I like to have a good book or two pulled from the bookshelves and a pile of comics pulled out of the cupboard lying around the place to read through when I have a spare moment. Today I've been reading, not for the first time in my life, "Beyond the Burning Lands" by John Christopher. I really love that trilogy. It took me ages to find the third and final part, back in the olden days when I was relying on books being in the school library or the public libraries of Horncastle or Boston. One way or another, they had the first two books, in big glorious hardback editions wrapped in library plastic - the best way to read a fantasy kind of novel! - but not the third. I forget exactly how long I was deprived of the Sword of the Spirits, but it probably wasn't as long as it felt. These paperbacks I've got now have "Kitwood Boys' School" stamps, the school in Boston where my mother was a teacher, so they must have come from there, probably around the time it merged with the girls' school and got rid of all the duplicate stuff. I don't remember getting them, but I'm glad I did.
But the point is, it took a while to know how everything was resolved, and I had plenty of time to linger on the ending of book 2. Luke has finally become the Prince of Winchester, and isn't at all sure if that's a good thing. "I sat on as dusk drew down over the city, thinking of the unalterable past; and all my dead." There's no particular cliffhanger, but plenty of dangling threads, and we're left to ponder just what might happen in the next book. And think about all the mysteries and fascinating questions raised by this second volume, like... how exactly is King Cymru's name pronounced?
See, beyond the Burning Lands in this post-apocalyptic (well, post-natural-disaster-kind-of-apocalypse, as the books make clear) world is the Land of the Wilsh. The city of Klan Gothlen, people called Yews and Kluellan; you get the idea. Corrupted versions of Welsh names, to nicely indicate the diversification of two different strands of the English language over generations of separation. But the King takes the name "Cymru", and are we supposed to pronounce it the standard Welsh way? It doesn't feel right when everyone else has names written in a sort of phonetic English. The books give us no clue, and that irks me a little. But seriously, if you've never read the "Prince" trilogy, you have to go and read it. It's the best thing John Christopher wrote, in my humble opinion, and he wrote no end of wonders!
Anyway, it struck me this morning that there's an interesting connection between this book and the comics I've got out to read through just at the moment. They're the Alpha Flight comics written by James D. Hudnall and mostly drawn by John Calimee, and they're the kind of thing you have to be in the right mood for. Let's be honest here, I'm an Alpha Flight completist, I love the series, but I'm not going to say you have to go out and read these particular ones. In fact, they're awful. Hudnall wasn't a great writer, Calimee wasn't a great artist, and they certainly didn't bring out the best in each other. But sometimes I like to take a look through the comics anyway, and recall the horrors of the Sorcerer Saga.
This endless series of adventures for the Canadian super-team pitted them against the machinations of Llan the Sorcerer. Why an ancient sorcerer who returns to our dimension every ten thousand years and confines his operations to the Northwest Territories of Canada has a Welsh place-name for his nom-de-sorcerie is never discussed ["Hudnall' backwards is Llan, duh]. But I thought it was fun to be reading of Llan and Klan Gothlen at the same time, and it inspired me to write about how things that seem to have no connection at all do in fact all come together, somehow, in the end! Join Zoomy's Holistic Detective Agency and let me teach you all about the Spirit of the Times!
Alpha Flight #78 has a theme of prophecies of the future, hints of what's to come. It's James D. Hudnall's chance to give tantalising glimpses of the storylines he's planning. Which is a good enough idea, and it's clearly not his fault his plans had to change. The cover suggests Doctor Strange will play a prominent part in the story, but actually he's just the framing sequence...
Sensing something terrible happening up in Canada, the Sorcerer Supreme (Doc Strange, not Llan, who's just "the Sorcerer") gets cryptic symbolic visions to tell him what it's all about, starting with one of South America...
In Brazil, so the narrative caption appropriately tells us everyone's speaking Portuguese. Captain Forsa (presumably meant to be Força; 'strength') is a very stereotypical Latin ladies' man, full of heroic bravado. He's never been seen before, but the first page of his debut appearance here is enough to tell us what he's all about.
And the third page of his heroic career chronicles his grisly demise at the hands of the mysterious Zeitgeist! This mysterious figure with time/space/form-bending powers won't be satisfied until he/she (it's a bit hard to tell from Calimee's art, but it looks like his 'real' form is male) has killed all the heroes and villains in the world! And taken photos of them!
What is the connection with Canada, Dr Strange wonders. Good question. And not one that has ever been answered. Nothing remotely related to this scene ever has anything to do with any future adventure of Alpha Flight, or anything to do with Canada. Except one little line from Llan at the end of the final omen in this issue...
Having restored Alpha Flight's foe the Master of the World to health, Llan tells him he'll get involved with Marrina's offspring (he never does) and says that Llan meanwhile is going to introduce Alpha Flight to someone from South America (he never does).
Again, it's clearly not Hudnall's fault. He doubtless had a story already written where Zeitgeist would clash with the Canadian heroes. But the next two issues of Alpha Flight were forced to tie into "Acts of Vengeance", the Marvel Comics 'epic' in which all their superheroes fought some different superhero's villains. Alpha Flight, instead of Zeitgeist, tangled with North American villains the Scorpion, Nekra, the Asp and the Owl for a while. The mysterious Zeitgeist disappeared into unpublished limbo and Alpha Flight never had anything to do with him. They eventually beat Llan, although the hasty and incomprehensible conclusion was again clearly not what Hudnall would have had in mind if he'd been given more time and freedom to bring his stories to a conclusion.
Actually, it would probably still be dragging on today if he'd been left to it. They really are terrible, interminably dull and badly-written comics. Sorry. That's just mean. I do kind of like them, really!
Anyway, does Zeitgeist move on to the rest of the Marvel Universe on his way up from Brazil to Canada? Well, a Zeitgeist shows up in Germany, two years later, in 1991, in the pages of Captain America. But there's no connection, right?
Here's a connection! Marvel's comics of 1989, like that Alpha Flight, had interesting cover dates to them. Four consecutive monthly issues were dated "Nov", "Mid Nov", "Dec", and "Mid Dec". Marvel were reducing the gap between publication date and cover date, which had reached a plainly silly four months and now was brought down to two. They weren't publishing two issues of Alpha Flight a month, despite what the cover dates might suggest.
But in the summer of 1991, Captain America actually was being published twice a month! And so we got the 390th issue of his comic, dated "Late Aug 1991"!
Oh god, the Femizons. Actually, we can ignore the main story, in which Captain America fights an army composed of Marvel Comics' entire cast of female supervillains if we want to - Zeitgeist only appears in the backup strip at the end of the comic. But let's take a look and see if there's a Canadian connection...
Yes, there is! Look there - it's Alpha Flight's fat female foe Pink Pearl! She only appeared in one Alpha Flight comic, years and years earlier, but will come back to their pages just a couple of months later in 1991, when it will turn out that after her release from jail she became a legitimate businesswoman. Hmm, I guess she took a few days' vacation to join the Femizons and then went back to running her strip club.
And she shares the action in this scene with Screaming Mimi, who'll later go on to become Songbird of the Thunderbolts. That's not an Alpha Flight connection, I just happen to like Thunderbolts. But everything is connected, so let me make an observation about this scene. See, this comic is written by Mark Gruenwald, a truly GREAT writer whose work I mostly love. This one doesn't show him at his best. He was a really gloriously nerdy continuity-lover, and he's deliberately put Titania in this scene just to titillate the kind of nerdy fan like me who appreciates the juxtaposition. See, this is the Skeeter McFerran Titania, no relation to the Titania who used to hang out with Screaming Mimi and Poundcakes, but who was dead by the time of this comic. Just remember that bit of trivia, because everything here is connected, I promise.
Now let's turn to the brief backup strip, and see this Zeitgeist. While Captain America himself was fighting the women, his arch-foe the Red Skull was in prison in Germany, and a gang of baddies led by Crossbones are planning to break him out. But they're stopped by German heroes Hauptmann Deutschland (newly-introduced German counterpart of Captain America), Blitzkrieger (one of the 'international' heroes created for "Contest of Champions" a few years earlier, although back then he was called Blitzkrieg) and their mysterious teammate who becomes visible for the first time on the final page of this comic - Zeitgeist!
Nice costume, Zeitgeist. I mean, he's just stealing the look from the Clock King, who had been appearing in DC Comics since 1960, but it's still pretty striking (if you'll pardon the clock pun). But this heroic German Zeitgeist is no relation to the killer of Captain Forsa, obviously. He's just a German word being applied to a German hero being written by an American who (despite his German surname) doesn't seem to know all that much about Germany.
Any superhero stories involving heroes from a different country to the one they're published in are almost invariably dreadful. Alpha Flight are a rare exception. These guys aren't. I mean, when the "Schutz Heiliggruppe" story appeared in German translation, they changed the names (you can't call a hero "Blitzkrieg" in Germany!) and basically rewrote the whole thing to remove the idea that they're dedicated to defeating war criminals.
But is there a connection between this Zeitgeist and Canada? Sort of! See, Blitzkrieg's one previous appearance, as I said, was in Contest of Champions. In that, the heroes of the world were arbitrarily sorted into teams, and Blitzkrieg ended up in a trio with Captain America and Sasquatch, the Canadian from Alpha Flight! Everything is connected!
The Schutz Heiliggruppe appear in the remainder of this backup storyline over the next few issues of Captain America - Zeitgeist does practically nothing - and then are gone and forgotten. Until 1995, anyway!
1995 comics were terrible. Okay, I'm possibly going a bit too far with the abuse, but here I'm just quoting a popular opinion about the Avengers family of comics at the time. They were about to be radically relaunched under the direction of Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee. And the relaunches were terrible too. But then, after a year of that, they were relaunched again, and this time they were really awesome! See, that's a positive! But we're here in 1995 at the tail-end of Mark Gruenwald's time in charge of Captain America, and he's resolving a whole lot of plotlines. Starting, weirdly enough, with Zeitgeist!
The Schutz Heiliggruppe have for some reason gone to South America to investigate a series of murders of superhumans in South America, all of them found with a polaroid photo of their deaths! Yes, that never-resolved storyline from an obscure and forgotten issue of Alpha Flight six years previously has been brought back into the light! And it IS the same Zeitgeist after all!
Note that list of dead superhumans - "Captain Forza" has had the spelling of his name corrected, and it's STILL wrong. Força with a ç. If he ever gets mentioned again in a Marvel comic, I hope they get it right. The next on the list, Defensor, will be familiar to Blitzkrieger - he's another one who was created for Contest of Champions. Everything is connected, and perhaps the two of them became friends during the contest (they were on the same side), explaining why the Germans have come to investigate poor Defensor's death! But it's the end of Blitzkrieger too, when Zeitgeist finally shows his true colours.
Meanwhile, Hauptmann Deutschland has changed his name since we last saw him, and is now going by "Vormund". Apparently they were going for the German word for Guardian, which - everything is connected! - is the name of the leader of Alpha Flight and conveys a sense of protecting the country or ideals of the heroes. But it doesn't work, because Vormund only means guardian in the sense of a child's legal guardian. It's like a superhero calling himself "Parent". But let's not laugh at him; he's very upset by the death of Blitzkrieger.
The 1940s hero The Angel had been brought back in two mutually contradictory ways in previous comics. This clears up the confusion to everyone's satisfaction, except those who are wondering what the deal is with Zeitgeist's costume and priorities. So what, he starts by killing all the superhumans of South America, then moves on to the North American heroes starting with the oldest? It probably makes sense to him, at least.
There are a lot of other plotlines crammed into this issue of Captain America. It's not until quite a bit later that we catch up with Vormund and Zeitgeist, and confirm that he constantly changes his appearance and disappears mysteriously.
While Vormund wonders exactly why this time-shifting, clothes-shifting lunatic is his only surviving teammate in the first place, the reader knows that he's set up an invitation for Captain America to attend an elderly-superhero party at The Angel's place. And he mentions that the Angel had previously financed assassins who killed minor villains, including the Titania I mentioned earlier. Everything is connected!!!
And then there's a confusing fight scene at the party, in which Vormund and Captain America both seem to be assassinated by Zeitgeist, but aren't. And it all comes to this hasty conclusion.
And the comic has run out of pages, so Captain America has to blurt out in the last couple of panels that Zeitgeist was really Everyman all along. What, you don't remember Everyman? He was in one Captain America story in 1981 and a Marvel Team-Up in 1983. Apart from having a sword, he had absolutely nothing in common with Zeitgeist in any of his incarnations. Why connect them posthumously now? Only Mark Gruenwald knows. Everything, absolutely everything, is connected! But since there wasn't room to explain anything in the comic itself, he commandeers half the letters page, of all places, to describe at length what we've just been reading!
Credit also goes to Peter Sanderson, an even more gloriously nerdy continuity expert! And the final line is a nod to Bill Mantlo, who of course wrote Alpha Flight before James D. Hudnall. Everything is connected, from first to last.
Personally, I think Zeitgeist was the Clock King. There's a whole DC/Marvel crossover going on that nobody knows about yet, but it'll find its way into the comics some day.
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