The Soul of an Old Machine
In the back pages of Astonishing Tales 25, which introduced a new character called "Deahtlok the Demolisher" in 1974, co-creators Doug Moench and Rich Buckler discuss their collaborative process:
RB: I keep telling you. We think alike—cinematically.
DM: But it wasn’t just that. It was more than just sharing a common desire to tell the story in cinematic terms. We actually thought alike as far as the story was concerned.
RB: So mention that in the article too. And say something about how we’ve tried to use simultaneous progression.
DM: You mean having one thing happening in the dialogue while something else is happening in the pictures…?
RB: Not just that, but also having the backgrounds tell something in addition to what’s happening in the foregrounds.
The combination of “cinematic” storytelling with a concern for parallel narration is a feature of some of Moench’s best work (particularly his collaboration with Paul Gulacy on Master of Kung Fu). But it is also a glimpse into the medium’s future. Using film techniques on the comics page was well established, particularly in the 1960s work of Jim Steranko. But on Deathlok, which is narrated by multiple voices within the same panels, Moench and Buckler use cinema to transcend cinema in an early attempt to do in comics what cannot be done in film.
The series’ narrative conceit, involving disparate voices arguing within Deathlok’s head, was Moench’s idea. Buckler and Moench highlight the book’s polyphonic approach:
DM […] And let me tell you, having him locked in this machine-like death really started to get complicated as far as the dialogue was concerned…
RB: Blame yourself for that; it was your idea to play pinball in his head.
DM: Yeah, well... I think it’s worth it, even if Deathlok takes me twice as long to write as any of the other books I’m doing.
Just twelve years later, this would be on of the signature accomplishments of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel Watchmen, where various narrators are identified by the shape and color of their captions, and where nearly everything contained in said captions is explicitly talking about something that we cannot see in the page, while implicitly serving as a counterpoint to the panel’s action. [1] In 2003, what was once an experimental technique went mainstream in Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness’ Superman/Batman, which had both title characters narrate in captions in the same panels, distinguished by color and by symbol. But it started with Deathlok.
In his original incarnation, Deathlok headlined Astonishing Tales from 1974 through 1976 (issues 25-28, 30-36), before sporadically bouncing around the Marvel Universe for several more years, and eventually getting killed and replaced by other, more popular versions of the character.[2]. Moench did not actually create Deathlok, but was a crucial part of the character’s adventures for the first year, credited as scripter or co-plotter for issues 25-27 and 30, and “writer” for issue 31. The credits for Deathlok’s first appearance state that it was “conceived, plotted, & drawn” by Rich Buckler, the creator and driving force behind the character. But where Buckler developed the book’s striking visuals, it was Moench who established the narrative structure.
Set in what was then the dismal, but largely recognizable near-future of the 1990s, Deathlok tells the story of Luther Manning, an American soldier turned into a cyborg after his death in combat. His transformation is not entirely a resurrection; his dead flesh is still dead, drawn as gray and corpese-like next to the shiny silver of his mechanical parts. Even his brain has been partially replaced by computer circuitry. General Harlan Ryker meant him to be an unstoppable, inhuman killing machine, but Deathlok proved more complicated and intransigent. To the surprise of his creators, the cyborg has retained Luther’s original consciousness in addition to the computer that was supposed to be the body’s sole pilot.
Deathlok is a new variation on the Marvel monster hero. We have seen the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic of the Hulk, the eventual synthesis of Ben Grimm’s insides and The Thing’s outsides, and the many silent or near-silent, occasionally non-sentient monsters alluded to so far. Deathlok is a hybrid: not just half-machine, but half-corpse. His in-story creators clearly intended him to be a cybernetic zombie, directed by a computer and unburdened by any vestiges of his humanity. Yet for reasons never precisely explained, Deathok, rather than being an empty husk, has a surplus of selfhood. The first page of his very first appearance drops the reader into a narrative muddle, with the computer providing the simple facts in block letters (“Identity confirmed; target established”) and another voice, represented in italics, turning the events into a prose poem (“hated animal response etched livid and stuffed with bright horror’s screaming lust to live”).
Already by page 2, it becomes easier to differentiate the voices. The computer continues speaking in block letters, its captions blue and usually rounded. Luther Manning himself uses a normal font in rectangular yellow boxes, as the computer issues commands while Luther argues for a more emotional approach
[Computer]: Fire. Repeat: fire.
[Luther]: No. Not yet. Let ‘im suffer. Let me savor his fear.
[Computer]: Incorrect response. unacceptable. Implies emotion; emotion precluded by nature.
[Luther]: Stuff it. I’m gonna see ‘im squirm. And if that’s emotion, it’s the only one: hate and contempt for his flesh-and-blood guts.
When Deathok finally fires on his target, the mysteriously poetic third voice breaks in:
[Third voice]: Feel the exquisite pleasure of our flex-steel fingers vise-squeezing a streaking spurt of ripping searing boring light.
[Computer]: I feel.
[Luther]: And I feel it too.
[Third voice]: See the hated human target stiffen in beautiful agony, spitting crimson shrieks of death.
[Computer]: Of liquidation.
[Luther]: Of death.
As this example shows, the interplay of the three voices could be successful and fail at the same time. This polylogue is evocative and emotional, but incredibly confusing, especially for the second page of a new feature. For some reason, the computer is using the first-person singular (“I”) and expressing an emotion, while the identity of the third voice is a complete mystery. In the next issue, after another stream of consciousness contribution from this voice (“feel spurting death slicing through scarlet-ripped hated human flesh destroying killing slashing cutting beauty”), Luther asks: “Y’know, ‘Puter, I been wondering—is it you or me who contributed the sick streak to our third personality?” The computer’s response: “Both.”
The third voice’s recognition by the other two only makes its presence more jarring. If its captions had simply been left in the panels unremarked, the voice could have been chalked up to some sort of extradiegetic effect, like mood music heard by an audience but not the characters. As it is, the third voice disappears as soon as Moench stops scripting, reducing the narration to a much more comprehensible dialogue. But the question remains: what was that voice doing there in the first place?
It turns out that Deatholk’s hybridity (part machine, part corpse) is replicated at multiple levels. Deathlok looks like he should be a mindless monster, and that is how his in-story creators designed him, but in fact, he is an entirely different kind of fictional device: Deathlok is a machine that cannot stop producing interiority effects. The first two voices corrpespond to his human and cybernetic halves, but neither one is entirely Deathlok. The third voice that arises to the surprise of the other two is identified by the computer as a synthesis; he is what happens when two halves start to make a new whole.
Deathlok the comic is even more preoccupied with interiority than Deathlok the character. In the end of the very first issue, we find that he is not the only person in the book who is part of a human/machine interface. Ryker’s lover Nina accidentally discovers that the back of his head is a computer port. Subsequently, he turns her into an organic processor for his “omni-computer,” in order to have it guide an unmanned tank. As is fitting for a comic in which the protagonist’s multiple personalities have their thoughts visually manifested on nearly every page, Deathlok the Demolisher has little regard for the boundaries between the internal and the external.
Finally, the same dynamic applies to the comic as physical object and commodity. The comic’s covers promise pulp sci-fi adventure with a high body count, but the pages inside area all about what it is like to be inside this cyborg’s head. In other words, the comic is more than it seems—an assertion made my many a frustrated comics apologist in the 1970s
Note
[1] Between Deathlok and Watchmen, Steven Grant performed a similar feat on his independent series Whisper (1983-1986). Unlike 1970s Marvel comics, Whisper is relatively self-contained, but the weak art in the character’s first several appearances is a barrier to entry.
[2] Depending on how you count them, there have been at least six different versions of Deathlok published since 1974. The most commercially successful was Michael Collins, who starred in his own series in the early 1990s. A Deathlok named Mike Peterson was featured in ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D television show.