It’s Got Its Ups and Downs: Hercules Unbound #1-#12
Live long enough, it seems, and you will revisit the pleasures of your youth. You wonder if they still hold up, or perhaps you’re looking to learn if (or how) they shaped the person you’ve become. Which is why — for the first time since the mid-1970s — I recently reread Hercules Unbound #1-#12 (1975—1977), the complete run of a cancelled DC Comics series aimed at the 1970s’ booming sword & sorcery market.
DC’s Hercules is the demi-god of Greco-Roman myth, transposed to a post-apocalyptic then-future. The published issues of this solo series feature scripts by Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, and David Michelinie, and art by José Luis García-López, Wally Wood, Walt Simonson, and Bob Layton.
If the sheer number of creators on such a short run makes your spidey sense tingle, well, yeah. It’s not a great sign. But on this, more anon.
[Click the images for Herc-sized versions.]
Launched by fresh-from-Marvel writer Conway and the artistic dream team of penciller García-López and inker/EC Comics stalwart Wood, Hercules Unbound #1 (October-November 1975) gets the series off to a literal start, as the titular demi-god breaks the chains which have pinned him to an isolated Mediterranean rock for millennia (apparently these chains are far stronger than the ones Hercules snapped to free the rock-bound Titan Prometheus). Hercules was imprisoned by Ares, the God of War, who is also Herc’s archenemy and half-brother (the mythological beings here usually bear their Greek names). The astute reader will have already deduced an ongoing antagonistic role for Zeus’s martial son.
Hercules promptly rescues a little sailboat’s crew of two — American teen Kevin and his dog Basil — from the rock’s guardian octopus-demons. From freshly-orphaned Kevin, Herc learns about the end of the world as they know it. No-prize if you’ve connected World War III with the war-god.
Hercules swiftly deduces Kevin is blind, though the young mortal isn’t as hindered as one might expect, because Kevin is an example of the Super-Crip trope. In a world with immensely powerful gods and demi-gods, and suggestions of linkage to the greater DC Universe with its manifold superheroes, the presence of what is essentially a superpower in a disabled person is not automatically a terrible choice; in such a world, granting superpowers only to the able-bodied characters is problematic. Dealing with the specific challenges of a metahumanly-gifted disabled character would make for a fascinating series, but, alas, the research, sensitivity, and nuance this would require are not to be found here.
Regrettably, the herky-jerky handling of Kevin proves to be rather a metaphor for this busted series.
It starts out well enough. We get the frequent action and conflict one expects in sword & sorcery and in superheroics, the subgenres blended in this series. The attempt to establish a tie with another post-apocalyptic DC title of the era, Jack Kirby’s Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth (whose scripts Conway took over around this time), is intriguing. Promising also are the assembly and development of Hercules’s band of brothers (including one sister) and his ongoing enmity with his divine brother.
There is tragedy in the worldwide catastrophe, of course, but also in the arcs for the secondary characters Cerebus (sic) and Orpheus during the sequence in Hades, as well as in the eventual revelation of Ares’s world-shattering existential despair.
Unfortunately for Hercules Unbound, the series preceded the ’80s explosion of multi-issue story arcs and comic-book miniseries, which would have allowed deeper exploration of the darkness and loss themes. Cerebus and Orpheus do get a couple of issues. But their tragedies must be wrapped up in a couple of panels, because there will be another issue along in two months, in a series intended to go on episodically for years and decades.
Even more unfortunately, the creative team changes with issue #7, and continues to undergo tinkering. Ares, whose ongoing presence has maintained a sense of continuity, suddenly finds his conflict wrapped up and himself shuffled off-stage in issue #6, opening the path for the new creative team’s new direction. Only, there are multiple new directions.
We’ve already gone from the Mediterranean to Paris and the British Isles as part of the team-building and Kamandi-linking; now, we’re abruptly (and unbelievably) wrenched to the United States for mind-grinding attempts to tie Hercules Unbound to DC characters the Atomic Knights and to Kirby’s DC title OMAC: One Man Army Corps.
Meanwhile, the creative turnovers in the final six issues make for some obvious changes in art styles. And, since the new creators apparently don’t like Hercules’s sidekicks, or maybe just don’t enjoy writing about teams, the band of brothers is systematically destroyed by a succession of monsters-of-the-month. Kevin’s end is particularly bad, and a reminder of why we disabled readers brace for disappointment when a disabled character enters a comic.
Towards the end, Herc gets a welcome change of costume, which adds armor; the comic returns to that fateful Mediterranean rock; Ares returns to the stage; and the rest of the Greco-Roman gods — and the catastrophically destructive Anti-Gods they’ve unleashed — join the fun, sporting a cool character design inspired by ancient Greek art.
These are attention-grabbing developments, and in them you can see suggestions of future greatness (or at least of the future splendor of Walter Simonson’s definitive ’80s run as writer-artist of The Mighty Thor). But, since Hercules Unbound has been cancelled, everything needs to be wrapped up toot sweet.
I enjoyed Hercules Unbound greatly at the time, but, revisiting it fifty years later, I can see how uneven it was. This isn’t entirely the fault of the creative turnovers, nor of the dated attitudes, like the assumption that only white people will survive the end times, the thematically unnecessary digs at “women’s lib,” and the inability to figure out quite what to do with the token female.
Partly it’s also a result of the era’s rigid deadlines, episodic approach to storytelling, and mandate of prodigious output… although many other titles facing these particular hurdles, such as the Roy Thomas/Barry (Windsor-)Smith/John Buscema run on Marvel’s 1970s’ Conan the Barbarian, maintained a high level of quality.
Perhaps the problem, ultimately, is stated in issue #11, in its reference to Herc’s “irrepressible strength.” The published issues provide sidekicks he could have bonded with emotionally, but the changes of direction mute that possibility; as a result, the creators never develop a clear sense that the mighty man-god has any limitations, emotional, mental, or physical. Superman is usually as physically invulnerable as Hercules, but he has multiple clear vulnerabilities: kryptonite, red suns, and the threat of harm to his loved ones, his country, and his planet. With little to lose, Herc ultimately offers readers little reason to care.
Another hurdle, for GenZ and GenAlpha readers familiar only with the generally high auctorial, artistic, and technological levels of 21st Century sequential art, is that HU #1-#12 may just seem too primitive to get through, as the classic James Stewart movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) is too dated for many younger viewers to sit through. A recolored reprint collection would help to ameliorate this, but there appears to be no graphic novel available or on the horizon. This leaves the series a curiosity of interest almost exclusively to postapocalyptic comics completists, to fans of the creators involved, and to aficionados of sword and sorcery (although, ironically, many readers may deny Hercules Unbound is S&S, given its focus on modern settings, fisticuffs, and super-science!).
This pleasure of my youth may not have aged like fine wine, nor proven a strong influence on my development as person or writer. But the series is worth a visit by modern readers. I hope the Fates do not decree that it continue to languish in the dusty bargain longboxes of your neighborhood comics shop.
Cynthia Ward is the author of The Adventure of the Incognita Countess (Aqueduct Press, January 2017), Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (with Nisi Shawl), and more than 70 short stories and chapbooks. Her last article for Black Gate was a review of Battleborn Magazine.
Sorry to read that the bloom is off the rose of a comic beloved of your youth. A word of encouragement, though: at the very least among the gaming communities of generations Z and alpha, there is a hunger for the retro interfaces of the ’80s and ’90s, and a thirst for the “cruder” visuals because of their more focused presentation. It’s possible that younger readers would find “Hercules Unbound” desirable precisely because the art is not polished to within an inch of its immortality, precisely because it does not overtly pile on layers and attempt to engage all of the overwhelmed senses.
I remember this series. At the time I wondered how, if this was the official DC Hercules, he could have been enchained for milennia and still somehow have popped up occasionally in connection with Wonder Woman or Superman. And why the Ares shown here seemed to have nothing in common with the Ares who had also appeared in Wonder Woman (who was red-haired and was apparently her grandfather, from which I took it that Hippolyta must have been a daughter of him and Aphrodite). In those days, it seemed, every time DC wanted to bring Greek gods into a series, they started afresh with new versions, whether or not there were already established versions running around. They kept doing it after this series ended, too, for that matter. Actually, the most interesting thing for me is that it brought in characters from an earlier post-apocalyptic series, the Atomic Knights toward the end of the run. I had seen some of their stories reprinted previously, so this seemed cool. Though it does off one of the Knights and have him replaced by an energy being immediately unbeknownst to anyone else, and without explanation. The development ultimately led nowhere, and I seem to recall the whole series subsequently being retconned out of existence. A series of immense promise that unfortunately fizzled.