Twilight of the Superheroes
The Interminable Ramble
An unpublished series proposal for DC Comics by Alan Moore
Okay... I'm sure this is going to be an interminable ramble as
these things usually are, but I first want to set down my thoughts
on the whole idea of mass crossovers, partly in response to Paul's
letter on the subject and partly just to clarify my thinking for
myself. Hopefully, somewhere along the line you might catch a
glimpse of some of the logic behind the story outline that follows
and will thus be able to make a little more sense of my reasons for
doing that way.
Firstly, as I see the commercial side, taking into account what
Paul was kind enough to pass on to me, the perfect mass crossover
would be something like the following: it would have a sensible and
logical reason for crossing over with other titles, so that the
readers who were prompted to try a new title as a result of the
crossover or vice versa didn't feel cheated by some tenuous linkage
of storylines that was at best spurious and at worst nonexistent.
It would provide a strong and resonant springboard from which to
launch a number of new series or with which to revitalize old ones
again in a manner that was not obviously crassly exploitative so as
to insult the reader's intelligence. With an eye to the
merchandising that Marvel managed to spin out of Secret Wars, I
think it's safe to assume that if it were possible to credibly spin
role playing games, toys, "Waiting for Twilight" posters and T-shirts and badges and all the rest of that stuff from the title,
then that would be a good idea too. Ideally, it might even be
possible, while appealing to the diehard superhero junkie, to
produce a central story idea simple, powerful and resonant enough
to bear translation to other media. I mean, I know that I'm
probably still intoxicated by the Watchmen deal, but it never hurts
to allow for these things as a possibility, does it?
Okay, so assuming that the above is an accurate summary of what,
ideally, DC would like to see happen with the title commercially,
then I'll go onto tackle the other pertinent areas of concern with
an eye to that and then hopefully tie the whole lot together at the
end before moving on to the actual plot outline. If I don't manage
that and just forget and wander off at a tangent or something then
I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to bear with me. As long as I
don't start free-associating about my childhood then we should be
okay. The first of these other pertinent areas relates to the
effect of the storyline in question upon the DC Universe itself,
and in response to this I figure that perhaps I ought to outline
briefly my thoughts upon crossovers of this magnitude in general.
For one thing, they require some very hard thinking about in
advance if they're not going to generate more problems than they
solve, and in thinking about something which will affect every book
that the company publishes, if only in subtle ways, then one
obviously has to be very careful. I should say that as yet,
although I saw the outlines I haven't read any of the Legends
series or its crossovers, mainly by reason of not having got out
to a comic shop recently. The premise, if I understand it
correctly, looked very good: it seemed to be attempting to give a
sort of resonant mythic context to the DC pantheon while at the
same time establishing a more vigorous social context for the
assembled characters in terms of its storyline, thus drawing the
whole DC continuity together into an interesting whole, which is
exactly what needs doing in the wake of the Crisis. The more we
can reinforce the idea of the DC Universe as a magical and
fascinating concept in itself, assuming that those are our aims,
then the more successful we'll be in keeping readers hooked upon
that universe and on the books that chronicle its various
phenomena.
Of course, this approach isn't without its problems. If you don't
do it right, if your assembled multitude of characters look
merely banal, which I personally believe happened with Secret Wars
(although that may be mere personal prejudice on my part), then your
entire continuity is cheapened in the long term along with its
credibility, whatever the short term benefits in terms of sales
might be. When this happens, your only recourse is to greater acts
of debasement in order to attract reader attention, more deaths to
appease the arena crowd element in the fan marketplace, eventually
degenerating into a geek show.
Then there are the unintentional injuries in internal logic that
can be unwittingly inflicted upon the mass continuity by such a
venture, whatever the individual merits of the creators or their
efforts, purely by the vast organizational problems that a project
of this size seems to encounter. To explain what I mean, I should
perhaps look at a series that I have read, that being Marv and
George's excellent Crisis on Infinite Earths. Although the motive
was pure and the aim true with regard to Crisis, I can't help
feeling that somewhere along the line, in the attempt to
consolidate and rationalize the DC Cosmos, a situation even more
potentially destabilizing and precarious was created. Instead of a
parallel Earth cosmology that was, if the reader was sensible
enough to overlook obvious discrepancies as what they were (i.e.
simple mistakes), relatively easy to understand, in the wake of
Crisis and related seismic impacts upon the continuity such as John
Byrne's new Superman books we have a situation far less defined and
precise. In the wake of the time-altering at the end of the Crisis
we are left with a universe where the entire past continuity of DC,
for the most part, simply never happened. While I understand that
Paul is attempting to sort out the Legion/Superboy problems over in
LSH at the moment, and that other writers are tackling similar
discrepancies, the fact remains that by far the larger part of DC's
continuity will simply have to be scrapped and consigned to one of
Orwell's memory holes along with a large amount of characters who,
more than simply being dead, are now unpeople.
I believe this is dangerous for a couple of reasons. Firstly, by
establishing the precedent of altering time, you are establishing
an unconscious context for all stories that take place in the
future, as well as for those which took place (or rather didn't
take place) in the past. The readers of long standing, somewhere
along the line, are going to have some slight feeling that all the
stories that they followed avidly during their years of involvement
with the book have been in some way invalidated, that all those
countless plotlines weren't leading to anything more than what is
in some respects an arbitrary cut-off point. By extension, the
readers of today might well be left with the sensation that the
stories they are currently reading are of less significance or
moment because, after all, at some point ten years in the future
some comic book omnipotent, be it an editor or the Spectre, can go
back in time and erase the whole slate, ready to start again. I
myself felt something similar at the end of the first Superman
film, when he turns time back to save Lois. It ruined the small
but genuine enjoyment that I'd got from that first movie and
destroyed all credibility for any of the following sequels as far
as I was concerned.
I know that the average eight year old reader in the street is not
thinking these things consciously while buying his monthly batch of
titles. Probably the average seventeen or twenty five year old
reader isn't either, although that's more open to debate. My point
is that the large and largely incomprehensible tides of public
favor or dismissal that determine the success of a title are often
influenced by very subtle things far below the waterline. I don't
think it's too high-faluting to assume, for example, that the
current success of the Teenage Superhero Group book has more than a
little to do with the current massive sense of instability
pervading our culture, especially with respect to instabilities in
the family structure. I firmly believe that both this and the
current seeming obsession with a strict formal continuity are some
sort of broad response from an audience whose actual lives are spent
living in a continuity far more uncertain and complex than anything
ever envisaged by a comic book. I believe that one of the things
that the comic fan is looking for in his multi-title crossover
epics is some sense of a sanely ordered cosmos not offered to him
or her by the news headlines or the arguments of their parents over
breakfast.
That isn't to say that it's healthy or necessarily desirable to
fulfill this fundamentally escapist sort of urge. I myself would
feel uncomfortable if the imaginary reality I was offering my
readers was intended as a pacifier rather than as something to make
them think about their own reality. I'd cite Watchmen as an
example of how it's possible to fulfill the requirements of a
continuity much more strict and rigidly defined than is usual while
still making some sort of relevant point, hopefully, about the real
world that the book's readers are living in.
Attendant to this, there are a number of people in the industry
(and in my opinion they have a good case even if I'm undecided
about the right means to carry it off) who feel that it's time to
break down the continuity and try to get rid of a lot of the rather
anal and obsessive attitudes that have been allowed to dominate the
marketplace and to some degree have hindered it in its periodic
attempts to be taken seriously. I suppose a shining example of
this would be Frank's Dark Knight, which, while it doesn't seem
bothered about fitting into any graven-in-stone continuity, does
service to the legend of Batman and brilliantly redefines the
character for an eighties audience, and nobody really seems to care
much how this all fits into the continuity because it's such a
bloody good story. Will Jason Todd really die? Will all the
superheroes leave Earth to Superman and his government pals? Will
Oliver Queen really get his arm burned off at the elbow in a fight
with Clark Kent and become an embittered urban terrorist? Who
cares?
The readers seem quite capable of accepting that this may or may
not happen in the future, without getting worked up and starting to
chew through their own arms over how the idea of alternate possible
futures fits in with the Crisis idea that there is only one
timestream with no possibility of alternate pasts, presents or
futures.
Okay... so on one hand we have an audience thirsty for the
stability that an ordered continuity gives them, and on the other
hand we have good creative reasons for throwing continuity to the
winds altogether. Is there any way that these two apparently
conflicting notions can both be accomplished at once? Yes, I
believe there is. I think it is possible to create a limited run
series that would embrace both these attitudes comfortably and
fulfill all the other requirements that we've gone over concerning
crossovers of this type before. I think we could come up with a
story that, like Legends, casts new light upon all the DC
characters, and yet does no violence to however their creators and
current creative teams are handling them in their own titles.
Something that pulls together the threads of the DC Universe in an
interesting and revealing way, while at the same time remaining
simple enough in construction so that the chances for any screw-ups
in the crossover continuity are diminished or avoided altogether.
This last point is important. Looking at the practicalities of the
situation with the insight that Crisis has afforded us, it is
possible to see the various practical problems which have emerged
and which are unlikely to be solved by vigorous debating between
the parties or sides involved. Firstly, there will almost
certainly be some writers or artists who do not really want to
involve their stories with the crossover, whether they say so or
not. Making them "toe the line" if they're vocal about it or taking
comfort from the fact that most people, even if they don't like the
idea, will go along with it for the sake of a quiet life clearly
isn't practical when you're dealing with writers and artists. If
they aren't motivated by an idea, while it is theoretically
possible to force them to adapt to it, it isn't possible to ensure
that you'll get better than a mediocre story out of them, thus
cheapening the whole overall concept to some degree. It seems to
me much more workable to come up with a concept by means of which
whatever individual writers choose to do or not to do in their own
books will have relevance to the crossover, whether they
necessarily intend it to or not. If they choose to involve
themselves actively in the crossover, then that's fine. If they
refuse to do so, then the very act of refusing to do anything about
the crossover also becomes part of the overall storyline, without
doing any violence to the continuity of the books involved at all.
If the mechanics of how all this is to be achieved seem a little
far fetched at this stage then I'd ask you to bear with me until
after the story outline, at which point I'll attempt to demonstrate
how the outline fulfills the various criteria that I'm defining
here, including the next pertinent area on our agenda after the
demands of commerce and continuity have been covered, this being
the purely creative opportunities and pitfalls involved.
Creatively, there is an immediate aesthetic problem in the multi-title crossover in that, baldly put, it is very easy to strain the
credibility of the entire universe by putting certain characters
next to each other. Swamp
Thing and Blue Devil spring immediately to mind, or Sgt. Rock and
The Legion of Super-Heroes. In such juxtapositions, the flawed
seams of the illusion of unity that we're trying to create become
most apparent, and some thought should be given to a way of
avoiding this distracting effect. There is also the very real
possibility that any storyline involving so many characters in more
than a superficial fashion is going to degenerate into incoherence
and gibberish, becoming a sort of comic book babel of difficult-to-explain powers and origins and characterizations topped off with a
muddy cosmic conclusion, some of which I feel that I certainly fell
prey to in my recent "Crisis in Heaven/American Gothic" conclusion
in Swamp Thing and am anxious to avoid repeating here.
The creative plus side of the equation is more dependent upon the
tastes and leanings of the creative people involved, in this
instance myself and whoever we get to draw this thing and work with
me on it. For my part, speaking purely subjectively for the moment,
what I'd like to do creatively with the series, above and beyond
the creative satisfaction to me and in fulfilling all the criteria
above, is to create a storyline that lent the whole superhero
phenomenon, the whole cosmos and concept a context that was
intensely mythic and we extracted from the characters involved in
it their last ounce of mythic potential, aiming at coming up with
something that cements the link between superheroes and the Gods of
legend by attempting something as direct and resonant as the
original legends themselves. One legend in particular will be the
main thematic drift of the storyline, this being the Norse legend
of Ragnarok, twilight of the Gods.
The Storyline Itself
Okay... assuming that six pages is enough for preliminaries, we'll
now move to a discussion of the storyline itself. Please bear in
mind that firstly, since the story has time travel as one of its
central motifs, it's often
difficult to present events in a clear chronological sequence
without getting muddled, for which I apologize in advance. Secondly, since I myself don't have all the fine details filled in
yet... unless those details occur to me over the course of this
writing, which often happens... then there are going to be a few
areas where the plot is maybe fuzzy or the storyline seems flatter
and less inspiring than the areas surrounding it. I hope these
don't detract too much from your enjoyment of the idea, since these
will be things that will be polished up to their final shine in the
actual scripting. I'd again cite Watchmen as an example of how
much of this stuff only finds its way in at the final draught stage
and ask your indulgence wherever necessary.
To kick off, I should perhaps explain the overall structure of the
story, which, incidentally, I'm currently imagining as something in
the Watchmen format, twelve issues long, twenty-eight pages, no
ads, although these are just working assumptions and are certainly
open to alteration at this early stage.
The story is structured so that there is a central "core-narrative"
which in this case is the tale of the Twilight of the Superheroes,
taking place at some point in the not too distant future, say
twenty or thirty years. Around this there is a sort of framing
narrative, a device which links these hypothetical future events with
what is going on in the DC continuity at present. This device
provides the sort of interface between the fairly self-contained
story of Twilight and the numerous fairly self-contained storylines
and continuities of the DC Cosmos, and it is achieved as follows:
we have agents in the future who have managed to send a message
back to agents in the present day DC continuity, urging them to
warn the superhero community of the terrible future that is
possibly waiting for them, and to avoid it if at all possible.
(This is not without its own ambiguities, as we shall hopefully
see, but it provides for the moment the easiest conceptual handle
with which to grasp the mechanics of all this.) Thus, the agents in
the present set about reaching various superheroes in the present
and delivering the warning. Some of those who are warned heed the
warning, and make decisions in their current doings and lifestyles
that will hopefully avert what is to happen in the future, even
though this is by no means definite. Others will ignore the
warning and carry on with what they were doing, which of course has
some relevance, even by default, to the outcome of this horrific
Götterdümmerung waiting in the potential future. Some of the
superheroes affected will perhaps not be reached at all, and thus
remain ignorant of the whole thing, although this, too, obviously
has relevance to the outcome of what will happen in the future. I
hope this makes it comprehensible how I hope to solve the problem
of writers/artists who don't really want to involve themselves in
the storyline: even if they choose to have their characters remain
oblivious to everything going on, or to ignore it, their actions
are having an implied relevance upon what is going on in the
crossover book while at the same time what happens in the crossover
book down the line in the future will be seen as having a direct
relevance to how those characters are perceived in their own books.
Knowing the fate of characters in even a potential future lends
them a sort of poignance which is very important and which I'll take
a few moments to discuss.
As I mentioned in my introduction to Frank's Dark Knight, one of
the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the
status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended.
An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are
clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw
by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his
origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and
forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls
in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham.
That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the
formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see
the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman,
firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried.
That is his resolution--you can apply the same paradigm to King
Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You
cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to
meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never
have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any
of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for
these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human
as well as falling far short of true myth.
The reasons this all came up in the Dark Knight intro was that I
felt that Frank had managed to fulfill that requirement in terms of
Superman and Batman, giving us an image which, while perhaps not of
their actual deaths, showed up how they were at their endings, in
their final years. Whether this story will actually ever happen in
terms of "real" continuity is irrelevant: by providing a fitting
and affective capstone to the Batman legend it makes it just
that... a legend rather than an endlessly meandering continuity.
It does no damage to the current stories of Batman in the present, and
indeed it does the opposite by lending them a certain weight and
power by implication and association--every minor shift of attitude
in the current Bruce Wayne's approach to life that might be seen
in Batman or Detective over the next few years, whether
intentionally or not, will provide twinges of excitement for the
fans who can perceive their contemporary Batman inching ever closer
to the intense and immortal giant portrayed in the Dark Knight
chronicles. It also provides a special poignance... while I was
doing some of the episodes of "Under the Hood" for the Watchmen
text backup and especially upon seeing Dave's mock-up photographs
of the Minutemen in their early, innocent days, I felt as if I'd
touched upon that sense of "look at them all being happy. They
didn't know how it would turn out" that one sometimes gets when
looking at old photographs. Dark Knight does this for the Batman
to some degree, and I'd like to try to do the same for the whole DC
Cosmos in Twilight. I feel that by providing a capstone of the
type mentioned above, but one which embraces the whole DC Universe
rather than just a couple of its heroes, I can lend a coherence and
emotional weight to the notion of a cohesive DC Universe, thus
fulfilling the criteria set out in my ramblings about the effect of
all this on the idea of DC continuity as mentioned above. Being
set in a possible future, it does nothing that cannot be undone,
and yet at the same time has a real and tangible effect upon the
lives and activities of the various characters in their own books
and their own current continuities. At the same time, by providing
that capstone and setting the whole continuity into a framework of
complete and whole legend, as Frank did in Dark Knight, we make the
whole thing seem much more of a whole with a weight of circumstance
and history that might help to cement over any shakiness left in
the wake of Crisis and its ramifications. Even if we pull the
threads of these various characters' circumstances together at some
hypothetical point in the future, this does imply that there is a
logical pattern or framework for the whole DC Universe, even if the
resolution of the pattern is at a point thirty years in the
hypothetical future.
This also fulfills the criteria that I outlined in my opening
paragraphs concerning the commercial application of the idea. The
framing device, which links the central story of Twilight to its
possible crossover points with the mainstream DC Universe, is
constructed so as to be detachable from the whole. While the whole
story presented in the actual comic will have cutaways to what is
going on in the present to show how the crossovers work, the main
storyline of Twilight will be working towards its resolution
unimpeded. Thus, in order to make the central storyline
comprehensible to a wider audience than the trivia-mesmerized
hordes of comic fandom, the link with the present can be ignored
and effectively severed, leaving only a powerful and simple central
story idea, that of an apocalypse for superfolk played out by
warring factions against the fascinating backdrop of a drastically
altered future, with all the plotting, romance and intrigue of one
of those stirring historical dramas about warring factions amongst
the Medici or whatever. This central idea... that of a war and all
its spectacular ramifications, makes it ideal material for a role
playing game... perhaps the ultimate superhero role playing game.
It also lends itself nicely to a wide range of other spin-off
projects, including those in the toy soldier range. The
apocalyptic mood of the series, tied in with current preoccupations
and encapsulated in a phrase like the previously mentioned "Waiting
for Twilight" could work nicely with regard to the advertising
campaign as well as giving us a range of credible adult items such
as badges, posters and T-shirts. The storyline would hopefully be
resonant enough to provide a good springboard for new characters or
revitalized old characters, and this again would work seamlessly
when it came to actually orchestrating all this. A character who
hasn't been seen yet... say Barbara Randall's proposal for a female
Flash... could be presented in Twilight as an old established
character who's been in the Justice League for years. When the
character appears on the newsstands in her own title some months
later, this should strike a suitably ominous resonance back to the
Twilight storyline; is it all coming true? Even if it doesn't all
come true in every detail, even if, say, she never joins the
Justice League, mightn't most of it come true? This is the sort of
feedback effect that I want to foster. In addition to that, any
changes that writers have planned for their characters in the
future could be hinted at directly as having happened in the past,
so that when they actually happen in the regular comic book, they
have a meaning beyond that which they have on the surface. Even if
plans change and certain things don't materialize as planned, then
even that has its implications with regard to the future proposed in
Twilight, especially after certain key ambiguities that will be
introduced in the final issues of this proposed crossover.
I should also point out (if only to start a new paragraph... I just
noticed I didn't draw breath on the last page) that the fact that
the meat of Twilight's central storyline is detachable from the
crossover device means that should anyone see any potential in the
ultimate superhero movie, bearing in mind that DC currently own
almost all of the really important superhero icons imprinted on the
mass consciousness and could thus perhaps come up with something
that legitimately laid claim to that title, then it will be simple
to detach the central idea from the off-putting clutter of a
massive continuity such as would almost certainly alienate the
average non comic fan moviegoer. I'm talking about characters such
as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Marvel Family, Blackhawk,
Plastic Man, the Shadow and all the other truly classic and
publicly recognizable characters that DC are fortunate enough to
have access to. Handled in the right way, with the inclusion of
these classic figures, the Twilight storyline could be printed as a
spectacular and epic finale to the whole essential superhero dream.
Like I say, anyway, it never hurts to consider these angles, just
in case.
Okay, so now that the actual mechanics of this linking/framing
device have been discussed, perhaps it would help if I told you
what they actually are. Bear in mind that the details of this are
subject to change, as long as the overall idea is sound, since I'm
not absolutely sure about forthcoming events in the DC Universe
that might invalidate some of this. I'm confident there'll be a
way around any such problems anyway, so the following should still
be fairly sound and useful.
The first thing we do is to solve the paradox mentioned earlier,
concerning "Does Dark Knight really happen in the future?" and the
attendant schism between those who want a concrete universe and
those who want endless possibility free of the restrictions of a
rigid cross-title continuity. At the same time, I'd also like to
put right something that has bothered me since the resolution of
Crisis, namely the fact that I actually like parallel world stories
and that a lot of other creative people enjoy the freedom that
gives them too. Some of the better stories in DC's history have
been those directly related to the idea of alternate Earths
(including Crisis itself, paradoxically enough), and there are a
lot of brilliant imaginary stories which display the same urges and
the same ideas at work, albeit outside mainstream continuity. What
I propose is something that would allow for the possibility of
alternate world stories as well as the possibility of revisiting
old discarded continuities that still have charm without opening up
the whole "Earth-One through -Fifteen" problem that prompted the
Crisis in the first place. It will also be an idea central to the
whole concept of this framing/linking device with which we connect
the events of Twilight with the current continuity. What I
propose, basically, is something like the following, subject to
input by any creative people with prior claims on the characters
I'm suggesting, of course...
Firstly, I understand that there is to be some restriction upon
time travel in the revised post-Crisis continuity, which is all
well and good by me. To consolidate the importance of these
restrictions and their reverberations upon the various books that
use time travel as a motif, I suggest that, as an example, some
members of the Legion of Super-Heroes should volunteer for a
reconnaissance mission exploring the time stream and testing its
new limits with regard to their vehicles. Those Legionnaires might
be selected for this that me and Paul have agreed between us are
appropriate. At the same time, in any other books that might have
time travel problems, it could be mentioned in passing that from
our own era, Professor Rip Hunter was currently investigating the
phenomenon in his time top.
Okay... now if Paul and Karen and everybody else involved are
amenable to this, then I figure the next step is to introduce a
scheme by the Time Trapper. The Time Trapper, living up to his
name, intends to set up a sort of temporal fluke field in the
timestream that will in effect make time travel in or out of this
area all but impossible, thus trapping the Legionnaires who
volunteered or were selected in the past, unable to return. I
suggest that the Legionnaires chosen should be some that Paul is
able to do without for a few months, and maybe those that he'd like
to see some changes made to. Like I say, these details can be
sorted out later. The Time Trapper is maybe planning to trap these
various Legionnaires in the past so that they cannot help prevent
some plot he is planning to devil the Legion with in the future and
might conceivably be useful as a plot springboard to Paul over in
the Legion's own book. The important thing in terms of Twilight is
that the Time Trapper successfully sets up his fluke field, which
effectively distorts a whole stretch of the timestream from, say,
1990 to the year 2010. With very few exceptions, nothing can get
in or out of this Time Tangle. Furthermore, as a result of an
effect of the fluke field upon a continuum already sorely abused
during the reality-reordering of the Crisis on Infinite Earths,
within this bubble of fluke time, numerous alternate realities
again become possible, if only for a limited thirty year stretch.
Although we won't be exploring any of these realities save for one
in Twilight, the possibilities there for story ideas in other books
are limitless. Within the fluke, there are maybe worlds where the
imaginary stories happened: what would the world of Superman
Red/Superman Blue be like if you were to visit it twenty years on?
Or the world in "The Death of Superman". Is there a world perhaps
like the old Earth-Two or a world in which Dark Knight takes place? As well as opening up a wealth of story possibilities without
opening up the attendant can of worms, it also provides a
convenient trash bin for every story that DC ever published that
didn't fit in with the continuity. Brother Power? It happened in
the fluke. Prez? The fluke. The Rainbow Batman? In the fluke.
Because travel by people in the mainstream continuities into the
fluke zone of the timestream would be presented as all but
impossible except in exceptional circumstances, the chance for the
infinite number of maybe-worlds in the fluke to spill over and
damage the mainstream continuity would be minimal.
Okay... so while the LSH volunteers are exploring the altered Post
Legends Timestream, the Time Trapper springs his ultimate Time Trap
and the fluke comes into existence. The group of Legionnaires find
themselves trapped upon an Earth, circa the year 2000, albeit only
one of the Earths A.D. 2000 that now exist in the flux. As a
result of the sudden moiré effect rippling across the timestream
from the fluke, any time travelers in the timestream at the time
of the flux coming into operation (which, as we shall see later,
poses an interesting little subparadox) are drawn to the same
point, trapped within the enclosed multiple continuities of the
flux. These include Rip Hunter and some others who I'll detail
later. They find themselves cut off from their own times on a
world in which the superhero ideal seems to have gone badly awry,
with events seeming to be leading to a terribly apocalyptic war
between superheroes. As they struggle to find a way to return to
their own times, they experience the terrible events which are
going on in the world around them, these events making up the
central core-narrative of Twilight. Eventually, they find a way to
escape, the Legionnaires and others returning to their respective
times while Rip Hunter returns to the present, which is where our
story proper "begins", if such a timecrossed tale can be said to
have a real beginning. At some point during his unwanted stay in
the future, Rip Hunter has met a twenty-years-older version of John
Constantine, who, as ever, seems to be a prime mover behind the
scenes in the events going down in this world. Prior to Hunter's
escape, Constantine circa A.D. 2000 has told Hunter that he must
find and enlist the aid of John Constantine circa 1987, who will
help him in alerting Earth's super-people to the possible danger
waiting in their future and thus avert it. This Constantine and
Hunter proceed to do, crossing over into a couple of current books
in the process, or merely making phone calls and writing letters if
a guest appearance was too much trouble for the various creative
teams involved--they could also talk to a few people in the pages
of Twilight itself, this narrative providing the stuff that makes
up this linking/framing device, as the two prophets of doom meet
different reactions to their tale of a nightmare future waiting to
claim the world. The mechanics of this as a crossover device, as
explained above, allow all the creative people involved to do or
not do whatever the hell they please while still directly or
indirectly involving them in the concept of Twilight as a whole.
Think how much mileage the Thor writers have got from the idea of
the Norse Gods trying to do something to prevent Ragnarok, or
fearing that Ragnarok was about to come upon them and I'm sure
you'll get the possibilities.
Okay, so now that everybody is at least hopefully conversant with
the concepts behind this framing/linking sequence, I'll go on to
discuss the meat of the story, the terrible possible future that
Constantine and Hunter are warning everybody about. To do this I'll
start off with a brief description of the world and its background
before moving on to give sketches of the main characters who make
up the events which happen in this world.
The World and Its Background
The world of Twilight is not a world where the superheroes have
deliberately taken over, but one where they have inherited the
Earth almost by default as various social institutions started to
crumble in the face of accelerating social change, leaving the
superheroes in the often unwilling position of being a sort of new
royalty. Even though government and civic authority has all but
disintegrated, the various areas of America each have their own
coteries of protecting superfolk to look after them, and the
superheroes have thus tended to group into clans, each looking
after a certain province. There are numerous "Houses" of this
nature dividing America up into a kind of feudal barony system
effectively, in terms of politics if not in terms of technology,
which is as advanced as one might expect by 2000 A.D.
The development of this future society is something which I intend
to go into in detail, although not here. I want to avoid the sort
of nuke-blighted future that has been a feature of Dark Knight,
Watchmen, Ronin and a lot of other futures presented in comic books
and other media, like the Road Warrior films and their ilk, because
I feel that is becoming something of a cliché, and, while it's gone
some way towards serving its purpose and alerting people to the
dangers of the present day by pointing out the possible effects
waiting in the future, I personally feel that it's all but outlived
its usefulness as a motif in Twentieth Century function and would
prefer to come up with a different kind of holocaust. What I want to
show is a world which, having lived through the terrors of the
Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a
nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found
itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion
that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually
have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect
of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the
indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient
mushroom cloud or nine hundred. Following the predictions made by
Alvin Toffler and other eminent futurologists, I want to show a
future in which everything from the family structure to the economy
is decentralizing into an entirely new form that, while it might
ultimately be better suited to survival in the changed conditions
of life in the Twenty-First Century, is in a constant and
incomprehensible state of flux and chaos for those living through
it, caught in one of those violent historical niches where one mode
of society changes to another, such as the industrial revolution,
for example. The people of our world find themselves going through
an upheaval more abstract and bizarre but every bit as violent, and
as their institutions crumble in the face of the wave of social
change, they find themselves clinging to the various superhero
clans who represent their only anchor of stability in this rapidly
altering world. At the time in which our central Twilight
storyline takes place, there are eight "Houses", each containing a
different superhero clan, scattered across America, although as we
shall see some of these are pretty well abandoned or non-functioning in any active sense. I'll deal with these one at a
time, and introduce our main characters along the way, House by
House.
The Houses of the Heroes
The Houses
This is one of the two most powerful clans, and it dominates the
eastern seaboard around New York and environs. Alternatively, if I
change my mind it could be outside America altogether and set in
the Arctic Circle, based around a new Fortress of Solitude. This
is because the House of Steel consists of the clan founded by
Superman--we have Superman himself, a morally troubled figure who
doesn't know what's best to do about the chaos he sees surrounding
him, but who has come to accept that the Houses provide the only
real permanent structure in a destabilizing world and are thus
important to maintain. Superman has married and raised a couple of
kids, and the person that he has married is Wonder Woman, who has
had an identity change to Superwoman to accommodate her new
stature--we see the genuine and powerful love between these two in
the face of the perils of the world surrounding them and the desire
to do what's best. They are also troubled by their two offspring--one of these is a new Superboy, and he's about eighteen when the
story opens, and he's real bad news. The other child is a less
delinquent Supergirl, a new one who, like Superboy, has been born
of the union between Superman and Wonder Woman but who is much
kinder and gentler, more her mother's child. Having three members
in the Superman class and Wonder Woman (Superwoman) herself, they
are obviously a clan to be reckoned with.
The House of Thunder is the other major power, and possesses
members with power in the same class as that of the House of Steel.
The House of Thunder is composed of the Marvel family, plus
additions. Captain Marvel himself is the patriarch, and is if
possible even more estranged and troubled by the state of the world
than Superman is, perhaps because the Marvel family are having to
come to terms with the difficulties of having human alter egos
along with everything else, a point I'll return to when I outline
the plot. Alongside Captain Marvel, there is Mary Marvel, who the
Captain has married more to form a bona fide clan in opposition to
that of Superman than for any other reason. There is also Captain
Marvel Jr., now an adult superhero every bit as powerful and
imposing as Captain Marvel in his prime, but forced to labor under
the eternal shadow of a senior protégé. To complicate things,
Captain Marvel Jr. and Mary Marvel are having an affair behind the
Captain's back, Guinevere and Lancelot style, which has every bit
as dire consequences as in the Arthurian legends. The other member
of the Marvel clan is Mary Marvel Jr., the daughter of Captain and
Mary Marvel Sr. Mary Jr. is fated to be part of a planned arranged
marriage to the nasty delinquent Superboy during the course of our story, in order to form a
powerful union between the two
Houses. Peripheral to all this but perhaps interesting, somewhere
in the House of Thunder (which rises up from the middle of Los
Angeles over on the west coast, by the way) there are quarters
occupied by those characters from the Fawcett universe who can no
longer cope with life in an increasingly realistic and difficult
outside world. These include a sad and aging Mr. Tawky Tawny and
perhaps even Mr. Mind. Please don't laugh... I think I can make
it work. The Houses of Steel and Thunder face each other across
the country, with the various minor Houses and constellations
gathered somewhere in between, vying for the power that's left over
after the two major Houses have had their share.
One of the two foremost clans making up this collection of lesser
Houses is a clan composed of the remains of the Teen Titans, now
grown up and a hell of a lot grimmer and more frightening than they
ever were in the past. They are led by an adult Nightwing, who,
trying to emulate and live up to the reputation of the Batman, has
become every bit as driven and vicious as his mentor but who lacks
the depth of compassion and understanding that separate the Batman
from all the other grim vigilantes. As a result, Nightwing is not
an altogether nice character. This isn't helped by the fact that
Starfire has been killed some years earlier during a period when
all the aliens were being forcibly expelled from Earth by the big
powers, who feared alien influence moving in to take advantage of
the disruption and uncertainty in society. Other Titans who have
died include Jericho, while some, including Kid Flash and Wonder
Girl, have left the Titans to take up with other clans, a cause of
bitterness amongst the remaining Titans. These include an adult
version of the Hawk (formerly of the Hawk & the Dove) who is maybe
renamed Warhawk and who only lives up to his name... a sort of
super Rambo who Nightwing tends to use as a human weapon. There is
also the Cyborg. Vic Stone has had some rejection problems with
his bio-electronic parts in the time that's elapsed since our
present day, and as a result more and more of his body has been
replaced by mechanical parts, including one lobe of his brain. He
is forced into considering the frightening question of when exactly
something stops being a person and starts being a machine. How
much do you have to take out and replace before there's just a
robot left? One thing that helps take Stone's mind off his own
problems is that he must keep an eye on the Changeling, who has
serious problems of his own. When the terrors of the world finally
became too much for his hokey, light-hearted façade, the Changeling
did what he always said he'd do: he went crazy. Not completely
crazy, but more and more these days he stays in animal form, or
worse, in some awful halfway form between the human and the animal.
Worse still, increasingly these days he is starting to adapt the
forms of animals that don't exist outside the increasingly tortured
confines of his mind. Before the story is out he will have adopted
a new identity, calling himself the Chimera. The only other Titan
is Raven, who is now an aging, very dignified sorceress. She stays
with the Titans out of loyalty for the way they stayed with her in
the past when she had troubles, but increasingly she finds herself
drawn to the tempting notion of leaving the House of Titans and
moving into one of the other Houses, which is far more suited for
her, this being the next House on our agenda for discussion. (The
House of Titans, incidentally, can be constructed around the
remains of the original Titans Tower, although I must confess I
forget exactly where that's situated geographically.)
Nothing to do with the previous House of Mystery except in name,
this House of Mystery is built around Baron Winter's Georgetown
mansion and is the residence of a number of DC's supernatural
characters. These include Jason Blood, a.k.a. the Demon, maybe
the Spectre, Zatara, Dr. Fate and a strange amalgam of Baron
Winter and Deadman. Baron Winter has had his mind burned out in a
psychic battle some years earlier and is now just an empty shell,
except when he's inhabited by the spirit of Boston Brand, who uses
the Baron's body as a kind of holiday home in the land of the
living. The other person in residence at this new House of Mystery
is a reformed Felix Faust. The supernatural presences at the House
have very little to do with the outside world and have instead
devoted their pooled knowledge and talents to plumbing the depths
of the universe's many mysteries, being all but inactive in the
world of men.
Again, similar only to its predecessor in name, this House of
Secrets is the residence of a rough conglomerate of the few
surviving super-villains that haven't been wiped out in an earlier
Justice League-headed purge on super-villains which makes up part of
the historical background of our story. The villains, all
considerably older than today, who make up this fraternity are
roughly as follows, subject to revision: Luthor, the Joker, Gorilla
Grodd, Captain Cold, Catwoman, Chronos and Star Sapphire along with
maybe Dr. Sivana and a couple of others. This House is powerful
enough to defend itself against occasional attacks by the other
hero-centered clans but isn't otherwise especially active and thus
tends to get left alone, largely because the province that these
villains protect, somewhere up in the reaches of Nevada, is just as
well-looked-after as the places controlled by the heroes, whereby
hangs some sort of moral.
The House of Justice, built around the remains of the JLA's old
cavern headquarters, is the residence of the remains of the Justice
League. These are the most important of the lesser House, along
with the Titans. The lineup of the Justice League at the time of
our story includes Captain Atom and the Blue Beetle, an Aqualad
that has grown up to be the new Aquaman and a Wonder Girl who has
taken on the mantle of Wonder Woman after Wonder Woman herself
opted to become Superwoman upon marrying Superman. In addition to
this there is the Flash (Wally West) and the new female Flash,
Slipstream (although I prefer the name Joannie Quick, but this is
by the by). There is also Captain Comet and the new female Dr.
Light.
This is the House built by all the various exiles from other eras
who have been trapped in this world by the Time Trapper's flux.
These include Rip Hunter and some members of the Legion, but since
anyone passing through that strip of timestream at any time in the
"future" or "past" would be sucked into that time zone as well,
there are a paradoxical number of past and future selves of the
various time-travelers also caught there, including two or three
different Rip Hunters and two or three versions of the Legion at
different stages in their development. Other time travelers might
very well include Tommy Tomorrow and even maybe an earlier version
of the Time Trapper himself, who might very well provide the help
these stranded travelers need to return to their own times. It
strikes me that amongst these travelers there might also be Space
Ranger and Jonah Hex. This might even be an opportunity to return
Jonah Hex to his original western continuity where we know he will
eventually end up according to previous DC history. It would also
be convenient to explain the so far unassigned radioactive
hellworld that Hex's adventures have been set in as one of
the maybe-Earths that exist in the fluke. Another possibility that
struck me for time travelers stuck at the House of Tomorrow would
be past selves of those DC characters who've traveled through the
time barrier in their past adventures. One that I'd like the
limited use of is Barry Allen, the Flash. I understand that there
might be reservations about this, but I think I could do it all
lucidly enough to avoid any complications. Anyway, the people at
the House of Tomorrow aren't terribly active since they are trying
their best not to influence events going on around them too much
with an eye to possible repercussions in the future if they mess
around with the timestream in the past. Also, their energies are
mainly directed towards finding a way out of their time trap...
which, as I mentioned, is a problem that might be solved by a past
self of the Time Trapper himself.
The House of Lanterns, at the time our story opens, is abandoned
and shattered, since all the Green Lanterns, being self-confessed
agents of an alien power (the Guardians) have been banished from
Earth during the anti-alien purges mentioned earlier which resulted
in Starfire's death, and which also resulted in the banishment from
Earth of the Martian Manhunter, the Hawks and any other alien
characters I may have forgotten. Superman, since his own alien
culture no longer exists, and since he has lived on Earth since
infancy, has been made a citizen of the United States and is thus
exempt--anyway, while the House of Lanterns no longer exists upon
Earth, an emergency House of Lanterns has been set up upon one of
the moons of Mars. (There's one that seems from radiotelescope
scans to be either hollow or riddled with caves, but I can't
remember whether it's Phobos or Deimos.) Here, the exiled Green
Lanterns conspire with the other space powers, including the Ranns and
Thanagarians to restore their power on Earth. The space powers, knowing
through their intelligence sources of the imminent joining of the
House of Steel and the House of Thunder by marriage are afraid
that such a union will enable the Super/Marvel family to bring all
the Houses under control and unify Earth as a resourceful planet
ruled by a pantheon of invincible gods--the space people fear that
such an empire might soon set its sights upon territories that are
currently the province of the Hawks, Guardians or Martians. The
actual Green Lanterns residing in the House of Lanterns at this
time are a reformed Sinestro, Carol Ferris and Guy Gardner, Green
Lanterns of Earth; Sodal Yat, the Daxamite "Ultimate Green Lantern"
whose existence I hinted at in the story me and Kevin did for the
Green Lantern Corps Annual, and maybe an aging Tomar Re, just
because I'd like to see what Parrotmen look like when they get old.
Drunks, Hookers, and Panhandlers
The Heroes
Okay, so that's about it for the Houses. Not all the superheroes,
however, are actually members of clans. Those who aren't in clans
are almost totally inactive, and for the most part inhabit one of
the rundown barrio areas of either Gotham or Metropolis, both
cities transformed beyond anything we've seen previously by the
passage of time and change. The way I see it, the scenes in the
barrio will take up much of the book and will probably be some of
the livelier ones. The barrio is a superhero slum where all the
old heroes come to die. As I see it, almost every passerby,
shopkeeper and incidental background character there used to be
some sort of super character or other twenty years ago. A lot of
them are drunks, some of them are hookers or panhandlers; the
majority eke whatever living they can out of dead end jobs, while
there are a few who have actually adapted to their changed
circumstances quite successfully and certain others who still
actively carry on their own personal vendettas against injustice,
albeit secretly. I'll list these various characters one at a time,
mainly because I have fairly specific ideas about all of them that
I'd like to get across so that you'll know who we're talking about
before I get on to the actual plot. Most of the following have
been altered almost beyond recognition, so this is fairly
necessary.
Constantine is about twenty years older, but obviously hasn't
changed a bit, except for the fact that he's living with a woman
and has been for the past fifteen years. This woman might even
turn out to be the Fever character that I introduced in my two part
Vigilante story a while back. Anyway, her and Constantine are to
all intents and purposes married, and are obviously loving it.
Constantine is still into the same sort of scams and wheeler-dealing, and in the whole story of Twilight he seems to be the only
character who has his finger upon all the pulses and knows exactly
what's going on in this maze of plot and counterplot between the
various factions involved. He thus becomes a central character in
the story, and it strikes me that Constantine would probably be a
logical choice to launch into his own title off the back of this
crossover, if you're looking for characters to do that with.
Sandy's Place is one of the pivotal settings in our story. It's
the main barroom in the barrio, and thus acts as a meeting point
for a lot of the characters involved. Its proprietress is Sandra
Knight, formerly the Phantom Lady. I'll run through the main
characters who hang out at her joint starting with the Lady
herself.
Sandra Knight is now somewhere approaching fifty and has a sort of
ripe, down-at-heel Joan Collins sexuality to her still. She runs
the bar and acts as a sort of a den mother to all the regulars who
drift in there, maybe occasionally sleeping with one of them for
old times' sake, although never anything lasting or serious. She's
a nice woman, doing her best to get by in a difficult world who
nevertheless seems to have a lot of care and affection to lavish on
others, as evidenced by her care of the next member of our cast up
for discussion.
Darrel Dane is probably the most unsettling and pitiful character
in our cast, even though we don't see much of him. What has
happened, basically, is that the constant shrinking and growing,
plus the effects of the square cube law with regard to size
increase have taken their toll upon him. As the years passed, his
bones became brittle and would break easily if he stayed at normal
size for too long. Eventually it became easier to stay at six
inches tall all the time, but this itself was not the end to the
problem--remaining at a constant six inches, Dane's body and brain
began to adapt to their new size, redistributing their mass and
aging their neurons for greater comfort and effectiveness. As a
result, Dane has slowly changed shape into a horrible elongated
insect man, still six inches high, whose bone structure has altered
dramatically into something barely recognizable as anything that
used to be human, although just recognizable enough to be
disturbing. His brain has also had to change to accommodate
drastically reduced brain size and capacity. He's still
intelligent, but it's a non-human intelligence and he can barely
communicate coherently with normal humans anymore. Sandra Knight
has taken him under her wing. She keeps him in a vivarium behind
the bar (it brings in enough money to pay for his food, and he's
too alien to mind being displayed like this, so what the hell,
although she still feels bad about it), and Sandy is almost the
only person that the former Doll Man can talk to and make himself
understood. She's also the only person unselfish enough to be able
to bear the creepy little bastard running up her arm to nestle on
her shoulder and talk into her ear in his eerie, piping, almost
inaudible voice. Darrel Dane, while he's the only person other
than Sandy who lives at the bar full time in his tank, is not the
only lame duck that Sandy extends her sympathy to.
Uncle Sam in the character I'm most looking forward to writing,
taking my cue both from the character of Uncle Sam in Robert
Coover's excellent book about the Rosenberg execution, The Public
Burning, and from the portrayal of Richard Nixon on Robert Altman's
Secret Honor. In Coover's book there is a sort of giant called
Uncle Sam who is exactly like the old Quality character right down
to his dialogue, which is a sort of breathless rush of manic
cornball philosophy and darkly lyric jingoism. He talks endlessly
about his exploits, boasting Paul Bunyan fashion about how he
strode across the sea, up to his red and white striped thighs in
the deepest waters of the Pacific and rooted out his archenemy, the
Phantom, wherever he should strike. In the Altman film, there is a
harrowing portrait of Richard Nixon putting himself through a
solitary self-confessional, sitting in a lonely room and vomiting
his history into a tape recorder, helplessly spilling out all the
things that he'll never be able to tell another living soul for
fear of his life. All the stuff about Watergate that nobody ever
suspected, all the stuff about Kissinger and the Shah, all the
places where the bodies are buried. As I see my Uncle Sam, he's a
hopeless derelict with no power at all, and nobody is even entirely
sure whether he actually is the Uncle Sam or some wino dressed up
like him. He sprawls in a dark corner of the bar, drinking the
last years of his life away and babbling to himself in a mixture of
the two styles outlined above, his cornball jingoistic
reminiscences occasionally leading his erratic memory up alleyways
in the American past down which he'd rather not stray since his
ramblings will have a kind of dark poetry to them. I see him acting
as a sort of surreal Greek Chorus or something, his senile
monologues having suggestive resonance within the main framework of
the story. He is one of the other social cripples that Sandy can
always find a free drink for, even though he is not an actual
physical cripple yet, despite the fact that his liver is obviously
deteriorating rapidly. The only actual physical cripple to
regularly visit Sandy's Place is our next character for discussion.
For a few issues it might not even be apparent that Blackhawk is a
cripple. This is because he has a perfect pair of prosthetic legs
to replace his own legs which, Douglas Barder style, are now
missing. He is a sinister and obsessive figure, still fighting a
private war inside his head which has never quite been the same
since the mission in which all his teammates died and in which he
lost his legs. He lives in a single room in the barrio, paid for
out of the remains of the fortune that once funded Blackhawk Island.
I figure at some point in the Second World War he got his hands on
some Nazi gold and still has a reserve of it somewhere, albeit a
dwindling one. Gold is more than ever a firm economic unit in the
chaotic economic flux situation of this future world, so he could
probably afford to live a less Spartan existence. He just doesn't
want to, rising at five every morning and strapping on his legs
before working out in the gym and the flight simulator that he
keeps at a secret location downtown. In the evenings he maybe
calls in at Sandy's for a glass of Perrier before going on to
cruise around the barrio's leather bars. At the bars, he singles
out young men according to some system known only to him and offers
them employment in some unspecified endeavor--we eventually find
out that he is recruiting a new squadron of Blackhawks to replace
his dead friends, and that he has seven F-III bombers hidden in a
massive underground hangar that he has invested the remains of his
gold into. He picks up boys and asks their names--maybe one of
them says, "My name's Charles." Blackhawk pats him on the shoulder
and smiles and says, "I think I'll call you Chuck." A boy called
Andrew becomes André and so on--Blackhawk is a sort of obsessive
urban fascist with a survivalist mentality and a strong sociopathic
streak. He is obviously building up his squadron of vicious
leatherqueen Blackhawks and equipping them to act out some terrible
version of his own internal holocaust. You can take the boy out of
the war, but you sometimes can't take the war out of the boy, and
Blackhawk's new squadron will almost certainly figure prominently
in the explosive climax to this series.
Like most of the old Quality characters, Plastic Man often calls by
at Sandy's before moving on uptown to look for trade--Plastic Man
is a male prostitute or gigolo or whatever the polite term might
be. Thanks to his elastic consistency, he can keep himself looking
young and attractive for a lot longer than many of his fellows, and
it is this facet of his talent that he now exploits for a living.
He is employed by the Seductive Winks escort agency, managed by one
W. Winks. He is, in fact, the only employee of the agency. He is
likable and kind despite his shady occupation, and everyone gets on
with him--with traces of his past as Eel O'Brien finally starting
to show through, he is a sort of active and romantic neighborhood
hoodlum who always dresses well and buys flowers for old ladies and
drinks for bums and apples for kids. There is a more somber side
to him that he probably only reveals to old friends like Sandy, who
is the only person that he'll sleep with for nothing these days.
Although he seems permanently youthful, he has started to notice a
lessening of the elasticity in the skin around his lower back.
It's becoming saggy and feels like crepe, like something that has
been stretched once or twice too often and is becoming shapeless.
Plastic Man has a sort of horrible half formed vision in his head
that he doesn't like to think about concerning how he might finally
end up. He might end up as just a puddle--he often wakes up
screaming in the dead of the night from dreams about this, and the
shades that he habitually wears now are there to hide the tired and
worried look around his eyes as much as anything else. Woozy Winks
is a roguishly half-likable but mostly disgusting old pimp who will
get a phone call from Kathy Kane (yeah, I know the Earth-One
Batwoman died, but the one on Earth-Two didn't and has presumably
been living in anonymous retirement on Earth-Composite ever since
the Crisis) and notify Plas, who will go round to her mansion to
keep Ms. Kane company for the evening, giving Woozy a cut of the
subsequent moneys. I see Plastic Man as being a sort of reluctant
hero who'll come through in the end.
Okay... those are the main characters who hang out at Sandy's,
although most of the other characters pass through from time to
time. These include:
Another character that I'm looking forward to doing, and one of the
nastiest characters in our assembled cast. Basically, what has
happened to Bill is that he got old. His human body got older and
older while at the rub of a ring he could transmit his body to that
of a powerful and immortal sacred golden gorilla. Ask yourself,
what would you do? Anyway, Bill eventually decided to stay in the
body of the gorilla forever and now is quite a wealthy and
successful local businessman, a golden gorilla wearing a business
suit and even managing to talk just about recognizably, even if
some of it has to be done in sign language. The sort of operation
he runs is a sort of lucrative small time criminal organization
that services the bars and the gambling dens and the brothels and
also supplies most of the barrio's drug traffic. His activities
will bring him into contact with lots of the other characters...
putting protection pressure on Sandy's bar, for example, or having
Woozy Winks beaten up for non-union pimping, and assuming that the
barrio is set in the remains of Gotham, which I'm starting to favor
more and more, then effectively he becomes the new "Gorilla Boss of
Gotham City". He has a dark secret in his closet, however...
almost literally. The body of Congo Bill, now over ninety years
old, refuses to die. The gorilla mind that has been trapped in it
unfairly refuses to let go and is hanging on with a fierce and
horrible willpower. Unable to bring himself to kill it outright,
Congorilla keeps the shackled and naked old man in special rooms at
his apartment, feeds it garbage and hopes it will die soon, but it
doesn't. It just lies in the corner and snarls weakly when he
enters and fixes him with its ancient glaring eyes as he gives it
its food.
Oliver and Dinah have both retired from costumed crimefighting and
are now coeditors of a small but vital and thriving radical
newspaper that serves the barrio and will be useful in getting over
background information quickly and stylishly. Oliver and Dinah are
two of the nicest and most normal people in the series, both
fiercely committed and tireless in their efforts, both loving each
other very much despite the violent rows that they have learned to
weather and almost come to enjoy as part of their relationship.
Their paper is called Black Feathers, and on its masthead there is
a symbol of a drawn-back arrow about to be fired, fletched with
black flight feathers.
The Question is a freelance investigator... a sort of masked Philip
Marlowe who doesn't make very much money and who usually ends up
taking cases just for the interest or the moral necessity. He's
quite good friends with Oliver and Dinah and often gives them the
inside dope on situations that he has knowledge of for reporting in
Black Feathers. Him and Oliver have strong political differences
but are firm friends despite this. When our story opens, the
Question is investigating an impossible locked-room murder mystery
involving a midget and a 6'6"-tall call girl into heavy bondage.
Don't worry, I'll explain later. It's all vitally relevant.
Nobody's actually seen him for years. He's rumored to be around,
he's rumored to be active, and rumored to be doing something, but
nobody knows what or even really if. He might have died years ago.
See The Batman.
In actual fact, these two crime-fighters have joined forces in a
clandestine bid to rid the Earth of the oppressive and dominating
superhero Houses forever, so that mankind can get on with its own
destiny. We won't learn this until later in the series, although
they play a big part in the ending. As an aside, are Tarzan and
Doc Savage in the public domain yet? No big deal, but I'd really
like a sort of secret council of the immortals: Batman, the Shadow,
Doc Savage and Tarzan, all planning to start the revolution that
will rid Earth of the super-people forever. Being basically more
elemental forces than people, these characters have remained
exactly the same, except they got tougher.
Very few of these survive. Platinum is working as a waitress in a
sort of weird sci-fi autosex bar, while Iron is working as a
construction worker, slowly corroding and losing his faculties as
the rust claims his mind. No hope of a resurrection should he be
damaged, since creator Will Magnus passed away years ago. Tin is
destroyed, as is Mercury. Gold has gone into hiding, mainly
because of the fact that, as mentioned earlier, gold is more in
demand than ever, and there are a lot of people who would like to
capture him and melt him down. We get to see Gold towards the end,
but he isn't much in evidence throughout the rest of the series.
The Metal Man with the strangest fate is Lead. who has become an
animated part of the shielding surrounding a closed-down nuclear
reactor that is still considered to be dangerous. As a result of
his activities, Lead is radioactive and will not be able to go near
anyone for about six million years. The Metal Men are not major
characters, but I think we should be able to get some darkly comic
stuff out of them, as well as a lot of genuine poignance.
Still alive and clanking after all these years, this former Doom
Patrol member is one of the few people hanging around the barrio
who still has an ear amongst the superheroes in the Houses. He is
friendly with Cyborg, of the Titans, who he is maybe helping to
adjust to his new, mostly robotic, state. He also has contact with
the Justice League, since he was once close to the Teen Titans and
since three ex-Titans... Wonder Girl, Kid Flash and Aqualad... are
now amongst the Justice League membership. Mostly, though, he just
hangs around the barrios, maybe going out for an evening at the
cinema with Platinum when she's finished work, or calling by at the
construction site to talk to Iron. I figure a character who can
cross the social boundaries will be useful, and it's nice to have
someone from the Doom Patrol represented.
Adam Strange is trapped on Earth, but is still in contact with the
alien alliance based around the new House of Lanterns on the moon
of Mars. He is a sort of a mole, and he will eventually figure
largely in the aliens' plan to invade Earth and "liberate" it from
superhero dominance. We see him around a lot, but don't realize
who he is until near the end of the series.
There are maybe other characters that I don't have anything clear
in mind for as yet but who I'll want to include when the time
comes. I figure I ought to list them here, so that any real
problems can be sorted in advance. I might want to use the
Challengers of the Unknown, the Golden Age Flash, Roy Raymond, Bobo
the Detective Chimp, Johnny Quick, the Black Condor, the Ray, Sarge
Steel and perhaps a few old villains from here and there. One
thing that this series will enable us to do, if it should be called
for, is to simply introduce a new and revamped group like the
Challengers of the Unknown as an established fact, to try them out
on the reader before launching them in a new title, which should be
borne in mind.
The Plot
The Framing Device
The Central Plot
Okay, I think that's about it as far as the character sketches go,
so I'll get down to a sketchy outline of the central plot. This is
the area I have the least worked out in detail, although I have the
overall picture pretty clearly, so maybe I'll just trust to luck
and hope it comes together as I go along. If not, I hope you'll
bear with me and I'll clarify and polish the weak points at some
later date. As before, since the plot comes in two sections, with
the central narrative and the framing/linking device, I'll discuss
the plot in two parts for the sake of greater clarity, starting
with a description of the events that make up the framing sequence.
As before, since this is a time travel story, telling things in a
chronological sequence is sometimes difficult to do without getting
muddled, but I'll give it my best shot:
The plot of the framing device is as follows: the story starts at
its ending in a one-page prologue that takes place at the end of
1987 in a bar someplace in New York. John Constantine sits
drinking alone, looking very bitter and pissed off at somebody or
other. A striking and personable blonde enters the bar and,
noticing Constantine, leans over and asks him for a light.
Constantine, sitting there with a crumpled letter in one bunched
fist and a glass in the other, glances up at her and then stares at
her as if transfixed. We close up on his face and then move into
flashback. Basically, the whole series is what passes through
Constantine's mind in the two seconds it takes him to respond to
the girl asking him for a light.
We flash back to the beginning of 1987, when Constantine is
surprised by a visit from Rip Hunter, who he doesn't know but who
appears to know everything about Constantine, including some very
personal details that Constantine has never told a living soul
about. Intrigued, Constantine listens to Hunter's story. Hunter
tells him about how he's been marooned in time for subjective
months, stranded at the House of Tomorrow in the world of Twilight.
Hunter tells him about how, in this world, he had met up with an
older version of John Constantine who was somehow instrumental in
Hunter's escape back to his own time after the events to be
chronicled in Twilight have concluded. This elder Constantine,
explaining about the flux that exists in the timestream, explains
that there is a better than good chance that of the potential
future Earths waiting in the fluke down the timestream from our
present, this future Earth is the one most likely to actually
happen, with all of its chaos and carnage. It's a world of war,
and it ends with all of the super-beings being either killed or
exiled from Earth forever. Giving Hunter enough personal
information to convince the younger Constantine and get him to aid
Hunter in his mission to alert the people concerned and avert this
nightmare future, the elder Constantine sends Hunter back in time
with his dire story of horrors waiting in the future that must be
averted. Hearing Hunter's tale (although the readers don't hear it
all at first) Constantine the younger is convinced enough to help
the time traveler contact some of the various personages affected
and tell them the bits of the story that are relevant to them,
maybe in their own books or maybe in Twilight itself. This framing
device has its own resolution, but I'll leave that till later.
This is the main central plot of Twilight, being the story that
Hunter tells Constantine and that Constantine passes on to the
other parties involved, and it deals with the world of the
Twilight. I don't have it broken down issue by issue or anything,
but the rough shape is something like this: In the middle 1995 or
earlier, when society was starting to break down, many of the villains
on Earth tried to take advantage of this situation by exploiting
the uncertainty and disaster. Incensed by this, the current
Justice League decide to go on the offensive for the first time and
plan a careful campaign that will remove all the super-villains
forever. They enlist the aid of a lot of other superheroes in
this, and they are mostly very effective. So effective, in fact,
that they begin to be seen as the only effective force for reason
and order in a fast crumbling world. This goes to the assembled
heroes' heads a little, and in an attempt to secure their new power
base they pass a majority motion outlawing aliens from Earth.
While this is passed and is rigorously enforced, it is one of the
decisions that causes the first serious rift in the ranks of the
assembled super-doers, with some small groups like the Titans
starting to drift away from the main group. This process continues
until the state of the ruling Houses is pretty much as described
above, with the House of Secrets containing the only super-villains
to survive the purge other than those who reformed, and the House
of Lanterns demolished upon Earth and temporarily relocated upon
Mars pending the planned secret invasion. At the start of our
story proper, there is quite a lot of different activity going on
in the various camps. The Houses of Steel and Thunder, each
suffering their own internal stresses, are preparing for the
marriage of the delinquent Superboy with Mary Marvel Jr., daughter
of the Captain and Mary Sr. This is a development that causes
considerable anxiety all over the place: previously, even the two
most powerful Houses could not attempt to exert any pressure upon
the others for fear that the other Houses would unite against them.
Both Houses knew that individually they couldn't hope to take on
the assembled might of the Titans, Justice League and others. This
preserved a status quo of sorts. However, with the prospect of an
alliance in the offing, it seems quite possible that the assembled
forces of three people with the power of Superman, four people with
the power of Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman into the bargain could
easily smash the most firm resistance. This prospect worries both
the Houses of Titans and Justice tremendously. It also worries the
villains remaining at the House of Secrets who remember back to the
purges of the nineties and shudder. It certainly alarms the people
living in the barrio, who, though downtrodden, still have a certain
amount of liberty, impoverished though it be, and are not actually
living under the absolute dictatorship that could result from a
marriage between the Houses of Steel and Thunder. The other major
party alarmed by the prospect are the assembled alien forces that
are conspiring out on the moon of Mars. They don't like the
thought of a planet ruled by an unstoppable superhuman elite purely
because it might very quickly pose a threat to the aliens' own well-being.
Their plan is cryptic, but we learn a bit of it at a time.
The main thrust of their plan is that they intend to use Adam
Strange's place as their agent on Earth to set up a Zeta Beam link
through which an inviting army of Hawkpeople, super-powered green
Martians and members of the Green Lantern Corps could materialize
in the center of Times Square or somewhere, this plan being linked
to a Thanagarian Plan that has to be abandoned in the current
issues of Swamp Thing, resurrected here to much more spectacular
purpose.
Okay, so that's the rough background. Down at Sandy's the bums are
hanging out, Uncle Sam muttering in the corner, Plastic Man
dropping by for a drink with Blackhawk before they both go to
cruise the bars uptown, Doll Man scuttling around his vivarium and
so on. Oliver and Dinah are publishing their newspaper, with the
Question occasionally dropping by for a political argument with
Ollie or to pass on a bit of information. His current case is one
that has him totally mystified: a midget turned up at a rough
trade bar, was seen by witnesses, finally vanishing to an upstairs
room with a very tall, very beautiful call girl that nobody had
ever seen before. When the door was broken down, this after nobody
had emerged from the room for some several hours, the body of the
midget was found bound and gagged, with his neck broken by a single
clean blow. The room was locked with no other possible exit. The
call girl was gone. There was no murder weapon. This little
conundrum will continue to puzzle them throughout the series until
we get a few shaking revelations at the end.
In the Houses themselves, things are unsettled. At the House of
Steel, both Superman and Super(Wonder)woman are worried about their
delinquent son and his increasingly-difficult-to-conceal tendencies
towards sadism and sociopathic behavior. They are also worried
about their daughter, who they cannot find a suitable suitor for,
since Captain Marvel Jr. doesn't appear to be interested in her.
Captain Marvel Jr.'s disinterest is largely due to the fact that he
is madly and passionately in love with Mary Marvel Sr., and is
liaising with her behind Captain Marvel Sr.'s back. Their
relationship has grown difficult of late, largely because the
increasingly erratic and cranky behavior of the Captain seems to
have taken a turn for the worse. All of the Marvel family have had
problems with the fact that they have two sets of bodies neither of
which ever age in the slightest but Mary and Junior have solved
this by more or less giving up their human identities. This
doesn't worry them, mainly because they are a lot closer to the age
of their counterpart than, say, Billy Batson is to his alter ego.
(I should point out that for reasons I've yet to find a good
explanation for, the Marvel family seem to grow, in their
superhuman forms, to an ideal age, and then stop. Thus, Mary and
Junior are both around twenty-five in their superhuman forms, as is
Captain Marvel himself, since he is already the ideal age and
hasn't grown up any more in the intervening years. All three are
still children if they happen to say Shazam, but the only one who
still uses the word is the Big Red Cheese himself, unable to give
up his human self as Mary and Junior have done. Hanging on to his
Billy Batson identity has caused a lot of problems for the Captain,
as well as in his relationship with his wife, but these seem to
have become a lot better recently. Now, however, there is a new
element that is perhaps even more threatening. Whereas before
Captain Marvel was wrapped up enough in his personal problems to
leave Mary and Junior lots of time together, lately he has started
to make more normal marital demands upon Mary's time. He's even
being extra nice to her, which worries her like anything. There
are other oddities of behavior... the Captain will no longer go
down and sit and talk with Mr. Tawky Tawny as had been a regular
habit of his. In the midst of all this, there are problems with
Mary Jr., who really doesn't want to marry Superboy at all.
In the background of all this we see John Constantine moving around
amongst the various characters, gathering a bit of information here
and there, obviously conducting some plan that he has in mind.
(Remember this is the older Constantine we're talking about here.)
He seems to be paying particular attention to the areas of stress
between the various Houses, and it becomes quickly apparent that
although he's older he's still in the habit of manipulating people
in various cryptic ways for reasons unclear to anyone but himself.
As things progress, we see the paranoia concerning the coming
wedding between the Houses of Steel and Thunder amongst the lesser
Houses start to come to a boiling point. The Titans, directed by a
ruthless and embittered Nightwing, maybe approach the Justice
League proposing that the two Houses should join forces, along with
maybe the villains in the House of Secrets, to stand against the
possible threat of being overrun by the Houses of Steel and
Thunder. Maybe an uneasy alliance is formed between the three
Houses, although the Houses of Mystery and Tomorrow are not at all
interested in joining in. A plan starts to emerge for a massed
attack upon the Houses of Steel and Thunder, perhaps even on the
wedding day itself, in the hope that both Houses can be eliminated
and the country divided up between the victors. Meanwhile, we see
Blackhawk continuing to recruit his new Blackhawks, and we see
Constantine starting to step up his plan, making contact with more
and more of the people he's going to need to accomplish it. For one
thing, we see him finally manage to make contact with the elite
council of the Shadow, the Batman and maybe Doc Savage and Tarzan
as well, and learn of their plan to oust all the superheroes from
Earth. Constantine seems eager to help them with this, although we
aren't sure about how much of a double game he's playing. He also
makes contact with Adam Strange, and through gaining Strange's
confidence learns of the alien's planned attack upon Earth.
Constantine seems eager to help with this plan as well. In fact,
as Constantine brushes against the various groups involved, it
becomes clear that he is promising his undivided assistance to all
of them. It is maybe during this period that he calls at the House
of Tomorrow and makes the acquaintance of Rip Hunter, who also
figures in his plans. Beyond this, he also spends a lot of time
hanging out with the Question and around the offices of Black
Feathers, seeming to be everywhere at once as he works his dubious
and incomprehensible scheme.
As the plot builds up in momentum, it is this ingenious and
baffling juggling act of Constantine's that becomes the main
attraction. We see him urging on the Justice League/Titans to
their attack upon the Houses of Thunder and Steel, and yet we see
him call at the House of Thunder and speak to Captain Marvel
himself, telling him of the planned attack. This is a key scene:
Constantine tells the Captain of the attack and asks him not to do
anything to help the House of Steel in the thick of the battle.
When the Captain politely asks Constantine why he should do this
when he is, after all, supposedly intend upon cementing the union
between the Houses of Steel and Thunder. Lighting a cigarette,
Constantine smiles and says that he thinks the Captain already
knows what the reasons are. The Captain flinches back from the
match as Constantine strikes it with a look of terror which passes,
changing into a smile at Constantine's cleverness. He agrees to go
along with Constantine so far as it suits his own plans.
While urging the Titans/Justice League to strike while the iron his
hot and simultaneously urging Captain Marvel not to defend his
allies, Constantine is at the same time urging the Batman/Shadow
group to hold back in their attack upon the super powers until a
more advantageous time. After he has explained his plan to them,
although not to the reader, they agree. On top of all this,
Constantine is acting as a fifth columnist to the planned alien
invasion through Adam Strange. He urges Strange to commence the
alien invasion after the Titans/League and the Houses of Steel and
Thunder have had a chance to weaken and decimate each other at the
wedding. This sounds sensible, and they readily agree. As if this
wasn't thoroughly confusing enough, Constantine also has a number
of other irons in the fire. In the barrio he is seen at various
times searching for two people. One of these is the vanished Metal
Man, Gold. The other is an old crippled man who is reputed to live
somewhere in the barrio that nobody knows the history of.
Eventually, Constantine finds both of these. Gold, after leading
him on with some story or other, he tricks cruelly and has melted
down. The old man, when he finds him, he is much more careful
with. I don't know when I'll reveal the information, but this old
man is in fact Metron, formerly of the New Gods, banished to Earth
for some treachery that he's committed in the past when the
temptation to uncover new knowledge became too much for the feeble
moral restraints that he places upon himself. What Constantine
wants with Metron is fairly straightforward: He wants the Moebius
chair, although we don't find out why until later. I should point
out that these various plot threads will be spread out
dramatically, intercut with developments in the lives of the other
characters, so it won't all be about John Constantine, endearing
though I obviously find him. For example, while planning their
raid upon the Houses of Steel and Thunder, the assembled Houses of
Titans, Justice and Secrets will attempt to pressgang various
heroes in the barrio into their army, with mixed results. Some of
the barrio heroes either reluctantly or willingly go along with the
revolutionary Houses, while some other people are enlisted by
Constantine to aid in his master plan. When we finally have the
various factions set up and defined, even if there are some
ambiguous areas, we let the climactic fireworks commence.
On the wedding day, the planned attack by the Titans, Justice
League and villains upon the Houses of Steel and Thunder gets
underway. The losses are heavy upon both sides. Wonder Woman (the
former Wonder Girl) is killed in battle by Superwoman (formerly
Wonder Woman) who is herself killed by Captain Atom. Superboy is
also killed, along with most of the Justice League, Titans and
super-villains. Captain Marvel, who has been expecting the attack
after being warned by Constantine, is unharmed, while Captain
Marvel Jr. And Mary Marvel decide to take advantage of the
confusion to flee into space, where they hope to make a new home.
Supergirl goes with them. This leaves only Captain Marvel and a
badly battered Superman standing amongst the bruised and bloodied
remnants of an army of beaten superheroes. The attempted coup by
the Titans/League has been successfully repulsed, and three Houses
lie shattered, but all that remain of the two most powerful Houses
of all are the two archetypal superheroes, standing back to back,
waiting for what's going to be thrown at them next.
This turns out to be the alien invasion. Arriving by Zeta Beam, an
army of Hawkmen, Lanterns and Martians pour into Earth and quickly
get rid of what remains of the armies recruited by the Houses of
Titans, Justice and Secrets in their failed attempt at a coup.
They then advance upon the main palaces. Superman isn't worried,
since with Captain Marvel by his side the two of them should still
be just about powerful enough to send the invaders packing.
This is where the surprise card is played. Captain Marvel isn't
Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel has been dead ever since the story
opened.
It had all started with little Billy Batson and his problem. There
he was, unwilling to give up being human, still spending a lot of
time in a child's body. The unfortunate thing was that though
little Billy's body didn't age, his mind did. Trapped in a child's
body but afflicted with adult needs, Billy went quietly... well,
bats, I suppose. A lot of the problems were sexual. Physically,
Billy was not capable of normal sex and thus pretty soon began to
experiment with more bizarre variations such as S&M, visiting the
appropriate bars in clothing that made him look as grown-up as
possible while he still had the face and body of a child. At a
certain club on a certain night, Billy had met a strikingly tall
call girl who seemed to meet his every fantasy requirement.
They went to a room upstairs together and locked it from within.
Billy was tied up, and then agreed to be gagged. At this point the
call girl began to melt and change shape, shimmering as if through
a heat haze before Billy's startled eyes. In the end, instead of a
six foot six human woman, Billy is staring at a seven and a half
foot tall green Martian man. It is J'onn J'onzz, the Martian
Manhunter, on Earth incognito using his power of disguise. Billy,
being gagged, cannot say Shazam and turn into Captain Marvel. Nor
can he prevent the Manhunter snapping his neck with one blow of his
hand. The Manhunter then walks out invisibly through the walls and
leaves a dead midget and an insoluble mystery. The Manhunter has
assumed the Captain's identity, being able to convincingly
duplicate his powers, in order to catch Superman by surprise when
the alien invasion finally comes. This is why he flinched when
Constantine struck a match and why he didn't mind letting the three
rebel Houses and the House of Steel tear each other to bits.
Upon realising how he has been set up, Superman fights with the
Martian Manhunter, killing him with his heat vision. However, by
this point it is too late, and the assembled Martians and Green
Lanterns have arrived. We have a powerful and intense sequence
where Superman manages to smash his way through a lot of the alien
forces single-handed while being ring-whipped by the Lanterns, only
to finally be beaten to death in single combat by the massive and
frighteningly powerful Sodal Yat. The alien invasion is a complete
success, and the coalition forces of the Martians, Guardians and
Thanagarians will now govern Earth forever and keep it nice and
peaceful. It seems that in his dealings, Constantine's plan has
gone awry, unless he actually meant to impose an alien dictatorship
upon the Earth.
It is at this point that the final pieces fall into place. The
alien conquerors find themselves suddenly attacked by a small army
of superheroes, these mostly being those recruited by Constantine
as well as the forces of the council made up of Batman, the Shadow,
etc. Most of these are wearing thin golden armor, made from the
body of the unfortunate Gold, which renders the otherwise
omnipotent power rings of the Green Lanterns useless. The aliens
are driven back and contained by the surprise attack of the others,
and the battle seems to come to a Mexican standoff when one of the
Hawkpeople or Green Lanterns points out that however valiantly the
heroes fight, there is a massive army of combined extraterrestrial
warriors ready to keep pouring onto the Earth until all resistance
is squashed. It is at this point that Constantine plays his trump
card.
Using the Moebius chair of Metron, Constantine has visited the
antimatter universe of Qward. In return for a firm promise of
immunity for the planet Earth and its immediate system, Constantine
has then sold them the secret of the Boom Tube, which he has also
managed to wheedle from Metron. Thus, while the assembled aliens
are preparing to pour into Earth via Zeta Beam, Thanagar, new Mars,
Rann and Oa are currently being overrun by a vast army of Qwardian
weaponeers.
Stunned, the aliens are forced to return quickly to their
respective homes to fight wars upon their own soil that may take
them centuries to win, if they win them at all. For the most part,
the only heroes left on Earth are the non-powered variety, and most
of these are more than prepared to take off their masks and go
public. Constantine explains to them that under the guidance of
the Batman, the Shadow and all the rest, American society, free of
government or a super-dictatorship, will start to organize itself
along different lines, so that it can deal with the future without
fear or anxiety. The days of the big powers are over, and
henceforth America will be built up from much smaller and more
flexible units, both socially and economically. The story of
Twilight ends with a delighted John Constantine standing at the
verge of a new utopia, free from the interferences of power, all
superfolk banished from Earth for ever.
Of course, the story that he gives to Rip Hunter to take back to
his past self, while it gives the gist of all this, doesn't give
the whole story. This comes home to the younger Constantine right
at the very end of the series, when we wrap up the framing device.
Somewhere earlier on in the continuity, we'll have a scene where
somebody says to Constantine that if he isn't careful, one day
he'll run into somebody craftier than himself and get into a whole
mess of trouble, to which Constantine replies confidently and with
some justification that there isn't anybody smarter than him.
At the very end of the series, he finds out differently. Having
contacted all the hero groups and people involved and met with
varying responses, Constantine is disturbed. Has he failed? Some
of the people he warned have taken his advice, some haven't. Some
he hasn't been able to reach at all. He is still thinking of this
event in the future as being a terrible thing, and he fears that he
might not have averted it well enough. All he has for consolation
is the knowledge that according to Hunter, at some point in this
future, he's going to meet a woman who he will love very much for
the rest of his life and who will fill a big lonely hole in him.
He even knows, thanks to Hunter, how he will meet her. She'll come
up to him in a bar and ask him for a light; their eyes will meet and
that will be that...
While he is musing over the pros and cons of this Hunter delivers
the last part of his message from the future Constantine, which he
has been instructed not to give to the younger Constantine until
after he has warned as many people as he can. Surprised,
Constantine reads what may turn out to be the ultimate "Dear John"
letter. Written by his future self, the letter apologizes for
using his younger self so cynically, but assures John the younger
that it's all for the best. The older Constantine having the
advantage of hindsight, can remember everything that happened to
his younger self, including meeting with Rip Hunter, getting told a
terrible story and then launching on a mission to warn everybody
affected of what waited in their future and how they might avert
it. The elder Constantine can even remember how that all worked
out: The world of Twilight came about anyway, often because of
people's actions in response to his warning. He can even remember
getting a letter handed to him, exactly the same as this one. He
muses briefly over the paradox of who really wrote the letter
originally before apologizing to his younger self again and
consoling him with the fact that a wonderful woman is waiting in
his near future, and that she will be worth everything.
Reading the letter, the younger Constantine is furious. It has
turned out that there is someone craftier than John Constantine...
namely, John Constantine twenty years older and smarter.
Constantine has been conned by himself. Worse, since the person
who tricked him is twenty years away in an unreachable future,
Constantine has no way of getting vengeance upon the person who did
this to him. Angered and enraged, he goes into a bar and sits with
the crumpled letter in his hand, getting drunk. This is the end of
the story, and we only have a final one-page epilogue that takes us
back to the beginning, now that we've come full circle. The woman
enters the bar and notices John, asking him for a light. He looks
up and their eyes meet. She is beautiful. He knows instantly that
he could love this woman forever. Knows who she is, knows how
happy him and all his future selves are going to be with her... and
finally, perversely, he understands how he can have his revenge
against his future self, how he can avert the circumstances that
lead to Twilight by throwing a small but important spanner into the
workings of destiny.
"Excuse me, have you got a light?"
Constantine looks at her and blinks twice before replying.
"No. I'm sorry. I don't smoke."
The woman shrugs, and after a while leaves the bar without speaking to
Constantine any further. After she's gone he sits, dead drunk at a
dimly lit corner table, and cries his cold and cynical heart out.
And that's it. I hope you can see how it's meant to fulfill all
the requirements mentioned earlier. There are opportunities for
new characters to get a springboard, old characters to get a shot
in the arm and all the merchandising you can handle in terms of
games and stuff, at least as I see it. The warring Houses idea
sounds ideal for role-playing games, or maybe even a video game.
The overall continuity is hopefully enhanced without being damaged
in any irreversible way, and I think we might get a damn good yarn
out of it in the bargain. Anyway, I seem to have gone on far
longer than I intended, so I better wrap this up. I'll be looking
forward with interest to hearing what any of you have to say about
all this when you've had a chance to read it. If any sections
are incomprehensible and need clarifying then please give me a
call.
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