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The Devil in the Marvel Universe

On the whole, spiritual evil has not been handled particularly sensitively or particularly well in the Marvel Universe. The first purported appearance of Satan was back in the original ghost Rider series in the original Marvel Spotlight. There he was depicted as a big red horned guy with a trident, a sort of caricature of the mediaeval view of the devil. Other than that he was treated as a big powerful supervillain, battling Blaze by shooting energy blasts from his hands and throwing hellfire round like a nasty Human Torch. He seemed to want to do bargains for people's souls (as he did for Johnny Blaze's) but was repelled by the "purity" of Blaze's girlfriend Roxanne.

The same interpretation was placed on him in the original Son of Satan series, which sprang from the continuity of the original Ghost Rider stories and also debuted in Marvel Spotlight. Satan fathered Daimon Hellstrom (and Satana, as was later revealed) on a mortal woman for reasons never fully explained even by writers who had just been to watch the Omen and left him to grow up and become the principal opposition to his rule.

In both these cases Satan was easily foiled by the same sort of ploys that Spider-Man uses to annoy Kraven the Hunter - getting him riled by fast talking, outsmarting him using the terrain etc. Satan is apparently willing to make people into superheroes if they give up their soul, but the said hero is then allowed to win it back if they manage to sneak into Hell, a place of badly-drawn rocks, flames, and writhing naked people whose private parts are fortunately covered by Comics Code hellfire. Demons are sort of horned, tailed monsters who might be able to possess you but can be driven out by Daimon Hellstrom pointing his trident at them. Otherwise they are super-strong, might have some minor magical talent, and are willing to explain their plots to you over three or four pages of fighting.

But before all of this, the Devil in another guise had appeared in Stan Lee's Silver Surfer - Mephisto. Again a red-skinned dweller in a plane of tormented souls, Mephisto sought the Surfer's soul for its purity. He manifested "do anything" powers and set tests and traps for his mortal adversaries.

So on the whole Marvel's Devil has been a sort of bastardised and caricatured Judao/Christian Satan, although aspects of that belief, including the Christian conviction of the triumph of Christ over Satan, have rarely been depicted. Souls are merchandise which can be stolen or bartered under the right circumstances; there is little consideration of souls falling to the Devil through everyday sin (as the evangelists would warn us) or of the redemption of souls through repentance. It is intriguing that comics are far less uncomfortable showing the Devil acting in the world than God.

That said, there have been some interesting later depictions of Satan. He made a couple of similar appearances in Doctor Strange and Tomb of Dracula at around the same time, both drawn by Gene Colon. In these he is almost omnipotent, a schemer and webspinner, a spittingly-evil malevolence that challenges his protagonists - Strange and Dracula - on moral and spiritual levels as well as physical ones. Marv Wolfman's Milton-quoting Satan remains the most convincing depiction to date in my opinion.

Later still, around Defenders #100 I think, Marvel covered its back on the proliferating "ultimate evils". That story established that all these entities calling themselves Mephisto, Satan. Thog, Asmodeus etc. were actually aspects of one evil force, but were competing in a sort of game where human souls = power. This was taken up again in Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme where Roy Thomas had Strange defeat Mephisto and Satannish by threatening to recombine them.

Then came the Hellstorm series. The implications of that series are that good and evil are actually misnomers for order (and lack of free will) and chaos (or anarchy). Heaven is shown as the loss of personality into a divine whole (a doctrine at variance with that of the Judao/Christian view of life after death but consistent with some Eastern philosophies), Hell as the ultimate consequence of human "deregulation". Daimon Hellstrom kills his father at last and goes on the become ruler of Hell - or one of them, depending on which title you read. Elsewhere, in Daredevil and other comics, Mephisto is dethroned by his offspring Blackheart.

Into all of this we now place the Avengers. The Avengers have only faced Mephisto on three occasions I can recall, once at the end of the Mephisto limited series when Mephisto was gunning for Thor, once in West Coast Avengers #100 (of cursed memory), and once as part of the assembly gathered for Rick Jones' wedding in the Hulk's title.

What do the Avengers make of all this? Well, the idea of alternate planes of reality is well understood by them, from Thor's Mjolnir-accessed Dimension of Exile (from Avengers #16 and 327), to Dormammu's Dark Dimension (Avengers #118), to Morgana's Astral Plane (Avengers #241), to the whole chain of realities along that river where the Cat People live (WCA#6?). Heck, they've even visited Olympus (but curiously, never Asgard). Likewise they have battled supernatural "belief" entities from Loki to the Lion God.

Many of the Avengers seem to regard the various Satan lookalikes as just another cosmic villain. Iron Man, Hank Pym, and Quazar have been established as atheists and must have found some pseudo-scientific rationale for these kind of events. Thor, the Scarlet Witch, Firebird and others who are more attuned to mystical evil see them as some sort of predators to be thwarted and fended off. I'm not sure any of the team believe these entities to actually be "the Devil" as Western culture has come to conceptualise him. I'd like to hear from anyone who can cite evidence to the contrary.

Mockingbird's death remains a stain on the history of the Avengers. I'm not going to repeat the content of a previous post on Bobbi's passing but I will emphasise that Mephisto remains the only villain ever to get away with murdering an Avenger. And if one of my teammates - or my wife - was killed in battle with a notorious soul-trapper I think I'd at least trouble to stroll down to Greenwich Village sometime and have a word with Dr Strange just to check she wasn't now in everlasting tormented thrall to the creature that slaughtered her - but, hey, she wasn't that popular an Avenger anyway, so who cares, right?

In summary, Marvel's current thinking seems to be that there are lots of soul-snaffling supernatural entities out there pretending to be the Devil, but either none or all of them really are. When you die in the Marvel Universe you don't go straight to heaven or hell, you go to a rocky barren desert to be met by a skeleton with breasts (as per Michael and Carina in the new epilogue to the Korvac Story).

But the best trick the Devil ever pulled was getting people to believe he didn't exist...

More on the Devil in the Marvel Universe

A couple of other points have come to mind. First, I should have made more reference to the fairly unique storyline in the latter part of the Wolman/Colan Tomb of Dracula run. For those unfamiliar with it, Dracula had taken over Anton Lupeski's Boston-based Church of Satan and was setting up a cult. He was wedded to one of the cultist's slaves, a woman called Domini, whom he was portrayed as eventually truly loving, and through occult means she managed to conceive Dracula's son. In the deconsecrated church was a picture of Christ which could not be removed, and through this Domini became a Christian. She came to believe that she would be the instrument of Dracula's redemption. The point of these stories was about the nature of God's love and his willingness to receive souls even as stained as Dracula's if they turned to him.

Of course things go horribly wrong. Dracula's child is turned against him, ages to adulthood and pursues him in the form of a golden angel. Dracula's love for Domini leads to the loss first of his status as Lord of Vampires (as a really slimy new Lord arises) and later as a vampire. We see Dracula hoising a cross that STILL burns his hands to ward away the vampire hordes from a couple of innocent children he is protecting. This all culminates in Dracula reclaiming his power and defeating the new Vampire Lord - just before Drac is apparently destroyed forever as his series is cancelled.

The point of me quoting this is that here is a comics portrayal of Spiritual Good, in its truest and most redemptive aspect. Christ's presence is passive in a sense, shown only through the portrait on the former church wall, yet his influence is pervasive, dragging even Dracula back from the hell of his own making through the love of his wife.

The second thing that occurred was to say what I think Marvel's policy was - and may well still be - on religious matters. I don't know if this has ever been written down, but it is implicit in 90% of the relevant stuff.

Marvel does usually differentiate between living religion and mythology (the no-longer-held religious beliefs and folk-myths of yesteryear). In Thor #301 the Thunder God was seen struggling with the tripartite Hindu gods. Here was a serious PC blunder, because there are LOTS of people out there who still worship Vishna and co. Marvel got a lot of angry letters from people for whom these were real, tangible, life-defining deities. I think one or two even made it to the letters' page, along with an apology. Since then Marvel has been careful not to make that mistake again.

So in Marvel writing its OK to show any pantheon or legendary figure who is no longer the subject of current orthodox worship (yeah, I know there are a few Odinists around, but that's an entirely different bulletin board). New age figures like Gaia are OK because there's no established church to annoy. But for other contemporary religious focuses like Christ, Muhammad, etc., or of an omnipotent God, any reference has to be couched in such a way as to neither confirm nor deny the correctness of one contemporary belief over another, not to depict them as either definitely being true or untrue.

That said, Christian belief is pervasive in Western Culture and its iconography has become "Public domain". Hence Judao/Christian angels and devils are fair game for titles like the revised Punisher.

Marvel has fairly elegantly bypassed some of the theological minefields by introducing conceptual entities like Death, Eternity, Eon, etc, and the previously discussed Lords of hell-like dimensions. It is just about possible to accept that these powers exist in an order over which are Supreme Good and Supreme Evil (in whatever format the religiously-inclined reader chooses to believe in them).

Ian Watson (who is sure that the only thing more terrifying than Absolute Evil is Absolute Good)