Today, we look at the time that Vigilante turned out to have supernatural healing powers.
This is “And Of Course,” where I spotlight particularly outlandish/convoluted comic book plot resolutions.
Introduced by Marv Wolfman and George Perez in the pages of New Teen Titans, District Attorney Adrian Chase was someone who decided to work outside the law when his wife and kids were murdered. After making a memorable debut in the New Teen Titans appearances, Chase’s adventures continued into a Marv Wolfman-penned ongoing series. In that first issue (by Wolfman, Keith Pollard and Dick Giordano), there is a recap about Chase’s origins….
Notice the point about Chase being clinically dead in the explosion that killed his family. That turns out to be an important piece of information.
HOW DID WE LEARN THAT VIGILANTE HAD SUPER POWERS?
One of the interesting things about Adrian Chase was how often he was sort of out of his element in the series. A lot of Vigilante was about typical comic book stuff, like a high tech motorcycle, but a lot of it was also about Chase trying to figure out how to do stuff that he really didn’t know HOW to do, like some of his assaults on villains were really sort of making it up as he went along. We saw this at play in Vigilante #5 (by Wolfman, Pollard and Romeo Tanghal), where Vigilante ran up against two villains and ended up stabbed in the chest by one of them!!
The bad guys are taken down, as well, but Vigilante is near death when the cops arrive to find him passed out with the knife still sticking into his chest.
Vigilante had a sort of sidekick named JJ and all JJ could think to do was to steal the ambulance that Vigilante was in and ride off with it to figure out what to do with his dying idol…
The best thing he could think to do was to strip Chase out of his costume and drop him off at a hospital and see if the doctors could save him. Well, shockingly, in the next issue (by Wolfman, Chuck Patton and Pablo Marcos), the doctors are shocked to learn that Chase has somehow fully recovered from the vast injuries from the knife wound, as his tissue has actually begun to heal itself!!
We then see Chase reflect back on when he “died” after the death of his family and we now see, in his dream, that there was more to it than him just coming back from the “dead”…
His dream seemed to see him recall that something special happened when he “died” the first time…
WHAT WAS VIGILANTE’S SUPERNATURALLY INSPIRED ORIGIN?
Later in that same issue, we see more of Chase’s dream, including a mysterious woman who can heal from burns…
and apparently from stabs, too, which she now explains is Chase’s superpower, as well. He can survive from a typical stabbing. He can still be killed, of course, but it will take a lot more than just being stabbed to kill him now…
This leads to the origin of the Vigilante in the next issue, where see that the mystery woman, Lynn, has brought Chase to meet three other mysterious people, Bloody Knife, Chaka and Chastity…
They then offer Chase powers and training to make him a person who can wreak vengeance on evil, but he has to commit to following their teachings….
He accepts their offer and they put him under an amazing series of training exercises that turn this fairly run-of-the-mill distract attorney into a sort of killing machine…
Chase then discovered that these mysterious people are actually spirits….
They are spirits of the dead and their plan was to give Vigilante his powers and the training to go out and wreak vengeance upon the evil-doers of the world.
It is obviously not a bad idea period, as concepts like that or stuff that are a similar sort of deal like it have been part of comic book (and genre) lore for decades, but it is more a matter of it really just not fitting, especially as it came so far into the character’s existence. Think about the idea of an urban vigilante and having it turn out that he has super powers that come from ghosts choosing him to be their spirit of vengeance. It reads a lot like a late in the game revamp of a character, right? Like the time that the Punisher was turned into an angel, but here, it was something that Vigilane’s own creator came up with and it was introduced soon into the Vigilante’s ongoing series.
I wonder if this was actually in Wolfman and Perez’s original conception of the character. On the one hand, it is at least a somewhat novel attempt to explain how a guy like Chase could remain alive for as long as he has, as he has healing powers, and it also explains the idea that a regular district attorney can suddenly become a good enough fighter to become, well, you know, a Vigilante, but it is just so OUT THERE as a concept still.
An odd side effect, of course, is that Vigilante eventually does die at the end of the series, as his healing powers weren’t quite a match for a bullet from his own gun straight to his head. I suppose we could see if this spirits chose another person to become their new Vigilante. I don’t believe that was the setup for Wolfman’s Vigilante sequel series about a decade or so ago, was it? So I think that setup is still open for a future hero if any writer feels like using it.
That’s it for this installment. Please send in ideas for other comics with convoluted or bizarre plot resolutions to brianc@cbr.com!
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