Created by Gardner Fox (writer) and Murphy Anderson (artist)
DC Comics, October 1964
American superhero comic books have long had a history of adding sidekicks to headline characters. Presumably the idea was to have an avatar for the young reader, caught up in the adventure with the main adult protagonist. And so, we have Batman and Robin, Captain America and Bucky, Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl, and Green Arrow and Speedy. But falling outside of that mould is Zatara (who first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1939, along with Superman) and his daughter, Zatanna. Unlike the other pairings, Zatara and Zatanna rarely had adventures together. While stage mystic superhero Zatara has drifted into publishing limbo, Zatanna is entirely capable of holding the spotlight by herself.
Zatanna has long been a fan favourite, partly because of the appeal of mesh stockings to a predominately male readership, but also because of the girl-next-door attitude that the character has been invested with over the years. A fun ongoing solo series, Zatanna, in May 2010, written by Paul Dini and with art by Stephane Roux did not last long despite the character’s popularity.
As a character with enough profile to have a following, but not enough to upset DC Comics’ licensing applecart, this has meant that writers and editorial staff have been able to engage in experimentation. Some of that has been quite vanilla – for example, Zatanna upon her death transforming into a cosmic being in 2022’s Dark Crisis: Worlds Without a Justice League – Batman #1 by Meghan Fitzmartin and Dan Jurgens:
In 2023, Zatanna was rendered magically evil (see Knight Terrors: First Blood #1). It was not the first time Zatanna was overtaken by dark magic, but the lapse into malevolence never sticks. There have also been the odd costume changes, with the character’s attire coming a full circle in 2003: see this entertaining graphic below created by @zatannaarchive –
Some of the experiments over the years however have been quite radical.
Deadpool (the motion picture especially) and She-Hulk (both comic book by John Byrne and TV series) might be well-known for breaking the fourth wall, but Zatanna has a different take on it. She has been able to magically perceive the structure of the fourth wall, as a physical thing. This is discussed in an article by David Faust in Sequenart Magazine, entitled “Archetypal Fictional Universes and Hypertexts in Seven Soldiers of Victory” http://sequart.org/magazine/39812/archetypal-fictional
“The first happens in Zatanna #4, when she finds herself in battle against a renegade member of the Terrible Time Tailors, the same one who destroyed the Newsboy Army in the Guardian miniseries. At the climax of her battle, Zatanna sees her reality as existing within a completely separate reality, and reaches out for help, saying “If I could reach out through all this weird machinery, this scaffolding stuff that was holding all our lives together…I knew I could contact them” (v.3 62). The scaffolding and weird machinery that Zatanna sees are the gutters that exist on the page between comic panels. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, says that the gutter of a comic page “is the place where human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66). McCloud goes on to say that “comic panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure (the gutters) allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality (67). Zatanna, then, sees her world as existing within the pages of a comic book. Zatanna’s perception goes even further “[t]here were eyes, tens of thousands of eyes in different times and places all converging on me”(v.3 64). She sees, for a brief moment, that her story is being seen by other beings and not all at the same time, thus showing that her universe exists within a separate space time continuum.“
This is not the first time comic book characters have contemplated the structure of the pamphlets in which their adventures appear (in Planetary, the characters know that their universe exists as stacked layers, referring to the paper of a comic book, and the titular character in Animal Man met the title’s writer Grant Morrison), but it is Zatanna who is depicted as being capable of seeing that she exists in this strange panel structure. Zatanna (and Paul Dini) was ahead of the game in the simulation hypothesis: after all, if we might live in a simulation built of binary code (Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation | Scientific American ) then why cannot Zatanna be alive in the same sense that we are, where she is living in simulation of ink and paper?
Zatanna’s less existential controversy occurred in the pages of Identity Crisis, published in 2004, written by Brad Meltzer. Identity Crisis was applauded at the time for its grit, but as time has passed, fans have become appalled by the themes of rape and murder in a mainstream superhero title. Mr Meltzer uses the series to explain how the personalities of some of DC Comics’ characters changed in the 1980s, notably that of:
a. Batman. Up until the 1980s, Batman was a quiet but calm detective. In 1983, Batman was depicted as uncharacteristically quitting the Justice League of America and forming his own super-hero team (we wonder if editor Len Wein took a cue from prominent musicians quitting bands in the same era – Sting left his very successful band The Police in 1983, and Lionel Ritchie left The Commodores in 1982). Batman’s establishment of the Outsiders was a popular move for DC Comics (see Happy 40th anniversary, Batman and the Outsiders – World Comic Book Review ) but it did not make much sense for the character to leave the team he helped establish, and especially treat his best friend Superman in such a cavalier fashion.
b. Dr Light, a perennial DC Comics villain who had over the years had been transformed by various writers from an ardent villain to a goof.
Identity Crisis pegged Zatanna as responsible for the personality shifts. After Dr Light rapes the Elongated Man’s wife and gloats to the Justice League about his crime, Zatanna wipes Light’s memory of the event. Batman happens to return to their satellite headquarters after Light’s defeat, and realises what has happened. In a panic, Zatanna mind-wipes him, too. DC Comics’ characters has engaged in memory alternation in the past (super-hypnosis for the most part, but also Green Lantern’s mental bloc on Major Disaster) but altering the memories of a major superhero was a big ethical leap for a beloved heroine. But, worse, the interference with the memories of the two characters is attributed as the cause of their personality shifts. Zatanna is also revealed as having wiped the memories of the Secret Society of Super-Villains during a body-switch caper. The moral ambiguity was compelling: should Dr Light have been essentially lobotomised as a consequence of his actions? Zapping Batman, though, was nothing more than a cowardly cover-up.
Zatanna for much of the 2000s then became an iffy plot device. In 2005, Geoff Johns took the precedent created by Mr Metzinger and ran with it in JLA #115 to #119: in addition to saving her colleagues from the mind-controlling monster Despero, she re-wipes the restored minds of the Secret Society of Supervillains (the tale is called “Crisis of Conscience”, perpetuating DC Comics’ decades-long tradition of using the word “Crisis” in significant storylines). Zatanna is also depicted as radically interfering in Catwoman’s personality.
In 2008, writer Will Pfieffer has Catwoman (in the Catwoman Dies storyline) ask Zatanna to wipe her memory of her baby, Helena: Zatanna refuses, although Zatanna does agree to mind-wipe the villains Film Freak and Angle Man who has kidnapped Helena.
But as time progressed, continuity has been unravelled and rebooted thanks to various editorial decisions, and the mind-wiping has been… forgotten.
A screen play for a Zatanna movie was announced in 2021, written by Emerald Fennell who described it as “reasonably demented” but by 2023, with James Gunn taking control of DC Comics’ motion pictures, the project was cancelled: see https://gamerant.com/zatanna-movie-cancelled-emerald-fennell-dc-warner-bros/ )
Happy 60th birthday, Zatanna.
