And You Think Your Life is a Soap Opera: Thoughts on the 2000 Hellcat Mini-series
Patsy Walker, a.k.a. Hellcat, is my favorite Marvel hero. She’s everything I love about Marvel condensed into a single, fabulous character: a convoluted backstory full of soapy intrigue, Stan Lee dialogue delivered with only a smidgen of self-awareness, and vague super-powers that only become more indecipherable as time goes on.
I could detail the minutia of Patsy’s fictional history, but luckily the illustrous Don Markstein has beaten me to the punch. Read this and this to bask in all the absurd glory, but suffice it to say that Patsy Walker was originally a teen romance/comedy heroine in the ’40s, sort of Marvel’s answer to Archie. Her long-running series ended in 1967, but in 1972 writer Steve Englehart brought her back as a supporting character in a horror strip. Then, once super-heroes were back en vogue, Englehart took her over to The Avengers, gave her a yellow jumpsuit (with impossible-to-define psychic powers/fighting skills), and called her Hellcat.
Hellcat has never been a major figure in the Marvel universe, spending most of her time as a supporting character in The Defenders (a third-tier team book), but she’s carved out a rather unusual niche as a semi-serious, semi-ironic super-heroine who still desperately clings to her girl-next-door image from the ’40s. This is despite the fact that she’s a two-time divorcee–the first husband abused her and then became a super-villain, the second was the “Son of Satan” and the marriage ultimately ended with her suicide.
Like most comic book characters, Patsy didn’t let a little thing like death end her fictional career. She was accidentally resurrected by some super-heroes, and then she teamed up with them to save her hometown of Centerville (straight out of the 1940’s comedy strip) from a band of demons.
It’s at this point that the 3-issue Hellcat mini-series picks up Patsy’s story. I’ve been wanting to read this for a long time because I love the character from her 1970s adventures with the Avengers and the Defenders, and this is basically the series that established her modern status quo, such as it is (Hellcat has made virtually no significant appearances since this series). And it’s Englehart writing her again, confirming that he’s probably the only person out there who loves the character as much as I.
In these pages, Patsy is confronted by an existential crisis. Though restored to life, she worries that everything that makes it up is artificial, created to fit a pleasant but ultimately false image. Centerville has been turned into a tourist trap by her childhood friend/rival Hedy (also from the original 1940s series), who has “perserved” the town by turning it into an idealized facsimile of Leave It to Beaver small-town America–at least on the surface. Patsy herself is on a book tour pitching a ghost-written memoir that airbrushes over the more disturbing aspects of her life story. And she’s still trying to convince everyone that, despite being a super-hero who has recently returned from the grave, she’s “just a normal girl.” (The metafictional question of whether Patsy’s life is “real” is reinforced by how each issue’s title is based on a soap opera; “One Life to Live” is the first issue.)
This especially tragic when compared to her experience after death. As a suicide, Patsy went to Hell, where she was forced to take part in the endless torment of warfare. As horrific as that experience was, it’s also the only thing Patsy feels was really “real,” since it was the rightful punishment, viscerally felt, for the very grave (and very real) sin of suicide.
It’s a great premise, which is why I was suprised to see the story take such a conventional route after the first issue. Hellcat ends up getting sucked back into Hell, and then caught in the middle of a conflict between two demon lords. And from this point on the series is standard super-heroics, replete with lots of fight scenes, as Patsy tries to manuever her way around the political intrigue of the underworld and get back home (all the while wondering if Hell might be where she really belongs).
I guess Englehart didn’t have much room in a 3-issue mini-series to really explore the ideas that he presented in the first issue. The theme of reality-versus-artifice is a strong one–one for which Hellcat is the perfect character to use, since her history is really just a bunch of elements from different literary genres cobbled together–but I don’t feel like the series did it justice. There’s an interesting idea in that Hellcat was able to figure out the big secret because she’s intimately aware of soap opera cliches–in a sense, it is her awareness of the fictional nature of the conflict that gives her the edge–but it doesn’t do much to resolve the internal conflict she’s experiencing. She’s happy to return to her normal life in the end, but why? Is it any more real?
(As an aside, Englehart also pulls out the gnostic idea that Hell is actually only a manifestation of one’s mind, a mere illusion, which is unfortunate because that completely undercuts Hellcat’s belief that her original death and descent into Hell really meant something. I understand that the Marvel Universe can’t really use the Christian conception of Hell, as a spiritual state totally devoid of the presence of God, because that would firmly establish a monotheistic worldview, not to mention drag the story into theological depths where it simply doesn’t want to go. But, purely on literary terms, the conception he did go with doesn’t help the story at all.)
There’s some smart stuff here in a subplot with Hedy and the Scarlet Witch trying to round up everyone who loves Patsy so they can hold a seance to bring her back from Hell, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. I realize the seance couldn’t actually work–Hellcat is the protagonist here, after all, so she has to be the one to save the day–but the fact that there were so many people willing to work to save her served as an interesting contradiction to Patsy’s belief that her earthly life is totally artificial.
Perhaps I’m being overly analytical. The Hellcat mini-series functions first and foremost as a fast-paced super-hero adventure, just as Hellcat herself first and foremost wants to be a fast-paced super-hero adventurer. Norm Breyfogle’s lovely art supports this reading rather well–it’s bright and colorful and necessarily energetic. It’s a shame that this series didn’t provoke more Hellcat solo stories; I really had a lot of fun with these three issues.
EDIT: I see that Paul O’Brien over at The X-Axis did short reviews of the first two issues of Hellcat when they originally came out. He didn’t like it much at all, and he has no love for the character; but his complaints are valid, and the reviews are worth reading: here and here (scroll down on each page).
