When Mary says – ‘I’D LOVE TO MEET ME FROM ANOTHER UNIVERSE. I WONDER IF I’D BE VERY DIFFERENT at all…’ - it’s a wry reference to the ‘main Earth’ Mary Marvel as she appeared in Final Crisis.
The creators of the weekly Countdown series that preceded Final Crisis introduced a running thread where sweet, innocent Mary Marvel is turned to the dark side by Black Adam and equipped with a shiny black mini-skirted costume a new dedication to wickedness and a new name, Black Mary. The creators of Countdown intended to have her redeemed but we decided to explore some of the implications of a bad Mary Marvel.
For me at least, the sexing up of Countdown’s Black Mary Marvel had a real-world analogue in the sexualisation of Disney starlets like Britney, Christina, Miley, and the rest. Presented to the audience as wholesome kid entertainers and role models for girls – then given a ‘dirty’ makeover to attract a whole new following…
Final Crisis showed the horrific, corrupting onslaught of a cosmic suicide capitalism - ‘WORK! CONSUME! DIE DIE DIE FOR DARKSEID!’ - that reduces all life to its market value, to commodity, no more than the disposable instruments of a singular tyrannical will to power.
In that vein, we twisted the Countdown plot thread further to reveal a Mary Marvel possessed by Jack Kirby’s torture god Desaad, (standing in for middle aged male comic book writers or music execs), and pornified into a monstrous caricature of cosmetically and surgically enhanced synthetic femininity. Her hair was chopped down to stubble and a few dyed purple tufts as a call-back to those ‘crazy Britney’ headlines, hinting at the toll on her mental health such performative saleable sexuality might imply (there are also deliberate echoes of Mary Marvel’s UK counterpart Kid Marvelman, who became in the hands of Alan Moore the apocalyptic and terrifying epitome of the superhero kid gone bad trope).
The savage satire sounded great on paper, but in the end, I felt bad about putting Mary Marvel through all that just to make a point about people putting her through all that.