Saturday, September 22, 2007
Comic Art
While not technically "omnipotent" today's character certainly is immortal, well sorta, and is in many ways one of my favorites. Dr. Fate is a throwback to the Golden Age that never seems to have really found a place in the modern age for reasons I cannot understand. He has, over the decades moved from a simple magician/wizard to an immensely powerful and very enigmatic sorcorer with serious identitiy issues. Technically Dr. Fate is the identity bestowed on anybody possessed by the spiritual near-god Nabu. There are always great battles between the person and the spiirt as to who is in control.
Fate, like most JSA Members is stunning to look at. I remember as a kid in the Silver Age when I first stumbled upon the JSA and the costumes and looks of the old Golden Age heros. There was just something about them that had the "cool" factor - but Fate stuck out more than most. Is it the helmet? - Or the stunning blue and yellow?I have to admit, I always found the helmet intriguing, particularly because the eye slits change shape routinely for that little bit of non-verbal communication. That does not happen with the other common helemted figure - Iron Man - and that seemed to show that this guy was really creepy and mystical.
It would be interesting sometime to talk to editors and writers to find out why the magical types are not so much a part of the everyday comic scene now. When they come in, it is very much like the Omnipotents - they solve plot problems overwise insoluble - magic has become, well "magic."
When I was a kid, magic was just another way to gain powers of some sort. The magicians, Fate here and Dr. Strange over at Marvel, had a limited set of capabilities that casued real world effects so they were battling bad guys like everybody else. Now they live like wise men, their versions of the Batcave turned into holy sanctuaries and all the other heroes hate them because they are so seemingly inhuman.I can't tell if they have been so relegated because the creators take the magic seriously, or because the readers just don't like them. I, for one, would like to see Dr. Fate back in more regular action, battling baddies with "spells" that create brick walls for escaping robbers to run into - that kind of stuff. Maybe he could even throw the occassional punch? I mean that outift just calls for action....
