The Flash's "Mopee" Origin

[Andrew Lowe]

 I've read the good Commander's post below mentioning mutual amnesia over certain stories, including a "Mopee" revision of Flash's origin.  Well, I've taken the bait - what's it all about?  

[Captain Comics]

 I'll jump in here before the Commander, who will likely follow with chapter and verse. But I can't resist.

There was a story in the Silver Age Flash that completely retconned Barry Allen's origin. A character named Mopee appeared before Barry, Mxyzptlk-fashion, a mop-topped character with too-big glasses and a monk's robe, claiming to be a magical "Heavenly Helpmate" who had REALLY been responsible for the bolt of lightning that transformed the police scientist. As he pointed out, the origin was really implausible -- what were the odds? Instead, he said he was an initiate Helpmate trying to earn his "wings" and that's why he did the lightning trick -- and, further, it was a mistake, and he was there to take The Flash's power away!

I won't go into the Spoilers here, but obviously Mopee didn't take Flash's power away. But what's important for our discussion is that the "new origin" was allowed to stand at the end of the story. Barry Allen didn't become The Flash by accident -- it was arranged by heavenly powers, specifically the goofy-looking Mopee.

Well, briefly. See, the Mopee story -- to my knowledge -- was never mentioned again!

One can only wonder at the story's existence at all: Was DC trying to make Barry's origin less one of chance, and more one of selection, like Green Lantern's? (Of course, they later went the opposite way with Hal.) Were they trying to give Flash a pesky imp of his own, like Superman and Mxyzptlk, Batman and Bat-Mite, and Aquaman and Qwsp?

But whatever the reasoning, DC (or, more likely, editor Julius Schwartz) apparently thought better of it. Mopee instantly disappeared into limbo. In every subsequent reference to The Flash's origin, no mention was made of Mopee, and it's always referred to as an accident. By unspoken agreement, readers and editors alike decided on "mutual amnesia" to pretend the story never happened.

But, again, only briefly. This astonishing retcon -- so thoroughly ignored by DC, but never openly repudiated -- has become legendary among comics fans. Mr. Silver Age of CBG has even named an annual event in his column "The Mopee Awards" -- awards granted to stories so wrong-headed and just plain dumb that we choose to ignore them as if they never happened.

Some previous recipients are ones the Commander mentioned. For example, one Silver Age Superboy story established that Jor-El and Lara survived Krypton's destruction in a comatose state, but that Superboy couldn't revive them and they remained in suspended animation in orbit in glass sarcophagi. You guessed it: This story was never mentioned again, and Kal-El's parents are dead, dead, dead in all subsequent mentions. "Mutual amnesia" again, because otherwise the story too thoroughly changed Superman's origin for all time.

And as long as we're on the subject, what "Mopees" can YOU recall?

I'll start off with one nomination: The sad thought balloon Professor X had in an early issue of X-Men where he wished he could tell Jean Grey how much he loved her. Stan Lee has established in later interviews (and in his autobiography) that he knew instantly that it was a mistake -- that it made Prof. X was some kind of creepy lech, lusting after one of his teenage students -- and quietly dropped the idea. (The sad thought balloons and star-crossed love aspect was switched to Scott Summers in subsequent issues.)

One thing may discount this as a Mopee: A later writer (possibly Claremont) addressed (and dismissed) it. I've forgotten the particulars, but the gist was that Xavier admitted to someone that at one time he had mistakenly believed he was falling in love with Jean, but that it was confusion arising from their close mental collaboration to control/develop her telepathic powers (later established as ongoing in the background of those early issues).

Since the thought balloon wasn't COMPLETELY shoved under the rug, that may discount my nomination. But I'll submit it anyway, because for more than two decades we readers and Stan Lee both quietly agreed to mutual amnesia.

Another nominee is the New Metal Men that the Commander mentioned, where the team was disquised as humans and on the run from Col. Magnus of the U.S. Army. As he said, after the title featuring this new direction flopped, those events were never mentioned again.

Any other nominations?

[ClarkKent_DC]

And as long as we're on the subject, what "Mopees" can YOU recall?

It's hard to think of too many this early in the morning, but I can think of plenty stories I wish WERE Mopees, Ms. Marvel's rape being chief among them!  :huh:

I suspect Mopees are fewer and farther between these days, what with the likes of Roy Thomas, John Byrne and Kurt Busiek feeling compelled to explain away/reconcile/revise/retcon every incident, no matter how minor, that ever appeared in print. But since I don't wish to hijack the thread, let's see ...

I'd nominate "Teen Tony" in Iron Man, but that was explained away in a subsequent Avengers annual.

Leiko Wu was kidnapped and had a hand amputated in a "Master of Kung Fu" storyline in Marvel Comics Presents, but she was whole in the recent MOKF miniseries.

Oh, yes! -- the notion that Clark Kent's eyeglasses induce a hypnotic effect on people to make them see him as shorter, smaller and less good-looking than Superman. (Who wants eyeglasses that do that?)

-- ClarkKent_DC (who wishes he didn't have to wear eyeglasses at all)

[Commander Benson]

 Cap, I couldn't have described the Mopee story any better than you did, both in terms of the events of the story itself and the resultant "mutual amnesia" (I love that term!) over it.

As for additional "Mopee stories" to add to the list, I do have a few more (although ClarkKent beat me to one, while I was checking on chapter-and-verse information).  First though, it bears mentioning that "Mopee stories" were and are rare, even back in the Silver Age.  You see, a Mopee story is not simply one which is completely absurd (otherwise, there would be a stack of Jimmy Olsen  and Lois Lane  stories going out the window) or a tale which one just hates.  

In order to qualify as a Mopee story, the tale must purport to alter a significant fact in a character's established history and  it must be so universally reviled that mutual amnesia is engaged and the story is ejected from the canon, never to be mentioned again.  That narrows the field considerably.

Going by that criteria, I have to say, Cap, that the New Metal Men, in my estimation, doesn't qualify for "Mopee-hood".  I probably misled you in my final paragraph in my comments on that time of the Metal Men's career.  My post had turned into a virtual treatise and I concluded it a bit too quickly and probably didn't make my final remarks clear.

While the specific story in that final Silver-Age issue--Metal Men  # 41--was left unresolved, the general scenarios were addressed in later DC mags.  First, in The Brave and the Bold  # 103 (Sep.-Oct., 1972).  Here, it was shown that while some of the Metal Men still clung to their human guises, others had disposed of them and had gone back to their original appearances, empowered by a sense of "robots' lib".  And when the Batman entreats the robots' aid against a military computer which has acquired independent thought and is holding the nation hostage by threat of launching ICBM's, he uses Doc Magnus' final words to his Metal Men from his last will and testament to sway the reluctant robots.

In this scene, it is specifically mentioned that Doc's mind was still suffering from the effects of the brain operation and he still worked for the dictator Karnak.  They permit the Batman to reveal Doc's last words (written when he was still normal) since he "was as good as dead."

Eventually, the Metal Men series was revived in 1976.  After a handful of reprint issues, new Metal Men stories kicked off with issue # 45 (Apr.-May, 1976).  The opening pages of the story reveal that, in the interim since that B&B  tale, Doc Magnus had been rescued from the clutches of Karnak and another brain operation had restored his sense of decency to normal.  In short, Doc and his pals were back at the same old stand.

This seemed to be a swift bit of exposition to kick off the new series, except for the fact that, as hints were dropped in the first few new issues, the operation that restored Doc to normal had not quite taken root and he occasionally demonstrated aberrations of behaviour, some of which had sinister overtones.

Eventually, as the series progressed, Doc was able to throw off his demons and return to complete normalcy.

Another nice touch of continuity which, indeed, did link with the "New, Hunted Metal Men" days occurred in issue # 46 (Jun.-Jul., 1976).  The plot of this issue concerned the Metal Men's efforts to retrieve the $10-billion-dollar ransom which Doc, during his evil period, had extorted out of the United States--an event which actually occurred in the last issue of the original run.

Therefore, while the situations comprising "the New, Hunted Metal Men" were overturned, they were not forgotten about--no mutual amnesia here--and thus, it really doesn't qualify for Mopee-dom.

As for stories I do nominate for admission to the Mopee list, besides the ones I mentioned before, I suggest the following:


• Superman  # 203 (Apr., 1968), "The Man Who Destroyed Krypton"

This is the infamous "Black Zero" story, in which it was revealed that Superman's father, Jor-El, was actually wrong in his calculations that Krypton would self-destruct under its own internal stresses.  And when the nefarious space pirate Black Zero discovered this, he used his own super-science to re-agitate the stress at the planet's core.  In the vernacular, Krypton didn't commit suicide; it was murdered .

The problem with this story is that it undermined the very character of Jor-El.  Central to Jor-El's image in the comics was that he was a brilliant scientist, combined with an intense dedication to duty and his home world and a high standard of nobility.  Thus, Jor-El had courageously subjected himself to loss of reputation and outright mockery by his peers and the public in his frequent attempts to awaken his people to the danger they faced.

By stating that Jor-El had been mistaken in his prediction of Krypton's doom all along, he became what his fellow members of the Science Council had called him--a crackpot.

The idea that Jor-El could have made such an error and that Black Zero actually destroyed Krypton was quickly swept under the rug and never mentioned, again.


• World's Finest Comics  # 223 (May-Jun., 1974), "Wipe the Blood Off My Name"
   World's Finest Comics  # 227 (Jan.-Feb., 1975), "Death Flaunts Its Golden Grin"

These are the two stories, the second a sequel to the first, which purported that Bruce Wayne had had an older brother--Thomas, Jr.--who had suffered brain damage while still an infant as the result of an auto accident.  According to the first story, Dr. and Mrs. Wayne had then confined the injured boy to Wildwood Sanitarium for the rest of his life.

The Batman discovers the existence of his older brother after Thomas, Jr. escapes from the sanitarium and commits a series of random murders.  The efforts of Batman and Superman to recapture Thomas, Jr. are hampered by Deadman, who desires to use the brain-damaged man as a permanent host, thus enabling him to rejoin the physical world.

For whatever reason--in my opinion, it just didn't feel thematically right that Bruce Wayne was not an only child and the last of the Wayne line--the story didn't take with the readership and the idea of Thomas, Jr. was never mentioned in any future retrospectives of the Batman's origin.


• Superman  # 330 (Dec., 1978), "The Master Mesmerizer of Metropolis"

This is the story which ClarkKent cited, the story in which DC made the ill-fated attempt to explain the long-accepted comics convention of why a pair of eyeglasses kept anyone from recognising that Clark Kent was Superman.

As the tale describes, an encounter with an old Batman villain, the Spellbinder, causes Superman to question the effectiveness of his own disguise, a doubt which is reïnforced when, catching him in the act of changing to Clark Kent, Lana Lang sees only Superman wearing a pair of glasses and not Clark Kent.

The Man of Steel's investigation of this phenomenon reveals that, since he first adopted his glasses as part of his Clark Kent identity, he had been sub-consciously using his power of super-hypnotism on those he encountered, making them see Clark with features clearly distinct from those of Superman.  Had the story stopped here, it might have worked.

However, the reader sees how Clark Kent is supposed to appear to the denizens of the DC universe when Clark asks the Planet's  staff artist to draw a picture of the reporter.  That likeness shows Clark to appear frail, slightly wizened, with a receding hairline.  In short, he looks like Don Knotts' slightly huskier older brother.

This flew in the face of the fact that it was a long-time convention of the Superman mythos that Clark Kent bore a noticable resemblence to the Man of Steel, and was, in fact, one of the reasons why Lana Lang, and then Lois Lane, had suspected that Kent was Superman.  Besides that, the persona of Clark Kent possessed its own innate nobility and decency and courage, qualities which were undermined by the notion of how Clark "really" looked to other people.

It was a rare editorial misstep for Julius Schwartz, and I suspect he was more than glad when "mutual amnesia" kicked in.

[Captain Comics]

 

QUOTE

In order to qualify as a Mopee story, the tale must purport to alter a significant fact in a character's established history and it must be so universally reviled and rejected that mutual amnesia is engaged and the story is ejected from the canon, never to be mentioned again. That narrows the field considerably.

This was my interpretation as well. That's why I hedged on my Prof. X entry -- if that one, single thought balloon had never been mentioned again, it was a definite Mopee. But since a later writer attempted to address it, however feebly, it loses some of its credentials. However, as I said, I still feel very Mopee-ish about it, because that later writer didn't make his effort for at least two decades -- 20 years that I indulged in the "mutual amnesia." I may have come out of my coma, but it's difficult to forget the experience.

Still, it may not count to others, particularly those who didn't start reading X-Men until recently, and stumbled across that thought balloon in reprints.

QUOTE

Going by that criteria, I have to say, Cap, that the New Metal Men, in my estimation, doesn't qualify for "Mopee-hood".

Acknowledged, Commander. "New Metal Men" scratched from contention.

QUOTE

This flew in the face of the fact that it was a long-time convention of the Superman mythos that Clark Kent bore a noticable resemblence to the Man of Steel, and was, in fact, one of the reasons why Lana Lang, and then Lois Lane, had suspected that Kent was Superman. Besides that, the persona of Clark Kent possessed its own innate nobility and decency and courage, qualities which were undermined by the notion of how Clark "really" looked to other people.

I also felt that the idea was dropped for similar reasons that Prof. X's crush on Jean Grey and Jor-El's "error" about Krypton were erased: It made the character look bad.

If Superman had been subconsciously hypnotizing people for decades, that's bad enough. But once he became aware of it, he'd have to stop -- I just can't believe that Clark would continue voluntarily violating people's minds. It just makes him look like a creep.

Further, if he stopped, he'd immediately be exposed as Superman, since Clark's appearance would "change" so radically and abruptly. So he'd either be exposed, or he'd continue being a mind-rapist. Neither scenario is palatable.

Yeah, let's Mopee that puppy!

[Baron Bizarre]

 I'd never heard of the "Mopee" story, myself. Was there ever a Silver Age story that explored the astonishingly unlikely "coincidence" that Barry Allen and Wally West had the exact same bizarre accident happen to them?

-BB, playing with Smilies...




     

[ClarkKent_DC]

World's Finest Comics # 223 (May-Jun., 1974), "Wipe the Blood Off My Name"
World's Finest Comics # 227 (Jan.-Feb., 1975), "Death Flaunts Its Golden Grin"

These are the two stories, the second a sequel to the first, which purported that Bruce Wayne had had an older brother--Thomas, Jr.--who had suffered brain damage while still an infant as the result of an auto accident. According to the first story, Dr. and Mrs. Wayne had then confined the injured boy to Wildwood Sanitarium for the rest of his life.

The Batman discovers the existence of his older brother after Thomas, Jr. escapes from the sanitarium and commits a series of random murders. The efforts of Batman and Superman to recapture Thomas, Jr. are hampered by Deadman, who desires to use the brain-damaged man as a permanent host, thus enabling him to rejoin the physical world.

For whatever reason--in my opinion, it just didn't feel thematically right that Bruce Wayne was not an only child and the last of the Wayne line--the story didn't take with the readership and the idea of Thomas, Jr. was never mentioned in any future retrospectives of the Batman's origin.

Oh, yes! I saw a reference to that just last week when I was looking up websites to add to the list! Don't know why it didn't register...

I'd add that the story didn't feel thematically right because it asked us to believe the Waynes dumped their kid in an asylum and never spoke of him again. Further, it asked us to believe that Alfred never said anything. Okay, Alfred is the faithful family retainer, and if the master and lady wished him to be silent, he would be. But it still doesn't seem right.

Maybe that's the way things were done in the old days (like Dick Grayson being Bruce Wayne's "ward" and not adopted son; back then, no court would ever grant custody to an unmarried man -- or woman, for that matter). However, it makes the Waynes seem heartless, and that's NOT a quality we wish to associate with the Waynes.

Not to mention, there's a severe "ick" factor in the notion that Thomas Wayne Jr. would become little more than a ventriloquist's dummy for Deadman.

Definitely a story best forgotten about. Would that Marvel would take this approach. I notice most of the stories cited were DC stories. Not because DC had more "Mopee"-type clunkers, but because their creators had the sense to leave bad enough alone.

-- ClarkKent_DC

 

[Commander Benson]

QUOTE (ClarkKent_DC @ Jun 19 2003, 03:20 PM)

Further, it asked us to believe that Alfred never said anything. Okay, Alfred is the faithful family retainer, and if the master and lady wished him to be silent, he would be. But it still doesn't seem right.

 Point of order:  under the "rules" in effect at the time of the Thomas Wayne, Jr. stories, Alfred was not  the old family retainer.  After Alfred Pennyworth's days with the Resistance during World War II, he became a stage actor in London.  It was his father, Jarvis, who was the butler to Dr. and Mrs. Wayne.

On his deathbed, Jarvis Pennyworth pursuaded Alfred to take up the "family business" as a gentleman's gentleman, and that's when Alfred went to work for Bruce Wayne.

Given that, I'm not sure that Jarvis would raise an issue with the Waynes sending their brain-damaged son away.  That's the way things were done in those days, and Jarvis, while viewing the action as regrettable, would not have seen anything untoward about it.

[Rich Lane]

 I'm not sure if this is a Mopee or not, but if it isn't it probably comes close.

In the mid-80s J.M. DeMatteis (there's that name again) attempted to make the Forever People relevant by all but placing them in the script of the movie The Big Chill .  Mark Moonrider was a "Gordon Geko" type, Serifan was a drugged up societal washout, Dreamer and Big Bear were married with children and Vykin was dead.  They all got back together to fight a ill-defined enemy called "The Dark" (which was all but copied in origin and ability from DeMatteis's character Null, the Living Darkness from while he was ruin...I mean, writing Marvel's Defenders ).  

Infinity Man was revealed to be nothing more than their Mother Box taking human form to defend them, and she/he gave up her life in one last battle to save them.  They were sent back to Earth, supposedly wiser, more mature and twenty years older  than when they were last seen.

I don't know if they appeared in the interim, but when I next saw them they were battling side by side with rest of Earth's heroes during the "Panic in the Sky" mini-crossover in the Superman books.  Guess what?  Dreamer was back with Moonrider, they were all in their original, youthful outfits, and they were able to transfer places with the Infinity Man once more.  Most baffling was the exchange between Infinity Man and Captain Marvel when they recognized their similarities and wondered if they might have a connection.  

A point which shouldn't have occurred if Infinity Man knew  he was the Mother Box.

TAARU!

[Luke Blanchard]

 This isn’t really a Mopee either, but the post-Kirby NEW GODS stories of the 70s were similarly dropped from continuity when Kirby did THE HUNGER DOGS in the 80s.

[Chris Fluit]

 
O my word, Mr. Lane.  I found te DeMatteis/Paris Cullins Forever People series in a ten cent box.  I paid 60 cents for te entire run and I still felt like I wasted my money.  I didn't even read numbers 5 and 6.  Instead, I gave te issues to my toddler and let 'er rip 'em apart.

It was a bad one.
 

[Commander Benson]

 Here's a definite Mopee story:

Hawkman # 22 (Oct.-Nov., 1967), "Quoth the Falcon, 'Hawkman Die!' "

This is probably one of the most forgotten Mopee stories.  The others mentioned here so far have become notorious in their own fashion simply for being  Mopee stories.  However, this Hawkman tale is deserving of Mopee-hood, yet has remained beneath the radar.

This story opens with Carter Hall appearing as a guest on a local panel show.  On camera, Hall's face seems to melt away, revealing an inhuman face underneath and he is chased from the studio as an alien.  Shiera Hall is immediately assumed to be an alien as well, and panic infests the citizenry of Midway City.  The Halls are forced into hiding as armed vigilantes comb the city for them.

The Halls' "outing" as aliens is key to the plot of a winged criminal called "the Falcon", who believes the museum curator and his wife to actually be Hawkman and Hawkgirl.  In order to remove their interference with his plan to loot the city with an army of trained birds, the Falcon acted upon his belief of their secret identities.  By exposing the Halls as aliens, the villain planned on the lynch-mob response to keep the couple occupied with their own survival.  Since Thanagarians are outwardly identical to Earth people, the Falcon posed as Carter Hall's make-up man for his television appearance and applied chemicals to his face to simulate an unearthly alien complexion.

The Falcon continues his campaign to expose the Halls as aliens.  Ultimately, the Thanagarian couple are able to convince the Falcon--and the public--that Hawkman and Hawkgirl are not Carter and Shiera Hall and put an end to the Falcon's scheme to rob the city.  However, the Halls are forced to admit publically that they are, in fact, alien beings.

This confession is genuine and lasting.  No last-minute retraction by stating it was part of a clever ruse or anything of that nature.  No, the status quo  at the story's conclusion is that the world now knows that Carter and Shiera Hall are not natives of this Earth.

As with all stories of this nature, the final captions raise the question of how this new development will affect the lives of the heroes.  The answer was:  not very much, since the concept that the Halls were generally known to be aliens was completely ignored after that story.

A true Mopee story.

[Captain Comics]

 Great Guardians, Commander! I had forgotten that story, and a particular anecdote, until you brought it up!

I remember as a lad, I read all of my brother's Hawkman books -- as well as all his others, in the helter-skelter manner of childhood. I read #22, as well, knew the Halls had been revealed as aliens, and thought nothing of it -- after all, I was reading them out of order. I assumed sooner or later that I'd read later issues which explored the issue.

Flash-forward a couple of years, and I buy my brother's collection. Title by title, I read them all -- in order this time, scratching a long-standing itch. I get to Hawkman, read through #22 ... and #23 opens with no mention of the previous issue's "new direction". My response, as you can imagine, was "What th--?"

Same with #24, #25 ... the series ends around #27, still with no mention of the new direction. I was puzzled, but didn't know what to do about it: Hawkman had long since been canceled (actually, merged with "The Atom" and THEN canceled). I couldn't even write anybody. It bothered me for several days ... but there was nothing that could be done, nobody to ask.

And that's what really bothered me -- it reinforced the isolation I felt as a comic-book fan, a feeling I generally could put out of my mind. If it was a sports question, a TV question, a movie question, I could quiz my friends. But with comics ... I was alone. I either solved the question myself, or it didn't get solved. I remember sitting alone in a room at my Dad's apartment thinking about that Hawkman, and suddenly having a moment of painful self-awareness: "I'm sitting. In a room. By myself. Thinking about something nobody cares about. What a weirdo I am."

Needless to say, I got over it, and continued to collect comics. And now I'm no longer alone; I've got you guys and gals.

Unfortunately, now you've reminded me of that moment, and of the unanswered questions surrounding Hawkman #22. Now I'm bothered all over again. What were they doing? Why was the "new direction" ignored after one issue, before sales could even be taken into account? Why am I sitting alone in my room asking questions about a 30-year-old comic book that I already know the answers to?

It's a Mopee. Wow.

[Luke Blanchard]

 According to the Grand Comics Database the issue was the first one edited by George Kashdan and written by Bob Haney. My guess is it’s an example of Haney’s upending the status quo for the sake of a story, something that’s quite typical of his work. Other examples are Wonder Woman and Supergirl’s Parisian romances in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #63, Superman’s abandonment of his Clark Kent identity to serve as King of Kandor in WORLD’S FINEST #240, and Superman’s evil hunchbacked twin brother’s successful creation of a US-wide totalitarian dictatorship in WORLD’S FINEST #246-7.

I actually like this aspect of Haney’s work - it takes the stories to places they otherwise wouldn’t go. You get to see things you couldn’t otherwise see, such as Batman on the run from Superman’s brother’s secret police. But it’s true that it’s often hard to believe that the status quo could be restored after such events. I think the conclusion to HAWKMAN #22 is supposed to be understood as a restoration of the status quo (although people will now know the Halls are aliens, no-one will consider it a big deal), but it just isn’t convincing.
 

[DocManbot]

 How DID they resolve the Teen Tony issue? Thats gotta rank up there with the Spider Clone in terms of ugh.