Adapt
and Survive, Survive and Prosper: The Shifting Identities of Kyra
Zelas, the
Adaptive Ultimate.
By
Dr. Peter Coogan and Dennis Power
Kyra Zelas in her Mari Blanchard identity starring as “Kyra Zelas” in the film She-Devil (1957)
Kyra
Zelas was an
unwanted child. Her parents, poor
and
uneducated, never planned for her. She grew up reminded every day
that
her existence had been forced on them, that she was the reason they had
married, the reason they were poor, the reason her father drank, the
reason her
mother whored. When she was six, Henry Zelas abandoned his wife
and
child. In school, she did not fit in. She was a drab,
plain,
uninteresting child; her hair oily, unkempt and stringy; her features
flat and
unattractive. As she grew she tried fitting in, tried to adapt
herself to
different cliques, but they knew her for an imposter and rejected
her. In
high school she never dated, she was invisible to the boys. The
girls
never noticed her even to make fun of her. Her mother took her
out of school
at fifteen and sent her to work in a sweatshop. She contracted
tuberculosis and was sent to “
But
she didn’t
die. Dr. Herman Bach saved her, to his everlasting shame and
regret.
Bach
was a
genius. He attracted other geniuses to work with him. Dr.
Dan
Scott, a young biochemist, was one of these.[2] Scott was a research
scientist working
under Bach who discovered a basic principle of life, that adaptation
was the
key to survival. It was adaptation that drove the engine of
evolution,
adaptation that took humankind from its single-celled origins to become
master
of the planet. He researched adaptation and began experimenting
on the
most adaptive of insects, the common fruit fly. Fruit flies, he
found,
were “known to produce a higher percentage of mutants than any other,
more
freaks, more biological sports” (Scott, “Inherited” 15). The eyes
of
fruit flies would change color when exposed to x-rays, and these
changes were
heritable. Scott developed a serum from fruit flies that acted,
he
believed, on the pineal gland, enlarging it and causing it to produce
the
hormone pineal. He was wrong in this belief, but he only
discovered that years after unleashing an amoral horror on the world—a
beautiful, intoxicating, desirable horror—the adaptive ultimate.
One
crisp fall
day in 1933 Scott burst in on Bach in his office to announce the
development of
his adaptive serum.[3]
He had tested it on tubercular guinea pigs; they adapted to the
tubercle
bacillus and were cured. He tried it on a rabid dog; it adapted
and was
cured. He tested it on a cat with a broken spine; the spine
knitted, the
cat walked again. He applied to the board of Grand Mercy for
funds to
test his serum on an anthropoid, but they refused his application. He
came to
Bach to get permission to advance to human trials. Bach resisted
the idea,
suggesting the Stoneman Foundation, but Scott was loyal to Grand Mercy
and
wanted it to have the credit. The old doctor found Scott a mercy
case, a
hopeless, friendless young woman dying of tuberculosis. He knew
it was
against medical ethics, but felt that no harm could come of Scott
trying to
cure her. He would regret that decision the rest of his life.
Zelas
had only
hours to live when Scott injected her with his serum. It
worked.
The following day she had improved, but her case still looked
hopeless.
At the end of a week, the spots on Zelas’ lungs were gone, and she
flourished
under Scott’s care. Scott began to notice odd things about his
patient. Skin punctures would heal immediately after blood was
drawn. He did not notice, though, that he was drawn to her.
Scott
wanted to keep her under observation, so Bach offered to let her live
at his
house employed as a housekeeper. She accepted the offer.
Scott
suggested she take a walk in the park to get exercise and then come to
Bach’s
house. She took his advice.
Zelas
walked out
of
Scott
and Bach
met her after the trial and extended their offer of a place to
stay.
Scott moved in as well, planning to keep an eye on Zelas and prevent
her from
committing further murders. Scott experimented on his formerly
tubercular
guinea pigs and discovered that they had enlarged pineal glands, and
deduced
that Zelas’ adaptive abilities came from the pineal hormone.
Scott
and Bach tested Zelas’ powers, injecting her with morphine to no
effect.
They tried anaesthetizing her with ethyl chloride, she adapted.
She
laughed at their efforts, and to show them that they could not harm or
control
her, she plunged a knife full into her bosom. The wound healed
instantly.
The
next day she
killed a child. She saw a car she wanted and stole it. In
her
escape—the car’s owner shouting at her—she ran over a boy. She
drove the
car around the block and abandoned it. She felt no remorse,
telling
Scott, “I have learned something. What one needs in this world is
power. As long as there are people in the world with more power
than I, I
run afoul of them. They keep trying to punish me with their
laws—and
why? Their laws are not for me. They cannot punish me”
(Weinbaum
68). Scott made her swear never to leave Bach’s house without
him.
She swore it. The next day she—and all the cash in Bach’s
house—disappeared. Bach noted, “The lie as an adaptive mechanism
deserves
more attention” (Weinbaum 68). Zelas’ lies could never be
detected by her
listeners, who would see in her whatever they wanted to as she adapted
her
appearance and manner to their desires.
Scott
and Bach
tracked Zelas through the newspapers. William Woodin, upright
secretary
of the treasury, had begun to change his ways and was seen often in the
company
of the beautiful Zelas.[4]
She acquired the unofficial title of “the tenth cabineteer” for her
growing
power and influence in
Scott
and Bach
decided to take action. Knowing they could not keep her locked
up—she
would merely adapt to the situation and “develop enough strength in her
writes
to break the locks on the doors” (Weinbaum 72)—they decided to fix the
situation permanently. They would apply the fundamental
biological law
that no creature could live in its own waste product and poison her
with carbon
dioxide. As she slept, they sealed her room and filled it with carbon
dioxide. She woke after her candle was extinguished, but was too
weak to
smash the window and collapsed. The doctors operated on her,
removing her
pineal gland, reverting her to her original plain and unattractive
appearance.
Her hair shifted from blond to black and lost its luster. They
had undone
the evil of their science, “A flame had died; she was goddess no
longer”
(Weinbaum 78). Scott still loved her, still saw the beauty she had once
had.
This
closes the
record of Kyra Zelas that Weinbaum left, but we turn to other sources
to
continue this story. Bach and Scott were confident, supremely
talented
doctors. But they fell under their own spell, believing
themselves
smarter than those who surrounded them, including Zelas. Little
did they
know that Zelas had eavesdropped and overheard their plans to poison
her and
remove her pineal gland. She adapted to this situation, not by
fighting
them but by letting them think they had won. Secretly she laughed
as they
watched her performance, her struggles against the poisoned atmosphere
of the
room. Conscious during the operation but unaffected by the pain,
she let
them remove her swollen pineal gland. The next day, she refused
Scott’s
offer of marriage and fled the house in tears, crocodile tears as Scott
and
Bach would learn. Scott searched for her but never found her, and
he and
his mentor considered the case closed. With no adaptive
abilities, Zelas
was just another powerless woman, sucked into the whirlwind of the
Depression,
lost to the anonymity of urban America.
But
Scott’s
medical powers had been greater than he imagined. The adaptive
abilities
of his guinea pigs and Zelas came not from an enlarged pineal
gland—this was
just a freak side effect of the treatment—but from what might be called
“digital DNA.” Of course, Bach and Scott had no notion of DNA,
which
would not be discovered for two decades after their debacle with
Zelas.
But somehow Scott had come up with a genetic serum that gave its
recipient the
ability to instantly rewrite its genome, to resequence its own DNA to
fit its
needs. Zelas was even more powerful than Scott and Bach had
imagined. And even more ruthless than they knew.
Zelas
left Boston
and returned to Washington, only to find that Woodin had been forced to
resign
his position due to a minor scandal: the
Senate Banking Committee had found
his name on a list of J. P Morgan's preferred customers and discovered
that he
had been given preferred stock options. We suspect that he took
these options
to afford the high life he had
been living
with Zelas. In December he had suffered a breakdown and resigned
on New
Year’s Eve; he died on May 3, 1934. Her plans were ruined, and
though she
could have seduced another cabinet secretary, she decided to seek a
more direct
route to power.
Zelas
preferred
to avoid the problem of dealing with Scott and Bach—despite Zelas’
cold,
calculating nature she retained some affection for Scott (Weinbaum p.
66,
73). She did not want the truth about her exposed: Scott and Bach
viewed
her—incorrectly—as a mutant (Weinbaum p. 64) and she knew from her time
in
Washington that the government was organizing itself to persecute
mutantkind.[5] She simply wanted
power and did not
want to have to murder her creators, so she fled the country. She
went to
Japan, where she knew the military was rising and where she knew she
could help
shape the modernizing nation into a great power. Her adaptive
powers
allowed her to pass as Japanese and to learn the language
quickly. We
have been unable to discover the identity she lived under in Japan, but
she may
have been the source of several Dragon Lady characters in the popular
media. We know that she used the code name Tsunami, for she would
become
a great force that would wash over the planet like a tidal wave.[6] She rose quickly within the
Japanese establishment, starting as a courtesan and working within the
Black
Dragons—a secret society of ultranationalists heavily involved in the
conquest
of China and in control of the opium trade; the Black Dragons are
believed to
have been behind the attack on Pearl Harbor.[7] She had learned to
rule from behind
the scenes—never again would she repeat the mistake of drawing press
attention.[8] We have been unable
to track down
sufficient evidence to put together a picture of her time in Japan, but
we have
learned enough to suspect a few things. First, we suspect that
she may
have taken on a male identity as an adaptation to patriarchal Japanese
society. Second, we believe that she may have been involved in
the germ
warfare laboratory developed by one Major Ishi in Manchuria, although
we have
no direct evidence. Ishi did use funds generated by the Black
Dragon’s
opium trade, and Zelas could easily have passed herself off as a
capable
scientist and may have used the names of Dr. Scott and Dr. Bach to
establish
credentials with Ishi, though she may have merely revealed her adaptive
abilities to him—having someone incapable of being infected with the
various
diseases brewed up by Ishi’s labs would have been incalculably
valuable.
Third, we also suspect that she was involved in the “Rape of Nanking”
but have
only hints of her involvement.
In
1936, Zelas
was sent as a special ambassador to Nazi Germany as part of the
Japanese
Olympic delegation. While there, she foiled an assassination
attempt on
Hitler’s life.[9]
This act gave her the gratitude of the Führer and access to the German
High
Command, including Karl Haushofer, known as “Hitler’s Merlin.“
Haushofer
was the genius behind the creation of the Axis alliance of Germany and
Japan
and may have ghostwritten portions of Mein Kampf; he was the
source of
much of Hitler’s intellectual philosophy and coined the concept of Lebensraum,
which was used to justify the Third Reich’s imperial ambitions.[10] Zelas told them that she was an Ainu, an
indigenous Japanese population with Caucasoid features.[11] The Nazis accepted her as an Aryan
because they, specifically Heinrich Himmler, believed the Ainu to be
Aryan. These connections would prove of great help in later years.[12]
Back
in Japan as
part of the Black Dragons, she initiated and planned the attack on
Pearl
Harbor. She led it as well, not trusting others to carry it
out.
The plan worked spectacularly, the American fleet was destroyed.
She was
then given the authority to plan a strike on the American
mainland.
Several weeks after Pearl Harbor, in February 1942, Tsunami led a small
demonstration force to the shores of Santa Barbara with the intention
of demonstrating
that Japan could strike the U.S. proper in order to convince the
American
public that it should not retaliate against Japan but settle their
differences
through diplomacy. This plan, conceived by Zelas, if effective
would have
kept the U.S. out of the Second World War and would have allowed Japan
free
reign in Asia. Likely it would have led to Zelas’ becoming
Empress of
Japan. But the attack failed because of Zelas’ lack of impulse
control.
The
small force
was spotted and reported by some small fishing boats several miles off
the
coast of California. Namor, the Sub-Mariner, was
in Los Angeles and was asked to lead a force to intercept the invaders.[13] Regular Navy vessels followed, but
Namor’s areosub outpaced them. Zelas spotted Namor emerging from
his sub
and was overcome with desire. Namor was the most beautiful man
she had
ever seen, a powerful specimen of masculinity, a man who could be her
equal. As Namor attacked, Zelas turned on her troops,
slaughtering them and
ramming her lead ship into one of the other two, scuttling both.
She
fired indiscriminately on her men. Between the two of them, Namor
and
Tsunami quickly disposed of the Japanese force.[14]
Zelas’
reaction
to Namor ties in with a pattern involving men that has run through her
life. Her father abandoned her family when she was little, so she
always
sought the acceptance of older, powerful men. Basically, she
wanted a
“strong daddy.” At the same time, her hatred of her father for
abandoning
her and the taunting and rejection she received from boys and men while
an
adolescent left her with a desire to dominate men. She wanted to
both
control and be controlled by men, an ambivalence that played itself out
in almost
every relationship she had following the transformative treatment by
Scott. Additionally, her upbringing gendered her to the idea that
only
men had power; consequently, when she attempted to gain power, she
tended to
attach herself to a strong man who was already in a position of power,
as she
did with Secretary of the Treasury Woodin.
Creating
an
identity on the spot, Zelas told Namor that she was Miya Shimada, an
American
Nisei who had been experimented upon and misled by the Japanese.
She
joined him and returned to America with him. Namor was taken in,
her role
as a persecuted Nisei in America struck a chord with him. When
she told
him of going to the relocation camps in search of her family, his heart
ached
for her.[15]
He knew what it was like to lose family and to be a stranger in a
strange
land. When she found it inconvenient to live with a Japanese
identity due
to the reactions of white Americans during wartime, she took on blond
hair and
fair skin and began calling herself Namora, telling Namor that she was
Ainu and
had been forced to dye her hair black and to darken her skin with
melanin
treatments. The two seem to have been happy, but Namor maintained
his
relationship with Betty Dean, a Baltimore police woman. Then,
according
to Dennis Power, in early 1943:
Namor
found that for some reason he was undergoing a
further transformation into one of the Deep Ones. His eyes became more
protruding, his hands and feet developed webbing and he discovered that
he had
to immerse himself in water at least once an hour or else he would
sicken and
perhaps die. (“Submariner”)
This
transformation repulsed Zelas, who
regarded Namor with horror because of the associations physical
ugliness had in
her life. She associated ugliness with her former self, an
identity she
loathed. She broke with Namor, but realizing that she was several
months
pregnant, she brought the baby to term and delivered it at Balitmore
hospital. She could have spontaneously miscarried, but because
she wanted
to leave the baby as a taunt for Namor, her body and the baby adapted,
and it
was born healthy and fully developed. After recovering from the
delivery,
she pinned a note to the baby, which read, “Give this to Betty Dean,
Baltimore
PD, tell her it’s his.”[16]
Deciding,
as she
had done years earlier with Dr. Scott, to leave her problems behind and
to seek
political power, she chose Germany as her destination. By this
time, it
was apparent (at least to Zelas’ inside knowledge of the strength of
the
Japanese war effort) that Japan would lose to the U.S., and so she
decided to
pursue her Nazi contacts. Posing as an American soldier, she
shipped to
Britain, and then simply walked undersea across the English Channel to
France.
From there, she traveled to Berlin in the identity of an SS major whose
uniform
she stole, and reestablished herself as the Japanese ambassador
codenamed
Tsunami. She told the German High Command that Japan was working
on
occult researches, including the summoning of Oni demons to fight the
Americans. Very likely she revived her acquaintance with Karl
Haushofer,
although it is likely the two had been in contact during her time in
Japan as
well. Her Nazi handlers showed her various occult projects,
including
Project Ragna Rok (a.k.a. the Fatal Destiny), one of several doomsday
projects
initiated by Hitler to stave off defeat or change the course of the
war.
In Project Ragna Rok she found her way in to power in the person of
Ilsa
Haupstein, a Nazi scientist on the fringe of the project. Zelas
announced
that she was returning to Japan to brief the Imperial Government and
apparently
left Berlin, but she doubled back, killed Haupstein, and assumed her
identity.[17]
By
1943, Project
Ragna Rok had been hijacked by its leader, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin,
the
supposedly dead Russian Monk, and turned from Hitler’s purposes.
Shortly
after Rasputin’s supposed death in 1935[18],
Heinrich Himmler found Rasputin in retreat in a small Italian village
and hired
him to head the project. Rasputin promised Hitler a miracle that
would
reverse the course of the war and bring victory to Nazi Germany, but
the mad
monk knew the days of the Third Reich were numbered and turned the
unlimited
resources Hitler put into his hands to his own designs. Rasputin
guided
the project team into creating the Ragna Rok Engine, a device for
summoning,
magnifying, directing, and containing the forces that would conjure
forth a
demon that could act as a conduit for freeing the Ogdru Jahad, a
seven-part
evil demonic dragon elder god, from its prison in seven rock cocoons
floating
in deep space.[19]
In
early 1944,
Heinrich Himmler proposed project "Vampir Sturm,"[20] and sent Zelas to Castle Giurescu to
recruit the vampire Vladimir Giurescu to the war effort. Giurescu
was not
a true vampire but a Romanian nobleman of the Napoleonic Era who had
been thrown
from his horse into a river in winter and lost under the ice. His
father’s servants found and freed his frozen body, and the father gave
his son
to Hecate, a lamia or ancient demon witch-goddess.[21] Hecate made Giurescu immortal,
linking his revival to a room in Castle Giurescu where the wounded or
injured
Vladimir would be brought to bathe in the light of the full moon and be
healed,
even be returned to youth and vigor from a skeletal state.
Zelas
fell in
love with Giurescu, although the details of their meeting and romance
are known
only to her and have never been revealed. Zelas seems to have
been
successful in her mission, and she returned to Project Ragna Rok, which
took
her to Tarmagant Island, a small island off the Scottish coast, on
December 23,
1944, where the Ragna Rok project was to come to fruition.
Rasputin
succeeded in summoning the demon child, but it broke through to the
earthly
plane in East Bromwich, England, rather than on Tarmagant Island.
Although
General Klaus Werner von Krupt, the German officer assigned to monitor
the
project for Hitler, regarded this failure as a betrayal by Rasputin,
the mad
monk intended this result.
Some
weeks
before, on December 3, Hitler, out of fear of Giurescu’s power, had
ordered the
Romanian and his six vampiric wives arrested and taken to Dachau, where
they
are all impaled, decapitated, and burned.[22]. This betrayal turned Zelas bitter
and she planed to kill Hitler, but Rasputin told her that the Third
Reich had
less than five months to live and promised that he would return her
love to
life. Although Rasputin ordered Zelas and the other principles of
Project
Ragna Rok to their den in Norway, Zelas returned to Germany, likely
intending
to kill Hitler despite his foretold demise. Once there, for some
unknown
reason, Zelas accepted reassignment to Castle Wagner and Project
Fimbulvetr,
“The Winter of Winters,” a back-up project designed as insurance
against
treachery by Rasputin.
Project
Fimbulvetr was headed by Baron Erik Wagner and had been initiated by
Hitler
after von Krupt, who was much more knowledgeable than Rasputin
imagined,
informed Hitler of the true nature of Project Ragna Rok, the summoning
of a
demon. Wagner assembled a team of German sorcerers and scientists
and
kept his team under firm control in his castle in outside Elbing in
East
Prussia. Hitler intended this demon to serve as breakwall on
which the
Red Army would falter, thereby allowing him to redeploy his armies to
the
west. Zelas was rewarded for her service with the title baroness
and
promised lands in Bavaria if the demon could be turned to the German
war effort
as Zelas had done with Giurescu. Likely Zelas saw this demon as
her
opportunity to gain power. Knowing that the Third Reich was
doomed, she
would have probably tried to seduce the demon into an alliance with
her.
The expected post-war chaos would provide plenty of opportunities to
shape the
coming world and to exercise power, perhaps even create a new nation;
it is
impossible to know Zelas’ plans though. As she had done with
Giurescu,
she engaged the demon in carnal relations; the result was Kurt Wagner,
also
known as the Nightcrawler.
The
identity of
the demon summoned by Wagner’s team is uncertain, but significant clues
about
it have emerged.[23]
Nightcrawler originates from extra-dimensional aliens who are the
source
Earth’s legends about demons. The name Belshazaar is associated
with him
in some way and the name Azazel with his father. Finally,
Nightcrawler
was born at the end of World War Two.[24]
One
thing is
certain, the demon father’s name was likely never revealed to any comic
book
writer, nor for that matter even to Zelas. Demons guard their
true names,
but the tidbits above give us a definite lead on aspects of the
father’s
identity. The first clue is that Azazel is a goat demon.
The second
clue is that Nightcrawler’s father’s people were the source of demon
legend on
Earth. There is a known history of a race of goat-shaped aliens
who
inspired humanity’s image of demonkind, the Teff-Hallani.[25]
The
name
Belshazaar is our next clue. Belshazaar was the last king of Babylon,
son of
Nabonidus and grandson to Nebuchadnezzar. At a massive feast, he
and his
princes drank from sacred vessels taken from the temple in Jerusalem,
and the
hand of God appeared among the revelers, tracing the king’s doom on a
wall;
that very night the kingdom of the Chaldeans came to an end and
Belshazaar was
slain. The Babylonian connection is very important. The name
Belshazaar
has been connected with Nightcrawler, therefore the demon is “the
father of
Belshazaar.” Literal thinking would lead one to conclude that the
demon’s
name is therefore Nabonidus or possibly Nebuchadnezzar (who is named as
Belshazaar‘s father in the Bible). Thinking poetically, though,
the demon
is father of the last king of Babylon, that is, the father of the
Babylonian/Chaldean dynasty that can be traced back to Gilgamesh, King
of Ur.[26] Gilgamesh is descended from the
gods, hence the demon by being the father of the line of Babylonian
kings is a
god. This conclusion points to the identity of Nightcrawler’s
father. In The Chained Coffin, Hellboy’s father appears
as a
horned and tailed goat-like creature. He says, “Was I not God in
old
Babylon?” and claims to have been like a god to the women of East
Bromwich,
Lancashire, and Faversham in England, where he impregnated the nun who
later
gave birth to Hellboy. These connections lead to the conclusion
that
Nightcrawler and Hellboy are brothers, and their father is a
Teff-Hallani who
was somehow trapped in another dimension but could be summoned to Earth
and had
been since the ancient days of Ur.
Wagner
employed a smaller copy of the Ragna Rok Engine at
the same moment that Rasputin summoned Hellboy, and Wagner similarly
succeeded. He brought “Azazel‘s” spirit to Castle Wagner and
trapped him
in the body of a young SS officer. It was this beautiful young
man whom
Zelas was introduced to as the demon who might save the Third
Reich. The
version of this story told in various Marvel Comics has to be viewed
with
suspicion. The story that emerges there is contradictory and
illogical. The current Marvel Comics version asserts that
Nightcrawler
was born in 1980, although he first appeared in the 1975 Giant-Size
X-Men.
“Raven Darkholme Wagner,” a.k.a. Mystique, plays the bored, sexually
frustrated
wife of Baron Wagner,[27]
but comics published around 1980 portrayed her as both the deputy
director of
DARPA, raising her foster child Rogue, and living as Mallory Brickman,
a U.S.
senator’s wife. Finally the Wagners have access to highly advanced
infertility
treatments while at the same time ruling over superstitious rural
peasants who
take up the pitchforks and torches at the sight of the Baroness’ true
form, so
the time cues in the story are muddled.
The
truth is much simpler, but some facts about “Mystique”
must be established. First, Zelas never used the name Mystique
nor the
name Raven Darkholme; second, she was never blue-skinned. These
distortions arose at Marvel. Chris Claremont, the writer of Ms.
Marvel
learned about Zelas’ impersonation of DARPA director Mallory Brickman,
the wife
of Senator Brickman.[28]
At the direction of Odd John Wainwright, Zelas had assumed Brickman’s
identity.
Odd John had mentally manipulated Brickman into a near breakdown and
telepathically prodded her into retreating to a rest clinic, where he
installed
Jacquline Castagnet, whom Marvel has portrayed as the precognitive
mutant
Destiny, as a doctor.[29]
Brickman took a leave of absence from DARPA and went to the
clinic. Zelas
returned in Brickman’s form a week later and spent the next several
weeks as
Brickman in DARPA, researching the government’s plans for dealing with
mutants,
such as Project Wideawake. After Zelas learned all Odd John
needed, she
announced as Brickman that she was taking another vacation, but a brief
one.
Mallory Brickman was “cured” and when she returned to work, her
coworkers and
family treated her as if she had been gone just a week or so, which
suited
Brickman fine as she wanted to keep her supposed illness as quiet as
possible.
Claremont
learned of all this and would have included it
in Ms. Marvel, but Stan Lee had been warned by Odd John not to
reveal
enough about Zelas to draw her attention. As will be discussed
below, she
had previously nearly killed a man for writing a book about her, and
Lee passed
on to his subsequent editors-in-chief the danger of drawing her
attention,
hence “Raven Darkholme,” “Mystique,” and the blue skin.
The
demon
impregnated Zelas in early January. Whether the child came to
term
quickly because of its demon heritage[30]
or if Zelas’ body once again sped up the pregnancy is unknown, but the
child
was born on February 9, 1945, as the approaching Red Army encircled
Ebling. The birth of the child gave the demon father the anchor
he needed
in this dimension to assume his natural form and the body of the
handsome SS
officer melted away to be replaced by a great red, horned, tailed, and
cloven-footed beast, stinking of musk and brimstone. Zelas was
horrified,
as she always was by physical ugliness. She grabbed the newly
delivered
child and fled the castle, adapting great speed to flee her demon mate,
who was
bound to the castle by a temnos, or magic circle. Hearing the
guns of the
approaching Soviet army and seeing Red Army tanks rolling up the road,
Zelas
fled to the grounds behind the castle and a bridge that crossed a
roaring
waterfall. Having forgotten that she carried the child, she
suddenly
noticed it and hurled it down the waterfalls, not caring if it lived or
died. Baron Wagner, whom Zelas had murdered a few days previously
and
assumed his identity, had ordered a serving girl to keep track of the
baby, not
knowing what to expect of the unusual circumstances of the child’s
conception
and birth. The girl did so and saw Zelas just as she hurled the
child
down the falls. The servant took the low path and rescued the
baby from the
river. Returning to the castle, she found neither the Baron nor
the
demon. A few weeks later she sold the baby to Margali Szardos, a
sorceress and gypsy queen, who was fleeing the Red Army herself.
Margali
joined up with a small Bavarian circus where she worked as a
fortuneteller and
raised the child alongside her own children.
After
the war,
Zelas somehow found her way back to the United States. We next
encounter
her working for the U.S. government in the identity of Namora.
The exact
nature of this work is unknown at the present and we cannot hazard a
guess at
her motive for working with the U.S. government. From our sources
(which
are very sketchy) we have surmised that Zelas was recruited sometime in
late
1945 or early 1946 for some sort of government work. We suspect
that she
revived her Namora identity and explained that she was Namor’s
cousin.
Someone in the FBI likely contracted with Marvel Comics to produce
comic book
versions of her adventures, and this agent might have been “Jimmy Woo,”
who was
later instrumental in gathering the “1950s Avengers.”[31]
In
1948, Zelas
seems to have been floundering about for a direction for her life,
although she
appears to have maintained her Namora identity off and on throughout
the
1950s. Having tried political and supernatural routes to power,
she now
chose a cultural one. Picking an easy path for one of her beauty,
Zelas
took up modeling, signing with the Conover
Model
Agency under the name Mari Blanchard. Cartoonist Al Capp spotted
her and
incorporated her into L’il Abner as Stupifying Jones. He
then sent
her on a nation-wide tour as Jones to promote Sadie Hawkins Day, the
annual
gender-reversal holiday he had invented. After seeing an
adaptation of
Weinbaum’s “Adaptive Ultimate” on CBS’s Escape (broadcast March
26,
1949), she got the idea of moving to Hollywood to pursue a movie career
and
took a number of small roles, but was bored by the movie
business. She
made the acquaintance of an established Hollywood star, Rita LeMar, who
was
actually Jacqueline Castagnet, an Oddian mutant born in the Champagne
region of
France in 1765.[32] Castagnet’s parents
were dull
peasants and her childhood, with her supernormal intelligence, was
cramped and
ravenous. She was betrothed to a neighboring farmer but ran away
into a
life of prostitution. Over the centuries, she lived variously as
a
prostitute, a mistress, and a wife, discovering a capacity for a kind
of
spiritual sexual therapy, even developing disciple prostitutes to aid
in her
healing mission. She suffered from overwork, exhaustion, and
strain, and
retreated into marriage, seeking status in the social world via
marriage to a
Russian prince, whom she put on the path to the throne by playing
politics.
Again she felt overwhelmed and fled the Bynzantine world of Moscow
royalty. From then on she served primarily in her healing way,
with
respites of varying length into the refuge of marriage to recharge and
recover. Odd John Wainwright met her as a prostitute in Paris in
1926,
just after she had reestablished herself after a year of recovery in an
asylum
due to the strains she suffered from working her therapy in the vast
need of
the Weimar Republic.
In
the late twenties, Castagnet shifted her therapeutic work and took to
the stage
under the name Rita LeMar. Through the catharsis of terror and
pity she
offered a healing performance for her audiences. She made a few
films and
found acting to be a suitable refuge from the exhausting work of her
spiritual
therapy. She expected to continue as a Parisian actress, but the
destruction of Odd John’s Colony in 1933 and the coincidental rise of
the Nazis
prompted Castagnet to consider her vulnerability. She knew the
Nazis
would not stop with Germany, nor with the persecution of the Jews.[33]
The Colony’s failure taught her that mutants like her would also be
targeted if
ever discovered. She left for Hollywood, using her fame in French
cinema
to establish herself comfortably. She resumed her therapeutic
role, but
the Puritanical attitude toward prostitution in America pushed her more
toward
acting. To compensate, she began a romance advice column, and
subsequently a radio show, under the pseudonym Venus, the Goddess of
Love. For the hardest cases, she followed up her advice with
telepathic
therapy sessions, telling her listeners that if they imagined that they
were
talking to her it would seem as if she replied. This role suited
her
well. She was able to maintain her therapeutic work without
driving
herself into exhaustion. Because of her Oddian constitution, she
did not
age as other women and over time she found that more and more of the
Hollywood
community commented on her ability to stay young looking. In her
LeMar
identity, she announced her retirement and was forgotten by the fickle
world of
fame in a few years, but she kept the Venus identity and its attendant
work. It was just after her retirement that she met Zelas.
Castagnet
and Zelas became fast friends and then lovers.[34]
Each supplied something vital to the other. Castagnet saw in
Zelas a
damaged spirit that needed her ministrations. Zelas took refuge
in
Castagnet’s attentions, the first pure and unselfish love she had ever
felt. Zelas reshaped the Blanchard identity to match Castagnet’s
appearance and they shared the role of Mari Blanchard, glamorous
B-movie
star. In 1956, Zelas discovered that the rights to “The Adaptive
Ultimate” had been optioned and decided that she should star in the
film
version instead of letting someone else play her, as had been done on
television in the series Escape in 1949 and Studio One in
1955. Stanley Weinbaum
had heard Zelas’ tale from Dr. Bach, a family
friend, and had published the short story in Astounding Stories
(November 1935). Weinbaum died of cancer shortly thereafter in
December
1935. Had Zelas known of the story at the time, she probably
would have
killed him, but after two decades the Weinbaum’s version of events
merely amused
her.
As a
joke on both
Scott, whom Zelas discovered still lived, and the deceased Weinbaum,
Zelas
acquired the rights to her story (as she saw it) and produced and
starred in She-Devil,
a fairly straight-forward adaptation of “The Adaptive Ultimate.”
She
wanted Scott to know she was alive and to have this knowledge to gnaw
at him,
powerless as he now was to find her or expose her, having guiltily
destroyed
all records of his earlier involvement with her.[35]
We
suspect that
Odd John Wainwright recruited Zelas at some point during the late
1940s;
possibly he was the impetus for the revival of her Namora identity and
her
career in intelligence. We suspect that he suggested her
modelling and
Hollywood career, possibly engineering her encounter with Castagnet, knowing that the two women would be
attracted to
each other’s strengths and needs. We know that she played
a part
in the formation of the Legion of the Strange, the group portrayed in
comic
books as both the X-Men and the Doom Patrol.[36] In the decades after the
destruction of the Colony, Odd John traveled the world as X, building a
network
of contacts among talented individuals, including Doc Savage and the
Supermen.
He may have met Zelas at that time, though the mid-forties seems more
likely. And we suspect that the two have had at least one
together and
possibly more.
In
the early
fifties, she was on a mission to assassinate an East German scientist;
whether
this mission was for the
The
rest of
Zelas’ life is difficult to track. The published records are
inaccurate
and contradictory, and little documentary evidence has emerged.
Additionally, the nature of her abilities makes it easy for her to
assume, and
be depicted in, any number of identities, two of which include Madame
Rogue—foe
of the Doom Patrol as part of the Brotherhood of Evil; and
Mystique—enemy the
X-Men as part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. All four of
these
groups were founded and backed by Odd John Wainwright, and her
involvement in
them—despite the appearance of the published record—was in service of
his
ends. We do know that she encountered and adopted an Evil Twin (atelhs
antigratho), as undertaking missions for various branches of the
federal
government at various times.[39]
Further research is needed to untangle her life of the past few
decades.
Special thanks to Joshua Falken, Henry Covert, Ivan Schablotski, Loki Carbis, and Ana Quintero for reading and responding to this article.
Works Cited
Campbell, John. The Mightiest
Machine.
[1935].
Cooke, Jon. “‘The Mutant Blackhawks’: The Real Origin of the New X-Men.” Comic Book Artist Summer 1998: 75.
Hübinette,
Tobias. “
Power, Dennis. “Submariner.” The Secret History of the Wold-Newton Universe. 203. http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/marvelous/namor.htm.
Tatara, Peter. “Der Puppenspieler: The
Role of Karl
Haushofer in the Third Reich.”
Scott, Daniel. “Inheritance of Acquired
Characteristics in Fruit Flies.” The Journal of the Evolutionary
Society
of
---. She-Devil.
Weinbaum,
[1] We suspect that “Grand Mercy” is in fact St. Eligius Hospital, named after the eponymous saint who was well known for caring for the poor. It was nicknamed “St. Elsewhere” because “elsewhere” is where private hospitals would send patients who could not afford their care. Zelas was one such patient. St. Eligius was founded in the 1930s by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Joseph McCabe. He was the son of a cabinetmaker and named the hospital after his father's favorite saint—Eligius is a patron of craftsmen. McCabe was something of a rebel and an iconoclast, whose often unorthodox management techniques attracted caring doctors such as Herman Bach and Daniel Scott.
Although the television show, St. Elsewhere, gives the date of 1935 for the hospital’s opening (episode 85, “Time Heals”), this date is deceptive as it does not account for the delay between events and their transformation into broadcast television. Given the production process for network television, we suspect that the events of St. Elsewhere must have occurred at least two to three years before they were broadcast, thereby establishing a date of 1932-1933 as the latest possible for the founding of the hospital. Very likely it was 1929 or 1930. Perhaps the hospital was founded in partial response to the Depression, though this seems unlikely.
[2] Dr. Dan Scott is better known as Dr. Daniel Auschlander, whose later life was depicted on the television series St. Elsewhere. Daniel Auschlander was Jewish, but as young man he did not look like a typical Jew. The casting of Norman Lloyd to play him on St. Elsewhere reflects this appearance. On the television show, Lloyd is the classic elderly Jew, but as a young man he had blond hair and in fact played a Nazi saboteur in the classic Hitchcock thriller Saboteur. Other casting of the character followed this line, as the blond James Stephens (best known as the main character James Hart from the law school series The Paper Chase) played Auschlander in the flashback episode, "Time Heals: Part 2" (episode 4-18, aired February 20, 1986).
Upon graduating
from high
school, Dr. Auschlander realized that many avenues of research would be
closed
to him, so he attended medical school under the name Daniel Scott,
using his
middle name as his last, and legally changed it for certification
before taking
his medical boards. As Daniel Scott he joined the staff of St.
Eligius in
the early thirties. Daniel Scott hid his Jewish heritage mostly
by
ignoring anti-Semitic remarks and by acting like a good
His experience with Kyra Zelas brought home
one fact to
him: no matter one’s ability to adapt, it is often best to accept
who one
is rather than trying to change oneself to suit the surroundings.
Scott
left St. Eligius shortly after the Zelas affair and had himself
re-certified
under his full name. As Dr. Daniel Scott Auschlander he was a bright
and
upcoming surgeon and researcher. When the war with
[3]Some may wonder about this serum and whether or not another scientist discovered the same properties in fruit flies and if there are other adaptive ultimates in the world. The simple answer is no. Was there something unique about Zelas’ genome that made the serum effective on her alone? Absolutely not. Zelas is as ordinary as can be. The secret to the efficacy of the serum lies in the cow Scott injected in order to derive his serum. In “The Adaptive Ultimate,” Scott explains, “So I used fruit flies. I putrefied their bodies, injected a cow, and got a serum at last, after weeks of clarifying with albumen, evaporating in vacuo, rectifying with—” (p. 55).
This account leaves out much that Scott was unaware of. After Zelas turned bad, Scott destroyed his serum and all his lab records. He did not want to risk the creation of another monster. He need not have bothered. According to his self-published biography of Zelas, She-Devil, Scott ran several unsuccessful trials before getting a serum that worked. He assumed that the difference originated in a radioactive treatment of the fruit flies, but in fact the difference lay in the cow. The successful test cow—and Scott had no way of knowing this—was no cow at all. It was an “evil twin” of a cow.
Many novels,
films, and
television shows turn on the notion of an evil twin, someone who looks
just
like the protagonist but acts completely differently. The term is
actually a misnomer, arising from a translation error of the Greek
term, atelhs
antigratho, coined by Dr. James Clarke Wildman Jr. to describe the
phenomenon in reference to a creature he encountered in
Very briefly, a space ship was discovered during an expedition to the Antarctic. Dr. Clark Wildman (popularly known as Doc Savage) joined this expedition in September 1925 under the assumed identity of McReady, a meteorologist who had studied medicine. This adventure was recorded in the short story, “Who Goes There?” (1937) by John Campbell. Rick Lai provides a succinct summary of the story:
The expedition discovered a frozen alien from outer space in the ice. The alien‘s had crashed in Antarctica millions of years ago. When the alien was defrosted, it was to be alive. The alien had the power to copy any other life forms. It could also split off parts of its body to copy more than one life form. The expedition was faced with the horror of being gradually murdered, and then replaced by duplicates that were parts of this monstrosity from another world. An expedition member named McReady came up with a scientific test to tell the real humans from the duplicates. Under McReady‘s leadership, the remaining humans destroyed the invader from the stars. (Lai, Chronology of Bronze, 102-103)
Dr. Wildman coined the term atelhs antigratho or “imperfect copy” to describe the copies of people and animals made by the alien, but the term has been mistranslated as “evil twin” and applied to a whole range of beings created by other protoplasmic aliens.
A surviving
segment of this
creature threatened humanity on two separate occasions, as depicted in
the
films The Thing From Another World (1951) and The Thing
(1982).
It may be that these films depict encounters with two separate crashed
spacecraft, one in the
These protoplasmic aliens have been identified by Gryphon Institute researchers as belonging to an offshoot of the Founder species, although their specific planetary origin is not known. The Founders are a protoplasmic shape-shifting species capable of taking on any form, probably best known from the depiction of Constable Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In “Through a Faceted Lens of History: The Trek to the Legion” (http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/marvelous/supermanfamily/trektolegion.htm), we theorize that the Founders and other shape-shifting species in the Milky Way Galaxy were descendents of the shapeshifting Eddorans from the Andromeda Galaxy. Other offshoot races include the beings that have been depicted by Marvel Comics as Skrulls and Dire Wraiths. The beings described by DC Comics as Chameleon Boy's Duralans and the Proteans were in fact Founders stranded in the Alpha Quadrant.
The being that created the evil twin of the cow, which we will refer to as the Evil-Twin Maker, was most likely a Dire Wraith scout sent to the Earth as an information gathering agent in the distant past; it could reshape itself into the form of the people it met in order to fit into the society it was studying. It is possible these are the are the same beings as those sent by the Outspacers, an alien race living in the Alpla Centari system and depicted in the 1953 Philip K. Dick story “Imposter” (film version, Imposter, (2002)). In “Imposter” the Outspacers (clearly a term applied by Terrans to the aliens and not an indigenous name) send a biological robot with a bomb embedded in its heart to kill the Earth’s chancellor. In the film version, two such “robots” are sent. It may be that the Outspacers are themselves Proteans, but it seems more likely that they have somehow adapted Proteans—either captured or bred for the purpose—to their needs. If so, it seems likely that the Proteans would not be used merely for assassination but would also serve as spies. Both versions of “Imposter” are set in the near future (clearly, given his oeuvre, Dick had access to some sources of information sent back in time), but it is possible that the Outspacers maintained surveillance of the Earth for millennia.
Unlike the “Things” depicted in “Who Goes There?” and the two films, the Evil-Twin Maker’s craft did not crash land and get buried under tons of ice and snow. The creature seems to have been able to carry out some aspects of its mission but was nearly killed during the volcanic eruption at Thera, circa 1650 BC. Its ship had been hidden near the Santorini volcano when it exploded, and the communications equipment aboard it was destroyed either in the massive volcanic eruption or the subsequent tsunami.
Yet this destruction remains only a dim memory for the Evil-Twin Maker. Severely burned and reduced in mass, the creature needed to absorb a great deal of protein matter to regenerate and regain its original mass. It chose the easily available charred human tissue of the living and dead bodies of humans and animals in the region of the volcano. This regeneration left it damaged and defective as a result of its injury and of incorporating so much “alien” tissue into its biomass. Although it no longer remembered its mission, it took on a pathological feelings of abandonment and resentment, knowing that it could not return home and not understanding why it was stranded on this wasteland of a planet, forever cut off from its kin and kind.
Its reproductive system—heavily influenced by the various terrestrial reproductive cycles newly incorporated into its system—no longer worked as it should have, which was to meld with another of its species and form a new duplicating being. Ever since its regeneration, it has been producing evil twins, albeit unintentionally. It now has monthly discharges of eggs, the resulting offspring being a duplicate of the being it first encountered when entering estrus. This new body egg, a sort of homunculus, falls off when quite small and grows, usually in some hidden nest. The egg takes nutrients from its surroundings and grows into a fully sized duplicate of the being—human, animal, or insect—that the Evil-Twin Maker encountered during estrus. The duplicate awakens with distorted memories of a life based upon the memories of its original, but with an underlaying of the Evil-Twin Maker’s emotional state of resentment, abandonment, and alienation, resulting in an internal conflict.
Typically, human evil twins construct identities based upon their originals’ lives and go on to have ordinary but unhappy existences. Most turn to drugs and alcohol, and many seek acceptance through prostitution. They do not live long, however, as Evil Twins are subject to an insidious form of cellular degeneration that is often misdiagnosed as cancer, leprosy, muscular dystrophy, and various others ailments. Even without this biologically driven short lifespan, most human Evil Twins die soon after emergence because they tend to pick lifestyles that are inherently dangerous, often involving criminal activity, frequent violence, and other self-destructive behavior. This tendency toward self-destruction and psychological need for affiliation has led many evil twins into the role of henchmen for crime lords, supervillains, and criminal organizations such as Hydra, AIM, SPECTRE, and THRUSH. In the rare instances in which they reproduce, the psychological problems inherent in the evil-twin parent are passed on to the children through both nature and nurture.
The cow that proved a successful medium for Scott’s serum was an evil twin, whose alien DNA enabled the adaptive serum to work. Such animal evil twins are rare, and their distemper often leads to them being put down if domesticated or shot if wild. The chances of finding another such cow, especially given the mimicking abilities of the alien DNA (some evil twins so successfully duplicate their original’s DNA that even genetic testing cannot reveal that they are anything other than what they appear), is extremely small.
[4] In “The Adaptive Ultimate” Woodin is called John Callan and is said to be a bachelor, but this name is clearly a pseudonym, probably an effort to protect Woodin’s reputation. Willilam Hartman Woodin (1868-1934) was appointed secretary of the treasury in 1933, but resigned after only one year due to illness and a scandal.
[5] It was during her visit to Washington in early 1934 after the resignation of Woodin that she first learned of Odd John Wainwright. According to records of the briefing (available through a Freedom of Information Act request) given to President Roosevelt, the United States Navy had taken part in the destruction of Odd John’s Colony. The Colony was considered communistic and the association of mutanity with communism led to the development of strongly anti-mutant policies in the U.S. government, including the genocidal Project Wideawake. For more on Wainwright, see Olaf Stapledon’s novel Odd John or Power and Coogan’s “Deceptive Brilliance: The Lethal Luthors. Part One: Luthor by Nature But Not by Name; Jonathan ‘Odd John’ Wainwright, 1910-1933 (?).” <http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/Luthors/lethalluthors-oddjohn.html>.
[6] Tsunami is a Japanese word with the English translation, "harbor wave." Represented by two characters, the top character, "tsu," means harbor, while the bottom character, "nami," means "wave." In the past, tsunamis were sometimes referred to as "tidal waves" by the general public, and as "seismic sea waves" by the scientific community. The term "tidal wave" is a misnomer; although a tsunami's impact upon a coastline is dependent upon the tidal level at the time a tsunami strikes, tsunamis are unrelated to the tides. Tides result from the imbalanced, extraterrestrial gravitational influences of the moon, sun, and planets. The term "seismic sea wave" is also misleading. "Seismic" implies an earthquake-related generation mechanism, but a tsunami can also be caused by a nonseismic event, such as a landslide or meteorite impact.
[7] For more on the Black Dragons, please see “Japan, Incorporated: Black Dragons” at http://vikingphoenix.com/public/JapanIncorporated/1895-1945/dragon.htm
[8] While we have not been able to track down much information regarding Zelas’ life in Japan, it is possible that she gave birth one or more children there. If so, according to Joshua Falken (via private correspondence), it is possible that a grandson of hers was the short-lived hero, Sunfire. Sunfire was not the superpowered mutant portrayed in the X-Men comics, but he did have an ability to tolerate very high temperatures. He was involved in Project Sunfire, an attempt by the Japanese government to develop portable weapons, in this case a flying firesuit much like the one developed by Norgil in World War Two that served as the basis for the Human Torch (according to Jess Nevins, “The All-Aces Squad: Super Heroes at War,” <http://ratmmjess.tripod.com/wold5.html>). The Japanese government lent him to the international team put together in the mid-seventies. Unfortunately a freak accident caused a leak in his fuel tanks, which exploded, killing him instantly.
We also believe that she is the great-grandmother of Princess Akiuki Orugawa, a current leader of the Black Dragons (please see Jeff Christiansen, “Black Dragon Society.” The Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe. <http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/nsblackd.htm>).
[9] For a mangled account of this, see X-Men: True Friends #3.
[10] For an excellent, brief overview of Haushofer’s life, please see Peter Tatara’s “Der Puppenspeiler.”
[11] The Ainu are Caucasoid but not Caucasian or Aryan. For a brief discussion and reference to the belief that Ainu are Aryan, see Hübinette’s “Asia as a Topos of Fear and Desire for Nazis and Extreme Rightists.” Additionally, Haushofer considered the Japanese as the “Aryans of the East” (see Tatara).
[12] We do not know the exact relationship between Karl Haushofer and Zelas, but we suspect that he played a significant role in her ascent to power, both in Japan and in Germany. He was likely one of the driving forces behind Project Ragna Rok and likely smoothed Zelas path into the role of Ilsa Hauptstein.
[13] Namor’s life has also been portrayed by DC Comics via the characters Aquaman and Neptune Perkins. For more on Namor, see Dennis Power’s “Submariner.”
[14] Young All-Stars #2 (July 1987).
[15] Young All-Stars #4 (September 1987).
[16] This child would grow up to be Namorita, also known as Deep Blue and Indigo. Betty Dean raised her, but told her that her mother had died. Dennis Power reports that Namorita:
was perfectly human in appearance and behavior until her puberty when she developed pointed ears. In her early twenties, she moved to Texas living by the Gulf of Mexico. While living in Galveston, she met and had an affair with an oil man from Dallas named Ewing, despite him already being married. She became pregnant with his child. The pregnancy's hormonal changes transformed her rapidly into a scaled humanoid Dyzan from the destroyed city of Y'Psoodsn. She dove into Baltimore harbor and was not seen again. In the mid-seventies however a humanoid male with webbed fingers and feet, purportedly lacking memory of his origins. He was given the name Mark Harris by Dr Elizabeth Merrill, and was then drafted into the Foundation For Oceanic Research. After aiding them several times against a man named Schubert, he disappeared again. A highly fictionalized version of his life appeared in the television series, The Man From Atlantis.
[17] Wake the Devil, detailing events from the early 1990s, depicts the return of a youthful Haupstein, who has supposedly been in suspended animation, to aid in Rasputin’s freeing of the Ogdru Jahad. This person was not, in fact, Haupstein, but the real Haupstein’s daughter, also named Ilsa, in remarkably good shape for a woman in her fifties (it is possible that the daughter discovered her mother’s secrets, went to Norway, found the cryogenic chambers, and placed herself into suspended animation). The daughter Ilsa had been born a few years before Zelas murdered the mother; she had been conceived as part of Himmler’s Lebensborn Aryan breeding program and was being raised in an “SS Mother Home,” one of several Lebensborn homes established in Germany and Norway as orphanages for these children. See “Hitler’s Children” by Joshua Hammer. Newsweek International, March 20, 2000. <http://www.rickross.com/reference/hate_groups/hategroups164.html>
[18] Rasputin’s “death” is detailed in The Shadow Strikes #4 (December 1989). Rasputin is depicted as degenerate, grifting, murderous, lecherous, jealous old man, who was castrated in the 1916 murder attempt. He is shown falling to an icy death off the Brooklyn Bridge after being shot and stabbed by The Shadow in a death scene that recalls his 1916 murder in Russia. The Shadow reports him as killed, but the body is not shown. He likely survived this death and retreated to Italy, where Himmler found him a year later. Then again, the depiction of Rasputin here differs so greatly with the one in Hellboy that one wonders if they are the same man. As with Merlin and Dracula, Rasputin’s name drew imitators. Either Rasputin from The Shadow Strikes or Hellboy (or both) might be imposters.
[19] The story of Project Ragna Rok and Rasputin’s role in it are told in several Hellboy collections, including Seeds of Destruction and Wake the Devil.
[20] It seems likely that other aspects of project Vampir Sturm are depicted in “Why We Fight,” an episode of the television program Angel in which a German submarine transporting three vampires is intercepted and taken over by American naval forces. Nazi experiments on vampire brains to control the undead and turn them into soldier-slaves are hinted at. One of the vampires, called “The Prince of Lies,” seems to be Count Orlok, portrayed by Willem Defoe in Shadow of the Vampire (2000).
[21] The files of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense are vague as to the true nature of Hecate. They contain a brief history given by Vladimir Giurescu’s father to the effect that Hecate was some sort of demon witch-goddess cursed by Thoth into a half-human/half-snake form, unable to live in sunlight. This version was recorded by Hellboy, but the truth behind it is indeterminable. It seems possible that Hecate‘s is related to that of the vampires depicted by Ann Rice in the Vampire Chronicles.
[22] Mignolia, Wake the Devil, ch. 2.
[23] Dave Cockrum first learned about Nightcrawler while serving on Guam in 1968 (Cooke 75). He claims to have created Nightcrawler to distract himself from storms buffeting the island, but, curiously, there was an ex-Nazi living on Guam at the time who had published a highly fictionalized memoir titled I Was a Nazi Sorcerer, a battered copy of which turned up in a bookstore in Denver where we acquired it. Nazi Sorcerer appears to have been written by a former German solider named Hans Liegendsäufer, who claims to have been a Nazi wizard in charge of Project Fimbulvetr. He claims that after the war the U.S. took him in and put him in charge of various secret occult programs. The book is suspect as much of it appears to be cribbed from Nazi occult writings and the author’s name translates at Hans Lyingdrunkard. But Liegendsäufer apparently wrote the book in the middle sixties while living on Guam. It is possible that Cockrum encountered him or picked up a copy of the book.
[24] Christopher Claremont discovered this piece of information (see “X-MEN COMIC BOOK QUESTIONS, Part 3,” http://www.faqs.org/faqs/comics/xbooks/main-faq/part3/section-2.html.) Claremont originally supposed that Mystique was Kurt Wagner’s father and Destiny his mother, but this supposition arose from his knowledge of Zelas’ and Castagnet’s roles in raising Rogue. Claremont proposed that Zelas might have taken the form of man and impregnated Castagnet, but this proposition was not based upon hard evidence, instead it was an extrapolation based upon Rogue’s family situation.
[25] The following history of the Teff-Hallani is drawn from The Descent by Jeff Long, Merlin's Godson by H. Warner Munn, and The Mightest Machine by John W. Campbell. A description is given in The Mightiest Machine:
Their faces were long and narrow, and they had hors, but their eyes and their noses and their mouths were something like those of humans. They had a torso and a pair of true hands, but their feet were the feet of goats and their bodies were hairy. And the strange light [of the underground caverns] had bred something into them that made them red, for the light was greenish in hue. They were hideous. It was hot in those depths, and they loved heat. (75-76).
The Teff-Hallani live in caverns beneath the surface of the Earth, are carnivorous, and have carried off human beings as breeding stock cattle. They were once ordinary humans mutated by radiation that caused them to become horned, hoofed, hirsute and to a certain extent telepathic with enhanced senses. Obviously this radiation is limited to the caverns they inhabit, otherwise all under ground dwellers would have these traits.
The Teff-Hallani are led by “Lucifer” or “Satan,” or rather someone claiming to be such. This is an entity whom we have called The Demon and who has the ability to not only inhabit different bodies but also to traverse time so he can have simultaneous incarnations in the same time period.
Originally the Teff-Hallani lived above ground, but they aligned with the forces of Darkness during the time of Lemuria and were driven underground. They surged forward once again to try to retake Lemuria, which caused the destruction of that civilization. Memories of this war lived on through myth, and the Teff-Hallani became a trans-cultural model for evil among the nations of the earth.
A group of Teff-Hallani led by “Lucifer” stole an experimental space vessel before they caused the destruction of Lemuria. They were followed by a group of Lemurians in another vessel capable of space travel. These two groups gave birth to the interplanetary civilizations seen in The Mightiest Machine. Some of the Teff-Hallani stayed behind and continue to live in the caverns beneath the Earth, still led by one of the incarnations of the Demon.
[26] Christian Answers Network, 2004, http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/chaldea.html.
[27] Wagner and Zelas were never married. The source of Marvel’s version of Nightcrawler’s birth is a long footnote from the monograph Die Deutsche Bauern, eine Geschichte und Untersuchung (Berlinisher Polytechnic, 1963. 694-697). The footnote is a transcription of an oral history taken from a Prussian peasant woman regarding supernatural phenomenon in her village. The woman tells of having been a serving girl at Castle Wagner and of rescuing a demon child when its mother, the baroness, flung it over a waterfall. She then sold the baby to a band of Gypsies. The woman’s discussion of the Baron and Baroness were thought by the interviewers to refer to a married couple, which Wagner and Zelas were not.
[28] Brickman is of course a pseudonym. We have been unable to determine the true identity of Senator Brickman.
[29] According to Marvel Comics, Destiny’s true name is Irene Adler. This name is obviously suspect as it is the name of Sherlock Holmes lover and the mother of Nero Wolfe. Is this name a joke on the part of someone at Marvel or is it a clue intended to lead researchers to some conclusion? For Adler’s place in the Holmes’ family tree, please see “Watching the Detectives, or The Family Tree of Sherlock Holmes” by Brad Mengel, <http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/contributors/holmes-family-tree.htm>.
[30] Such quick pregnancies seem to be common for human women impregnated by demons. For one such instance, please see “Expecting,” an episode of Angel in which Cordelia is impregnated by a demon and comes to term in one day.
[31] The adventures of Namora and her earlier history with Namor as children was either created by Bill Everett or made up by Zelas. The story of the “1950s Avengers” is given in What If #9 (June 1978).
[32] Rita LeMar plays a small role in Anthony Boucher’s The Case of the Baker St. Irregulars (New York: Collier, 1962, copyright 1940), which tells the story of the derailing of a production of The Speckled Band at MGM (called Metropolis Pictures in the novel). Thanks to P.J. Lozito for bringing LeMar to my attention.
[33] It is possible that Castagnet was herself Jewish. Her prediction about the Nazis was correct, and all the Jews from her home village were sent to Auschwitz. Castagnet’s precognitive powers are not mentioned directly in Odd John, but are hinted at (p. 105).
[34] For an analysis of Zelas and Castagnet’s sexuality (as revealed in various X-Men comics), see “Mystique and Destiny's Bisexuality” by Tilman Stieve <http://www.alara.net/xbooks/mystifaq1.txt>.
[35] After the release of the film She Devil, Dr. Auschlander researched, recorded, and self-published a version of Zelas’ life, She-Devil. He was found nearly dead of natural gas poisoning in November 1961. The police report, which I have reviewed, indicates a gas burner had been left unlit in his kitchen. He was found bound to his bed by a neighbor, who happened to drop by his house. I suspect that Zelas found out about his book (which was rejected by several publishers, according to Scott’s preface), posed as his wife, tied him up during sex (claiming that she wanted to try something kinky—it was the sixties, albeit the early sixties—to spice things up), and had sex with him. But during the sex she lost the control she kept against adapting to the other person's desires and began to revert to her original form . It seems likely, given the attachment Dr. Scott is portrayed as having for Zelas in “The Adaptive Ultimate” even after she apparently lost her beauty, that Auschlander may have been attracted to Zelas’ original form, and so she may have reverted to it to adapt to his desires. Discovering her appearance, she would have been revolted at herself and furious with Auschlander. Thus, her reaction would likely have been to turn on the gas and leave him to die, her attachment to him still strong enough to keep her from murdering him directly.
[36] This gathering was depicted in What If #9 (June 1978), “What If the Avengers Had Been Formed During the 1950s?” Zelas is portrayed as Namora.
[37] The exact date of this mission is uncertain, but it was likely in 1952. In the comics, this mission is dated to 1961, but that date is impossible. Mystique conceived Graydon Creed during this mission and he ran for President in 1992. The comics present his campaign as occurring in the 1996 election cycle, but this cannot be as the system of comics production does not provide enough lead time for the events to have occurred in the 1996 and then have been retold in comics form. To run for President, Creed would have to be thirty-five and was likely a few years older than that. A 1951 or 1952 date places Creed at about forty when he is assassinated (which likely happened in late 1991 before the primary season proper).
[38] X-Men Unlimited #40
[39] The story of this Evil Twin, code-named Rogue, will be told in a forthcoming article, “Rogue Things from Another Planet.” In her Madame Rogue identity, Zelas worked for the so-called “Brotherhood of Evil” and had a child, who has grown into the woman code-named Gemini.