Gloomy Monday: The Death Of The Swordsman

My Father would always say that it's an idiot who tries to learn about life from comic books. Or perhaps he meant a child. Or perhaps somebody with the emotional maturity of a child.(Who could well be an idiot too.) Well, here I am. I was that idiot, immature child, and I may still be him too. Oh, dear.

The first character I recognised something of myself in was, predictably, Peter Parker, The Amazing Spider-Man, who was always going to coin the outsider vote, given that in the very first panel of his very first appearance, he was being mocked by school hipsters for being a "bookworm". This wasn't a label he was ever able to quite throw off. In fact, he's called a "bookworm" again in just 7 panels time, and far worse was to come. Peter Parker, outsider bookworm: our Peter.

But Peter Parker as a role model was impossible to keep up with. Pretty soon, he was surpassing himself, and exceeding any of my own possible achievements. Within a few years, he had the two most attractive college-age women in comic-books actively pursuing his charms. I couldn't even imagine dating Gwen Stacey or Mary Jane Parker, or their real-world equivalents, so I knew Peter was leaving me behind. I was glad for him, but I realised that I should've known Peter and I weren't going to be together for long, that my trailing about trying to follow in his spider-steps was doomed to failure. After all, before Gwen and Mary-Jane, there'd been Betty, his employer's secretary, and even Liz, the girlfriend of Peter's chief high-school tormentor. Why, Peter Parker wasn't a loser, an outsider, a geek, a nerd, or even an average achiever. This man was an absolute stud.


So thank you, Steve Engelhart, the writer of "The Avengers" in the early-to-mid 1970s, for Jacques Duquesne, the original Swordsman. Ah, poor Mr Duquesne, a man who played many parts in his time, all of them pretty poorly. A superhero of very little power or achievement. A super-villian with nothing but a big energy-projecting sword and low ambitions which constantly over-reached his competence. A thief, a drunk, a liar, a Judas. A self-pitying under-achiever with a tendency to sob abit in public about lost lovers. A character so low on the "I Wan'na Be Like You" scale that everyday professional shoplifters shouldering major heroin habits on Marvel Earth might have at various times held him in contempt. Oh, he was perfect for me.

But when The Swordsman was first inaugurated into the ranks of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes", I couldn't have cared less. He was so beneath my lofty 11-year-old's notice that I wasn't even irritated by his presence. He couldn't even take up enough space to irritate me! But since he'd brought with him the martial arts heroine Mantis, as his lover and partner, I gleamed that there was one good thing about him. He'd brought a new and interesting woman into super-hero and super-heroine land.


Gradually, Engelhart made something unexpectedly special out of our might-be-reformed, no-character, no-interest ex-super-villian. Jacques was revealed to be incredibly insecure, though he blustered his way through concealing it. Deeply pessimistic, it seems he expected every ray blast to finish him off, though he never cowered away from a fight. So utterly ashamed of his own past that he thought just about everything he'd ever done "completely wasted", he considered himself "a posturing fool. As a villian, I was always someone's flunky. As an Avenger, I've been wounded -- captured --!" (He could've added tortured to that list too. And, just as you and I would've done, he broke under his ordeal, something that superheroes never did.) Mocked as "The spare-tire Avenger" by his ex-pupil Hawkeye, mocked by Kang The Conqueror as "a weakling and a blunderer" who wasn't even worthy of being done away with, mocked by his lover as "quarrelsome -- weak": Jacques Duquesne quite won my heart. He wasn't pleasant, powerful, or even well-balanced. But, as is the way of these superhero things, he was a scrapper. He was a less-endearing, and for me a far-more powerfully-involving, Rocky Balboa, or at least, he had something of the guts of the real-world inspiration for Rocky, Chuck Wepner; because the Swordsman was never going to win his equivalent of the World Heavyweight Championship Of The World. It was the very best that he could hope for not to collapse before the 15 th round.


I'm not sure if the Swordsman ever won the respect of most of his fellow Avengers when he was alive. I don't think most of them even particularly liked him. (Thor seemed to, praising him by declaring "His expertise with a blade doth rival any e'er seen in Asgaard", and it was Thor who seemed the most outraged by the "atrocity" of the Swordsman's torture.) The Valkrie, from the Defenders, another team of superheroes, called Jacques " an enigmatic man ... and ... a presumptuous one .. but a gallant foe ..", but then she like Thor came from a warrior culture, and skill with a sword would count more with them that it would with us, or indeed the other Avengers. (Still. if the Swordsman had been conscious when the Valkrie had given that compliment, I think he would've been more than pleased to be called "gallant". He always wanted to be both gentleman and rogue.) But that was pretty much that as far as compliments and warm feelings went. He never belonged, he was never liked. He was that bloke with a sword who tried hard and tended to fall over alot.


And then he died. Was killed. A heroic death, of sorts, of course, because that's how superhero comics tend to work, but as far as heroic deaths go, it was a rather desperate and random affair. He threw himself in front of Mantis as she was being threatened with death, and his sword conducted "living lightning" that killed him. It was all very quick, and there was something of the accidental to it, as least as it was drawn: the blast that hit his sword may have been deflected so that it would have missed both he and Mantis if the Swordsman hadn't been holding the point of his blade up in the air. Ah, well, Intentions count, as does achievement, and though he'd been rather publicly embarressing and embarrassingly woeful when abandoned by his lover, his love seemed far more than pathetic now.

But what caught my mind so fiercely, so intensely, that I still think of it regularly after almost 37 years - 37 years! - were two untypical things. The first was that Jacques' last words weren't contended, or glad, or victorious. Even though Mantis was now distraught at his imminent loss, and therefore in a sense so obviously still in love with him, he was in death as he was in life; pessimistic, depressive, crippled by low self-esteem and ashamed of his days:

"We are .. only what we are, darling ... I tried ... to be worthy of you .. of the Avengers .. but .. like Kang .. I was doomed ... from the beginning ... I'm a failure .. I'm just .. one of those people ... who doesn't count .. "


I bet he even felt wretched about upsetting Mantis so by dying.

I don't think that there's ever been anything like those for last words in any superhero comic before or since, with one noble exception which I'll come back to another time. This was a bloke who had indeed fought his way to the 15th round and who just couldn't get up for the very life of him. I was amazed. Like so many of us, I knew what it was to not feel good enough. But I didn't know that anybody else felt that way so deeply, so fundamentally, even if they were "just" a Marvel Comics superhero.

The second thing that caught my mind and froze the memory of it was the simplicity and brevity of his comrade's farewells to him. There was none of the excessive sentimentality so common to the rituals of a superhero's passing. No-one spelt out what a great bloke he'd really been, or how they'd always remember as a hero. Iron Man simply refuted The Swordman's belief that he didn't count, and the Vision delivered the simple hope that the Swordsman can rest in peace. (I suspect that the Vision would also miss the Swordsman. There was something so human and fallable about Jacques and his death that I believe it would have captured the android's Pinocchion heart.) The later funeral of the Swordsman is a similarly simple, undemonstrative affair. We're shown it in one panel, and one panel only, and we're told nothing of what was thought or said by the five people attending beyond the fact that " .. he now lies in state, surrounded by those who never believed they would miss him, as they do, more than any has words to say." And then, in the space of one more panel and 48 hours of comic-book time, the Avengers are home and sitting around the table, happily chatting away, talking with guests, petting cats, sharing gossip: the Swordsman is gone.


So what did I learn from the Swordsman, and why has his death stuck with me for so many years? Firstly, I think, I learnt it was alright to feel unhappy and dispirited at times. (It was a lesson I'd have to learn over and over again, but it was a good start to that particular curriculum.) After all, the Swordsman had been in despair for much of his life, and yet he came through in the end. And, hey, I learnt that I wasn't so odd, so different to everybody else, that there hadn't been a superhero who shared some of my personality characteristics. It was alright to fail, to not be so popular, to fall over again and again, because evn if a body never made it through to the end of the fight, each round that passed was an achievement. (This too is a lesson still being mastered.) The Avengers, most of them, probably never gave Jacques' death too many second thoughts. They didn't then and I doubt they do now, in their secret comic-book consciousnesses. They're not unkind in that. It's just the way things are. I bet the Avengers never sat around the kitchen in their mansion and their skyscraper and wished that Jacques was there to banter away the small hours with. And they certainly wouldn't have gone into battle yearning for their power to be augmented by that bloke with a purple costume and a pencil moustache and his sword that crackled and spat energy. They certainly did not. Not everybody gets to be a massively important figure in many other people's lives. That's OK. But, for all of that, he did his best and he did alright, and I think that was a grand thing to learn about as a kid, and as a middle aged man too. So, "Sleep well, Avenger. Rest ... in peace."

My hero.



The Swordsman's only substantial stint as an Avenger can be found in "The Avengers" volume 1, numbers 114 to 130, and Giant-Sized Avengers 1 & 2. These are collected in the cheap and cheerful black and white collections entitled "Essential Avengers" volumes 5 & 6. It won't surprise you to know that I recommend them.

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