In the Fifties, the Silver Age of Comics was a phenomenon born from necessity and finally the initiative of a single editor. Superhero comics had been dying. In the post-war period, the beliefs of the authentic class of heroes simply weren’t connecting with then-modern audiences. Apart from Superman, who was nonetheless flying robust, one thing needed to change as a way to reconnect the line with readers. Enter Julie Schwartz, who, together with his Showcase line, took DC’s traditional heroes and tasked writers with fully recreating them in all however identify for a new technology, taking inspiration from the traits of the day. Aliens, area journey, and cutting-edge science fiction all made their method into reimaginings of the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, the Atom and extra.
Forty years later, the comics trade had modified additional nonetheless. Titles like Stormwatch and Astro City had been demanding a larger degree of realism in superhero worlds, the place the presence of a super-powered class immediately impacted the society they existed in. And so, taking a web page from Schwartz earlier than him, Superman author Dan Jurgens started plotting a related reimagination of the DC Universe—one which might carry it consistent with the grunge ’90s the method the Silver Age realigned DC Comics with the atomic ’50s.
To Jurgens and the different expertise enlisted in the venture, any and each change was on the desk. The extra radical and surprising the departure, the higher. The solely rule: the names keep the similar. Everything else can, and can, be completely different. All of it will be rolled out by single points launched on the similar day in October 1997. In a little bit of mathematical humor referencing a line which solely intersects with one other at a single level, it was dubbed “Tangent Comics.”
The First Wave: 1997
There’s no higher place to start a dialogue of Tangent than the way it immediately carried the legacy of Julius Schwartz’s reimaginings of Golden Age heroes in the Fifties Showcase comics: The Flash, Green Lantern and the Atom. The Flash particularly is considered one of the finest examples of Tangent’s modus operandi in motion. If you forgot all the pieces you knew about the Flash however the identify itself, what sort of hero would you count on them to be? Super pace in all probability wouldn’t be the very first thing that involves thoughts.
Tangent’s Flash, Lia Nelson, is a teenage superhero with light-based powers extra much like the Ray than any speedster. Similarly, the most mysterious of the trio, Green Lantern, does what you’d count on a hero named “Green Lantern” to do: really use a inexperienced lantern to wield her energy, versus a ring that’s charged from one. Possessing the skill to commune with the useless, Green Lantern’s origins are ambiguous, with conflicting origins suggesting her true id to be anybody from Zatanna to Lois Lane. Paying respects to his conceptual predecessors in the Golden and Silver Ages, Tangent’s Atom, Adam Thompson, is an atomic-powered third-generation legacy hero doing his finest to stay as much as his forebears.
Teams like the extra literally-focused Doom Patrol, the very human Metal Men, the supernatural Nightwing, and the subaquatic Sea Devils fill out the nascent universe, with Flash and Green Lantern becoming a member of forces with a reimagined Joker, Spectre, Plastic Man and Manhunter to kind the covert planetary defenders generally known as the Secret Six.
The Second Wave: 1998
The Tangent experiment didn’t precisely overtake the reputation of the ongoing comics of the day—nor was it meant to—but it surely did garner sufficient curiosity for a comeback the following yr.
After displaying a commendable quantity of restraint the first time, 1998 is when Jurgens and firm lastly unleash their massive weapons: the Tangent trinity. We’re launched to a medieval Batman who falls someplace between Dark Knight and Shining Knight—an Arthurian hero who fought alongside King Arthur, now shelling out justice in the fashionable period. Tangent’s Wonder Woman takes her sobriquet critically, a philosophical poet warrior from the stars who travels the Earth and better cosmos alike in seek for her place and that means inside it. But maybe the most compelling determine in the complete Tangent line arises in the visage of NYPD officer Harvey Dent, the man who would change into “The SuperMan.”
Deemed too harmful to function unchecked, the Justice League of America is fashioned to cease the trinity with an unlikely roster of Human Target, Johnny Double, Vigilante and the Question. In China, the authorities engineers their very own superhuman in “Powergirl”—a thematic precedent to the New Super-Man story which might comply with almost twenty years later. And lengthy earlier than Geoff Johns coined the phrase for his Black Label collection, three Jokers emerge in an id shared by Lori Lemaris, Mary Marvel and Madame Xanadu.
Legacy
In 2008, Jurgens would return us to the Tangent universe with the Superman’s Reign collection. It’s right here we study that Tangent’s SuperMan has extra in frequent with creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s authentic imaginative and prescient of their Man of Steel years earlier than Action Comics #1, as a telekinetic tyrant who makes use of his powers to manage the world—reconnecting the authentic Superman idea with extra fashionable depictions of a Superman gone bitter with energy. The most up-to-date look of a Tangent character was in final yr’s Superman and the Authority and the follow-up “Warworld Saga” storyline in Action Comics, wherein Tangent Flash appears to perish in a battle towards Mogul and his Warzoons.
The Tangent experiment might not have precisely set the world on fireplace the method Julie Schwartz’s daring recontextualization of traditional heroes as soon as did, but it surely stays a highly effective testomony to the infinite storytelling prospects offered by a multiverse. To that extent, the Tangent universe has been enshrined as considered one of the core worlds in DC’s Multiverse, designated as “Earth-9”: a numeric tribute to how a DC Universe fully reimagined for the final decade of the twentieth century would look. In DC’s Tangent Universe, it’s all the time and endlessly the Nineteen Nineties.
Alex Jaffe is the writer of our month-to-month “Ask…the Question” column and writes about TV, films, comics and superhero historical past for DC.com. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexJaffe and discover him in the DC Community as HubCityQuestion.
Discussion about this post