Anarky

Anarky is the title of a series of comic books published by the US publisher DC Comics since 1996.

The Anarky comics, which are about the adventures of a teenage anarchist, are a mix of adventure and science fiction comics. Motifs from superhero comics as well as philosophical and esoteric echoes are also typical of the stories depicted in Anarky .

Release dates

The main character of the Anarky comics is a young anarchist named Lonnie Machin, who tries in his second identity as "Anarky" to help his anarchist ideas to break through. Machin / Anarky was first introduced in the comic book Detective Comics # 608 from May 1990, in which he appears as an opponent of the superhero Batman , the main character of the Detective Comics . Since the character of the underage anarchist received a positive response from the readers of Detective Comics , he was incorporated into other Batman stories in the following years.

Since these stories also met with a positive response, the publisher DC-Comics , the publisher of Detective Comics , commissioned the creators of Anarky, the Scottish writer Alan Grant and the American illustrator Norm Breyfogle , to produce a four-part mini-series about the character in 1996 . In the miniseries Anarky , published that same year, the character was elevated from a Batman supporting character to the main character in its own format. Since the four-part series, which lasted until 1997, achieved satisfactory sales figures, DC-Verlag finally gave the green light in 1998 for the publication of an ongoing Anarky series, the first edition of which came on the market in late 1998. The series came to a total of nine issues before it was discontinued in autumn 1999 due to dwindling sales. Issue # 10 was published on the Internet.

Title character

The focus of the Anarky comics is the young anarchist Lonny Machin, known as Anarky, who uses unusual methods to try to realize his ideal of an anarchist society free from domination. Machin always uses the term anarchy stressed in the original sense of the word, i.e. H. With a view to the hope of the end of the rule of “people over people” and not in the sense of the colloquial meaning of the word anarchy, d. H. Disorderly chaos in which the will of the stronger reigns. As an anarky, he wears a long, flowing red coat, red jumpsuit with an "A" emblem on the chest, a wide-brimmed red hat and a gold face mask.

Originally, Alan Grant, the creator of Anarky, introduced the character into the Batman series in order to gradually make him Batman's assistant. After Batman's teenage assistant Robin, the boy who was hiding behind the mask of Robin, Jason Todd was killed in the story "A Death in the Family" from Batman # 428 from 1988, Grant asked Batman to provide a new teenage helper to have to, who would eventually take on the name and costume of the dead Robin. The boy's radical views were intended to lend a new piquancy to the traditional Batman / Robin relationship, as Batman should no longer - as ever - have an obedient follower to the sidekick , but would be confronted with a partner who often decidedly different opinions than he would represent himself.

Grant's plans came to nothing, however, because the publisher - without having informed Grant in good time - had already commissioned Marv Wolman with the creation of a new character, who would eventually become the new Robin, at the time of Lonnie Machin's debut in Detective Comics # 608 . After Anarky's development into the new Robin was blocked, Grant continued to use his character as an opponent of Batman.

action

Anarky describes the methods with which Machin tries to bring about his ideal of a social order without coercion and domination.

Character history

Lonnie Machin was a gifted boy who grew up with his parents Michael and Roxanne Machin in the American east coast metropolis Gotham City. Already at the age of fourteen he became aware of the numerous grievances in his hometown: corruption, the extreme unequal distribution of prosperity and poverty, the highest murder rate in the country, gang crime, drug trafficking and much more. In order to remedy the social misery, he decided to create a second identity and by drastic means to teach a lesson to all those who acted against "the will of the people" and thus made Gotham such a Moloch.

He drew his suggestions from the letters to the editor of the daily newspapers: for example, he murdered the operator of a factory that discharged sewage into the Gothamer River after an old lady had been angry about it in a letter to the Gotham Gazette - the city's largest daily newspaper. Machin - intellectually gifted and well-educated - used his ingenious intellect to put together sophisticated plans for carrying out his deeds and to tinker himself with technical aids that should make his actions easier, such as a taser (electric shock stick) disguised as a walking stick or stun grenades. To hide his identity, he wrapped himself in a ghost-like scarlet costume with a rigid golden face mask. In his opinion, the main culprit for the grievances attacked by him was the system of rule-based social constitution, the logical symptoms of which are these grievances. Therefore he declared a private war on the state as such. In order to give graphic expression to his final goal of bringing the system of "rule of people over people" to collapse, he chose the anarchist sign (an A enclosed in a circle, the letters of which break through the edge of the circle) as his sign.

Anarky committed various spectacular acts: He murdered, among others, the businessman Warren Bates, who discharged sewage into the Gotham River, and the drug-dealing rock musician Johnny Vomit. This finally called Batman on the scene. He finally succeeded Anarky - who had initially been mistaken for an adult by law enforcement - in his attempt to storm the Bank of Gotham with an army of homeless people and thus distribute the city's fortune among the poor and disenfranchised Surrender to police. This admitted the boy to a reform home, from which, however, thanks to his superior intellect and resourcefulness, he could break out at will and accordingly easily go in and out.

From the school he worked under his hacker pseudonym " Money-Spider ", using computer manipulation to transfer large sums of money from the accounts of rich people to the accounts of charitable organizations and poor farmers in the third world in order to enable them to have a better life . After this activity was nullified by Batman's assistant Robin, Anarky founded the company ANARCO , an internet mail order company for anarchist literature, which on the one hand popularized his philosophical views and on the other hand provided him with the financial means for his private war against the state. To shake off his pursuers, he also faked his death and moved into a secret hiding place under the Washington Monument.

Over time, Anarky came up against various other characters from the DC universe, including the Justice League superheroes , the eco-terrorist Ra's al Ghul , the adventurer Green Arrow , the false prophet Malochia, and the insane scientist Professor Jonathan Crane , the youthful crime fighters of the Young Justice team , the Amazon warrior Wonder Woman , the obscurant Jason Blood and his demon Etrigan, the monster Blasphemy, the alien despot Darkseid and the magician Eclipso.

Anarky is an accomplished engineer and technician. So he was u. a. able to develop a computer with its own personality and also to build its own teleporter. For a while, he also owned a Green Lantern Ring and offered a so-called boom tube, a transport tube that enables one to go anywhere using spatio-temporal curvature lines.

Alternative versions

Batman Annual # 15 from 1991 and Shadow of the Bat Annual # 2 from 1994 presented alternative versions of Anarky, which are located in dystopian future versions of the Batman material: in the first version, an adult Anarky helps a Batman who has been wrongly accused of murder to prove his innocence , while the second variant depicts Anarky as a resistance fighter against an authoritarian police state founded by Batman.