MYTHCOMICS: ["KAGOME'S HEART"] INU-YASHA (1998?)

 I won't devote any time in this essay to detailing the basic setup of Rumiko Takahashi's INU-YASHA serial. I outlined those basics in both of the other essays on this property: THE BLACK PEARL and SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION. Further, the long arc I've chosen to label as "KAGOME'S HEART" commences only a handful of installments after TRANSFORMATION, so the INU-YASHA status quo remains largely the same, at least in terms of who's chasing who and the stakes of the seesaw battles of good and evil. 

In my analysis of TRANSFORMATION, I noted that it was made up of two long arcs-- each labeled according to one of the story-titles (according to the Viz translated editions), "The Third Demon" and "Secret of the Transformation." These two had in common Inu-Yasha's progress toward mastery of the magical sword Tetsusaiga, though they were interrupted by three other story-arcs only tangentially related to that theme. I simply chose to use the title of the concluding arc as an umbrella-title for both.

An additional complication is that the story translated "Kagome's Heart" is one of the installments present in the intervening arc "Kikyo's Crisis," in which, to repeat myself, concerns how "Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha's feelings for his former lover," i.e., the dead priestess Kikyo, restored to a semblance of life by magic. Takahashi does not devote a lot of space to this "Crisis" arc, for she chose to let the emotions invoked in "Heart" simmer for quite some time, coming to a boil a little while after Inu-Yasha passed one trial by fire, only to face another with regard to the human girl he loves. Below are three illustrative pages from the "Heart" story:

The culmination of the "Crisis" arc is that Kagome tries to resign herself to Inu-Yasha's divided heart, obliging him to love both a living woman and a dead one. HEART-the-long-arc then comes back to this psychological conflict and combines it with the five heroes' efforts to destroy their nemesis Naraku and to gather together all of the shards of the Shikon Jewel. The group's sometimes allies-- Sesshomaru, the wolf-demon Koga, and Kikyo-- also have reasons for pursuing Naraku, though predictably enough Kikyo's entrance will unleash emotions that Kagome has tried to tamp down. As the arc begins, however, the five heroes only know that Naraku has somehow secreted himself so that they cannot find him, either to kill him or to take possession of his stolen Shikon shards. Their only clue seems to lead them to the legendary Mount Hakurei, alleged to have been the dwelling-place by a great monk, Hakushin. But Hakurei is so pervaded with spiritual energy that both Inu-Yasha and Shippo are adversely affected when they come close. So how can the evil Naraku be concealed therein?    

In addition, it's quite evident that Naraku has been busy, for seven dead mortal mercenaries have been restored (via Shikon shards) to undead status, implicitly to run interference for Naraku. Though Takahashi devotes a lot of space to Inu-Yasha's group battling the seven revenants-- each of whom has a deadly specialty-- I'll pass over them quickly, since the warriors are just there to keep up the needed level of spectacle for a shonen series. The revenant who has the most personality is the perverted Jyakotsu, who forms a homoerotic desire for Inu-Yasha, a desire that will only be satisfied when he cuts off the dog-demon's head. However, arguably the dog-demon really gets curbed by Kagome.

For some readers, it might be easy to mistake this scene for just another of Takahashi's many "irate-female-clobbers-insensitive-male" schticks. But there's a deeper dynamic here. In the short tale "Heart," Kagome confesses that she'll try to put aside her negative feelings toward her competition just to remain in Inu-Yasha's presence. But the rash hero wants to be held blameless for any pain he causes her, and that's what unleashes Kagome's ire. She's a woman in love who wants her loved one to be true only to her, and when he reacts to her sublimated resentments as if she had found fault with him, she uses her "sit command" power to punish him.     

 

 Takahashi eventually parallels Kagome's attempts at self-sacrifice with those of the Buddhist monk Hakushin. Once Kikyo manages to access Mount Hakurei, she meets Hakushin, who sought to become a "living Buddha" in order to help others after death. However, self-doubt infected the monk's resolve, and later Naraku suborned him, persuading him to let Naraku stay within the holy mountain. But Kikyo is able to assuage the monk's weakness, so that he's able to find peace.   

However, though the spiritual shield around Hakurai dissolved, Naraku accomplishes his purpose there: splitting off a part of himself, a sort of demon-baby. The baby, unnamed at this point, then seeks to take control of Kagome in order to utilize her ability to sense Shikon shards. The evil infant at first can't find darkness within the young girl's heart, until Kagome's negative feelings toward Kikyo come forth. However, even though Kagome feels resentment that Inu-Yasha left her side to search for a missing Kikyo, she successfully resists the demon-baby's spell with her love for Inu-Yasha, moments before he arrives on the scene. 

The spawn of Naraku escapes the hero's retribution, and once he's alone with Kagome, Inu-Yasha swears to never again leave Kagome for Kikyo. However, she realistically judges him to be incapable of deserting his former love-- who of course has further appearances to make in the ongoing series-- but the heroine manages to negate her natural irritation with her complete conviction in her own love. 

The INU-YASHA series takes place in a fantasy-version of Sengoku Japan, where Shinto gods and demons (or fictional versions thereof) intermingle with Buddhist monks seeking to transcend the physical world. I suspect that Takahashi's primary interest was the conflicts of the human heart. This is why, though she's respectful to Buddhist precepts, the artist is more concerned with Hakushin's failure than with his ascension to nirvana. But this is the core of her art, for in the words of G.K. Chesterton, Takahashi is, first and foremost, a poet who's in love with the finite, rather than a philosopher, whose abiding love is the infinite.   

    

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.         

RAIDERS OF THE LOST POST

 I was all set up to do a philosophical exploration of current developments in brain science, because I'd found some particular post asserting the unique nature of human beings with respect to a positive "need for communication." The article I remembered emphasized that animals did not seem nearly as desperate to communicate precisely because they lacked the human level of abstract thought. But instead of earmarking the article on my own blog, I made passing reference to it on a forum--

-- during the very week when that forum crashed and lost all of the data for that period.

I just blew a couple of hours trying to track down the article based on partial recollections. I found lots of essays asserting the uniqueness of human biological attainments, but nothing that quite placed the same emphasis on the necessity of communication in the terms I remembered. Here's the closest thing I found to the statement I recalled:

Overall, something about the degree and complexity of thought may be what sets humans apart. For example, for all their training, nonhuman apes cannot construct recursive, semantic sentences in which information is embedded within another representational phrase.54 This added complexity, combined with the sheer number of symbols (words) humans can learn, makes for infinite possibilities. Furthermore, while symbolic communication is found throughout the animal kingdom, no other animal, including other apes, has shown the same endless curiosity and propensity to ask questions that comes naturally to a human child.55 Thus, what seems to set human cognition apart is the degree of thought, curiosity, and communication, and the combination of all these skills at once. Yet how such differences may have arisen evolutionarily, and the biological mechanism for this increased complexity, remains to be determined.

Unraveling mechanisms of human brain evolution: Cell

I will probably still write something more on the communication quandary in future. For now, this serves as a bookmark not for the original essay remembered, but for a resource that at least came close to the desired item.    

NEAR-MYTHS: WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE (2016-2021)

 

I have a dim recollection that when Grant Morrison first began publicizing his WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE project-- and I was not able to locate the item I'm remembering, so this is at best a paraphrase-- that he considered it something of a challenge to devise a Wonder Woman concept modeled on the original Marston/Peter series of the Golden Age. Morrison stated that he intended at the very least to address the bondage element in some way, which element has been largely elided from many if not all post-Crisis WW renditions. Whatever I read sent up a bit of a red flag in my mind. I've liked a lot of Morrison's work, particularly many of his takes on DC characters like Superman (in ALL-STAR SUPERMAN) and Batman (various arcs from roughly 2008 to 2013). However, I wondered if he was simply undertaking the WW project because she was part of the "DC Trinity," not because he had a sincere interest in Marston's concepts.

Well, the three graphic albums of WW EARTH ONE-- part of a DC imprint that sounds like little more a refurbished ELSEWORLDS-- are at least more focused than Morrison's scattershot ACTION COMICS run. Still, I never felt like Morrison was allowing his EARTH ONE take on WW to soar into the heights of erratic creativity for which the writer is best known.

Several departures from the Marston canon are entirely justified. The Marston series was launched a few months prior to the Dec 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, but there was no way that a contemporary WW series, even a limited one, would begin in a WWII setting. However, one of the base concepts of the Marston series was that the heroine undertook her mission to man's world not just to fight Nazis, but to reform warlike males and bring them under the loving authority of the Amazon goddesses Athena and Aphrodite. I don't imagine that Marston, as much as he may have believed in his gynocentric philosophy, had any notion of showing the rise of a dominion of pagan goddesses in 20th-century America. However, Morrison-- who honors Marston as a representative of "alternative lifestyles-- decides that his Amazing Amazon will not just attempt such a conversion but accomplish it within a span from the 21st century to a time three thousand years in the future.     

To emphasize this manifest Amazon destiny, Morrison dials back the eternally-frustrated hieros gamos Marston arranged for his heroine and her beloved American Steve Trevor. In order to tweak expectations, Morrison makes his Trevor a Black man. However, Morrison isn't interested enough in his Trevor to make him into even a two-dimensional character. Morrison gives the readers mixed signals regarding the Diana-Steve relationship. It's as if he and artist Yanick Paquette were leery of imparting too much importance to the Amazon Princess's first potential heterosexual encounter. It's clear all the Amazons of Paradise Island have had frequent lesbian relationships, including both Diana and her mother Hippolyta-- even though no erotic encounters as such are shown-- so it's arguable that he might as well have dispensed with Trevor altogether.

Surprisingly, Morrison gets far more mileage with his version of perpetual comedy-relief Etta Candy, here renamed "Beth" and given the persona of a randy, plus-sized cheerleader for Wonder Woman's feminist agenda. Even the famed "woo woo" schtick works, possibly thanks to Morrison emulating various plus-sized celebrities. As a counter to all of the countless stories in which Diana's mother, Amazon queen Hippolyta, was simply a timely aid to her heroic daughter, Morrison forges a more acrimonious relationship between the two. But given that Hippolyta is destined to be disposed of in the second book, the effort feels somewhat doomed. Morrison also dispenses with WW's "clay statue" origins, but to no great effect  

But just as Marston couldn't really elaborate villains who had a well-conceived reason to oppose the Amazon's "loving authority," Morrison also struggles to embody believable masculine villains. Though a prelude establishes that in ancient times Hippolyta did encounter the genuine son-of-Zeus Hercules, the status of the Greek gods in the EARTH ONE domain is dubious. Does Ares, usually the opponent of loving Aphrodite in the comics, really exist, or is he just metaphorically true in the head of main villain Maxwell Lord? Possibly Morrison wanted any converts to Diana's philosophy to embrace her POV without any assurance of deific confirmation.

 Morrison's version of Doctor Psycho is not any better. In Marston, Psycho is an ugly dwarf who seeks to control women with his mental weapons, rather than with male muscle. Morrison's Psycho is a handsome charmer who comes close to seducing Wonder Woman with skillful mind games, but he like Trevor lacks depth. 

Similarly, Morrison devotes no background to his only female villain, the only holdover from WWII-- the Nazi Paula Von Gunther. Hippolyta allows Paula to join the Amazons after mental conditioning, much as Marston did, but this time, mercy for Paula has dire consequences. All of the villains, like most of the support-cast, are a little too transparent in their status as plot-functions.

Paquette's art is nice-looking but far too poised to possess any dynamism, even in the fight-scenes. Rough and blocky though H.G. Peter's art was, there were times it got across the cruel basics of the sadist/masochist tangos between various characters. In the hands of Morrison and Paquette, all that transgressive stuff just seems a little on the vanilla side.st

I'm not sorry I read WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE, but it's clearly not really Grant Morrison's jam. I'd be totally okay with Morrison steering clear of Matters Amazonian for the future.        

MYTHCOMICS: "MOON MADNESS" (THE UNSEEN #7, 1952)

 "Searchers after myth haunt strange far places. They climb to the zenith of the sky in the sun-god's chariot; they descend to the depths of the sea to marvel at pearls the size of houses. They visit islands swarming with prehistoric beasts, or with beasts that walk like men. The shadows of the minarets of Araby conceal for them a thousand treasures. Yet for the true epicure of the mythopoeic, there is no better breeding-ground for the combinatory power of archetypal phantasms than the pages of the humble comic book."-- Happily Phony Lovecraft.

      Just like last year I'm only managing to get one horror-story myth-analyzed this month of Halloween. But IMO this one's a doozy. This forgotten gem from Nedor Publishing has no credited writer, so as I've done in the past, I will impute for simplicity's sake full authorship to the credited artist, Jack Katz, later famous for a multi-issue fantasy I've not yet read, name of THE FIRST KINGDOM. After reading this short horror tale, maybe I'll give his fantasy-domain a closer look.

Katz starts off MADNESS with a bang and barely slows up thereafter. Protagonist Emil Jankow, identified in the opening caption as belonging to the class of "vagrants and hobos," is attacked by a mad dog belonging to a "witch-like creature named Agnes." As Emil faints from his wounds, Agnes uses a pistol to kill the dog, sparing Emil's life. The reader alone hears Agnes ruminate that she won't tell the hobo that her dog was rabid, though in due time it will become apparent that the pooch didn't have garden-variety rabies. Aside from naming her watchdog after the Prince of Darkness and having some allegedly "magic" salves on hand, Agnes doesn't seem especially witchy until she warns the recovered Emil to "stay out of the light of the new moon." That Katz departs from the usual werewolf trope re: the full moon shows that the artist was playing fast and loose with lycanthropic mythology.

The next departure is that Emil's wounds from the dog don't heal in the approved Larry Talbot fashion but instead give him a sort of "Phantom of the Opera" disfigurement. This development makes panhandling a little easier, and so does the very non-rabies effect of his injuries: that all dogs become Emil's friends. This also sets him on a fatal course when he runs across wealthy girl June and her dog Duke, and he instantly charms the bite out of the former member of the K-9 corps. (June doesn't quite say that Duke suffered PTSD because his experiences in the war, but it's a fair extrapolation.) June perhaps tosses out too much information when she goes on about how a local named Kirk Lamarr has been June's personal dog-hating Mrs. Gulch. But it's info the reader needs to know, just like learning that, within a week, Emil falls in love with June and resents her boyfriend Jim.

   Now the experienced horror-reader will expect poor Emil-- who at this point has done nothing bad, only had bad thoughts-- will have an unhappy encounter of the lunar kind. And the transformation of the lycanthropic (caninthropic?) victim is marked by an accidental killing before beginning his own killing spree. But the victim's victim is not of another shape-changer as in THE WOLF MAN, but by a member of the canine species that seemed to recognize Emil as a "big dog" of the pack. Emil accidentally shoots Duke dead, and he decides to conceal the dog's death to avoid blowback. (Katz was careful to show that Duke was not June's only dog, so the K-9's passing doesn't mean Emil would have been terminated.) However, Emil then transforms into a were-creature and immediately pounces on the first "smooth white throat" he comes across. But is he transformed by the moon, or by committing a sin against dog-kind?

Even though Emil wasn't bitten by a wolf (except in the general sense of dogs having evolved from wolves), he thinks of himself as a lycanthrope once he's returned to his human (albeit disfigured) form. Emil learns that that local pain Kirk Lamarr believes that Duke killed Emil's victim, and Emil's attempt to cover up his killing of the dog implicates the dead canine in Emil's crimes of the next few days. (It's interesting that June refers to Duke as a "watchdog," the same term Agnes used for her rabid pooch Satan.) The aggrieved dog-trainer seeks to quell his animal rage by chaining himself in his quarters and tossing away the key. I guess he didn't toss it far enough, because June finds it and unlocks his chains, which practically begs Emil to unleash his demon and attack both June and Jim.

  Improbably, Jim is able to drive off Emil with a mere club. Maybe it works because Emil didn't really want to kill either Jim or June? The couple can't convince dog-hater Lamarr that they witnessed a werewolf, though strangely, within the course of one day, some unnamed professor is able to talk the rest of the town into crediting the reality of werewolves. Said prof even convinces the polity that they don't need silver bullets, just ordinary torches, to kill a werewolf. Did Katz have a thing for all the cinematic scenes where Frankenstein's Monster got repelled by torches? Emil's near the end of his run now, because he didn't transform back this time. He decides to seek another victim in the unguarded town.

And who's one of the few people who didn't join the posse, because he didn't believe in werewolves? Why, it's skeptical smarty-pants Lamarr, though strangely he's not home when Emil invades his house, forcing the were-dog to cool his heels a bit. I assume Katz did this so that Lamarr would arrive at his house just as the posse just happened to return to town. It's surprising that Katz spared the dog-hater's life-- certainly no one who read the story then or now would cared if Lamarr had died. Indeed, killing the enemy of the woman Emil still loved would have given the doomed man one last, slightly altruistic deed before dying. But Jim bursts in and destroys the monster with nothing but a thrown torch. In death Emil not only does not look burned by the torch, his "rabies" disfigurement goes away too. I note in closing that Katz does keep drawing the moon in the sky, though technically a new moon should only last about three days, and it sounds like Emil was "wolfing out" longer than that. But I don't think Katz really cared about the moon-schtick popularized by Universal movies. I think he had a genuinely original take on lycanthropy, portraying it as a curse activated less because of the lunar satellite than because of the cursed man's sublimated failings and/or hostilities. And while MADNESS is not a masterpiece like THE WOLF MAN, Katz's tale seems to be playing with some of the same mythic concepts.           

INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY

 Response designed for a forum-post, context implicit.

____________

Because you and another poster raised the spectre of influence between the daughter of Sax Rohmer"s Fu Manchu (1912) and the daughter of Ming in FLASH GORDON of Alex Raymond (and all uncredited collaborators), here are my hot takes.

First off, there's no doubt in my mind that Ming derives from Fu Manchu, even though their specific characters are not very similar. The fact that both have disobedient daughters is one big factor, though surprisingly the big thing everyone knows about Princess Aura-- that she falls big-time for studly Flash Gordon-- is not initially a feature of Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee.   

Now, the element of a female ally of Fu Manchu falling for one of the heroes is a big part of the first two books, published respectively in 1912 and 1916. Fu's beautiful slave-girl Karameneh inexplicably becomes enamored of Doctor Petrie, and thus helps Petrie and his cop-friend Smith out of some jams. In the second book Karameneh even shoots her master to save Petrie, and the only thing that saves her from the devil-doctor's vengeance is that Fu uses his former servant as a bargaining chip to compel Petrie's aid in the third book.

This book, HAND OF FU MANCHU (1917) also introduces Fu's daughter, though she's not given a proper name and is never disobedient to her father's will. Then there's a lacunae of about fourteen years, during which there are no official Fu Manchu novels (though the doctor kind of "guest-stars" in THE GOLDEN SCORPION). DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU debuts in 1931, and here Fah Suee does get a name, and she does seek to wrest control of the Si-Fan from her father. However, she doesn't ally herself to any Englishman. In this and in the subsequent book, she implicitly uses drugs to make a young guy her lover, though there's no sense that she's in love with him.         

The sixth book, BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, again portrays conflict between father and daughter, though not over any romantic alliance of hers. Then finally, in April 1934, Rohmer starts serializing, in Collier's, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, Fah stuns her dad by claiming that she's fallen in love with Fu's worst enemy, Smith. In two or three later books, this romance is mentioned, and at least once Fah helps the heroes out of a fix, but the plot is left hanging by the end of the series.

However, FLASH GORDON debuts in January 1934 and its first arc, in which Aura meets and desires Flash Gordon (even as Ming desires Dale Arden) finishes up in April-- which as noted is pretty much when TRAIL got started.

Of course, Raymond et al could have taken the element of the romantically traitorous daughter from a lot of places other than Rohmer. But Rohmer did use that element, albeit with a slave-girl rather than a literal relation, for whatever that might be worth.  

    

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

 Here I'll discuss an "alignment-inversion" like the one primarily addressed in Part 3, where the main topic was the alteration that took place when Lois Lane, a Sub to Superman's Prime in the SUPERMAN titles, assumed the Prime posture in the LOIS LANE feature. I said that despite being in the position of a Prime for some years, Lois Lane's status is dominantly that of a Sub-- just like another subordinate-ensemble member who never had Prime status (Perry White) -- because she owes her existence to Superman.  

A similar situation pertains with the cast of the long-lived ARCHIE franchise. Because the titular character makes his first appearance alongside the equally durable characters of Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones, I gave some consideration as to whether Archie was the series' only Prime, or if he, Betty, Jughead, and the slightly later additions of Veronica and Reggie were all Primes within a superordinate ensemble. But it seems to me that the main focus is upon the simple ordinariness of Archie Andrews, "America's Typical Teenager," and that thus the other four are meant to play off him in one way or another. That makes the other four Archie's primary subordinary ensemble, who are the ones who appear most of the time in any ARCHIE story, while a secondary Sub ensemble is formed by other teens (Dilton Doily, Moose and his girl) and various teachers and parents, whose usage is more occasional. 

Thus when in the late forties-early fifties MLJ bestowed ongoing titles for all four Subs, their situation was the same as that of Lois Lane, for no matter how long their individual titles persisted, they were always determined as Charisma Dominant Subs. For the record, the title devoted only to Jughead (ARCHIE'S PAL JUGHEAD), and the one to both Betty and Veronica (BETTY AND VERONICA), lasted into the 1980s. The first title devoted to the acerbic Reggie only lasted five years, 1949-1954, but the concept was revived under a new name (REGGIE AND ME) in 1966 and then lasted until 1980.    

  

However, the setup changes somewhat for a group of phase-shifted variations on the originary characters. The first full wave of Silver Age superheroes had swelled forth at least by 1958, meaning that in 1966 the wave had persisted in the comics for roughly seven years before people began hearing about ABC'S new BATMAN series. Said news began the second wave, in, which many comics companies joined the spandex parade, and MLJ decided to produce spoofy superheroic versions of four of the firm's five best-known characters. Archie was the first, transforming into the noble Pureheart (who sometimes lost his powers if a girl kissed him, implicitly threatening his super-purity). Jughead became Captain Hero and Betty became Superteen, and all three had separate as well as crossover adventures, though it would take a fan more dogged than I to sort out the "continuity" of these haphazard stories.  Still, not even the naivest fan of the time would have believed that all three super-teens were continuous with their absolutely ordinary identities as middle-class/upper-class adolescents. So the whole "super-Archieverse" can't be judged on the same terms as the originary proposition. In essence, all of these superheroes have phase-shifted away from their models. In these stories, it's possible for Betty and Jughead to be Primes in their superhero personas, as much as Archie.   

But there was also-- EVILHEART, the costumed persona of nasty Reggie Mantle. He didn't tend to have separate adventures as did Super-Betty and Super-Jughead. Usually if not always, Pureheart was in those adventures too, because the whole point of Reggie Mantle was that he existed to rag on Archie Andrews, so that's what Evilheart did to Pureheart. So it might sound like Evilheart might be dominantly a Sub antagonist, and his independent adventures would be in the mold of, say, The Joker having his own feature in which he fought with villains and heroes, triumphing over the former and losing to the latter. Evilheart for his part enjoys his first supervillain team-up with none other than Mad Doctor Doom, who was first introduced in the pages of LITTLE ARCHIE in 1962.      

And yet, the Mad Doctor Doom episode loosely anticipates the pattern of all the later Evilheart stories, where he more often ends up making common cause with Pureheart against some third menace, even if Super-Reggie is primarily motivated by the desire to one-up Super-Archie. So for that reason I do regard Evilheart as being just as much a Prime as the other three, because all four super-spoofs exist in their own cosmos and are, to use my new term again, "discontinuous variations."