Prometheus And Logan

I mentioned yesterday Roger Ebert's contention that if nothing can kill Wolverine, why should the audience care about him. And I mentioned a reason, or a method to connect the audience to Logan, in the idea that even if he can't be killed he can still be hurt. And in that sense, his healing factor is a curse because it keeps him alive, so that he can be hurt all over again. Plus, he watches friends and loved ones die, and he just keeps chugging along. Even if he wants to stop, he can't physically turn off his healing factor, so unless he decapitates himself, he's out of luck.

While I was thinking along those lines, I suddenly thought of Prometheus. Not the DC villain, the Titan of Greek myth. He stole fire from Zeus, and gave it to man (after Zeus had decided to withhold it from man, because Prometheus tricked him). As punishment for that, Zeus has Prometheus chained to a rock, where birds tear out his liver and eat it during the the day. yet every night, his liver grows back, so it can happen again the next day. I thought that seemed rather similar to Wolverine, a being punished by a cruel and uncaring being of considerable power, in Logan's case it would be fate, or luck, or however you would care to define his genetic mutation. The place it falls apart is when I remembered Prometheus was punished after he gave fire to man. He had helped those weaker, and was punished by those in power for it. Well, Wolverine doesn't exactly have an action similar to that. His healing factor kicked in during adolescence, and he hadn't really done anything significant to aid mankind prior to that, had he? I suppose you could contend his efforts to protect humanity, even when they treat him like dirt, are his good deeds, but again, those come after the healing factor which keeps him going.

So the comparison fell apart. Then I thought of a character that really could be a descendant of Prometheus: John Gaunt, or GrimJack. After this point, there'll be some spoilers for the middle third of his series.

GrimJack #35, Gaunt dies. He's surprised to find he made it into Heaven. Turns out his deceased friends (and he has quite a few) appealed passionately for him, and he made it on the strength of his friendships. Lucky him. In Heaven, there's a pool where one can see what's ahppening back in the world, and Gaunt sees that his old foe, Dancer, had a minion reanimate his corpse, and will use it to kill John's best friend, BlacJacMac (who is being used as a political puppet by Mayfair, who is Dancer chief rival in trying to take over the city). John decides he has to go back*. After all, he made it into Heaven because he stood by his friends, how can he abandon one now? So he returns, saves BlacJacMac, and together, they stop the Dancer and Kalibos** in their dueling shcemes to unleash demons upon Cynosure.

Well that's cool. Gaunt saved his friend, and an entire city. Job well done, and he's got a reward waiting when he passes again, right? Wrong. See, Gaunt was found to good to be sent to Hell, but when he came back to life, he tacitly rejected Heaven to save Cynosure. He learns his fate is now tied to the city's. So from now until whenever the city is destroyed, he will be reborn in the city. He'll be born under a different name, with a different face, but at some point, his memories will return, and he'll be John Gaunt. And this will go on until Cynosure is destroyed. Gaunt learns all this from a version of himself who traveled back in time. A version of himself from who knows how many years down the line*** that is so desperate to escape, he's come back to release a demon trapped in the depths of the city, in the hopes it will destroy Cynosure and free him. This overlooks the fact that doing something like that will probably not go down on the good side of his ledger, and that his ascension into Heaven was narrow enough the first time. At any rate, Gaunt stops his future self, but is left with the knowledge of the fate that awaits him.

That's pretty Promethean. He rejected Paradise to save his friend and the city, in essence doing the very things that earned him entry to Paradise in the first palce, and his reward is to be stuck in that stinking city until the End of Time (more or less). He'll die, and be reborn, and die again, and again, and each time, he won't get back to Heaven, he'll just have to go through life again****.

Some thanks he gets, huh?

* Which he's able to do because a clone of a scientist he aided wanted to save his life, and made a clone body for him, but his soul resisted being drawn in (yeah, they have the technology to transfer souls to new bodies). If the body is still there, he can use it.

** Who is a telepathic, magic using cyborg that tortures and kills people for art, and wears their skins as a disguise. Hell yes.

*** As this version lays it all out, there's a two-page spread that shows, among other things, the faces Gaunt will wear in future lives. The one the series focuses on for the final third or so of the book, Jim Twilley, is near the bottom of the page, second or third in the sequence I think, and the one telling the story is at the top, 10th or so. We know Twilley is born 200 years after Gaunt dies for the second time (the death of the clone body), so the one that's time-traveled is probably at least from a 1000 years into the future.

**** And I would have to think the weight of all those lives, all those memories would start to bog him down after awhile. Which is probably at least part of why Time-Traveling Gaunt went around the bend.