http://blogs.commercialappeal.com/the_shelf_life/2010/01/human-target-101-christopher-chance-in-the-comics.html
Human Target 101: Christopher Chance in the comics
By Andrew A. Smith
Scripps Howard News Service
Fox is promoting its new show Human Target (debuting Jan. 17) pretty heavily.
And why not? It's another property based on a comic book, and those seem to be
doing well these days.
And, although Human Target in comics is a minor strip canceled numerous times,
it has somehow managed to keep coming back. Some elements of all those versions
are found on the TV show, so they're worth exploring.
The Human Target debuted in the back of Action Comics #419, way back in 1972.
Written by Len Wein (Swamp Thing) and illustrated by Carmine Infantino and Dick
Giordano, Target starred Christopher Chance, a square-jawed hero and bon
vivant. Chance would use his amazing disguise abilities to impersonate someone
whose life was in danger, and then use his astounding command of martial arts,
firearms, explosives and so forth to confound and capture the would-be killer.
In between gigs, he would hang out at Bruno's, a high-end restaurant owned by a
chef and aide-de-camp of the same name, drinking expensive wine, eating gourmet
meals and picking up extremely attractive women.
As a male fantasy, that can't be beat. And the disguise angle was a new wrinkle
on the old private-eye genre.
But the concept never really took off. Chance had eight stories in the back of
Action before moving to Detective Comics, where he appeared five more times
(still written by Wein, but illustrated by Howard Chaykin). Chance played an
important role in a 1982 Batman story, and had a cameo in the 1986 Crisis on
Infinite Earths, but his headline strip ended in 1980, and Chance seemed
destined for funnybook limbo.
But then Chance was rescued ... by Rick Springfield. For some reason, ABC
thought the series worth resuscitating in 1992, with the singer in the title
role. The adaptation was pretty straightforward, except that it dropped Bruno
in favor of "Philo Marsden," the now-cliché eccentric computer-genius sidekick.
The series only lasted seven episodes - but in all fairness, it was competing
with the Olympics.
For the sake of completeness, I'll also mention that DC published a one-shot
that dovetailed with the series. Human Target: The Mack Attack Contract (1991)
was by Mark Verheiden and Rick Burchett.
This is all pretty standard for comic-book detectives. Most have their brief
moment in the sun before fading into limbo or becoming supporting characters
for guys in Spandex.
But seven years after the ABC experiment, DC did something very, very odd to
Christopher Chance. They moved the concept to their mature-readers line
Vertigo, and handed it to Peter Milligan, a British writer known for surreal
and/or kinky stories (Shade the Changing Man, Enigma, The Extremist). Milligan
wrote a complex four-issue miniseries in which it is revealed that Chance's
psyche has become unstable and fragmented. He not only assumes new identities,
but he becomes that person, forgetting who he really is. And since he doesn't
know, the reader is often left guessing as well.
That apparently did well enough for an original HT graphic novel. Human Target:
Final Cut (2002) where once again, the nature of identity was explored. (The
mini and the GN are available in the trade paperback Human Target: Chance
Meetings.)
Milligan was again rewarded, this time with a Human Target ongoing series. Not
only did the readers have to play Whack-A-Mole with Chance, but Milligan
introduced another character with a similar problem: Tom McFadden, a former
Human Target protégé who had completely lost his original personality. With
that, the reader never knew if the character narrating the story was Chance,
McFadden, the original - or some combination, as everyone impersonated everyone
else, and often they didn't know who they were themselves.
That series lasted only 21 issues (2003-05). But that was longer than Chance's
original run as a stock heroic type, and seems to have re-defined the
character. Even the new TV series says of Chance (Mark Valley): "Does anyone
know who Christopher Chance really is? What secrets lay buried in his past?"
Otherwise the show seems like a typical action-adventure series, with Chance
playing human shield more than target, Guerrero (Jackie Earle Haley) replacing
Philo as the eccentric computer genius and Winston (Chi McBride) replacing
Bruno as Chance's business manager.
And that's probably good enough. Chance's disguise twist is at least as
interesting as Monk (the "defective detective") and that show had a good run.
And if they add the identity problems, it could break new ground. On TV, at
least. Chance is already pretty odd in the comics!
Contact Andrew A. Smith of the Memphis Commercial Appeal at capncom...@aol.com
or on his Web site, captaincomics.ning.com.
