This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.
Not long ago, I re-read (for the first time in many years) and wrote a Series Saturday post about the two Nathaniel Dusk mini-series written by Don McGregor, drawn by Gene Colan, and published by DC Comics. That, along with reading the first three volumes of Tomb of Dracula: The Complete Collection back in November, made me want to re-read more of the Gene Colan work I loved, starting with the Cary Bates-scripted, Colan-drawn maxi-series Silverblade.
Silverblade is the story of reclusive former movie star Jonathan Lord and his co-stars in the movie that shares the maxi-series’ title. At the height of his career, the “Lord of Sunset Boulevard” matched Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power as a screen star; in the waning years, Lord’s career parallels Boris Karloff, to an extent. In the then-present-day of 1987, Lord is long-since retired and is bitter and cranky. He spends most of his time watching his own old movies while being waited on by Bobby Milestone (who co-starred in “Silver Blade” as a young boy in need of rescue) and avoiding phone calls from several of his ex-wives (including Sandra Stanyon, the great love of his life, who also co-starred in “Silver Blade”). An ancient bird spirit, manifesting as a falcon, grants Lord the ability to transform into any of his former film roles (gaining whatever powers are inherent with each role), because the bird-spirit needs a human avatar to help battle the return of another ancient spirit called The Executioner. Returned to his prime (in his role as the hero of “Silver Blade”), Lord re-emerges into Hollywood society pretending to be his own son, Jonathan Lord Junior, going on auditions for a science-fictiony “Silver Blade” remake and falling in lust with a well-known reporter. All of which distracts him from the mission, to the falcon’s displeasure.
The story winds its way from there over twelve issues, delving into the characters’ shared past (other major characters include Brian Vane, who played the villain in “Silver Blade,” and Vincent Vermillion, the young boy who was Bobby Milestone’s stunt double on the film and holds a grudge) and slowly unveiling what the battle between the Falcon and the Executioner is all about. There are plenty of interesting twists and turns, and very cool use of the types of characters an actor who started out as a Flynn and ended as a Karloff would have played: there’s the swashbuckling hero, the disgruntled private eye, the turns as Dracula and the Mummy. Two of the issues have end-text that list every movie Jonathan Lord made, and several are named after classic DC properties. I really would have loved to see Bates and Colan’s take on Jonathan Lord as The Viking Prince or Sarge of “Gunner and Sarge,” but I suspect that list was created well after the main story was plotted out, and fitting every character Lord ever played into the main story would have been a bit too much. But I have to admire Bates’ dedication to giving us Lord’s full filmography and a look at the actor’s one turn on Broadway.
For the first three-quarters of the story, what we get is something that I think falls firmly into the realm of “urban fantasy.” There’s magic at play, forces that normal humans can’t comprehend; there’s a plucky band of main characters who are in the know, willingly or not, and working to save the day; and the city of Hollywood and its history play a major role in the proceedings (I’m not sure it could have been told the same way if Jonathan Lord had retired to, say, Chicago, or if his successful career had been centered on Broadway instead of the movies). There’s never a mention of other super-heroes, and the few moments where the supernatural is revealed to the greater public are usually written off as some kind of mass hallucination, which make it a lot easier to think of this story as taking place in “the world outside our window” (to steal a phrase from the great Philip Jose Farmer). Up to issue nine, Silverblade is a straight-forward “guy must save the world” story.
The final third of the story is where things get really weird. Metaphysics is a subject I’ve never been able to fully grasp, and Bates lays it on think. As a late teenager when the issues originally came out, I have to admit I didn’t really get it; I think I understood more of what he was attempting while rereading at age 53, but I’m still not totally sure. There’s a major change to the characters’ world introduced in issue #9 that allows Bates to move the story from straight-up urban fantasy to a treatise on the nature of reality. Is there more than one? How “true” is “the real world” versus its celluloid imitations? In the first eight issues, Lord deals with some of this as he transforms from character to character and explores where the line is drawn between private actor, public persona, and character (including being killed and brought back to life as Dracula). But thanks to the big shift in issue 9, every character has to consider the question of what is real and whether one is ever truly “whole,” either in inter-personal relationships with or within oneself. Ruminations on Reality and Wholeness lead into the twin ideas of Truth and Perception, questions about whether anyone can truly know everything about us, and whether our personal truth is one that others can recognize and accept. Which leads me to a slight digression: I had completely forgotten about the scenes featuring the newly-introduced characters of “Alfie York” and “Jeremy Lago,” forgotten about how clearly a May-December couple they are when we first see them and how later in the book as reality reasserts itself we find one of them at least uncomfortable with being forced to play that relationship. I’m torn between giving Bates kudos for even attempting to give us a gay couple in a mainstream comic in the mid-80s and being unhappy with the reveal that they’re not only not a couple but that one of them expresses their discomfort in a somewhat homophobic way (although I don’t think the lines were meant by Bates to be interpreted that way, they certainly can be) that might be more upsetting to the other character than he lets on (I think, without spoiling much, an argument could be made that that particular character is closeted throughout the book and only in the final third does he finally get a chance to live as himself).
(I also have to admit, the introduction of a spirit guide who takes corporeal form as a cartoonish leprechaun might have had something to do with me not taking part of the “big theme” seriously back in 1987.)
Colan’s art is, of course, brilliant through-out. His style lends itself to the more metaphysical aspects of this story as much as it does to the gothic storytelling of Tomb of Dracula or the noir of the Nathaniel Dusk books, showing just how versatile the man was without compromising what made him unique. He’s inked here by Steve Mitchell (except for the first issue, on which Klaus Janson did the inking, and which looks a bit like the issues of Daredevil that Janson inked over Frank Miller). Mitchell isn’t quite the perfect match for Colan that Tom Palmer was on Tomb of Dracula, but he’s still quite good. And occasionally we do get to see, as we did on Nathaniel Dusk, art shot straight from Colan’s pencils, in terms of movie posters and photos that appear as part of the end-matter.
Since Jonathan Lord and Sandra Stanyon have appeared in DC’s animated Young Justice series (at least according to Wikipedia; Young Justice is another cartoon I need to eventually watch), I assume the rights to Silverblade rest with the publisher and not with Bates and Colan (or Colan’s estate). I think Silverblade would lend itself excellently to a one-and-done 10- or 12-episode series on Netflix of Amazon Prime. (I have long pictured Derek Jacobi as the older Jonathan Lord; the “younger” Lord needs to be someone swashbucklingly handsome … while I’d love to cast Freddie Highmore because I think he’s that damned talented, he’s also still got a baby-face at almost 30, so I think the studios would have to use someone like Aaron Taylor-Johnson or Nicholas Hoult. I think Colin Firth would be perfect as Bobby Milestone… I might have to do a separate post with a “dream cast.”)
I also realize that DC seems to have a weird process for deciding which older books (meaning 40s-80s) get collected (and how they get collected: hardcover or softcover? Full color or black-and-white?), but since they collected Colan and Marv Wolfman’s Night Force run from around this period, one can dream that Colan’s other mid-80s work for the company (particulary Silverblade, Nathaniel Dusk, and J’Emm Son of Saturn) will also get the hardcover full-color treatment one of these days.)