The Keys to the City
Out of all of Don McGregor’s Marvel work, Killraven was the one who checked most of the writer’s favorite boxes: subjectivity, empathy, rupture, and pain. His Black Panther comics would have the greatest impact, fleshing out Wakanda for the first time and supplying most of the plot points and character beats for the 2018 blockbuster movie. Somewhere in the middle we find Luke Cage: Power Man.
All of McGregor’s ongoing series were abruptly cut short. Amazing Adventures ended with a beautiful, haunting one-off tale that was never intended as a conclusion, while Jungle Action was canceled in the middle of an ongoing mystery involving the Ku Klux Klan, to make room for Jack Kirby’s return to the character he co-created. In both cases, however, McGregor had ample time to make his mark (17 issues of Amazing Adventures and 18 of Jungle Action, each from 1973-1976). On Power Man, McGregor had a total of seven issues (28, 30-35, on the last one sharing a writing credit with Marv Wolfman, from 1975-1976) with five different pencillers (George Tuska, Sal Buscema, Frank Robbins , Rich Buckler and Marie Severin). McGregor introduced several new adversaries, many of whom went on to be featured in the Luke Cage Neftlix series, but left Cage himself surprisingly underdeveloped. True, he came up with a number of ongoing bits (such as Cage’s amusing ongoing struggles with faulty vending machines), but did little in the way of exploring the character.
This may have been because McGregor had a different set of priorities for Power Man. As he explains in his introduction to the third volume of the Marvel Masterworks Luke Cage Power Man collection, “The only comic I ever asked to write at Marvel Comics during the 1970s was Luke Cage” (np). Not because he was heavily invested in storytelling about black characters (although he was), but because he wanted the chance to write about New York City, his adopted home. The setting, rather than the character, was the draw. As a result, Luke Cage becomes a talkative, intelligent analog to Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing, or even an update of Will Eisner’s Danny Colt (The Spirit): he is the excuse for a story, the device that allows McGregor and the readers entree not just into a particular tale, but into the city where his adventures unfolded.
This does not make the Luke Cage stories impersonal or flat. To the contrary, these seven issues showcase a distinct voice. That voice, however, does not belong to Cage. It is the voice of the narrator who treats Cage’s dilemmas, and especially his physical pain, as a kind of free-writing prompt. The result is a set of stories that focus on Cage’s bodily experience accompanied by extended riffs that do not actually represent his consciousness.
The amount of suffering McGregor inflicts on his protagonist is not incidental. Though Cage’s powers are unexceptional by superhero standards, their symbolism has only grown more obvious over the decades (as evidenced by the extensive punditry inspired by the Neflix series). Thanks to experiments performed on him while in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Cage is not just strong; he has unbreakable skin. Luke Cage is a bulletproof Black man
But McGregor subjects this invulnerable hero to an extended series of baroque tortures, inflicting agony again and again. Within the first few pages of McGregor’s first issue, Luke is shot off a roof by Cockroach Hamilton and dislocates his arm. He seeks help from his doctor friend, Noah Burstein. Since Noah has a young boy and his mother in his office and wants to make sure the child is not traumatized, Luke is obliged to pretend it doesn’t hurt while Noah spends an entire page resetting his arm: "Luke looks up into the young watching eyes…and knows they will reflect enough pain some day..No need to add to it now.” Noah banters playfully, and Luke whispers “Noah…you../are enjoying this…/…too much!” Noah might not be the only one. And considering that Noah was responsible for the prison experiments that gave Lucas his powers without consent, the superficial lightness of this scene is particularly uncomfortable.
By the issue's end, Luke is chained to the bottom of the Harlem River Bridge, a drawbridge that is about to rise and tear him in half. The next issue of this bi-monthly comic was a fill-in, which means that Luke spent four months in real time hanging from that bridge. When we finally return , the tone of the comic has changed drastically, and the first five pages depict Luke’s protracted struggle to break free. The chains on his limbs only highlight the chain he regularly wears around his waist, adding several layers to the iconography of this particular ordeal: he recalls a slave trying to escape, a lynching victim, and, of course, Christ on the cross. The issue’s title, “Look What They’ve Done to Our Lives, Ma!” Is a parody of Melanie Safka’s hit song, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma!”, both repeating and enacting the anxiety of artistic appropriation in the original lyrics. And whose lives, exactly, are these? Certainly Luke’s is among them, but even as he is facing a solitary and gruesome death, the words point to people besides him.
We’ve seen how McGregor was able to combine graphic bodily torture with heightened interior states in Amazing Adventures, and we’ll see how he does it again (albeit somewhat differently) in Jungle Action. Here, though, we have a strange disconnect between the visual and verbal depictions of Luke’s suffering body and the emotional monologue that accompanies it. The pain belongs entirely to Luke, even as its description suggests a muddled understanding of Luke’s unbreakable skin (“The chains bite into his wrists”’; “He ignores the fact that his fingers are slippery from the blood coursing from his wrists”). But the pathos is expressed in a prose poem about the city rather than the man:
“Cry a lament.
“Cry it for the skyline that reaches from Harlem to the Bronx. The skyline that used to turn black with nightfall. It still tries, but it seldom succeeds.
“Cry a lement.
“Cry it for all the dead fish, living on their sides in the East River, their eyes mummified by the run, their bodies rotting amid the garbage.
"Cry a lament.
“Cry it for all the Manhattanites who wonder whether they should breathe come the next morning since the eleven o’clock news has told them the air will be unhealthy the next day.
“And cry it, also, for Luke Cage, Power Man, who is chained to the underside of the Harlem River Bridge."
It is not that McGregor’s writing shows a lack of sympathy to Black suffering; far from it. Issue 32 pits Cage against Wildfire, a costumed racist arsonist trying to drive George and Madelyn Simmons, a Black family with two children, out of a white neighborhood. Luke stops him, but only succeeds in saving one of the children. The story seems like a one-off, but McGregor follows up on the parents’ greet two issues later, when Luke attends the funeral. This is exactly the sort of plot that mainstream comics could easily do with a white superhero, giving readers yet another iteration of the white savior narrative. Superhero comics, even as they promoted a liberal message, tended to emphasize the need for Black people to recognize “good” white people as allies, and to abandon what the stories so often construct as paranoia. McGregor, however, is having none of that. The white neighbors are unmoved by the Simmons' plight, and one of them even warns Wildfire when George is sneaking up behind him. The white people are far from friendly, but the Black targets of their racist hostility are not passive. Having a Black character fight for this family makes a difference, as does McGregor’s familiarity with the Black intellectual tradition (the issue is called “The Fire This Time!”).
McGregor’s Luke Cage combines a troubling attention to suffering Black bodies with a role usually reserved for white characters: he is the white audience’s entrée into the “inner city.” With the exception of Wildfire, Luke fights an array of Black villains, which immerses him in the world of Black crime. But except for Clare Temple, who only appears in one issue, everyone who is a regular part of his life is white. If he weren’t Black, he would be like a white hero with One Black Friend. Perhaps if McGregor had had more time on the book, he would have delved more into Luke’s psyche, but as it stands, his Luke Cage stories are a missed opportunity.