyle and Trish are taking a moment to themselves outside the superhero/doomed romance plot to examine the desert landscape, where people throughout time have gone to be tested. And as I said: that's nice for them. They deserve it. Happiness may not be in the equation for anyone, here, but at least they haven’t ended, and if nothing else that means that the future (happiness' opposite?) is still open to being created. By them.

And, even better, off-panel.

Because it's the end of the story; and if that's what we're left with after all of it, if that's the deal, then I must say I think it's a good deal. At least, for adults it is. At least (as Lennon said), it's not too bad. Of course it doesn't seem that way to Shazana, who desires nothing but happiness, particularly in its purest and most sterile form – revenge as escape from the past, destruction as escape from the future – but then again she's only been resurrected to play the role of shadow here, anyway, and so she’s still one-dimensional, still irredeemable; Doc does away with her permanently in one panel with a wave of his hand, as soon as the crisis is over. Sure! Because she was only there to make a point, and now it's been made: as the past, so overfull of loose ends, has been gathered in again, and met again (because meeting again is a terribly important thing in stories – just read your old Chretien deTroyes), and finally transcended and laid to rest under that most unbreakable of seals, the five-pointed star of psychodramatic therapy. The magician's pentagram, the meditator's mandala, the symbol of the Self...Trish and Shazana and Clea and Doc and Kyle…

See it?

See the structure?

I’ll tell you: once you know what to look for, you start seeing it everywhere.