We Apologise for A More Stressful Than Intended Marooning Experience

Currently in DC Comics’ Salvation Run event, which is part of its bigger Countdown to Final Crisis event, a secret government agency is rounding up supervillains without trial and relocating them on what the agency mistakenly believes is a safe and pleasant planet. (The agency has been duped by two figures we’ve only seen in shadow, though they look like Darkseid and Desaad to me.) In fact the planet is a hellish place where the supervillains have to fight a constant battle for survival. I’m betting that at some point they come back to Earth a trifle peeved.

It’s rather odd timing for DC to be running this story, since it looks like a blatant rip-off of Marvel’s recent Planet Hulk story (with a dash of Civil War for the secret-supervillain-prison element). In Planet Hulk, a secret group of superheroes decides the Hulk is too dangerous to be allowed to roam the Earth freely, so they kidnap him and send him to what they mistakenly believe will be a safe and pleasant planet. Through some sort of glitch, the Hulk instead arrives on a hellish world where he has to fight a constant battle for survival. Plus he gets married, only to lose his wife to an explosion for which the superheroes who exiled him are made to appear responsible. Needless to say, the Hulk eventually makes it back to Earth a trifle peeved. (Of course the Hulk’s angry return, chronicled in World War Hulk, came just shortly after DC’s Black Adam’s angry rampage, likewise over a slain wife, in World War III; both were announced well ahead of time so I’m not sure who’s copying whom on that one.)

But both these stories are arguably drawing on an earlier Star Trek storyline, one that began in the original series episode “Space Seed” and was later continued in the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Captain Kirk exiles genetically enhanced supervillain Khan Noonian Singh and his followers (veterans of the Eugenics Wars, which were initially supposed to be conventional wars in the late 20th century, then were retconned into being conventional wars in the 22nd century, only to be re-retconned into being covert struggles in the late 20th century ….) to what he mistakenly believes to be a safe and pleasant planet. Shortly after Kirk departs, an unforeseen astronomical catastrophe transforms the planet into a hellish place where Khan and his people have to fight a constant battle for survival. Khan even loses his wife, and when he finally gets off the planet he’s a trifle wrathful.

But maybe Jules Verne got there first. At the end of The Children of Captain Grant (better known to American audiences as In Search of the Castways), the novel’s chief villain, Thomas Ayrton, is exiled on a desert island. We meet him again later in The Mysterious Island (which serves as a sequel both to Children and to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), where we find that those who marooned him have underestimated, not the physical harshness of the island, but its psychological harshness; Ayrton has gone cuckoo from isolation. Once rescued and reassimilated into society, however, Ayrton turns out to be reformed rather than revengeful – so the parallel’s not especially close.