W I N T E R 2011
and characters as a result, but what he wrote during his short life was highly memorable. Solomon Kane, to my knowledge, is the only great Christian su‐ perhero ever to exist in the popular market. I call him a superhero, though he theoretically has no super powers, because his strength borders on the superhuman as does his courage, raw toughness, de‐ termination, and skill with weapons. He is a tall man, dressed in simple Puritan black, wears two heavy pistols (single shot), a rapier, and a dirk. Kane also carries a musket, with which he is deadly. The dour Puritan is almost never without his slouch hat, which rests above his stern face characterized by a pallor almost like a corpse. His people face religious persecution in England. Persecution plays a part in Kane’s choice to live the life of a “landless wanderer” drawn into many mysterious adventures as though pulled on a line by supernatural force. As with most great popular entertainments, there is a formula. Kane typically happens upon some awful injustice and pledges him‐ self to visit vengeance (he feels he is the instrument of God’s justice) upon the perpetrators. At one point, he reassures a frightened wom‐ an that “in times past hath God made me a great vessel of wrath and a sword of deliverance. And, I trust, shall do so again.” Finding a girl dying in the woods and hearing her story, he comforts her until she passes and simply promises, “Men shall die for this.” Part of what makes him so appealing is his single‐minded devotion to justice: A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, avenge all crimes against right and justice. Way‐ ward and restless as the wind, he was consistent in only one respect – he was true to his ideals of justice and right. Such was Solomon Kane. Wandering through the jungles of Africa, he encounters slave trad‐ ers callously marching natives to ships on the shore. Observing their mistreatment, he is almost turned inside out with rage: The fury Solomon Kane felt would have been enough at any time and in any place to shake a man to his foundation; now it assumed monstrous pro‐ portions, so that Kane shivered as if with a chill, iron claws scratched at his brain and he saw the slaves and the slavers through a crimson mist. Kane is a complex character. Though he is relentless in his pursuit of evil, he is confounded by the means he is provided to conquer it. In several adventures, he makes good use of a “ju‐ju stave” given 111