Origins of Dr Horrible

The blog's been on an unofficial hiatus. I've been off my sleep schedule and no energy for the last few weeks. Apologies to my loyal readers (both of them)...

Last time I talked about Joss Whedon's online musical DR HORRIBLE'S SING-A-LONG BLOG (still recommended).

Since then I've realized that there seem to be some references to comic book and literary figures in that story.

The ones that stand out the most (at least to a comic book geek like me) are Captain Marvel and his arch enemy Dr Sivana. Dr Sivana appeared in the earliest Captain Marvel stories in 1940 and continued to plague him throughout his career into the 50s. The physical resemblance is true in all respects but one. Sivana is short and wears a white lab coat and thick, bottle-bottom glasses. Dr Horrible at least seems shorter than his heroic nemesis Captain Hammer, wears a white lab coat - though unlike Sivana he sometimes wears normal clothes - and the goggles on top of his head are counterparts of Sivana's glasses.

Comic book characters wear costumes for reader identification. Even non-superheroes tend to apparently own one suit of clothes, like Archie, Dennis the Menace and Charlie Brown. Clark Kent usually wears the same blue suit. Costumes are coded to define characters: the white lab coat tells us that Drs Horrible and Sivana are mad scientists.

The one physical aspect where Horrible and Sivana differ is that Sivana was grotesquely ugly: misshapen bald head, bad teeth, crooked nose, stunted body. Sivana was the villain of the piece, not a leading man like Dr Horrible, and ugly is a comic book code for evil. The message was not that ugly is evil, but the opposite, evil is ugly. DICK TRACY's creator Chester Gould said that he drew villains like The Brow and Flattop ugly to reflect the ugliness of crime.

While Dr Horrible is obviously a supervillain name - I doubt he was christened "Billy Horrible" - Sivana was the character's real name. Sivana was like Superman's enemy Luthor, another lab-coated mad scientist, although they appeared nearly simultaneously in early 1940. The motif

was an evil genius with a sinister, foreign-sounding name.

In a twisted way Drs Sivana and Horrible's relationship with their heroic enemies is similar. From Sivana's point of view Captain Marvel was just an overgrown bully ("the Big Red Cheese") picking on Sivana and breaking all his toys. Dr Horrible feels the same about his arch-Captain, although in Hammer's case he is a bully. Dr Horrible's motives were good but bent, at least at first. He saw the wrongness in society and thought he could change the world for the better by ruling it. Sivana declared himself "Rightful Ruler of the Universe" by virtue of his genius, but he never had any inclinations to save society.

DHS-A-LB is an example of Joss Whedon's turning a stereotype on its ear. In BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER it was the blonde girl killing the monsters, in FIREFLY/SERENITY it was "bad guys" as heroes. Now we have the villain who wants to right wrongs versus the hero who only cares about himself.

The "benevolent villain" concept is rare but it has been used before. I don't mean rogue heroes like Robin Hood, Zorro or The Saint, but as far back as Jules Verne, whose Robur the Conquerer wanted to be Master of the World because he thought he could do a better job of it, and Captain Nemo who sank Navy ships to end wars. Their flaw was that they were ruthless about it and megalomanical enough to think they could save the world singlehanded.

Another similarity worth noting is that at one time Sivana was a member of The Monster Society of Evil - not a far cry from Dr Horrible's Evil League of Evil. Both groups had non-human leaders, the ELE's Bad Horse and the MSE's "bad worm," Mr Mind.

Dr Horrible's sidekick Moist is a parody of the type of character, seen most commonly in X-MEN, with a realatively obscure super power and a one-word code name. In place of flamboyant names like Wonderman or Mr Terrific and standard powers like strength or flying we have characters like Marrow, who uses bits of her bones as weapons, or Skin, with extra folds of stretchable skin. Moist with his ability to "make things damp," sounds more at home in the Legion of Substitute Heroes, heroes with powers too ineffectual for the Legion of Super Heroes - with Stone Boy (turns to stone but can't move) and Polar Boy (makes things chilly).

Captain Hammer is the archetypal superhero. He fits the mold of Superman the way he was originally conceived in the 30s: super-strong, possibly super-fast and invulnerable. We see no direct evidence of the last two, nor of flying. But the original Superman didn't fly, he leaped ("over a tall building in a single bound") and wasn't completely invulnerable ("nothing less than a bursting artillery shell can penetrate his skin.") Of couse the biggest difference is that Superman and Captain Marvel were nice guys. Captain Hammer is a jerk.

It's not that there are elements of older stories in DHS-A-LB that matters. STAR WARS borrowed heavily from old movie serials, Japanese Samurai movies and World War II dogfight movies but it was still a unique vision. So is DR HORRIBLE. There are no new stories. Genius isn't in inventing new ideas, its in building on and re-inventing the basics.

If you haven't seen it yet, it's still at Hulu.com or at http://www.drhorrible.com/

Diversity and the Outsider

"We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams." ~ Jimmy Carter

"Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences." ~Mikhail Gorbachev"



"Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC) represents a Vulcan belief that beauty, growth, and progress all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities." ~STAR TREK

Myth and folklore are all about interactions between humans and magical and otherworldly creatures. That hasn't changed today, although you are as likely to find aliens and mutants among the gods, faerie folk and elementals. Otherworld includes the entire universe of possibilities.

Except for tales of the gods, classic mythology and fairy tales are usually told from the human point of view. There are exceptions, but in general the stories were meant as cautions to keep people safe; which could also mean keeping them in their place. Thus in the original Little Mermaid tale, the nonhuman heroine loses her prince to a human woman, returns to the sea and dies. There are tales of changeling children swapped for trolls in Swedish and Celtic legend; in both the way to get rid of them was to treat the child cruelly.

It's only recently that stories have shifted to the outsider's point of view. Superman, of course, is from another planet, but Kryptonians are human in most respects; he is more a god than an alien.

The first truly nonhuman character that I recall was Eando Binder's Adam Link. Adam Link was a robot who appeared in a series of stories from 1939 to 1942. The stories were about his attempts to be accepted by human society. There were other robotic heroes but most of these were so humanoid that it didn't matter or human brains in metal bodies.

Since then outsider heroes have become popular. Aliens like STAR TREK's Spock and the comic books' Martian Manhunter, demons from other dimensions like Hellboy (see image), vampires, and like creatures are heroes too.

In faerie lore, changelings were fey beings left behind when human children were stolen. The modern versions are the mutants in stories like X-MEN. The children are "different" from their parents, sometimes just by having super powers, but some have blue fur, tails, claws or scales. They are the ultimate version of the outsider. But in the new stories the changelings are the heroes.

Of course the truth represented by these heroes has nothing to do with the Otherworld. The appearance in popular culture of outsider heroes reflects, I think, a growing acceptance of human diversity in all its forms. And this is something we have to learn. There is too much beauty to be seen in differences and truths to be learned from each other to waste it hating ourselves over small differences.

And that's all there is between us ... small differences. There are no outsiders.