Lady Styx, Believe in Her

Whence came the Lady Styx is not known. The Guardians of the Universe recognised her armaments as Void technology and described her as approaching from “the eternal pit beyond the gates of space-time itself.” This is not dissimilar to the description given for the place where the Maggedon Warhead was chained. Wonder World once patrolled that border, but its destruction by Maggedon could have left the way open for Styx to approach. Her forces had already swept Sector 3500 clean of live in a process that had been called the Stygian Passover.

When the Stygian Passover reached the planet Vartu Captain Comet was waiting for it. He was a veteran superhero from the 1950s who had left Earth to adventure on other worlds. He had faced almost every conceivable foe, but even he was unable to stop the Stygian forces. Before he died he managed to send a final telepathic distress call.

I witnessed seven million minds fall apart when the unimaginable end arrived. I saw machines, the scale of which there no adequate words to describe, and armies…

Are you receiving me?

First of all, the Believer Cubes anchor themselves to a planet’s surface and shatter the ecosystem irreparably. Then the Glorifiers emerge in their billions. Walking dead men, chanting her creed, unstoppable. Where she passes, her armies grow, devouring all in their path as they spread the contagion, the living word of the Lady, the Lady Styx.

“Believe in her,” they say. “Believe in her.”

Are you receiving me?

The Green Lanterns Thormon Tox and Xax had been searching for the Lantern of Vengar when they heard Comet’s telepathic distress call. They came to Vartu, but found themselves abandoned when the Guardians ordered all Lanterns out of the occupied zones and cut power to any who remained. Tox,  Xax, and Captain Comet each fell to Styx’s Glorifier army (52 Week 31, 6 Dec 2006).

Starfire (Kory), Adam Strange, Animal Man (Buddy Baker), Lobo and the Lantern of Vengar heard Comet’s distress call (52 Week 31, 6 Dec 2006). They resolved to stick together despite the Earth heroes still having a bounty on their heads and finally reached the edge of Sector 3500, the Vega System (52 Week 32, 13 Dec 2006). As they searched through the rubble of Vartu Adam Strange recognised Lobo’s plan and made him confess that he was taking them to Lady Styx for the bounty she had placed on their heads – his way of getting past her security (52 Week 36, 3 Jan 2007).

Styx refused to pay the bounty and decided to take Starfire, Animal Man, and Lobo as her new soldiers. She baited Lobo with insults and finally made him lose his cool by calling him a coward. However, Lobo and Strange had deliberately timed their assault to coincide with the migration of the Sun-Eaters (powerful cosmic fauna that graze on stars). The Lantern of Vengar sacrificed himself and the Emerald Head of Ekron to carry Lady Styx into the mall of a Sun Eater where she was destroyed (52 Week 36, 10 Jan 1007).

Parting of the Ways

After Lady Styx’s defeat the group of adventurers went their separate ways.

Animal Man Buddy Baker had been wounded in the battle with Lady Styx and died on the bridge of her command ship. Before he died he asked Starfire to return his jacket to his wife on Earth (52 Week 36, 10 Jan 2007). Adam Strange wouldn’t take the risk that his friend’s corpse would regenerate as one of Styx’s Glorifiers. So, after Lobo had preformed a blessing from the Triple Fish God, they left Buddy’s corpse on an asteroid in deep space (52 Week 37, 17 Jan 2007). The Yellow Aliens who had remade Animal Man once before took notice of his death and restored him to life. They enhanced his existing ties to the morphological field so that he could draw on abilities of interstellar lifeforms like the Sun Eaters. In an instant he gained the ability to fly unaided through space at translight speeds (52 Week 43, 28 Feb 2007).

Animal Man met the Yellow Aliens again when he used the Sun Eaters’ ability to access “Space B”. From Space B a traveller could access any place or time in the Universe, this was how the Sun Eaters migrated between galaxies. The Yellow Aliens showed Buddy an image from one month hence of a man, Buddy’s best friend Roger, apparently making a pass at his grieving wife (52 Week 47, 28 March 2007). Ellen had actually given Roger the brush off, but it was the point of reference Buddy needed to jump back to Earth from Space B. Ellen and his children were overjoyed to see Buddy again – even if he was sat on the front lawn glowing from the residual solar radiation he had channelled (52 Week 51, 25 April 2007).

Lobo Lobo left to return to his pilgrimage for the Triple Fish God while Adam Strange and Starfire turned towards Earth (52 Week 37, 17 Jan 2007). He returned to the Three Golden Planets with the Emerald Eye of Ekron. The Triple Fish God unwisely revealed that Lobo had been sent to retrieve the Eye as it was only thing in the Universe that could kill him.  Lobo’s reaction to this news was to try it out for himself (52 Week 51, 25 April 2007).

Adam Strange and Starfire Despite Styx’s defeat the bounty on Adam and Kory remained active. A bounty hunter called Molek the Hunter wrecked their ship, but committed suicide rather than accept defeat by them.  Starfire was injured during the fight with Molek and the blind Adam Strange had to carry her free from his exploding ship. Fortunately for them the flare from the explosion was noticed by Green Lantern Opto309y and their failing craft  was brought into a crash-landing on the planet sized Green Lantern Mogo (52 Week 41, 14 Feb 2007).

The Green Lanterns took Adam Strange back to Rann where Sardath was able to restore his eyes using copies of his daughter’s eyes laced with genetic improvements which allowed him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Kory didn’t stay on Rann, she took a few hours to absorb energy from Rann’s suns and then left for Earth. She still believed that Animal Man had died in space and was determined to return his jacket to Ellen. She arrived just in time to stop a final pair of bounty hunters attacking Animal Man and his family before collapsing from exhaustion on their front porch (51 Week 51, 25 April 2007).

Infinite Crisis Recap.

Alexander Luthor and Superboy Prime were survivors from the first Multiverse (from back before it was compressed down into a single Universe with a single Earth). They moved entire star systems to create the cosmic alignment they needed to engineer the return of their Multiverse. This caused chaos among the interstellar empires and spawned a war between Rann and Thanagar. Many other races were pulled into the Rann-Thanagar conflict, but it was dwarfed by the growing spatial anomaly created by Luthor’s manipulations of reality. Superheroes from the planet Earth and the Green Lantern Corps managed to stop his insane plans. Unknown to anybody at the time a new Multiverse of 52 Universes had been created, the revelation and the mystery of which would play out over the following 52 weeks.

Adam Strange (the human defender of Rann) tried to save the Earth heroes from Luthor’s collapsing space rift by teleporting them away using Zeta-Beam technology. There was an accident, a refraction of the Zeta-Beam with the spatial and temporal distortions, that scattered the heroes through space and time. Most arrived back on Earth with strange injuries (Hawkgirl was turned into a giant), but Supergirl was catapulted a thousand years into the future. Starfire (Princess Koriand’r of Tamaran or Kory for short), Animal Man (Buddy Baker of Earth) and Adam Strange were less fortunate.

Pursued by Devilance the Puruser

Kory, Adam, and Buddy managed to get to a small Thanagarian ship, little more than a life boat, but they were in unknown space and their craft was damaged. They set down on a beautiful alien world to allow Adam Strange to make repairs – a compromise made even harder as Strange had lost his eyes in the accident. Kory enjoyed the beauty of her temporary home, but she recognised the world from ancient myths. On this world the passage of time was determined by the position of the sun in the sky – as the sun set time slowed down until it stopped entirely during the planet’s night (52 Week 5, 6 June 2006). Despite their plight neither Kory nor Buddy were too concerned as their minds had been befuddled by local fruit which, unknown to them, was narcotic.

The trio were captured easily by Devilance the Pursuer, the evil New God of the Pursuit. They had seen into the anomaly and had witnessed things that mortals were not meant to see. During the same event the Red Tornado had recorded a map of the Multiverse and was being stalked for it by Mister Mind. Kory, Buddy, and Adam didn’t remember the same amount of detail, but Devilance did not want their knowledge escaping. He believed that knowledge of the Multiverse belonged to the gods alone. Devilance was not the only being who knew what they had seen and he revealed to them that every bounty hunter in the Universe was after them (52 Weeks 7-9, 21 June – 6 July 2006). It was Devilance who unwittingly supplied the heroes with the power to escape the alien prison paradise. They managed to escape from his cages and stole his signature weapon, his Lance. With it they were able to power their Thanagarian craft and blast free of the planet before time stopped there all together (52 Week 16, 23 Aug 2006).

Adam Strange’s plan had been to jump several parsecs out into space and then contract the nearest inhabited planet – of which there should have been many – but they found the Universe around them had been wiped clean of life. The planets had been reduced to rubble and they found themselves navigating through a particularly dense asteroid field. After weeks cramped up in the little ship the normally easy-going Starfire and Adam Strange were beginning to get on each others nerves. They still had Devilance’s Lance and the New God of the Pursuit eventually caught up with them. Surprisingly, Devilance disappeared at the last moment to be replaced by the bounty hunter called Lobo (who had killed Devilance whilst the humans weren’t looking). Starfire went out into space to negotiate with Lobo and he surprisingly agreed to lead them out of the space wilderness (52 Week 17, 30 Aug 2006).

Archbishop Lobo and the Emerald Head of Ekron

Lobo, the superhuman Czarnian bounty-hunter, had a reputation as the “Main Man” – the deadliest and most powerful bounty hunter in known space. He’d always had a fondness for space dolphins (“fishies” as he called them), but now as Archbishop Lobo he had found religion in the service of the First Celestial Church of the Triple Fish-God. Lobo had been on a pilgrimage in the wasteland of Sector 3500 – the area of space Kory, Buddy, and Adam had just escaped from – for the Triple-Fish God and was returning to the Three Golden Planets when he encountered the Earth heroes. Lobo took them back to a refugee camp populated by aliens from a hundred world – the last survivors of Sector 3500 who were bartering away their races’ last treasures just to survive (52 Week 19, 13 Sept 2006).

Lobo’s pilgrimage with several space dolphin attendants had been to retrieve the Emerald Eye of Ekron from the Emerald Head of Ekron. He kept that secret until he was killed by a swarm of carrion eaters that attacked the refugee camp. Starfire used the Eye to destroy the parasites before Lobo could regenerate his body from a drop of his own blood. He was livid that she had used the Emerald Eye as it would serve as a beacon to the Emerald Head. It was searching for the thief that had stolen its Eye and would home in on them. Lobo hitched their ship to his space bike and they fled before the Emerald Head arrived (52 Week 20, 20 Sept 2006).

The Head eventually caught up with them and they began a desperate flight to avoid its attacks. It was Starfire who recognised that the markings on the Head belonging to the Green Lantern Corps. A lot later Adam Strange learnt from Green Lantern John Stewart that the Emerald Head had been a prototype weapon from the early days of the Green Lantern Corps and had been missing for centuries.

The Emerald Head was piloted by the Green Lantern of Vengar, a planet from Sector 3500. He had been driven insane by the sight of the worlds he protected being reduced to rubble. Archbishop Lobo was bound by a vow of non-violence so he need Starfire, Animal Man, and Adam Strange to fight off the insane Lantern’s attack. Despite Adam Strange’s anger with Lobo for getting them into this mess, Starfire recognised that he, they, and the Lantern of Vengar may be the only people able to stop the Stygian Passover (the force that had wiped Sector 3500 clean of life) from reaching Earth (52 Week 28, 15 Nov 2006).

Next – The Lady Styx of the Stygian Passover

Rann, by contrast ran is the ultimate retro-scifi wonder land. Everything has fins and spires. It’s like art-deco has collided with the atomic age. The colours are vibrant, everything gleams with needless chrome. The alien monsters are improbable, the sky is slightly orange and there is more than one sun. Adam’s contact on Rann is the lovely Alanna and her scientist father. The atmosphere I’m thinking of is like the father and daughter from the Forbidden Planet. In fact the colours and look should closely follow that film. His purpose on Rann is to fall in love and save the girl from some evil. The danger could be a rival of her father, a particular monster, a threatened invasion, maybe even all three over the course of the film.

The key element and high-concept in the plot is the Zeta-Beam. It’s the teleportation plot device that shifts Adam Strange between the dead-end colourless Earth and the threatened utopia of Rann. In my pitch we’d never see Adam dematerialise – it would be as if the character has blinked and the world around him is different when he reopens his eyes. There would also never be any evidence on Earth that Adam has been away or has been seen dematerialising by anybody else. The shifts are so sudden that Adam could well be imagining the entire thing.

Is Rann real or is Adam slowly loosing his mind? His personal life on Earth collapses as he gives up on his job and surroundings – only Rann matters to him. We should really resist the urge to made Adam a dual Indiana Jones/Flash Gordon character, he’s only the hero on Rann. On Earth he’s nobody, maybe we should even drop the archaeologist career and leave him as something more mundane. Ben Kingsley as Alanna’s father is the easist character to cast and maybe Milla Jovovich for Alanna. The Rann characters are all played by non-Americans – it helps play up that displacement between the Earth which by contrast is very American, very safe. The emotional heart to the film in Alanna and Adam’s relationship as they get torn apart and reunited by the Zeta-Beam – the parallel with the recent Time Travellers Wife is obvious.