Zatanna 2
From Barbelith
Categories: Seven Soldiers Issues
"A Book in the Beginning"
Barbelith thread: Shapeless thing alert! (http://www.barbelith.com/topic/20686/from/140)
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Background and General Commentary
Synopsis:
Having presumably taken a taxi to a rent-a-car in San Francisco, Zatanna and apprentice Misty Kilgore are trying to escape shapeshifting Gwydion, the "man of her dreams"...
The synopsis of this comic, on DC sites and last page previews, was totally not at all what the story ended up being.
Annotations
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Page 1
Gwydion goes through a variety of changes, from raindrops to coastline, all the while retaining a slight resemblance to Zatanna's father, Giovanni Zatara.
How many Gwydion forms can you find? I found seventeen.
Page 2-3
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. Zatanna is not the first Morrison character to traverse the bridge by motorcar, but she's evidently going a lot slower than King Mob ever did.
Mr. Tricks - Not to nit pick or anything but as I recall King Mob was crossing the BAY BRIDGE which connects Berkeley (where he hung with his ex) to S.F. For Zatanna to be crossing the Golden Gate to get into S.F. we'll have to presume her workshop was happening in the Marin area (a common location for esoteric workshops).
Misty's Magic Die seems distinctly correspondent with Manhattan's Foundation Stone (http://barbelith.com/faq/index.php/Guardian_2#Page_18), and - in turn - with last issue's cube-star of Ra-Realm.
Misty's an invisible to all-but-Zatanna runaway? Well...
Papers called me that, not I - I'm a little confused by the "Did you notice that nobody at the workshop saw me or heard me?" - because Cass does know she's there, so it's not just Zatanna. Anyway, it just seemed like a bit of a red herring.
(Worth noting that Cassandra is blind, and therefore subject to different stimuli, though.)
Also - Magic, Practice One: Nothing Is What It Seems. Summarised later by Misty as 'Misdirection.'
Page 4
Entering Cassandra Craft (http://polisci.uchicago.edu/~jtlevy/friends.html#Craft)'s occult miscellany shop, there's a Sheeda in a jar and a book on Qabbalah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah), quite largely the subject of Alan Moore's Promethea, beneath a couple of untitled books.
Mario - Cassandra Craft is the closest the Phantom Stranger has ever come to a girlfriend. She's been a member of his supporting cast since the early 1970's
FinderWolf - ...plus his girlfriend has an amulet and black turtleneck just like his!
Mario - Better than that pink jumpsuit she wore in the 70's.
Ganesh - Anyone else find the Sheeda in the jar reminiscent of Promethea? Little jibe at Moore?
It is also redolent of the (revelatory) scenes from Moore and Oscar Zarate's A Small Killing (http://www.popmatters.com/comics/small-killing.shtml)
The origin of the Sheeda in the jar appears in Guardian #4. It controlled the boxer Mo Colley and was later preserved for study by Baby Brain.
Page 5
The top left of the first panel has a poster of Sargon the Sorceror; the parallel image looks like Zatara, but I'm unsure it is.
The logo seems to indicate that this is a poster of Blackstone, the real/comic-book magician. Which makes sense, as he's obviously a little fuller of face than Zatara was. .... Blackstone, a real magician, had a comic book for a while. It started out written by Walter B. Gibson, and published by the people who used to do the old Shadow books, Street and Smith. "Super-Magic Comics" for the first issue, and then it was "Super Magician." He was published by EC for a while, and then by Marvel for a while.
Cassandra is wielding Kid William Tell's crossbow. The fiery bolt rhymes, like Smax' sword, and various cartoon weapons have done.
There doesn't seem to be any internet reference to a 'Golden Age' Shapeless One, but it's a distinct possibility. Sounds like a Doctor Strange (http://www.doctorstrange.net/) villain.
Page 6
Ali-Ka-Zoom's cabinet lurks in the corner of the bottom panel.
Mr.Tricks - I like the reference to the Invincibles being popular in the bay area.
Page 7
Cassandra confirms what Gumbitch told us two months ago about Merlin (and Lancelot,) and then makes things even more nebulous: "You can't narrow the shapeless one down. He can be anything." As if to confirm this, Answers.com reports Gwydion (http://www.answers.com/gwydion) as the son of Danu/Don, goddess of death and, in fantasy novels, the birth-name of King Arthur and Mordred.
And Jones Celtic Encyclopaedia's entry (http://www.maryjones.us/jce/gwydion.html) explains the ancient Welsh; meaning 'trees', which he was disguised as in Zatanna 1 and 'loom/weaver'.
Page 8
Misty's surname 'Kilgore' reminds me of the great Kurt Vonnegut's author surrogate, Kilgore Trout (http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html), and I'm sure Kilgore was an all-purpose signature for political graffiti in the late 70's/early 80's, not conceptually dissimilar to Luther Blissett (http://www.altx.com/manifestos/blisset.html), but can't seem to find any supportive evidence. Kilroy, maybe?
Grant Morrison sure does like cats. Here's another, called Prowley, who speaks in hieroglyphs which probably translate not dissimilarly to some of Tinker's dialogue in We3. One wonders how Prowley would get along with Klarion's familiar, Teekl -- since both owners evidently see through their pets' eyes, on occasion.
Prowley's word balloons translate to 'MROWW' and 'MEOW'.
Page 9
Cassandra talks about selling some of her ropey goods, including fake Dyna-Mite rings (It seems Dyno-Mite Dan was the recipient of a pair.) and a Ruby of Life, which was the aforementioned Sargon's item of power.
If Dyno-Mite Dan's rings are fake, he's far more impressive than what was assumed in the prologue.
All tying with Instruction Two: Learn To Fool The Experts.
Page 10
The identity of the Eternal Gentleman here is a puzzle:
Papers called me that, not I - ...Gwydion in disguise (this is after all a flashback), Zatara (from BEYOND THE GRAVE!), this Ali-Ka-Zoom fellow (seems the most obvious, although he's a bit bigger than he was over in Shining Knight if that was indeed Ali), or one of the seven unknown men. I momentarily thought it might have been the Shade (http://www.answers.com/The%20Shade) from over in Opal City.
The latter is a reference to James Robinson's Starman, in which The Shade (not to be confused with Shade, the Changing Man) also pursued a grudge against the current Spyder's brother, and precursor in that mantle, Lucas.
Note that Zatara himself appeared (more or less) in that run of Starman, saving a man's life from arrow fired by Lucas Ludlow-Dalt. Sargon and Dr. Fate (http://www.answers.com/Doctor%20Fate) also assisted Starman 'from behind the veil', as it were.
In Zatanna #4, we will learn that this unknown man is actually Zor, who deliberately planned his appearance in Cassandra's shop to trick Zatanna into thinking that her father might be coming back, and thus set her up for a cruel disappointment. Zor is a renegade former member of the Seven Unknown Men. He is also known as the Terrible Time Tailor.
Page 11
The story of the Newsboy Army murder case, and Ali-Ka-Zoom's apparent involvement, is fully revealed in Guardian 4. When the Newsboys discover that Captain 7's inappropriate actions contribute to the death of teammate Chop Suzi, they label him a murderer and exact their own punishment, leading to the dissolution of the team.
Zee describes Ali-Ka-Zoom, who appeared in Shining Knight 2, as another (tailcoated) 'top-hatter', hence establishing a possible relation to both the aforementioned 'Eternal Gentleman' and her father Zatara.
Gwydion's face on bottom right panel freaked the hell out of me when I noticed it.
Page 12-13
Note the autograph on the book changed.
Dances With Geckos - The page of text that the shapeless thing comes out of is from the Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees) (http://www.explore-reading.com/literature/C/Cad_Goddeu.html), a sixth-century Welsh poem from the book The Romance of Taliesin. It's about a battle between Arawn King of Annwm and two sons of Don - Gwydion and Amathaon. The piece quoted is the first section of the poem which appears to cover a string of transformations. I'm not familar enough with the poem to know if it's referring to Gwydion, but it looks like that's the way Grant Morrison's interpreted it.
And, of course, what is "a book in the beginning"? A tree.
Gwydion has thus far been a tree, a book and (on p.13) a letter - 'g', naturally.
Page 16
In the third panel, it's unclear whether the vision is Cassandra's, Prowley's or a mystical amalgam - in the above panel, she holds the cat and states that 'neither like the look' of Zatanna's confrontation with Gwydion. Both he and Ali-Ka-Zoom's cabinet glow white, in a white-on-black lithograph interpretation of Cassandra's/Prowley's vision, and Gwydion resembles a 7 atom nucleotide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide).
3rd Axiom: If You Can't Keep It Down, Don't Bring It Up. - At a mundane level, this is applicable to conversation. It can also function as sexual edict; storywise, to Zatanna's spell/desires that brought her Gwydion.
Page 18-19
Gwydion says he was sent by "the new supreme architect of the universe whose name is yet hidden"; it'd seem almost too obvious to go the metafiction route here, so one begins to wonder if this has bearing somehow to Morrison's proposed ambitions to "make the DC Universe sentient", and likely therefore Neh-Buh-Loh.
The "supreme architect" idea ties into the "Foundation Stone" at the heart of Guardian 2. There may be more Masonic imagery in the other titles.
Misty utilises the first rule. Though there's some question as to what her small "no" means, in the middle of her backwards speech. It could be an 'on' command to either her die, or to Gwydion, or Zatanna's new hat... into which she scoops smoke, just as a young hood threw burning paper into Ali-Ka-Zoom's hat in Shining Knight 2.
Most likely, she got the pronunciation wrong and is correcting herself.
Page 20-21
How many elements has Gwydion been thus far? Wood, fire, water, fish/cat (animal?), earth, air and glass(?) - seven, give or take.
Zatanna dispatches Gwydion with Kid William Tell's bolt (as predicted two pages prior by likely-prescient Cassandra,) shattering the mirror, and (via shard) leaves him palpably caught in the framework of Ali's cabinet. Which is made of magical wood, one would imagine.
Page 22
Gwydion, reduced to a homunculoid form (his 'natural state'?) is safely contained in a jar similar to that which earlier contained the Sheeda faerie. He sits in the same way Zatanna did when calling him.
Upon use of the word 'stranger' the Phantom Stranger (http://www.toonopedia.com/phanstrn.htm) arrives with dreary news and sandwiches.
FinderWolf -- ...the famous set-up of whenever the stranger shows up, someone has to say something with the word 'stranger' in it - partly pioneered by Alan Moore himself, I believe. (Or the Phantom Stranger would always introduce himself with some cool usage of the word in a sentence, always in a different context)...
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