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maxwell-grant · 12 days ago

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I managed to finally read The Chimera Brigade and it's given far, FAR more to talk about than I ever expected, and much like last time with Mina Murray and my LOEG breakdown, I'm devoting a separate post to a specific character that gives me far too much to talk about to include in the main write-up. The character in question is a French pulp hero I've covered some years ago by the name of Leo Saint-Clair a.k.a The Nyctalope - here presented as the "protector of Paris", entrusted by Marie Curie herself to watch over the city, and just about detested by everyone who has to interact with him on a daily basis, with the feeling very much reciprocated. He is a profoundly funny character, one of the smartest and most purposeful usages of a classic pulp character I've ever read, and one of greatest, most incisive takes on a pulp hero I've ever seen.

The official English translation of the comic calls him "The Eye", because despite being from 1911 and not having seen any kind of continuous publication since his author was disgraced for becoming a Nazi collaborator, apparently there are Nyctalope rights holders from Jean de La Hire's family who forced them to change the names for this comic and to alter it for all releases of the prequel series Lehman and Gess did, which is a hilariously obscene and yet fitting note to start this on - the very idea of Nyctalope rights holders invested in the sanctity of their hero, which is very funny considering that, within the story of The Chimera Brigade, the Nyctalope is driven in no small part by the fact that his legacy was entirely penned by hack pulp writers, and he desperately wants to correct that so he can take his place next to the greats that he claims he used to be on equal level with. It's an extension of the all-consuming insecurity that completely defines him and makes him such a pathetic, funny, and ultimately compelling character to watch, regardless of how much context you have for who The Nyctalope is.

Saint-Clair, as his alias indicated, has the ability to see in the dark after an injury. He has an artificial heart. He leads a crimefighting organization, the CID.

His decline is all the more pitiful: after traveling through time, rediscovering Atlantis and exploring an errant planet called Rhea, Saint-Clair becomes a collaborator in a 1944 tale called Night of the Nyctalope.

Even as an outcast, he remains a major figure in the French imagination, the missing link between the "gentlemen crimefighters" of the end of the 19th century and the modern adventurers of whom Bob Morane is emblematic.

He is painfully aware that, next to the likes of Lupin and Fantomas and Holmes, he is an insignificant nobody, that history will simply not remember The Nyctalope the same way it did them, and he has no idea why. We can certainly understand easy enough why he is generally despised by the other characters: he's a weasel, he's a cop, he's vindictive and petty, he's a reactionary, he's uncomfortable to be around, he's rude and snooty and demanding, he's self-obsessed, he's a piece of shit, he's unlikable, and we eventually learn he failed his most important promise on the most profound level possible and has only aggravated the problem ever since. And he is aware of all of that, and none of that, in his view, should have any kind of bearing on his record. Up until the finale of this, he had brushed off his failure to protect Spain from fascism, the dying promise that Curie entrusted to him above all else, as a quirk or flaw on the record, comparable to Holmes' cocaine addiction. None of these flaws explain to him why is it that he is not on the level of Lupin and Fantomas, despite having known them and been, theoretically, on their level. He has no context for his own existence.

He doesn't know how profoundly the world is gonna forget him. He doesn't know he's the last of a kind already on their way to extinction. He doesn't know what Jean de La Hire is gonna do in 1940. He doesn't know that whatever legacy he could have as a proto-superhero is gonna be tainted to shit because his author was a hack who sold out to the Nazis and fled town for it. He just knows that there is a Canon, and he is not a part of it, and this fact is killing him and blinding him to everything that doesn't revolve around his attempts to secure a legacy for himself.

The streets of Paris are adorned with big signs of him as it's protector, he is invited to political conferences as an international player of note, and Marie Curie, whose discovery of radium and whose scientific institute defines the backstory of the entire setting, entrusted him to protect the city, a huge unthinkable honor that her own children are baffled by, and none of this truly matters to The Nyctalope, because it's not enough. He holds a position of authority and power, but he is far less concerned with the impending war and bloodshed than he is at what's going to happen to his own legacy. Best exemplified by a particularly funny sequence in Issue 4, where he attends a Soviet conference and and learns firsthand about the alliance/treason kicking off the war that's gonna ruin all their diplomatic efforts so far, and his immediate concern is "what about the Eisenstein biopic I was promised??".

A single hour of darkness, and the vampires will tear the city apart.

What is Saint-Clair waiting for?

The first deaths. The public will crucify us, all he'll have to do is name the place. Well played.

It's in large part this obsession with legacy and imagery that makes him such an unpleasant person. The Curies even state in Issue 3 that the Nyctalope is willing to let the Chimera Brigade fail publicly and let casualties occur if it means he can take greater credit for fixing a problem they failed to contain, and eventually you can even see why he is so obsessed with the public perception: all of his victories and achievements have been hidden. Defeating and killing the secret ruler of the world, protecting the city from the shadows or up top in his airships, keeping dangerous beings hidden in his cave, none of that gets the public applause the Chimera Brigade got for stopping that alien frog.

If he'd kept up his promise to Curie and saved Spain, no one would have seen it happen. He says as much in the last issue that even now, to him, Mabuse is nothing, no more of a threat than Cagliostro, and certainly not as big of a priority as those dirty communists at the Curie Institute he will publicly deal with first. If you stop the threats before anyone sees you do it, they might as well not have existed, and he can't afford that anymore. He needs to have something to show for it all, he needs to have a victory that matters, he needs to belong in The Canon, and he has no way of understanding why he doesn't already.

I've said before, on my old post about the Nyctalope, that he is inherently emblematic of failure in a way that I find very interesting in so far as what it can say about the genre he's part of. How, disturbing origin and weird sci-fi adventures and design aside, he really was essentially a fairly clean-cut superheroic do-gooder. A Superman, a Captain America, indistinguishable from any other idealized patriotic do-gooder, and how none of that changed when his author sold out to the Vichy government. How just that single turn exposes how contextual and finnicky the entire premise of a pulp hero/superhero is, and how what happened to the Nyctalope could have befallen any number of other characters within the medium.

The Chimera Brigade's take on Nyctalope isn't even really about that historical fact surrounding him, although it is very much cognizant of this fact - it is more so about the failure state he represents and lives in. He stands for France, and thus stands for the failure of France in the pre-war era, the failure to do anything against it's fascist neighbors, the failure to assist in containing the threat of Nazism until it was far too late, the obsession with legacy and preservation of image coming at the cost of human lives. The failures of the Nyctalope are the failures of France, and he is a perfect character to stand in for failure. He is the perfect character to do this kind of thing with.

Significant and recognizable enough that he matters, not too significant or recognizable enough to not be irrelevant. A guy who was a perfectly ordinary pulp hero, if not for these strange proto-superhero quirks and that inescapable shame of his creator. He is part of the Canon, but he doesn't define the Canon, and the Canon will not wait for him to join it. He is just one of many pulp heroes, significant as a missing link between the ones that actually matter, and nothing more. Self-proclaiming as the last of the greats, instead of just being one of the greats or the next step of the greats - of course he wants to be the last of the great Gentlemen Vigilantes so that no others can come after him and overshadow him - ultimately a historical curiosity rather than a true step in the genre.

There is indeed real pity, even sympathy, for this contemptible schlub. There is an acknowledgment that his past deeds indeed mattered, and that it's his failure to move past them and grapple with his true present obligations that damns him more so than anything else. A lesser story absolutely would have cared about giving this guy some due, some respect or acknowledgment, but The Chimera Brigade is unflinching and the Nyctalope is not spared. He is laid out in clear terms as a colossal fuck-up loser too obsessed with his own myth to be of any help, and why would he be depicted otherwise? What does it actually mean to be The Nyctalope? What does he want to be remembered for? What does he HAVE to be remembered for?

For his great past deeds that nobody really saw? For his great magnetic personality? For the promise that he never kept, for the city that he doesn't protect, for the country he's failed, for the allies he's pushed away and the enemies he enables? For all these great adventures and accomplishments boiled down to nothing anyone really cares about, penned in cheap disposable pulp magazines? He desperately wants you to overlook everything else that surrounds him and listen to his assertions that he is one of The Guys, because his legend doesn't speak for itself, so he has to babble for it instead. And that's the note he ends on - finally realizing that there truly is nothing left for him, and that he failed on the most profound level possible. That even his tragic realization of failure is accompanied by a hilariously pathetic reveal - that all this time, in his most private quarters, he has all of his supposed "peers" framed in posters looming above him, and he was waiting to put himself next to them.

Holmes, Lupin, Fantomas, they were seismic shifts, they were major notable steps in their genre, they changed the world as a result of them, they were The Guys - and The Nyctalope wasn't. He was noteworthy, respectable, but just that, and he couldn't deal with that - that his legend will fade instead of endure. Ultimately, all he wanted was a spot on the wall next to them, and he's at last acknowledging that not only he will never have it, but that he never deserved it.

Whether you knew all this context about him or not going into this story, all along, deep down he knew the same thing that you did.