WHEN WE WERE ULTRA: The Girl Who Replaced Pamela Sue Martin* (MANTRA: SPEAR OF DESTINY, MANTRA V. 2)

 

At this point in the Ultraverse , I've come to accept that there is a rather...extensive shift in storytelling and art once Marvel bought Malibu Comics.  And it's reflected by the fact that of all the titles the Ultraverse put out, all of them were either cancelled, were allowed to end or rebooted with a volume two around the time of the Black September event.

(The Marvel-owned Ultraverse loved crossover events only slightly more than plonking Marvel characters into their titles, if you haven't figured it out yet)

One of the six titles that got blessed with a second volume was Mantra, and like most of these second volumes, its status quo got squished something fierce.

To be honest, the first sign of this shift comes in Mantra: Spear of Destiny, a two part mini featuring Eden Blake being recruited by Aladdin to go undercover as a different hot girl to gain control of the Spear of Longinus, the spear used to pierce the side of Christ.  This is an odd story in that Eve appears as Mantra only at the beginning and end, allowing for the bulk of it to be a kinda, sorta James Bond/Indiana Jones mash-up with a race of primordial underground people standing in for the Nazis (They're even called 'Herrenvolk').  There's some fairly nice artwork from Paul Abrams, but it overall reads like a spy story Barr always wanted to write that he reworked to place Mantra in.  It's alright, I guess, but if you don't read it you won't miss anything...except the ludicrous sequence of Eden in male drag and the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of the Holy Grail in the second half.

The second volume launched with an 'Infinity' issue with an all black cover and the kind of lack of coherence that seems to be part and parcel of the Marvel reboot.  Eve's two children have changed personalities something fierce, her daughter acting a good couple of years more mature than when last we saw her and her son deciding to go through an 'I Hate My Parents' phase that includes some violent outbursts.  This attracts...something?...that gives the kid Massive Mystical Power that he uses to take his frustrations out on his family and his babysitter Lauren (who we last saw in volume 1, #21's "Little Miss Mantras").  During the course of the battle, the Mantra abilities, armor and weapons are transferred from Eve to Lauren, making her the All-New, All-Hawt Mantra.

This lead to seven issues of the actual volume, with the blonde Lauren taking center stage with a new, silver set of armor.  Like with Volume One, the narration for the first four issues is provided mainly as an inner monologue from Lauren.  The sheer denseness of narration from the last volume is out the window--in fact, it has the same chaotic feel I've gotten off of All-New Exiles and Foxfire.  The cheesecake aspect is seriously amped up, typified by the cover of issue #2 which seems to emphasize our heroine's crotch, or the cover of issue #6, which has Lauren doing a semi-brokeback pose in her new (lingerie-esque) costume to avoid colliding with catcalling guest star Rush.

You remember Rush, right?  The guy who showed up in two issues of Freex?

Oh, and Mike W. Barr's name is missing from two of the first four issues before Jerald DeVictoria, a Malibu assistant editor writes the fifth while maintaining the first person narration, and Tom Mason pens the last two using an omniscient third person narration.  With the exception of two issues, Dave Roberts did pencils and Jim Amash did inks.

Now here comes the controversy....

The general rumor is that Barr was fired from the book, but I don't think it's that cut and dried; you don't get to give your character a neat send off in your last (albeit uncredited) issue if you've been told to clean out your desk.  I did ask the editor of this volume of Mantra for his view, and his response is presented below:

"There are two things that happened right about the same time.

1)When Marvel bought us, sales were already declining across the board (and the industry), thus Black September (reboot!). Part of what we wanted to do with Black September was “fix” things that had been problematic to begin with. Mantra was one of those because the licensing department couldn’t get anyone interested in the character. Oh, they were very interested until they learned Mantra was a dude. 

So, we were instructed to make the change during Black September. Barr didn’t like it, but he did it and created the new character (Lauren was the name, I think). 

As you likely know, comics are very much an assembly line process. So, they’re written considerably ahead of time of publication. I’d be lying if I could tell you I remember exactly where we were with scripts when the next event happened (but this should be fairly close); as the new #1 was getting ready to go out, the guy overseeing Malibu editorial after the departure of Malibu EIC Chris Ulm happened to be in my office and browsed through the film I had ready to ship to the printer. He demanded we add two pages with Lauren in a bikini. Sigh.

I wasn’t happy (I did NOT like late shipping comics—still don’t! haha) as the book was literally headed out the door. Mike was ticked and began to cause a bit of a stink, blaming Marvel for tinkering and all that. Wasn’t Marvel’s doing, it was our own licensing department trying to actually make money off of secondary rights. 

At the same time…After Marvel bought Malibu, I guess they started looking at all the paperwork. One day one of our lawyers storms into the office and literally declared: “Fire Mike Barr right now!” As you might imagine, I was a bit keen to do that, but that’s not who I am, so I asked him why he wanted me to fire Mike. It seemed that Mike had been doing work with us with no contract and legal wanted him gone immediately.

But also…Mike had been attaching “riders” to his contracts. I was not aware of this when I became editor—everything was pretty much in place when they moved me to the title and I didn’t deal with contracts anyway, I just signed the pay vouchers that the freelancers had submitted the work so that they could get paid.

So, I learned that Mike’s attorney and Malibu’s attorney had apparently been going at it and Mike’s attorney essentially refused to answer. Thus, they told me to fire him.  

What I did, though, was bought a week’s time—a full seven days. I asked them to let me convince Mike to sign the contract so we could continue to work with him. I called Mike immediately and let him know what had happened, and that if he did not sign the contract, I could no longer hire him. He asked if he was being fired and I said no, technically, it isn’t being “fired,” I just couldn’t hire him because he wouldn’t sign a contract.  I told him I had one week. He had to do it or I couldn’t use him. He assured me he understood and that he would talk to his lawyer.

For the next seven days, either me or my assistant either called or faxed him a reminder that the final date was looming. When the time passed, he had not signed the contract and I could no longer use him. If I recall, I asked Jerald DeVictoria to write the next issue because, as my assistant, he knew was Mike was trying to do with the story and we were able to wrap it up while I sought out a new writer (I’ll admit I was very excited to be in talks with Ann Nocenti, a writer whose work I very much like and I felt would elevate the female character in a way that needed to be done in the comic).

I have not talked to Mike since that final day when he told me to remove his name from #4."

I have reached out to Mike Barr, and if he responds, I will provide his account of the story.  Tom Mason, who provided his insight on my earlier article on Hardcase, stepped in to write the last two issues because Moore 'needed someone to write the final two issues.'

It's not surprising to hear about this controversy--especially the part about the licensing department given that I expressed the belief that Mantra was a transsexual superhero in the last article and having people disagree with me--and knowing this, I'm also not surprised at how the second volume ended up.  The pages of Lauren in a bikini (and a shower sequence in a later issue) came off as gratuitous before Mr. Moore gave me his account, and that thirstiness that pervaded the first volume gets amped up in the second...and it's a little ickier considering Lauren is a high school minor at the time.  The bulk of the first four issues has Eden sidelined as a voice in Lauren's head or a shrunken body in a shoe box.  The circumstances by which Eden is written out is a little forced--and it is, once again, to Barr's credit that he managed to get her exit worked out in the way he did.

But there is something very integral to what made the first volume intriguing that doesn't quite work for me in the second volume...namely, that Lauren's circumstances lacks the hook that we had with Lukacz's.  She ends up becoming the 'teen struggles to perfect her super hero/life balance' trope which has been done before (and done with a great deal more attention when the CW presents Buffy The Vampire Slayer two years later).  To be fair, a lot of what Barr does in his four issues makes the best of the idea, and Mason's switch to a third person omniscient pov makes the new angle work better, as we're no longer comparing Lauren's narration to Lukacz/Eden's.  I also thought the shift of focus during the Mason issues to emphasize high school worked.

Not everything is well-done, however.  The sudden heel turn of Gus Blake (complete with a transition to some weird-ass creepy doll oversized head) never works for me, and neither does the strife depicted between the Blakes after where Barr left them in the last issue of Volume One.  I just don't get the appeal of Necromantra, who pops up in the third issue--I understand the appeal of an evil bad girl version of Mantra, I just never get a sense of why she's worth my attention.  A second version of the hero Wrath is set up as a foil for Lauren the way Warstrike was a foil for Eden only for him to be literally carted away in the fifth issue after him having little interaction with our heroine.  Rush kind of takes up precious air away from Lauren in her own book.

As mentioned before, Dave Roberts takes over on art except for Henry Martinez in issues #3-4, and its not bad.  As with Dodson in the first volume, it's very cheesecakey.  I will say I like Roberts' facial expressions quite a bit, which really did convey Lauren's habit of being at turns excited at being her favorite superhero and anxious because she's in way over her head.  As seems to be the custom with the character, Lauren goes through two costume changes before settling on a lacy little thing that doesn't seem very....warrior-like to me.

This is a letdown from the first volume.  It's not a hopeless case--I can easily see this book work more if they started with Lauren having sole control of the Mantra identity, with the events of the Barr issues being shown in flashback.  The structure in place at the end of the last issue, with a third person perspective and a stronger emphasis on high school, is sound.  According to Mason, the second volume sold extremely well, but not well enough to justify continuing the series.  I wonder if, had they continued an issue or two beyond issue seven, sales might have justified the two year run that other rebooted titles Prime and Ultraforce.

Of course, while the reboot was prompted by Marvel's purchase of Malibu, it was prompted narratively by a four part crossover event that became a line-wide jam...and we'll be covering the weekly flipbook story Godwheel next time!

Until then....why be meta when you can be ultra?

Thanks to both Tom Mason and Roland Mann for their views and support.

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*--here's more signs of me getting old...for those who don't know, Pamela Sue Martin played Nancy Drew in The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries in 1977.  When her role was reduced in the following year, Martin left the series (immediately posing for Playboy) and was replaced by Janet Louise Johnson, who was so forgettable I actually had to look it up on the interwebs.  That title references Johnson.