Mind Candy

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Anyone who’s ever worked in television, or even just watched television, knows that the same thing happens there.

  Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who came up with the idea in the first place. Often the characters that seem the most original can be traced back to earlier sources; sometimes the originality is just in combining ideas, not creating them. I suspect Superman of being a combination of several ideas, taken from Doc Savage, Philip Wylie’s Gladiator, and so forth.

  When I was a kid, I assumed that Namor was stolen from Aquaman; after all, Aquaman had been around since before I was born, while as far as I knew the Sub-Mariner first appeared in 1962. It came as a shock to realize that the Sub-Mariner, created in 1939, was the original and Aquaman, who I believe first appeared in 1941, the imitation.

  Sometimes the great originals are easy to spot—Plastic Man, for example. Other times they aren’t—I have no idea who the first comic-book magician hero was.

  And there are some categories that I wonder about. Why haven’t there been more imitations? The Human Torch, for example. I guess there may have been imitations once, but none have survived. And while Iron Man himself is apparently descended from Electro, Marvel of the Age, why haven’t there been more imitations of him? Or are Cyborg and the Doom Patrol’s Robotman to be considered Iron Man imitations?

  Or to be a little more obscure, what about Kid Eternity?

  Then there are those that leave you wondering why anybody bothered to imitate them. Doll Man, for example—why did anyone bother to create Ant-Man or the Atom? I admit that Hank Pym became a good ongoing character in various identities, but most of the time he was growing, not shrinking; let’s face it, Ant-Man has never been a very successful concept. As for the Atom—well, back when his adventures were drawn by Gil Kane I read them if I couldn’t get anything better, but that’s the most I can say for him. I honestly don’t understand why these characters have survived when other worthies like Rima the Jungle Girl or Ultra the Multi-Alien have vanished.

  Ultra the Multi-Alien—at least nobody was ever fool enough to imitate him! Original, yes; worth trying, no. You need more than originality. You need a concept that has some sort of dramatic appeal. Raw strength such as the Hulk or Superman has, for example, has a built-in appeal, but it’s been done so often that it won’t work all by itself any more.

  I’m not sure there’s anything left that will work all by itself. So what we need are new combinations.

  Of course, some combinations have been tried—Super-American, for example, had a short run in Fiction House’s Fight Comics and presumably combined the patriotic hero with the powerhouse hero. But what about, say, combining super-speed with shrinking, so that our hero can move faster as he gets smaller? Or Stretcho the Great, the elastic magician? Or cross the Human Torch with Batman and get a hero who bursts into flame in dark alleys, lighting up the gloom of the underworld. Cross Zatana with Black Bolt, and you have a magician who can do anything by saying it backwards—but who destroys the entire area every time he says a spell.

  Maybe I’m beginning to get silly here. Ah… cross the Blue Beetle with the Red Tornado and the White Tiger, and you get Captain America?

  Yep, I’m getting silly.

  A Few Questions for Comics Fans

  Excerpted from a column in Comics Buyer’s Guide

  Can the Hulk blush? If so, what color does he turn? What about the Thing? And can either of them get a tan? If so, what color would that be?

  Speaking of the Thing, can he get zits? Or would they be pebbles?

  If the Sentinels and other anti-mutant groups are out to wipe out all mutants, why do they keep picking on the super-powerful ones? Why not tackle the easy ones first, the ones who can, say, wiggle their ears where their parents couldn’t? They’re mutants, too—except I guess the word means something different in the Marvel universe.

  Ever wonder why there are so many continued stories, and why they sometimes go on longer than they should? It’s because long stories are easier to write—you’ve got longer to come up with an ending, and lots of room to cover up plot holes with sub-plots. That’s why I write novels for a living instead of short stories.

  If Black Bolt had laryngitis, how would he know it? What if he needed to speak to blast some enemy and discovered he couldn’t?

  Just how many variations and adaptations of “A Christmas Carol” have there been in comics over the years, anyway?

  Has anyone else ever noticed how many of the covers for G.I. Combat, particularly from the mid-seventies, have the same concept—the Haunted Tank avoiding one menace while the crew sighs with relief, and we, the readers, can see that grinning Nazis are waiting right around the next corner? I’ve given this title the Evans Award for the Most Repetitious Covers.

  This has nothing to do with comics, but the most noticeable cultural difference I noticed between Kentucky and Massachusetts back in the 1980s, when I lived in Kentucky but frequently visited family back in Massachusetts, was that people in Massachusetts wore purple coats a lot more. Someone told me once that the color purple is inherently decadent—does this mean Massachusetts is decadent? Does it mean the Hulk’s pants are decadent?

  Spider-Man can stick to walls, right? What’s it feel like to shake hands with him?

  When the Hulk was rampaging about, in the good old days, and the U.S. Army was trying to stop him with tanks and planes, why didn’t they just use nerve gas? If they didn’t want to kill him, what were they doing with those bombs and guns? If they did want to kill him, why didn’t they just try a little neurotoxin? Since he was affected by knock-out gas, nerve gas should have killed him easily.

  Speaking of the Hulk, whatever happened to the Gamma Bomb after that fateful test? Does the U.S. on Marvel-Earth have them stockpiled? If not, why not? Too dangerous, you say? For the U.S. government? Oh, come on, get serious.

  Don’t try and tell me no one could build one without Banner, because anyone who knows anything about how science actually works can tell you that’s nonsense. Once people know it can be done, figuring out how isn’t that hard for an expert in the field. Nobody’s that far ahead of his contemporaries.

  If the U.S. on DC Earth has all those extra cities—Gotham City, Metropolis, and so on—why hasn’t it got a much larger population than the U.S. here on Earth-Prime? It apparently doesn’t, going by various references. Maybe some cities that we have are missing? Which ones? Jersey City, I suppose, since that’s where Gotham is—no great loss. Any others?

  When Mr. Fantastic goes diving, does he get the bends?

  How many of you out there knew that the Black Canary—the original one, anyway—could control a flock of wild black canaries, and summon them to her rescue when she needed help? Really! Just check out Comic Cavalcade #25! Does Roy Thomas know about this? Thanks to Ricky Burns for bringing this vital fact to my attention.

  Mutants breed true—at least in our universe; it’s part of the definition of a mutant as opposed to a sport. A mutant’s kids should have the same abilities the parent had, even if the parent lost whatever it was. Imagine if Ororo had half a dozen kids and there was a family disagreement—talk about your stormy arguments!

  Television

  Firefly: The Heirs of Sawney Beane

  Revised; original version published in Finding Serenity

  One of the annoyances in Fox’s insistence on showing the episodes of “Firefly” out of order was that it messed up the introduction of various elements of the Alliance universe. We first encountered the Reavers in “Bushwhacked,” rather than in “Serenity,” which left some of us—me, at any rate—wondering whether Reavers were real.

  After all, in “Bushwhacked” they’re never seen, merely described, and the circumstances are such that one is left wondering whether the stories are even remotely accurate. Couldn’t it be that the “Reavers” are actually aliens, whose space humanity is intruding upon? Might there be no Reavers at all, but only some form of space madness that causes people to turn on one ano
ther?

  But then when the two-hour pilot finally aired we got to see that yes, the Reavers are real, and they are nominally human, or at least fly human-built spacecraft—though they do so in suicidal fashion, with the shielding removed. It wasn’t meant to be a question; we should have known by the time we saw “Bushwhacked” that the Reavers are real.

  But can you blame anyone for wondering? After all, how likely is it that there would be communities of degenerate cannibals cruising the frontiers, preying on whoever came their way? Not savage natives of the hinterlands, but the descendants of civilized humanity, still able to fly spaceships. And why would one of their victims, as seen in “Bushwhacked,” try to become a Reaver himself?

  We did eventually have it all explained to us in the movie “Serenity,” but when all we had to go on was the TV series, we had to make do with what we saw there.

  At first glance, it seems absurd that an entire group of humans could sink to such a level while still able to work together and operate their spaceships.

  Well… perhaps it’s not as absurd as all that. The historical record apparently shows at least one case of a group of civilized people reverting to cannibalistic savagery for an extended period: the story of Sawney Beane and his family.

  According to the most common version of the story, Sawney Beane was born late in the 16th century and raised in a perfectly ordinary Scottish family; accounts differ on exactly where. As a young man, though, he decided he did not care to spend his life at the back-breaking toil he had seen his father do, and instead he and his similarly-inclined girlfriend fled the town one night and took up residence in a cave, whence they proceeded to rob and murder unwary travelers. The entrance to the cave was underwater except at low tide, so they were safely hidden by the sea much of the time, and able to carry on their criminal career largely undetected. Fearful of being recognized as thieves when they ventured into town to buy the supplies they needed, they did not dare attempt to barter or sell any of the jewelry or other valuables they collected, but used only the coins.

  Most travelers of the day did not carry much cash, and there weren’t that many people who dared travel alone in the first place, so the take was meager, not enough to fill the young couple’s bellies reliably—especially not once their children started to arrive. There was also the matter of disposing of the bodies of their victims.

  You can see where this is going, I’m sure; they solved both problems with a single solution by butchering and eating their victims.

  For twenty-five years, they lived hidden in their seaside cave, feasting on human flesh. In that quarter-century they produced fourteen children and thirty-two grandchildren, the grandchildren all being the result of incest, since none of the children were ever allowed any contact with anyone outside the family.

  And all of this clan, it seems, subsisted largely on human flesh; the reports estimate something over a thousand victims.

  Finally, the accounts say, a large group of travelers interrupted the Beanes in the process of attacking a couple; they rounded a bend in the road to see a horde of savages swarming around a husband and wife. The woman had already been dragged from her horse and slaughtered, but the man had drawn his sword and had been fighting for his life when the larger party arrived.

  Seeing themselves badly outnumbered by the new arrivals, the cannibals fled. The travelers, unprepared as they were, did not pursue them immediately, but noted the route of their departure, then attended to the survivor, listening to his tale of horror, tending his wounds, and seeing that his wife’s mutilated corpse was properly covered.

  This was the break in the case that the authorities had needed; they used bloodhounds to track the Beanes back to their lair, although even then, it was not until the search happened by the right spot at low tide that they were able to locate the cave’s well-concealed mouth.

  Moving swiftly, so that their prey would not escape them, the King’s men gathered on the shore and pursued the criminals into the cave. A large party of soldiers entered the Beanes’ home, lighting their way with torches, and after making their way up a long passage reached the family’s quarters.

  They were horrified at what they found—the carcasses of men and women strung up like sides of beef, severed limbs scattered about, while countless human bones and a fortune in clothing and valuables were piled together to one side, testifying to two and a half decades of terror.

  With the cave’s entrance blocked by the troops the entire family was easily rounded up, and at the direction of King James I of England they were taken immediately to the city of Leith, where they were summarily executed—the men by having their limbs chopped off and being left to bleed to death, while the women and children were burned alive in three great fires. Most protested vigorously the entire time, insisting they had done nothing wrong, but only what they needed to do to survive.

  This is the basic tale, as reported fairly consistently from 1719 on.

  If it could happen in 17th-century Scotland, why not on the frontiers of space in the far future? The very basis of “Firefly” is that even centuries from now and light-years from Earth, human beings will still behave like human beings, and will create the same familiar problems for ourselves that we always have. The Reavers are the heirs of Sawney Beane, living in the cave of space, preying on unwary travelers, sunk into cannibalistic barbarism. They produce nothing, they have no contact with the rest of humanity—they’re subhuman parasites.

  Terrifying subhuman parasites.

  One aspect of the story of Sawney Beane is that after a quarter-century of slaughter, the Beanes got very good at it; the accounts of that final attack say that they pulled the woman from her horse so quickly she had no time to react, and they had disemboweled her almost before she reached the ground. Practice can make one an expert at almost anything, even murder.

  On “Firefly,” nobody ever even suggests actually fighting the Reavers—if the Reavers catch you it’s just a question of how you die, because this is what they do, killing people, and they’re experts. You can die fighting, die cowering, or kill yourself before they reach you, but the idea of surviving a Reaver attack—well, that doesn’t happen. Not really.

  And in “Bushwhacked,” we see exactly that. Mal Reynolds knows it, and lays it out for us—after seeing the kind of horror the Reavers perpetrate, any “survivors” try to become Reavers themselves, because you can’t live with that kind of memory and still be a rational human being. It’s a sort of extreme version of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages come to identify with their captors.

  But there’s nothing like that in the Sawney Beane story; they never left anyone alive until that final failed attack, never recruited anyone from outside the family. I do not mean to say that there’s any particular reason that Reavers should be modeled exclusively on Sawney Beane, but it’s interesting how similar the stories otherwise are—and that this part of the story doesn’t follow the Beane pattern.

  That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t fit any pattern, though. Human literature is full of stories of people driven by encounters with monsters to become monsters themselves—in European legend those bitten by a werewolf become werewolves, in some American Indian tales a wendigo’s victims become wendigos, and more relevantly, there are many stories about people forced into cannibalism in an emergency who then develop a taste for human flesh and find ways to keep consuming it long after the emergency is past.

  But does it really happen?

  In 1846 a group of settlers known as the Donner party was trapped by early snow in the mountains of eastern California, and resorted to cannibalism to survive—those who died were eaten by the rest. Out of eighty-three in the group, forty-five survived and eventually returned to civilization; it’s believed at least half of those forty-five, perhaps far more, had tasted human flesh. Most of them were young and healthy, and lived long lives afterward.

  There’s no evidence at all that any of them had any interest in repeating the experience. Of the
forty-five, just one is reported to have been later mocked by his neighbors as a crazy old cannibal, and even in his case there’s no sign he ever did anything to harm anyone after that horrible winter; the experience seems to have damaged him with what we would now call “post-traumatic stress disorder,” or PTSD, but it hardly turned him into a monster.

  In 1972 the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes ate the bodies of their dead companions; again, this doesn’t seem to have given any of them a craving for long pig.

  Or simply look at any of the tribes known to have practiced cannibalism; most of them had no great difficulty in giving it up.

  Getting away from the specific issue of cannibalism, people who have survived horrific experiences—anything from abusive childhoods to the death camps of Nazi Germany or the killing fields of Cambodia—almost never show any interest in re-living any part of the experience; on the contrary, they tend to be hyper-vigilant in avoiding anything of the sort.

  It’s those who survived the camps who swore “Never again.” Surely we’ve all heard tales of Holocaust survivors who still keep an escape kit ready, who are constantly wary of police or other authorities, who respond to “It can’t happen here” with “That’s what we thought in 1933.”

  But on the other hand, consider the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages make common cause with their captors. This is a very real phenomenon, the most famous example being heiress Patty Hearst’s kidnaping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which resulted in her joining up as a revolutionary—but does it have any long-term effects? Does it last after the victims are freed?

  Amazingly, yes. In the case that gave the pattern its name, a hostage-taking in Stockholm in 1973, the victims considered their captors to be friends, to the point one woman got engaged to one of the criminals months afterward.