Here's the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John's description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: Metamorpho

(or "Nobody Gets What They Want Except The Audience")

I've talked from time to time in this column about something I call the "false status quo". The rough idea of a false status quo is that it's a set-up for a series in which the central concept involves something that the protagonist is trying to resolve, something that would result in a dramatic change to the series' set-up if they ever did manage to fix whatever was wrong. (The classic example is 'The Fugitive', a series that revolved entirely around the hero's hunt for the one-armed man who killed his wife. Every week, he almost finds him, and every week, he fails, because the second he finds him, the series ends.)

In general, I've talked about false stati quo as something to avoid. This is simply because putting a false status quo into your story makes an implicit promise to your audience that it will be resolved, and that's not always something that you can follow through on. (All too many series have floundered after finally resolving their false status quo, and a few--'X-Files', I'm looking at you--faltered when the audience got sick of never getting their resolution.)

But comedy has a slightly different set of rules, and 'Metamorpho' provides a great example of that. All the great comedies revolve around a false status quo, because the secret ingredient of all the greatest comedies is frustration. Not failure, because that's depressing, but that tiny gap of frustration between failure and success. Basil Fawlty never manages to make his hotel into a vista of taste and sophistication, Fozzie Bear can never quite polish his stand-up routines, Dobie Gillis never gets the girl, and David and Maddie never sleep together (remember what I said about series floundering after resolving their false status quo?)

And Metamorpho is truly one of the great comedy storytelling engines, a screwball superhero epic full of comedy frustration. Rex Mason, aka Metamorpho wants to be human again so he can get the girl, Sapphire Stagg, but Sapphire's old man, Simon Stagg, keeps putting him off with one promise or another. Simon, meanwhile, wants Metamorpho out of the way--dead, or at least the heck away from his daughter--but the crazy supervillains he keeps bumping into require an on-staff superhero to fight, and Metamorpho works cheap. Sapphire just loves Metamorpho, and doesn't care what he looks like, but she can't get him to accept that. And Java, Simon Stagg's manservant and an actual reanimated anthropoid, thinks that if Metamorpho dies, Sapphire will have no choice but to fall madly in love with him. Needless to say, he's doomed to frustration on both counts.

It's been said that the classic comedy formula is two people who don't like each other stuck in a room together. Here, we have two people who don't like each other caught in a partnership.

Rex and Simon hate each other's guts, but they both need each other just enough to force them into adventure after adventure (and the adventures are classic Silver Age craziness from Bob Haney, a trippy mix of pop-culture and pop-culture parody that effortlessly encourages you to laugh both with it and at it.) Even the addition of a frankly unnecessary "Element Girl", a female Metamorpho, just enhances the atmosphere as she adds a bizarre fifth side to a Freudian love quadrangle.

Ultimately, the series ended (as series are wont to do, even classic ones.) Metamorpho has continued on as a second banana to various teams in the DC Universe, but he's never managed to once again reach those same heights of popularity--and I think part of that has to do with the fact that Simon and Sapphire Stagg haven't returned when he has. Bringing back Metamorpho without his supporting cast misses many of the wonderful elements that his storytelling engine provides...and those are elements that the Element Man desperately needs.