STAN LEE 1922-2018

Stan Lee is the most important cultural figure in my life. More important than Tolkien and C.S. Lewis; more important than George Lucas; far more important than John Lennon or Bob Dylan.

I do not remotely claim that Stan Lee is the literary equal of any of those figures, although some sort of comparison with his Bobness could probably be made. I do say that encountering Stan Lee at the age of eight was like getting drunk or taking drugs or discovering sex. Things which, admittedly, I shouldn't have been doing at that age.

More specifically it was like a conversion; like encountering God.

In the days and weeks since he died, comic book fans and movie fans have been queuing up to say the same thing. Stan Lee changed my life. Stan Lee changed the comic book industry. Stan Lee changed movies. Stan Lee changed popular culture. Stan Lee changed the world.

Everyone loves Stan Lee

Everyone loves Stan Lee so much that if anyone had whispered "Jack" or "Steve" or "co-creator" or "original art" or "royalty payment", we would have fallen on them, as if they had insulted our favorite uncle or made a coarse remark about the Virgin Mary.

We may not read so many Marvel Comics nowadays. Our tastes are broader and wider and deeper than they were when we were eight years old, as well they should be. But loving Stan Lee—having once loved Stan Lee—is part of our identity. Going to see the Marvel Movies is, I am sorry, a sacramental act. When we were very young, Grandad brought us a comic from the newsagent each week; and there on the middle pages was a letter from Stan Lee; Stan Lee, speaking to us, and us alone, directly. I am glad to say that I had never seen a soapbox. I certainly had no idea why anyone would use a soapbox to write a letter. I thought it was the box in which Stan stored his pens and notebooks. I understood less that a quarter of what he said. Excelsior! Hang loose! Bullpen! Irving Forbush! But still, it was Stan, talking to little Andy and to no-one else. And now we are fifty we go and see those very same characters having those very same adventures in 3D at the shopping mall multiplex and always, always, always, there is a moment when Stan Lee appears and does something slightly whacky and we know that we never really got old and everything is going to be the same for ever and ever and ever.

And yet, the question hovers, in the background. It scarcely seems decent to ask it.

For what, apart from being Stan Lee, is Stan Lee famous?

What, if it isn't a rude or silly question, did he do?

Stan Lee ceased to be a comic book creator more than 40 years ago. In the 1970s and 1980s he held the titles of Publisher and President of Marvel Comics, and he continued to act as a kind of brand-ambassador or company mascot right up until his death. But his last issues of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four were published in 1972.

Some of the people eulogizing Stan Lee are baby boomers in their seventh decade: people who actually bought Spider-Man #33 and Fantastic Four #48 off the news-stands; people for whom The Coming of Galactus and If This Be My Destiny are as emblematic of the summer of '66 as Revolver and Blonde on Blonde. The younger ones, like me, may have been lucky enough to have lived in England in the years before 2000AD swept all before it: when Lee-era Marvel comics were being reprinted in black and white 5p editions, in roughly chronological order, surrounded by all the obsolescent paraphernalia of the Marvel Age. And, of course, it is easier to read old comics than it has ever been. Some of the supplicants at the shrine of Stan have presumably worked their way through his oeuvre via Essentials and Omnibuses and Masterworks and Marvel Unlimited and Comixology. I myself have listened to the records of popular 1960s guitar bands like the Beatles. I even had a youthful infatuation with Flash Gordon.

But I do wonder.

How many of the people filing past Stan Lee's coffin are fans of his actual work? And how many of them love Dan Slott's Spider-Man or Greg Pak's Hulk and have some unexamined faith that everything which carries the Marvel trademark proceeds from the heart of Stan? How many of them buy into the corporate myth that Stan Lee is the indirect creator of Moon Girl and Jessica Jones just as surely as Uncle Walt is the presiding spirit which gives life to Frozen and Pirates of The Caribbean IV?

Is Stan Lee a man who worked on comic books? Or is he the symbol of our loyalty to a particular brand?

Is he Carlos Ezquerra—or the Mighty Tharg?

Is he Ray Kroc—or Ronald McDonald?

Theologians distinguish the Jesus of History from the Christ of Faith. There are facts about an ancient Jewish holy man which could in principal be known and proven and agreed; but there are beliefs and credal confessions which no amount of historical research could ever verify or debunk.

Or, in another sphere altogether: is it permissible to feel nostalgic affection for Uncle Walt and the Mickey Mouse club while admitting that, as a film-maker and a businessman, Walter Elias Disney was actually a bit of a shit?

There are facts.

In 1939, at the age of 17, one Stanley Martin Lieber took a job as an office boy at what was then called Timely Comics. His cousin was married to the publisher; but that's just how kids from immigrant families found work during the depression. The years passed. Timely became Marvel: Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee.

He later claimed, with a flippant wink, that he wanted to save his real name for when he wrote the Great American Novel. But his greatest collaborator, Jacob Kurtzburg, is known to the world as Jack Kirby. If you were doing stories about square jawed American heroes in '40s it was probably a good idea not to sound too Jewish. In latter years, Kirby pointedly referred to Lee as "Stanley". It was a very long time ago.

With a brief break for military service, "Lee" continued to work for "Marvel" for half a century, ending up with a million-dollar salary and the title of Chairman Emeritus. During that half-century, he was credited as "writer" on many thousands of individual comic books. Marvel Unlimited throws up 1575 hits if you search for his name. That's a respectable body of work; a fine career; an all-American success story. But it is not what we remember him for.

It is indubitably a fact that in November 1961 "Stan Lee" was credited as "writer" of the first issue of The Fantastic Four. It is indubitably a fact that he continued to be titular writer of that comic, and dozens of others, until March 1972, when he effectively retired from active comic-wrangling.

Some of us may have taken the trouble to read endless 1950s twist-in-the-backside monster stories with titles like Monstro: the Menace From the Murky Depths! But Stan Lee's reputation rests entirely on those final 11 years; the culmination of forty years in the funny book trade.

So. In those crucial years, what did Stan Lee actually do?

"Surely everyone knows the answer to that question. Stan Lee wrote comic books, hundreds of them: Ant-Man and the Wasp, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Nick Fury, the Silver Surfer, Spider-Man, Thor, the X-Men."

Well, yes. But when we say that Neil Gaiman wrote Sandman, we mean that he developed the characters, worked out the plot, wrote the dialogue, and then handed a very detailed typescript to an artist. Lee wrote no such typescripts, and rarely worked out plots in any detail. By his own account creating a story often meant pitching a one sentence idea, like "Maybe in the next issue Doctor Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane": the sort of thing which any fan fiction writer can come up with in their sleep. Plot, subplot, structure, character, supporting cast—everything that would normally come under the heading of "writing"—all that was down to the artists, who didn't necessarily stick at all closely even to these minimal briefs.

"OK: so Stan Lee didn't write most of the stories he is credited with. But the artists wouldn't have had stories to tell if he hadn't come up with all those great characters to begin with. Anyone can make up a Spider-Man story: the genius is in thinking up Spider-Man in the first place."

The idea of Stan Lee as the Creator of the Marvel Universe dies very hard. The cover of his 1974 book, The Origins of Marvel Comics, shows Thor, the Human Torch, the Submariner, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and the Thing leaping from Lee's typewriter, as if he is calling them into being. Yet by Lee's own account, the idea for Doctor Strange came from artist Steve Ditko; Lee did not write the first episodes of Thor; and the Human Torch and the Submariner were created by Carl Burgoss and Bill Everett, respectively, years before Stan got that first job filling Jack Kirby's inkwell. 

For Lee, creation is a singular mental act in which a person conceives—"dreams up"—the germ of an idea. That is the hard part: everything else is leg-work. The historical Stan Lee "created" Spider-Man only in so far as he thought "I would like to do a comic about a teenager who can stick to walls like a spider". The iconic costume; the web-shooters; the radioactive spider; and very many of the stories came from Steve Ditko.

Of course Lee was not being serious when he compared himself with God. But he did honestly believe in Spider-Man as a pre-existent logos; and that once he had said "Let there be Spider-Man" his work was essentially done.

"Okay: so he was an ideas man, coming up with high concepts that artists worked up into full characters, and then full stories, which later became the basis for successful movies."

After Jack Kirby quit Marvel Comics he worked for animation studios and toy manufacturers. He could sit at an art table and sketch characters and hardware that could be turned into exciting product. Super Powers and Thundarr the Barbarian and Captain Victory are not his greatest works; but they exist; they are out there; people remember them. And they are undeniably Kirbyesque.

There are undoubtedly such things as "ideas men". Modern screen-writing, we are told, relies on the "elevator pitch": if you can't tell the studio what's great about your movie in two minutes, it isn't a great idea. Terry Nation, who "created" the Daleks for Doctor Who, seems to have had a knack for coming up with one-line pitches for successful formats off the top of his head. Say what you like about Blakes' Seven and Survivors, they are great ideas for TV shows.

In the years after his collaboration with Ditko and Kirby, Lee spent decades "dreaming up" new characters and pitching them for films and TV series. Not one of them got picked up. The supposed creator of the Marvel Universe was being sold to the studios as an endless source of sure-fire ideas. In fact, he didn't offer them anything a competent amateur couldn't have done.

So what is left?

Stan Lee wrote the words which appeared in the speech bubbles and in the captions. Very frequently—in some of the best issues of the Fantastic Four, all of the good issues of Spider-Man—he wrote those words for stories into the creation of which he had had no input whatsoever. Where the artists were storytellers like Ditko and Kirby, it worked great. When they got replaced by Buscema and Romita—fine illustrators but not storytellers—then the stories slowed down and the imagination drained away.

But still, Stan Lee put the words into the speech bubbles and the text into the captions.

But that doesn't put it nearly strongly enough. We should rather say: for that defining decade, Stan lee provided Marvel Comics with its voice. 

Here is the full text of one of Stan Lee's fondly remembered "Soap Box" columns, from the 1980s:

Any decent copywriter could have conveyed this snippet of information in 25 words:

"Michael Levine, vice President of New World Television, today revealed that a new episode of the Incredible Hulk, provisionally entitled "The Death of the Incredible Hulk" will be released in 1990"

If we wanted to translate Stan Lee's text into plain English, we would come up with something like this: 

• The point of this column is to bring you news.
  
• I have some news.
  
• Do not tell anyone this news.
  
• This news was told me by a TV executive.
  
• There is going to be a new episode of the Hulk TV show.
  
• He also told me the title
  
• You will be surprised when I tell you the title.
  
• The title is The Death of the Incredible Hulk.
  
• Although it may not be.
  
• That is my news.
  
• You should tell everyone my news.
  

Into this structure he chucks every literary device in the book. He uses hyperbole as an ironic cover for self-deprecation. The news that the Hulk TV series has run its course and the main character is going to be killed off is hardly "top priority" and no-one's senses are likely to be shattered by it.

"What's the point of having me at your beck and call with these sense-shattering Soapboxes if they don't give you some top priority news"

is a purely ironic piece of writing. What he is actually saying is: "I know these columns are increasingly trivial and I have nothing much to report again this month."

He uses suspense to build up to the non-announcement. Having told us that he has an interesting tidbit to pass on, he makes us wait for it for ten lines, while he raps out some nonsense about us not being allowed to tell anyone. Again; there is an obvious inversion here—if the news really were secret, then obviously, he wouldn't print it in every copy of every Marvel magazine. But it also plays into the conceit that he is speaking to each reader individually. "I, Stan the Man, am prepared to confide in you, Andrew Rilstone from London, England, but not with anyone else."

When he comes to share the actual news, he doesn't just tell us: he embeds it in a narrative. The historical Stan Lee, as president of Marvel comics, presumably had short and well-planned business meetings with the staff of film companies who held licences to the company's characters. But in his story, he just happened to be in a TV studio, he just happened to have lost his way, and he just happened to bump into one of the VPs who just happened to have just had a phone call telling him that a new episode of the Hulk was in the pipe line.

It would hardly be worth calling this "a lie": no-one could remotely suppose it to be true. It's a jazzy way of passing on a snippet. But much of Stan Lee's life takes the form of neat little stories which are almost certainly not true. Perhaps in 25 years time "The tale of Stan Lee getting lost in the TV studio" will be as established an historical fact as "The tale of how Joan Lee persuaded Stan not to quit the comic business."

But he is still not done. Having started the letter by warning us that we are not allowed to share what he is about to tell us, he winds it up by telling us to spread the news:

"Think of how you'll impress your friends and confound your foes with this priceless piece of tantalizing trivia".

Hype and self deprecation in the same breath. Of course the information isn't priceless: everybody now knows about it. And how can it be trivial when a few minutes ago it was top-priority and sense-shattering?

This is banter: this is riffing. This is a 25 word press release spread out to a 350 word column. This is a man who loves the sound of his own voice and will fill empty air and blank spaces with pages of it. 

This is, in fact, genius.

Here is the complete text of a soliloquy from a 1967 Silver Surfer comic ("perhaps the greatest fantasy saga of all time.")

"Amongst the mightiest—the most supposedly savage of all earth's creatures—I sit in peace—I dwell in safety!

For food has been plentiful—and no longer do they hunger!

Unlike the humans—who call you beast—there is no violence in your heart!

No hint of avarice—no smouldering hate!

Yet man who has won dominion over all this world...is a stranger to peace—a prisoner caught in the web of his own nameless fears!

And here stand I—hopelessly trapped in a world of madness!

Where reason is shunned while violence prevails!

But no longer shall the Silver Surfer be a part of man's insanity!

Let humanity do what it will—as for me, I shall dwell among the beasts!"

This monologue has no particular bearing on the story. On one page, the Silver Surfer is alone in the jungle; on the next page, Loki comes along to engineer a big set-piece fight with Thor. There could have been a story about Norrin Radd making friends with the jungle beasts, but this isn't it. Like the infinitely extended news item, it feels like a Beckettian game to fill blank space with words.

Elevated, godly beings have to talk in elevated godly language; and for Stan Lee, this means they have to talk Old Fashioned. Unlike Thor and Loki, the Silver Surfer never lapses into full scale cod archaisms ("Thou does behold Loki...whom fate hath decreed thou shalt serve.") But he talks about himself in the third person, and reverses the natural word-order. ("No longer shall the Surfer be a part of man's insanity.") He seems to consciously echo Biblical phraseology ("Let man do what he will, as for me, I shall dwell among the beasts") And he cannot resist repeating himself; he feels a strong need to say the same thing twice. "I sit in peace/ I dwell in safety" "Food as been plentiful/ no longer do they hunger."  This technique is taken directly from the book of Psalms. The sounds, as we were taught in Sunday School, do not rhyme: but the meanings do.

Stan Lee cares about what his characters sound like. His first thought on seeing Kirby's pictures of the Silver Surfer was "what would that character sound like: how should he talk." But he also cares about words themselves; their sounds, their rhythms; their allusiveness: the way they can just sit on the page, talking to each other, not quite making sense. He doesn't always get it right. He was as capable as anyone of saying "pedagogue" when he meant "demagogue" or thinking that "enfant terrible" literally meant "terrible child". And he never sorted out the difference between "thou art" and "you are". But he had spent 20 years hammering away at an essentially low-brow medium, and came out the other side with a patois all of his own. (That is the analogy I would draw between him and Bob Dylan.)

C.S Lewis said (admittedly not entirely seriously) that a good reader is one who will read the same book ten or twenty times and would know and care if a single word were altered; and that a good book is one that can sustain a good reading. Stan Lee was, in that sense, the first good writer I ever encountered. I was a bookish child: but the idea that anyone could love the words of Willard Price or Hugh Lofting in the way that one loved the words of Stan Lee was obviously absurd. Without Stan Lee, I would never have known that it was possible to love writing, as such, for its own sake.

I wonder if it was from Stan Lee that I picked up the idea that creative writing was something that I could be good at myself? You pick up more grown-up words from the Fantastic Four than you do from the Famous Five and it isn't too hard to copy his style when you are told to walk round the field and write a description of what you see. ("Autumn trees! Standing sentry-like over the grass. And their leaves, like copper, like red metal—what a mighty shape do they carve"!) And once you have committed The Silver Surfer to memory, it is relatively easy to transition to the classics. My first reaction on seeing a Shakespeare play or being taken to the opera was "Oh, I get it: this is like a Marvel Comic".

I have been writing for the last two and a half years about my deep love for Amazing Spider-Man #1 - #33: comics which I read in reprint between my eighth and tenth birthdays. I can still recite large chunks of The Menace of Mysterio, the first comic I ever read, by heart:

" 'I never thought this would happen. I'm afraid to shut my eyes and go to sleep.' But eventually, sleep does come to the stricken Peter Parker, and when he awakes....!"

When Peter Parker puts on that red and black mask he speaks with Stan Lee's voice. And it was that voice which we loved; that voice which defined Spider-Man. A deep, New York Jewish, Groucho Marx twang, every-other line a wise-crack.

"Spider-Man! I might have known!"

"No you mightn't! You're not smart enough!"

These are not comics which I once read and fondly remember. They are comics which I have read and reread and will never stop rereading; stories and characters who have accompanied me through my whole life. If anything, their impact was greater, coming back to them at the age of 50, than when I first read them at the age of eight.

"I didn't let you down this time, Aunt May. I didn't fail you."

There was also Thor. Thor was the back up strip in Spider-Man's British comic. (The letters page was called "The Web and the Hammer": how cool is that?) Thor was a bit of a bore to start with, but it gradually became less and less about gangsters and commie dictators and more and more about space gods and sentient planets and the Colonisers of Rigel and Mangog, who had the strength of a Billion Billion Beings. Thor stopped talking like Superman and beganst to speaketh as doth befitteth the only begatten son of Odin. Lee made no bones about Thor's daddy being a thinly veiled stand-in for Jehovah.

"Yea, beyond description...even as he who rules the fabled land is beyond description...for he doth surpass all understanding! Let it suffice to know that he be Odin...the all-wise...the truly omnipotent!! Odin...maker of the law...speaker of the word...keeper of the faith!! Odin! The lasting power...the lightning wrath...the living judgement!! Verily he be Asgard incarnate!! And to the God of Thunder he be one thing more—he be flesh of my flesh...blood of my blood...for Him, do I call..FATHER."

This is heady stuff when you are a Methodist Sunday School boy and the closest you have come to a spiritual experience is making a doll out of pipe cleaners and a house out of a shoe-box to represent the father of the prodigal son. It would be an interesting exercise to try to identify all the Biblical and hymnal allusions in that one paragraph.

Then there was the "Avengers" comic. I never liked the Avengers all that much, particularly when it became mostly about Hawkeye and Quicksilver quarrelling and Captain America trying to keep them in order. But the second feature in the British Avengers comic was Doctor Strange, with his distinct vocabulary of spells and incantations and general weirdness. 

"You don't know me, but..." 

"DOCTOR STRANGE KNOWS ALL. Enter."

I rapidly came to understand that real magicians said "By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth", while pretend magicians said "Abracadabra." I assumed that Ali Bongo and David Nixen would know this, and was annoyed when they seemed not to.

I came late to the Fantastic Four. There was a little digest comic, published in the Summer of '78 off the back of Star Wars, which reprinted hundreds of pages of late '60s FF, starting with the wedding of Sue and Reed and ploughing on through the Kree and the Inhumans and the one where Doctor Doom steals the Silver Surfer's Power Cosmic. The original Galactus Trilogy (which introduces the Surfer) is more famous; but Doom Stealing The Surfer's Power is bigger, sillier, more over the top and much more like the Fantastic Four. And it contains the best caption that Stan Lee ever wrote:

"Like some predatory winged monster from another age...another universe...the incredible arch-fiend zooms westward...at a speed which virtually defies belief...!

DOOM: "Nothing can stop me now!"

FOOTNOTE: Who says this isn't the Marvel Age of cliches?- Shamefaced Stan."

And there, in a panel, is everything you need to know about Stan Lee. He turns the volume up to 11. He allows the most evil villain to steal the power of the most powerful superhero. He allows the villain to rant and rave like villains do. And then he inserts himself in to the comic, in his own voice, the voice of the soapboxes and the letter columns, and admits that the whole thing is a bit of a cliche. He isn't really ashamed of what he has written, not even a little bit. He is loving it, and so are we. But there is a half wink. "The Marvel Age of cliches." He knows perfectly well what he is doing, and so do we. 

People have called it "camp". Camp means different things to different people; but this isn't the camp of the De Laurentiis Flash Gordon movie or the Adam West Batman TV show-—the camp of positioning yourself as superior to the material. It is much more like the reassuring voice of Grandpa. "She does not get eaten by the eels at this time." It gives you permission to love the story, by reminding you that it is only a story.

I could go on. The death of Gwen Stacy's father, in Spider-Man's arms.

"It's Gwen. After I'm gone, they'll be no-one to look after her. No-one, Peter, except you. Be good to her, son. She loves you so very, very much."

Captain America's spirited defence of his generation, Stan's generation, the generation of his readers' parents and increasingly grandparents:

"So I belong to the establishment! I'm not going to knock it! It was that same establishment that gave them a Martin Luther King—a Tolkien—A McLuhan  and a couple of brothers—named Kennedy!”

And the scene that Lee himself would single out as his favourite, a few issues later, when the Silver Surfer, bruised from his encounter with Doctor Doom, decides he is going to try out being evil, The Watcher, a supporting deity who lives on the Moon and never interferes in human affairs fudges his cosmic non intervention policy to warn Mr Fantastic about the situation.

"What can he do against the all powerful Silver Surfer!?" whines the Invisible Girl.

"All-powerful?" replies the Watcher "There is only one who deserves that name! And His only weapon is love."

Irony; religious allusions; meta-textuality; lyricism; the love of language for its own sake.

And if you insist, superheroes with acne who spoke like neurotic, down-to-earth people, but truly, if that's all you see when you look at the Stan Lee age of comics, you are reading them wrong.

And yes. More than half of what I loved about Spider-Man—the ludicrous webby waistcoat, the aerial ballet, the web shooters, the whacky villains, and the farcical soap opera came from Steve Ditko. And more than half of what I loved about Doctor Strange—the strange, non-euclidean alien dimensions, the psychedelic clashes between Eternity and Dormamu—that all came from Ditko as well. And more than half of what made the Fantastic Four truly the world's greatest comic magazine came from Jack Kirby. The page on which Doom steals the Silver Surfer's powers may be the most impressive panel of any comic book ever. If we had not got that image in our heads, then Lee's wise-crack would have fallen flat.

Sometimes embellishing the pictures, sometimes drowning them out, sometimes providing a secondary theme. Stan Lee's voice was what all the comics I loved and all the comics I still love had in common.

Stan Lee did not create Spider-Man in a single divine act. He did not come up with the idea of realistic dialogue in a unique light bulb moment. 

Stan Lee was a word-smith. Stan Lee slogged away at a typewriter, bashing out text, for thirty years. He took the characters of Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and he gave them voices. Or if we want to be melodramatic about it: he gave them souls. And he left us perhaps 10,000 pages of comic books to read. 

It is time we abandoned the myth, snuffed out the incense, and started to read them.

The Marvel Age of Comics.

1961-1973.

With words by Stan Lee.

Listen Bud

A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature

by

Andrew Rilstone

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. This essay forms part of his critical study of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original Spider-Man comic book. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock #8

I think I finally understand. 

Geoff Johns wants to write about the DC Superheroes—Superman, Batman, Shazam and all the rest. Those are the characters he cares about; those are the characters he has a feel for. 

Or perhaps those are characters who, whatever their origins, have been folklorized. Characters who have bounced from writer to writer and from medium to medium for nearly a century. Characters who are bigger than any one creator. Batman isn't Bob Kane's Batman, and possibly never was: he is just Batman. Each writer writes the Consensus Batman and passes him on to the next writer, knowing that Consensus Batman has changed, ever so slightly, under his brief custodian-hood. The Watchmen characters haven't been, and shouldn't be, folklorized in that way: they belong too much in a single text. It makes sense for Geoff Johns to be writing about Firestorm in the way that Geoff Johns would write about Firestorm. It makes no sense whatsoever for him to be writing about Doctor Manhattan in the way that he imagines that Alan Moore would have written about Doctor Manhattan, had Alan Moore not comprehensively killed him off and said very publicly that there shouldn't be any more Doctor Manhattan stories. So obviously, the DC Universe scenes work and the Watchmen scenes don't. 

Or perhaps that's just what we've been conditioned to think by the movie/publishing complex. 

Perhaps the comic that Geoff Johns really wanted to write was the seventeenth reboot of the DC Universe, bringing back Kid Flash and the original Justice League and possibly making the whole thing slightly less dark and slightly more Silver Agey. Perhaps someone Upstairs said he could only write his reboot if it included the cast of Alan Moore's graphic novel, and he agreed. Or perhaps he realized that his story needed a super-god to muck around with history and challenge Superman, and found himself thinking "Wouldn't it be a wheeze if my God Like Being was Doctor Manhattan?" 

Or perhaps none of these things are true. What certainly is true is that this episode has very much more fluidity and characterization and, oh god, dare I even use the word, fun than the previous seven issues of Doomsday Clock. 

Or perhaps Superman and Batman and Lois Lane and Firestorm are fun and interesting characters no matter what you do with them. Perhaps the Watchmen characters are, out of the context of that one particular text, actually quite boring. 

Or perhaps that's just what we've been conditioned to think. 

In this issue, the subplot which has been simmering away in the background since issue one pushes its way to the front of the stage. The Watchmen cast are almost entirely absent. Geoff Johns takes the trouble to write in some exposition about the DC characters and the current state of the DC Universe. This enabled me to keep track of which superhero was who and therefore have a fairly good idea about what was supposed to be going on. "Firestorm wasn't created by some secret government programme, Lois" says a bespectacled news reporter in an old-fashioned blue suit "Ronnie Raymond and Prof Martin Stein were in a nuclear accident which fused them together. Ronnie's in control of the body, and the professor advises him telepathically." 

Perhaps it is in the nature of classical comic book characters to explain the plot to each other in short sharp sentences. The Watchmen characters, being realistic, can't be expected to tell each other things they already know, so we can only find out what is going on through the medium of oblique flashbacks and sidelong glances. An interesting Watchmen/DC crossover would have played on that. Imagine Superman having a Doctor Manhattan style reverie, taking us back to Krypton and Kansas in non-sequential flashbacks, while Rorschach says "I'm trying to fill the shoes of a hero who never really was! Gosh, how ironic!" 

Or perhaps Alan Moore did that years ago, under the title of For The Man Who Has Everything. 

The overwhelming majority of DC superheroes are American. Meta-textually, this is because DC Comics are published in America and the overwhelming majority of DC Comics readers are American. However, people inside the comic book universe have started to realize this; and they have developed a theory that all the superheroes (apart from Superman) have been created by the American Government, and should therefore be regarded as military weapons and regulated by treaties. The appearance of a superhero (apart from Superman) anywhere in the world could be regarded as an act of war. This is the Superman theory. It may have been deliberately created by Lex Luther to make life hard for Superman, but on the other hand it may not have been. 

In this issue, the previously exposited Firestorm has been illegally superheroing in Russia, lost control of his powers, and turned an entire innocent crowd to solid glass, which the Russians take to be an act of war. Firestorm takes refuge in Kahndaq, a sanctuary for superheroes ruled by Black Adam. The last time I looked, Black Adam was the evil opposite of Captain Marvel. He now seems to be a kind of edgy good-guy who Superman treats with cautious respect. Superman and Firestorm work out how to use the latter's powers to make the crowd of glass statues human again, and Superman uses his innate nobility and charisma to get the Russians on side; but just when everything is going to be okay the army and Batman arrive, there is shooting, and the statues get smashed. 

The episode begins with Ozymandias, who has possibly somehow got inside the Oval Office, pulling a secret file off a shelf and saying "This will do nicely". Halfway through the episode, Lois Lane gets a memory stick containing footage of the Justice Society, who she has never heard of, and the final page has Ozymandias sitting in front of a bank of TV screens. (I like the fact that the high tech bank of TVs he had in Watchmen have been replaced by several different widescreens and some tablets.) Last issue he said "I have a plan"; this issue he says "It begins". If this is all too subtle, the alternative cover (all comics have lots of different covers nowadays) shows Ozymandias as a puppeteer, controlling marionettes representing Superman and Doctor Manhattan. 

So: the situation has been engineered (somehow) by Ozymandias. I think that what is supposed to have happened in the final panel is that Ozzy has somehow let off a Nuke or at any rate a Very Big Bomb in Moscow, but made it look as if the explosion is Firestorm losing control of his powers. He thinks that engineering a war between the US and Russia will force Superman to stop Doctor Manhattan. Stop him from doing what? I have rather lost track. Superman is certainly the biggest name hero in the DC cosmology; but I don't see why he is thought capable of challenging Doctor Manhattan, who is very nearly literally a god. 

But doubtless this will all be cleared up sometime before the summer of 2019. 

Or perhaps that's what we've been conditioned to think.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock # 7

PLAYER CHARACTERS

SATURN GIRL

Comes from: The DC Universe, 36th Century
Group affiliation: Legion of Superheroes
Powers: Telepathy
Objective: Keep history running according to the correct time line from her future perspective.

RORSCHACH II:

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Ozymandias
Powers: Being a badass
Objectives: Help Ozymandias locate Doctor Manhattan.

JOHNNY THUNDER

Comes from: The DC Universe, 1945
Group affiliation: The Justice Society
Powers: Used to be able to summons up a magic genie.
Objective: Reestablish contact with his magic genie. Believes the green lantern (see below) is related to his lamp.

Magic Items: Green lantern

The green lantern once belonged to the golden age Green Lantern who was Johnny Thunder's team mate in the Justice Society. (However due to the intervention of Doctor Manhattan, the golden age Green Lantern never existed and was therefore, presumably, never in the Justice Society. The green lantern has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to its contact with Doctor Manhattan.)

NON PLAYER CHARACTERS

OZYMANDIAS

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Himself
Powers: Rich genius.
Objective: a: Find Doctor Manhattan;
b: Persuade him to return to the Watchmen Universe
c: Prevent Watchmen Universe being destroyed in a nuclear war for real this time.

Magic Items:

1: Nite Owl's Owlship

Automatically deposits Ozymandias at the exact spot in the multiverse where the plot requires him to be.

2: Bubastis

Bubaastis was killed by Doctor Manhattan but has been cloned by Ozymandias. The Bubastis kitten has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to the original's contact with Doctor Manhattan.

BATMAN

Comes from: The DC Universe, present day
Group affiliation: Himself
Powers: He is ther goddamned Batman.
Objectives: a: Prevent Ozymandias destroying the world.
b: Catch crooks.

VILLAINS

THE JOKER

Comes from: The DC Universe, present day
Group affiliation: Leader of all the criminals in Gotham City
Powers: Mad, evil. Has more or less infinite supply of former Batman bad guys under his command.
Objective: Kill ther Batman

THE COMEDIAN

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Doctor Manhattan
Objective: Last orders were to kill Bubastis

The Comedian was killed in the Watchmen universe, but has been resurrected in the present day DC Universe by Doctor Manhattan

The Comedian has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to his contact with Doctor Manhattan.

THE MIME and the MARIONETTE

Come from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Powers: Unclear
Group affiliation: Came to the DC Universe with Ozymandias with the intention of helping him solicit Doctor Manhattan's aid. Currently allied with the Joker

SCENARIO

When the scenario begins, Mime and Marionette and a severely wounded Comedian and ther Batman are located in the Joker's secret base.

Ozymandias will pick up Saturn Girl, Johnny Thunder and Rorschach in the Owl Ship.

Bubastis is attracted to anything and anyone which has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles (i.e anything which has been touched by Doctor Manhattan.) This should eventually lead the party to the Joker's base.

If all the objects and people impregnated with McGuffin Particles (e.g Bubastis, the Comedian and the green lantern) are brought together then Doctor Manhattan will be forced to manifest.

When Doctor Manhattan manifests he will info dump the following facts:

1: Ozymandias does NOT have cancer after all; this was a ruse to persuade Rorschach to join his scheme.

2: Rorschach's parents' marriage was destroyed by his father's involvement with Kovacs. This information was withheld from him by Mothman.

3: Manhattan refrained from killing the Marionette during the bank robbery not out of simple compassion but because he used his precognizance to see what her child would do in the future.

4: Marionette is pregnant again; Manhattan will not say which child the prophecy refers to.

5: Manhattan knows that he will encounter Superman in one month's time: his precognizance fails at this point and he does not know if this means he will be killed, or that he will somehow destroy the world.

Once it is clear that Manhattan will not intervene to save either Watchmen-earth or DC-earth, Ozymandias will announce that he has a plan of his own.

Because the last one went so well.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock #6

I sometimes come to the end of a comic book and say "This handles the first meeting of Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington Bear in an obvious and predictable way; any fan could have written it themselves." The proper reaction to Doomsday Clock is more like: "This copies the superficial style of Watchmen in an obvious and predictable way; but it is written very much better than any fan would have done."

Which raises the question "Why is Geoff Johns, who can obviously write a bit, wasting his time on this thing?"

Anyway.

This issue establishes a back story for Marionette and Mime, the two Watchmen-universe super-villains introduced in issue #1. This is in itself an obvious and predictable copy of the superficial style of Watchmen; which dedicated several issues to establishing the backstories of individual characters. The flashback to Marionette's childhood copies the style of those flashback episodes in such an obvious and predictable way that it set my teeth on edge.

Doctor Manhattan's dad made watches; and that imagery feeds into the Doc building his weird artifice on Mars; his non-linear perception of time; Einstein's line about becoming a watchmaker; the title of the comic....and so on, to infinity and beyond. Marionette's father made -- I wonder if you can guess -- puppets. (An immigrant-run marionette shop opposite an immigrant-run cut-glass shop seems like something out of the 1930s rather than the 1970s, but possibly all superhero flashbacks take place in that period known as The Olden Days.) When Rorschach was a little boy a group of bigger boys called him whore-son and he stabbed one of them in the eye with a pencil. When Marionette was a little girl some bigger girls called her dad a creepy child molester and the boy from the glass shop over the road smashed one of their heads open with a bottle.

Marionette's father is forced to pass protection money, or possibly drug money, or possibly bribes between the mob and some bent coppers. He does this by, er, hiding wads of cash inside his puppets. He is so ashamed of this that he ends up taking his own life. Marionette finds him hanging in his shop as if he were a puppet himself. And we are all puppets, don't you know, only not all of us can see the strings. I wonder if some day that you'll say that you care?

But once we were told about the origins of Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias we felt we understood those characters a little more; and the more we understood the characters the more sharply the Watchmen setting came into focus. We saw that Rorschach was not just a vigilante: he believes that good and evil are absolutes but that they were invented by humans and imposed on an amoral universe. This to some extent explains his actions: when he chooses to die rather than compromise his beliefs we understand why. I suppose that this story tells us that Marionette and Mime are very dedicated to each other because of a shared trauma in their childhood; and that they became criminals because Marionette's father was driven to suicide by corrupt cops. But really: we're back in that monochrome universe where "Because a baddy killed his daddy" is a good answer to the question "Why would a brilliant multi-zillionaire dress up as a bat every night?"

Yes, you can blackmail me into empathizing with two characters by telling me that they had horrid childhoods; but the question "Who are these people? Why should I care about them? And how do they fit into the story?" remains entirely unanswered. They are currently hanging out with the Joker's entourage, which merely underlines the fact that they are not very much more than Poundland Harley Quinn knockoffs.

Meanwhile, in the present day, all the villains in the DC Universe or possibly Gotham City are gathered together in a villainous convocation. They get one panel each. Here's the Penguin; here's the Scarecrow; here's one I don't remember.

There are off-hand references to the Green Lantern and all his enemies having left earth and Wonder Woman having been forcibly returned to Paradise Island, which is either a witty allusion to Dark Knight Returns or else isn't.

Then the Comedian turns up and everyone gets shot.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock #5

Batman meets Ozymandias on the Owlship.

Batman says to Ozymandias: "You killed billions of people as part of a crazy, self-aggrandizing scheme." 

Ozymandias says to Batman "You spend all your time arresting individual muggers and supervillains, but have never tried to do anything positive to improve the world."

The consequence was that Batman falls out of the Owlship, is ripped apart by an angry mob, and handed over to the Joker. 

And the world said "We think its all a big conspiracy by the American government."

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

 Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock #4

"A Young Guy has been placed in a mental institution. His Dad was killed in a Horrible Disaster, shortly after befriending a Notorious Vigilante. The Young Guy meets a friend of the Notorious Vigilante who is also in the institution. The Vigilante's Friend gives the Young Guy some combat training and a copy of his Father's diary.  The Young Guy eventually takes on the identity of the Notorious Vigilante and goes after the Crazy Genius who caused the Horrible Disaster which killed his family. But when he finds out that the Crazy Genius is terminally ill, he makes an uneasy alliance with him."

Doomsday Clock #4 contains a story. Not a great story: but definitely a narrative; one which would make sense even to someone who didn't know the difference between "Earth-2" and the "New 52". It is therefore the best issue so far. 

Like Watchmen itself, it is very, very dense: too dense to really understand at a single reading. Like Watchmen it keeps jumping between the present day and the character's memories, showing how things in the past continue to influence things in the present. Like Watchmen, it involves a criminal being given a Rorschach test by a psychiatrist. Twice. But unlike Watchmen the flashback structure is spread across two different universes, which makes everything just that little bit more confusing.

Last month, our hero, Fake Rorschach, was trapped in Arkham Asylum as a result of a ruse by ther Batman. This month we learn that Fake Rorschach (who traveled from Watchmen-world to DC-world with Ozymandias) is in fact...

SPOILERS

....Reggie Long, the son of Doctor Malcolm Long who psychoanalyzed the original Rorschach in the original graphic novel. His parents were killed in Ozymandias's attack on New York, and he saw the giant alien squid himself. As a result, he was placed in a mental institution where he came to know Byron Lewis, the original Mothman, who had also been institutionalized. (Mothman appears in a couple of panels in the original Watchmen; he was a member of the original Minutemen team. He has a slightly bigger role in Before Watchmen, but I don't care about that.) The relationship between Reggie and Byron is pretty well done. They first meet when Reggie is thinking about jumping from the prison roof; and Byron appears to be planning to do the same thing. But of course, Byron is not really trying to kill himself -- he is testing his moth-glider wings. There is a tolerably Moorish subtext here: both characters are in their own way looking for the Light; and light is what moths, by their nature, are drawn to. But we keep seeing an image of a bug flying into a light and getting zapped by a bug trap. The scenes of the emaciated Reggie Long, on the roof, in the rain, thinking about jumping, recall the concentration camp scenes in V for Vendetta, possibly intentionally.

There is, I fear, a little bit of dot-joining going on. Geoff Johns needs to get Reggie to the point where he can plausibly impersonate Rorschach; but Rorschach was the ultimate bad-ass. So we get Mothman teaching Reggie the fighting techniques of the Minutemen; and Mothman taking trips "over the wall" on his glider wings and bringing Regggie the notes about Rorschach that his late father left conveniently on his desk. He even provides him with boarding passes which will take him most of the way to Ozymandias's base at the South Pole. (Reggie is, understandably, a little cross with Ozymandias once he finds out that the giant blue squid which killed his parents and landed him in a mental hospital was a fake.) It's all a bit contrived, but plenty of superheroes have had less convincing origin stories.

The whole thing is framed, rather confusingly, with scenes in which the present-day fake-Rorschach is interviewed by a psychiatrist in present-day-DC-Universe Arkham; so we get to go through the whole "What do these pictures make you think of?" routine twice.

The Arkham shrink turns out to be ther Batman and the mysterious telepathic lady in the next cell turns out to be Saturn Girl from the Legion of Superheroes. She springs Reggie out of Arkham. 

There is still a subplot about how lots of people think that all the superheroes were deliberately created as part of a conspiracy by the American government. I hope you are keeping up.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Going, Going, Gondolin

The Fall of Gondolin
by J.R.R. Tolkien
edited by Christopher Tolkien

Some people are very cross about this book. Some of them don't think that the unpublished notes of dead authors should ever see the light of day. Some of them think that literary estates should make posthumous material available for free (and that editors and printers should chip in their time gratis). Quite a lot of people think that Tolkien's history's of the First and Second Ages are just incoherent doodling without any kind of literary value. Some even believe that The Fall of Gondolin is a Brian Herbert style continuation of Tolkien that Christopher Tolkien is passing off as his own work. (I got sworn at quite loudly on Facebook when I pointed out this wasn't the case.) And the mainstream press have completely ignored it.

Assuming you are not one of those people, what is the book about?

Way, way back many ages ago, not long after the Silmarillion began, an Elf named Turgon discovered a Secret Valley, and decided that this would be an absolutely spiffing place to construct a Hidden City. He named it Gondolin, the hidden rock. 

Many years later, a pair of humans, Huor and Hurin were taken to Gondolin by The Eagles (it's always The Eagles) on condition they swore to keep the location of the Hidden City hidden. Hurin became the father of the spectacularly ill-fated Turin. Huor's son, on the other hand, is called Tuor and he is the subject of the present book. 

Turin son of Hurin, Tuor son of Huor, Andrew son of Mandrew. I don't know if there is any reason behind all these rhyming names. The Dwarves in the Hobbit went in for it in a big way. although Tolkien blames that on the translator. 

So. 

Ulmo, the God of the Sea, tells Tuor Son of Huor to go to the Hidden City and warn Turgon Son of Fingolfin that he needs to throw open the gates of the Gondolin and attack Morgoth the Dark Lord. After a very great deal of waffle, Tuor delivers the message, but Turgon has absolutely no intention of de-cloking his city. The trip isn't entirely wasted because Tuor falls in love with Turgon's daughter, Idril, and eventually marries her. If it is 1917 and Beren is still elvish, then this is the first time human and elf have ever intermarried. If it is after 1920 and Beren is a human, then it's the second time. If you don't know who the third interracial pair were then you probably aren't going to enjoy the rest of this essay very much. 

Due to some treachery we probably don't need to go into, Morgoth the Dark Lord finds out where the city is and attacks it with dragons and balrogs and orcs (oh my!). After much derring do, the city is wiped out. However, Tuor and Idril's son Eärendil is smuggled out of the city. Eärendil, you will recall, was a mariner who tarried in Arvernien and built a boat of timber felled in Nimbrethil to journey in. The whole of Tolkien's vast story world--his legendarium, if you absolutely insist -- was dreamt up in order to provide a context for the story of Eärendil. Because of his mixed parentage, he is Elvish down to his waist, but his legs are human. [Check this. Ed.]This makes it his job to sail to Valinor, the Undying Lands and ask the High Elves and the Gods to come back to Middle-earth and defeat Morgoth once and for all. 

Eärendil may be an Anglo-Saxon name for the planet Venus; and some Anglo-Saxon poets may have thought that Venus represented Jesus Christ. The Very Early Tolkien thought that he was at some level recovering lost mythic material that was inferable only from linguistic hints; that he wasn't making up a story about Eärendil, but rediscovering it. Eärendil is quite a major background figure in Lord of the Rings: he was the father of Elrond and the ancestor of Aragorn. The star glass which Galadriel gives Frodo contains some of the light from the Silmaril on Eärendil's forehead; and when Frodo cries out "Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima!" he is indirectly quoting the old English couplet which kicked off Tolkien's whole creative process. 

But here is the thing. Tolkien never wrote the story of Eärendil, or even attempted it. The long poem which Bilbo recites in the Fellowship of the Ring is about as close as we get to it. I suppose Tollers couldn't embark on the final story on which all others depended until the rest of the history and the languages were completed to his satisfaction: and he was never satisfied with anything. 

I think that this fundamental interconnectivity is probably the most important part of Tolkien's literary achievement. If we can hold all these stories in our head they form a single immense pattern. Elrond tells Gandalf that the swords which Bilbo and the dwarves found in the trolls' lair were forged in Gondolin. Gandalf's sword Glamdring may have been wielded by Turgon himself. If you can get right through the Silmarillion there is a wonderful sense of seeing history laid out before you: Gondolin is a great city that will be built at some point in the future; then it is the Hidden City that few people know about; then it is the fallen city that is remembered only in legend. 

Doubtless everything is connected to everything else in real life as well. But real life is too vast and too complex and too arbitrary for us to grasp. Tolkien's made-up mythology and his made up history (and, I very much suspect, his made up grammar) is more shapely and balanced and pleasing than real history, mythology and grammar ever manage to be. In his creation story, the gods first perceive the shape of history, from the outside, as a single artistic whole—specifically a symphony—and then enter into the world and experience it sequentially as a series of events. 

But here's the other thing. The romance of Beren and Luthien, and the tragedy of Turin stand up pretty well as heroic sagas in their own right. The story of Gondolin really doesn't. It's a pivotal moment in Tolkien's symphony, and we Tolkien-heads want to know about it, but it isn't particularly interesting out of context. And, inevitably, Tolkien never finished the story.

Tuor and the Exiles of Gondolin Which Bringeth in The Great Tale of Eaerendel was one of the original Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien's first draft of what became the Silmarillion, written off the top of his head in or about 1917. Parts of it are quite dramatic, but it is bloody hard work, written in that extreme cod-archaic diction that the Very Early Tolkien loved so much:

The ardour of Glorfindel drove that Balrog from point to point, and his mail fended him from its whip and claw. Now had he beaten a heavy swinge upon its iron helm, now hewn off the creature’s whip-arm at the elbow. Then sprang the Balrog in the torment of his pain and fear full at Glorfindel, who stabbed like a dart of a snake; but he found only a shoulder, and was grappled, and they swayed to a fall upon the crag-top. Then Glorfindel’s left hand sought a dirk, and this he thrust up that it pierced the Balrog’s belly nigh his own face (for that demon was double his stature); and it shrieked, and fell backward from the rock, and falling clutched Glorfindel’s yellow locks beneath his cap, and those twain fell into the abyss. 

The version of the story in the "synthetic" Silmarillion—the book compiled from Tolkien's notes by Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay in 1977—reads very much like a summary:

Along that narrow way their march was strung, when they were ambushed by Orcs, for Morgoth had set watchers all about the encircling hills; and a Balrog was with them. Then dreadful was their plight, and hardly would they have been saved by the valour of yellow-haired Glorfindel, chief of the House of the Golden Flower of Gondolin, had not Thorondor come timely to their aid. Many are the songs that have been sung of the duel of Glorfindel with the Balrog upon a pinnacle of rock in that high place; and both fell to ruin in the abyss. 

This text is not strictly written by Tolkien: it is a very lightly edited version of Quenta Noldorinwa, the history of the Noldor. written in 1930: 

Along that narrow way their march was strung when it was ambushed by an outpost of Morgoth’s power; and a Balrog was their leader. Then dreadful was their plight, and hardly would it have been saved by the deathless valour of yellow-haired Glorfindel, chief of the House of the Golden Flower of Gondolin, had not Thorondor come timely to their aid. Songs have been sung of the duel of Glorfindel with the Balrog upon a pinnacle of rock in that high place; and both fell to ruin in the abyss. 

Quenta Noldorinwa was, indeed, intended to be a synopsis of Tolkien's mythology. He did, in fact, write a much more expansive version in 1937, after the Hobbit but before Lord of the Rings. This was called Quenta Silmarillion, the history of the Silmarils, and it's where most of the book-we-now-call-the-Silmarillion comes from. 

The story of the fall of Gondolin in the 1977 Silmarillion runs to barely ten pages, where the story of Beren and Luthien run to over fifty. Why do Christopher and Guy run with this rather cursory version? Simply because Tolkien (of course) never got to the end of Quenta Silmarillion: the Gondolin tale is not in it. The very primitive and very archaic Lost Tales version and the very brief Quenta Noldorinwa summary was all they had to work with. 

Tolkien did embark on a full dress novelistic retelling of the story in the early 1950s (post Lord of the Rings) but he gives up shortly after Tuor arrives in the city. The fragment runs to some 40 pages so the full version would have been vast. When Christopher Tolkien published the fragment as part of the Unfinished Tales, he named it "Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin". I loyally ploughed through it when it came out in 1980, but I am afraid my reaction was "Of Whom And His Coming To Where?"

So: what is the point of the present volume? 

The 1917 version of the story has already been published in the Book of Lost Tales and the long 1954 version in the Unfinished Tales. I suppose these books aren't that east to come by—the History of Middle Earth is only gettable at in relatively expensive print on demand editions—and printing the same material twice in thirty years is hardly saturating the market. The justification for the Children of Hurin  (2007) and Beren and Luthien (2017) was that they made worthwhile literary texts available to the general reader, substantially stripped of their critical apparatus. Many people might want to know more of the story which Aragorn told Frodo and Sam on Weathertop without caring a great deal about how Tolkien's various notebooks are related. 

But the sad truth is, there is no version of the fall of Gondolin which is going to be much use to the kind of person who has read the Lord of the Rings twice and the Silmarillion once. The very archaic version of the fall of the city; the first few pages of a novel that was started but not completed; nothing else but notes and synopses. And Christopher's voice chiming in every few pages:

Towards the end of the Quenta my father expanded and retyped portions of the text (while preserving the discarded pages); the text as it stood before this rewriting I will call ‘Q I’. Near the end of the narrative Q I gives out, and only the rewritten version (‘Q II’) continues to the end. It seems clear from this that the rewriting (which concerns Gondolin and its destruction) belongs to the same time, and I have given the Q II text throughout, from the point where the tale of Gondolin begins. The name of the King of Eagles, Thorndor, was changed throughout the text to Thorondor. 

In 2003, in his important Tolkien and the Great War, journalist-historian John Garth made a substantial attempt to rehabilitate the original Lost Tales Fall of Gondolin as a work of literature in its own right: not as a back story to Lord of the Rings, not as a first draft of the Silmarillion, but as a bona fide war poem. Christopher just doesn't think in that way: he is a textual critic. The relationships between the texts is all he is interested in. 

It is a Gordian knot; a riddle which cant be solved. The facts are the facts. Tolkien's mythos exists, frozen at different points in time, in different contradictory manuscripts. What most serious but non-scholarly Tolkien fans want is the story of Middle-earth; the tale of the Fall of Gondolin, fixed and final. Christopher is being honest in telling us that we can never have that.

If you have read Lord of the Rings and want to know the mythos, then read the Silmarillion and worry not about its textual sources. If you have read the Silmarillion and want to know about the tangles of texts Tolkien actually left, then by all means ask Mr Unwin to print you out a p.o.d History of Middle Earth (a snip at five hundred quid for the twelve volume set). But it is not clear to me which middle group this book is intended for.

If you enjoyed this, please join my Patreon. 

I wrote a book about Tolkien, and everything.