DOES PHILOSOPHY HAVE A SHELF-LIFE?

I've started two books and am tempted to alternate chapters in each to see if they comment on one another.

Edward Skidelsky begins his 2008 book ERNST CASSIRER: THE LAST PHILOSOPHER OF CULTURE by stating how his opinion of the German philosopher altered over time. In his first draft of his book Skidelsky advocated Cassirer's goal of finding the unity of all human endeavors into terms of their value as "symbolic constructions."  However, in the finished version of the book, Skidelsky confesses that he changed his mind: that he somewhat devalued Cassirer because the philosopher "did not see what Heidegger and many others saw so clearly: that the secular idols of humanity and progress were dead."

While I can admire Skidelsky for having subjected his early enthusiasm to further analysis, I have to ask: are such ideals as "humanity" and "progress" capable of being entirely superseded?

As a countervailing opinion, here is Roy Bhaskar in his REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE:

...in one science after another recent developments, or in some cases the lack of them, have forced old philosophical problems to the fore. Thus the dispute between Parmenides and Heraclitus as to whether being or becoming is ultimate lies not far from the center of methodological controversy in physics... Sociologists are making increasing use of the allegedly discredited Aristotelian typology of causes.  And the problem of the universals has re-emerged in an almost Platonic form in structural linguistics, anthropology and developmental biology.

My readings into both books thus far indicates that both authors are experts in their respective fields, with, I confess, far greater knowledge than I regarding the history of philosophical developments.  But Skidelsky's contention that a given concept can be disproven and shown to be outdated strikes me as one that runs counter to my convictions regarding intersubjectivity.  I cannot personally verify any of Bhaskar's statements about the revivification of archaic philosophical concepts within the context of modern science. But it seems logical in that human intelligence cannot be quantified as a set of either/or propositions; rather it is a continuum, one fueled by the endlessly variety of human enthusiasms.  To the extent that Aristotle is a human being, and so is a given sociologist, it is always possible that a concept of Aristotle will find resonance within another human being's conceptual apparatus.

This is obviously relevant to me in that my critical project takes considerable fire from intellectuals who are no longer in fashion: Frye with his myth-criticism, and the Cambridge myth-and-ritual school that influenced Frye.  Obviously I do not think that they are "outdated," as I imagine most comics-critics would contend, to the extent that they would think about the matter.  But the more salient point is that no structured concepts-- even those I don't like, such as the Marxist myth of equality-- ever truly die.

Until the day that everyone thinks and perhaps looks alike, all of us will forever whore after gods our fellows consider "strange."

ALAN MOORE, ELITIST NEOPURITAN PT. 2

In my essay STALKING THE SYMBOLIC SNIPE, I offered a view as to how a given reader of a given corpus of works-- specifically, Alan Moore with respect to Ian Fleming's James Bond books-- could form an "untrue response" based on "true causes."  I observed that some elements in those books-- such as the "masculinist" attitude of Fleming-- could have caused Moore to jump the gun in terms of judging the character of James Bond to be filled with "utter hatred and contempt for women."  I also noted that Moore's opinions of Fleming's misogyny could have been triggered not by the books themselves but by Moore's own experiences with "real world misogyny," which he then proceeded to project onto the books.

In the same fashion, it should be obvious from PART 1 that I rate his opinon on superheroes as yet another "untrue response:"

I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently.

Here as well one can discern a "true cause" behind Moore's untrue response.  Moore has often praised the comic books of the so-called "Silver Age," in addition to pastiching them in features like SUPREME and TOM STRONG.  In a 2009 interview, cited here, he went so far in his liking of this period as to divorce it from the "age" that followed: the 1970s, which he was good enough to re-christen "the mud age."  Moore doesn't critique the comics of this period in any detail, except to say that he found them "dull." But perhaps the "true cause" behind this dismissive opinion was that comic books of the 1970s were moving away from the "nine-to-13-year-old audience."

I've stated many times that I think mass-market juvenile-oriented comics lines have gone the way of the dodo. Yet I can appreciate the desire to see more young people enjoy comics in the semi-innocent, imagination-expanding manner characteristic of Comics' Silver Age.  This attitude, I must admit, is more characteristic of the Populist Neopuritans, whom I described here as distinct from their Elitist brethren in that the Populists were still invested in the superhero genre but wanted it to return to the standards of "all ages" entertainment.  That said, I tend to think that Moore, who has foresworn all interest in the superheroes of this age, is not all that concerned with whether or not modern kids are exposed to what he once called "the funny uncle Batman."  Rather.he uses the inappropriate adult-ification of superhero comics as a rhetorical bludgeon against corporate comics-companies, though as I noted in Part 1 he has continued to write adult-ified characters whom some would view as "superheroes by any other name."

But there's a darker side to Moore's panegyric to the Silver Age.


At the end of Part I I noted that Moore's targets of "emotionally stunted readers and corrupt comics companies" were nothing special next to his comments upon the success of superhero films with a general audience.  Those remarks were as follows:

I think it's a rather alarming sign if we've got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.

One hardly knows where to begin.  The easiest place, I suppose, is to wonder why in the world he would speak of "12-year-old boys of the 1950s," when most of the successful superhero films of the past ten years were based on characters created either for the 1940s (Superman and Batman) or for the 1960s (Spider-Man, X-Men).  I suppose this lapse could be explained if Moore himself started reading American comics in the period of the 1950s.

The most egregious aspect of Moore's rant, though, is that he tries to extend his condemnation of non-juvenile comics-superheroes to non-juvenile film-superheroes.  While he spends a little time on tarring all adult superhero fans with the same brush-- that they are unilaterally trying to "validate their continued love of GREEN LANTERN or SPIDER-MAN"-- he expends no energy trying to fathom why mass filmgoing audiences, few of whom experiencd any hardcore fascination with comics-characters, should spend their hard-earned dollars on bigscreen versions of kiddie characters.

The obvious solution-- one that I'm sure will never occur to Moore-- is that superheroes are not fundamentally juvenile in nature.  He might, for all I know, choose to agree with those critics who believe that the public's current infatuation is merely a fad, perhaps a reaction to the advancements in CGI technology. But I don't think that the enthusiasm is so transitory.  I think that since the advent of "spectacle films" in the Silent Era, audiences have always embraced larger-than-life heroes and adventures.  Some of these would fit my defintion of the "superhero idiom," while others hew closer to heroic idioms of the isophenomenal mold.  Either way, the film-audience's love of the wildly escapist is nothing new, and Moore offers no reason as to why a GREEN LANTERN film deserves any more censure than a film-- or a comic book-- adapting Jules Verne's  20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

The aspect of Moore's remarks that I find particularly "dark" is the way he has so cavalierly forgotten how marginalized the comic-book medium was because of its association with juvenile entertainment.  For many years comics-fans hungered for films that would translate the icons of their beloved medium into forms that the mass American audience might appreciate.  This transformation of the cinematic landscape finally took place, instituted-- in my opinion-- by Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN.  That's not to say that acceptance of superheroes in film has brought about universal validation of superheroes generally or even the comic-book medium.  But it has given both more of a cultural cachet than they ever had in the Silver Age, a cachet on which Alan Moore has drawn more than a few times in his career.  If superheroes had remained confined to juveniles as Moore apparently wishes they would have, I find it unlikely that an author as talented as Alan Moore ever would have crafted any works in the superhero idiom.  He might well have become successful for some other works, of course.  But we comics readers would have been denied a substantial number of good "adult superhero" stories.  Which, I guess, would have been okay with Alan Moore.

ALAN MOORE, ELITIST NEOPURITAN

On 11-20-13, Alan Moore gave an interview to THE GUARDIAN in order to advertise his upcoming work FASHION BEAST.  I for one would have preferred that the interviewer leave out all references to Moore's opinions on superheroes, since they're generally ill-informed.  But of course the question was asked and Moore responded in his usual fashion:

When I mention that Geoff Johns has done a whole series of Green Lantern based on his story "Tygers", he gets tetchy. "Now, see," he says, "I haven't read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it's nothing to do with them. It's an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don't think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it's a rather alarming sign if we've got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s."

I'm not sure that I recall Moore having gone on record as to saying superhero comics were intrinsically juvenile, but it's hardly surprising.  I must assume that he's using the term "superhero" in a restrictive manner, as in "only the characters with costumes and/or powers."  Only with such a definition would he be able to make that statement while continuing further problems with various "science heroes" in his LEAGUE-related books, whose principal phenomenal difference from superheroes is that they do not wear costumes.

In any case, this position allies Moore with a subspecies of "Neopuritan" that I described in this essay:

On one hand, we have Elitist Neopuritans like Gary Groth and Dirk Deppey. Their base conviction is that superhero comics should not include adult levels of sensational material because superhero comics are for kids. Extreme usages of sex and violence should be for the sort of reading material aimed at actual adults, though to be sure the usage of such sensationalisms in "trash fiction" aimed at adults, such as Mickey Spillane, will usually reap the same contempt shown to the "kiddie" superhero stories.

Moore's animus for "adult pulp" superheroes clearly follows the same line of thought.  Superheroes can only be for kids, because form follows function: all that they can do is"expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience."  Older superhero fans are therefore abnormal in their attachments to the genre. Naturally Moore does not dwell on the extent to which older superhero fans purchased his works within the "formal" superhero genre: not just WATCHMEN, but also VIGILANTE, WILDCATS, SUPREME, and (arguably) TOM STRONG. 

What most astonishes me about this fulmination, though, is his issue with the success of superhero films with a general audience, which would seem to have little if anything to do with his usual targets: emotionally stunted readers and corrupt comics companies.  I'll expand on this topic in Part Two.

TWELVE PILLARS OF WISDOM

At the risk of getting this blog associated with an economics book sporting this title, I deciced to compile a list of the authors whose nonfiction works have had the greatest impact upon my critical theory.  I wanted to keep it down to the more traditional "ten" but I felt I'd be leaving out too many important figures.

Coincidentally I also recently finished reading Gary Lachman's book JUNG THE MYSTIC.  It's a well-researched corrective to overblown ultraliberal attacks on Jung, like Richard Noll's THE JUNG CULT, but it has only one point of relevance here.  In his book Lachman critiques, fairly enough, Jung's ponderous writing-style, and the fact that it's easy to lose track of Jung's thesis because he brings in dozens of quotes and references to earlier authors. 

However, I disagree with Lachman that Jung did this because he wanted to project what Lachman calls the "Herr Doktor Professor" attitude: to drown the prospective reader in so much erudition that he would be overwhelmed enough to agree with the implied thesis.  I won't say that this isn't an aspect of Jung's character, but when I delve into a heavy-going tome like Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, I sense a definite pleasure in the psychologist that I find in myself: the pleasure in making connections between authors who had no real-life connections but who participate in the symbolic space created for them in the author's mind.  In my opinion no one's going to go as far as Jung did with such activity purely for a rhetorical advantage.  In my own case only such a pleasure explains why I would devote considerable time to exploring similarities between figures as diverse as Schopenhauer and Gaster.

That said, here then are the "twelve titans" who have proved to be the shaping influences on my theoretical endeavors on this blog and elsewhere:

BATAILLE, GEORGE-- This French philosopher has been particularly valuable in terms of elucidating the common ground between those phenomena we commonly call "sex" and "violence."  In addition, he offers a brilliant critique of Marxist beliefs about consumption that deserves to be far better known than it is.

CAMPBELL, JOSEPH-- commonly regarded as a"popularizer of myth," Campbell may well be flawed in the scholastic sense but his theories on the notion of "supernormal sign stimuli" and his formulation of the "four functions" have set a heuristic challenge few academics have met.

CASSIRER, ERNST-- At the beginning of his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT this German-Jewish scholar credited the philosopher Schelling with having made the idea of myth intellectually respectable after centuries of disinterest from the intellectual elite.  However, Cassirer has become the most prominent of the "critical idealists" to deal with the topic, and his concept of "symbolic forms" deserves to be better appreciated.

FRYE, NORTHROP-- I hardly need point out that Frye has been the greatest influence on my idea of a synoptic theory uniting canonical and popular forms of literature.  His concept of "mythoi" has had the greatest impact on my theory but I flatter myself that I've found some interesting new applications for his theory of the dichotomy of narrative and significant values.

GASTER, THEODOR-- Gaster was a demi-acknowledged influence upon Frye. His most important contribution to my work has been his view of ritual dramas as signifiers of either "kenosis" or "plerosis," emptying or filling.

JUNG, CARL-- Jung's concept of the archetypes remains his best known contribution to culture, though he's been influential in many other respects, particularly in his commitment to the notion of "sovereignty," which I recast somewhat as "centricity."

KANT, IMMANUEL-- I've written more about Kant's concept of "the sublime" than on any other topic, but despite my disagreements with, say, his desire for "objective taste," Kant was the first philosopher of importance to show a "middle way" between the extremes of Empiricism and Rationalism.

LANGER, SUSANNE-- Langer, a fellow traveler of the aforementioned Cassirer, formulated a concept of  an opposition between "discursive" and "presentation" symbolisms, which has been useful though perhaps not central in my theory.  Far more central are her reminders that fictional narrative is always "gestural" in nature, to say nothing of her concept of "diffuse meaning."

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH-- His greatest impact in literary circles-- extending even to modern-day advocates like Camille Paglia-- would seem to be that of his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy.  This hasn't had a marked effect on my theory; in general Nietzsche has affected me more in terms of his gnomic pronoucements on the nature of art and human psychology.  In the same way this very non-systematic philosopher had a considerable impact on Bataille.

OTTO, RUDOLF-- Of all the influences cited here, I probably agree the least with the rhetorical position advocated by Otto, as noted here.  That said, his concept of the "fear/dread/awe" trinity, somewhat indebted to Kant but filtered through a Rationalist lens, has been more than a little helpful in my attempt to define the sympathetic and antipathetic affects common to myth and literature.

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR-- Though Nietzsche is a lot more fun to read, Schopenhauer's dogged theorizing has its charms as well.  Through him I came to the concept that all literary narratives must necessarily be seen as embodiments of will in conflict, and his comparisons of the attitudes of "seriousness"and "the ludicrous" have proved stimulating as well.

TOLKIEN, J.R.R.-- Of all the twelve Tolkien is the only author better known for his fiction than his nonfiction.  However, the Oxford don's concept of the "secondary world," while admittedly designed with only "fairy stories" in mind, should have immense importance for anyone's theory of "fantasy in fiction."

Naturally, there are others who have had strong if more peripheral effects: Paglia, Fukuyama, Wheelwright-- and even some influence from those with whom I have sought to refute, such as Freud Marx and Todorov.  The fact that even one female philosopher made it into the top twelve hopefully says something favorable, though I don't know what.  In terms of cultural influence, the Germans win hands down (Kant, Schopenhauer, Otto, Nietzsche, and Cassirer), with American philosophers in a strong second place (Langer, Campbell and Gaster, though Gaster was born in Britain).  With just one apiece are the Swiss (Jung), the Canadians (Frye), the British (Tolkien), and the French (Bataille).

COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS

"[The Flash's] villains were rogue personifications of scientific forces: thermodynamic (Heat Wave, Captain Cold), optical (Mirror Master), meteorological (Weather Wizard), sonic (the Pied Piper), gyroscopic (the Top), chemical (Mr. Element)... Chemical reactions wrre acted out as drama, while physics lessons could become dreams of velocity and romance."-- Grant Morrison, SUPERGODS, p. 83. 

This is one of the better insights to appear in Morrison's sprawling, somewhat repetitive defense of the superhero genre.  While I approve of his goals, I don't think he goes quite far enough.  Given that I seem to be comics' only "myth critic," one might anticipate that I would find the lack of attention to that subject rather glaring.  The absence is underscored by the way a mythographer like Joseph Campbell points out parallel themes in archaic myth, as he does in his book MYTHS TO LIVE BY.  In chapter 2, Campbell asserts that two factors that promote the "shaping of mythologies" are the individual subject's consciousness of death and his concomitant realization that the society into which he is born is relatively "immortal" by comparison.  He then observes:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

Nowhere in the book does Campbell invoke any intellectually-formed concept of the "sublime."  A quick Google search affirms that he did use it as a formal term elsewhere, but I'd venture to say that he never made this concept central to his hermeneutic project.  He does address Kant elsewhere in MYTHS TO LIVE BY, so when he speaks of existence having "magnitude," Campbell may well have some notion of Kant's "mathematical sublime" in the back of his mind.  But I don't believe Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT addresses the sublimity of nature in terms of "its changing forms." The only time something like this phrase appears is in Kant's discussion of "the beautiful," the opposite of "the sublime," and he does loosely associate it with a type of "regularity" that isn't stifling or tedious:

All stiff regularity (such as borders on mathematical regularity) is inherently repugnant to taste, in that the contemplation of it affords us no lasting entertainment. Indeed, where it has neither cognition nor some definite practical end expressly in view, we get heartily tired of it. On the other hand, anything that gives the imagination scope for unstudied and final play is always fresh to us.

And later in the same paragraph:

It is just as when we watch the changing shapes of the fire or of a rippling brook: neither of which are things of beauty, but they convey a charm to the imagination, because they sustain its free play.

Campbell speaks of a more "cosmic" form of regularity, as with the "heavenly courses," though I would assume that it applies to other forms of somewhat predictable earthly phenomena, which he views as belonging to his "cosmological" function.  But as I'm concerned not just with archaic myth but also with all common factors between myth and literature, I've chosen to exclude Kant's "mathematical sublime," which principally applies to natural phenomena in the JUDGMENT, in favor of a "combinatory sublime," first put forth in this essay.  a sublime affect brought about by the potentially dazzling array of "changing forms."

In my last essay I commented how baffling I find it that many fans and critics like to pretend that they exist back in the 1930s, when many perceived the existence of an illimitable gulf between Great Art and mere trash.  Similarly, I'm amazed that Morrison seems to be one of the few practitioners of superhero comics who can appreciate that one of the genre's main strengths is its ability to transmute simple cosmological facts of existence into "dreams of velocity and romance."  More often most critics only focus upon the genre's use-- and abuse-- of the appeal of "might."  But of course they have no clue as to its effects in terms of the Kantian sublime; they're only interested in critiquing the genre in terms of being about nothing but "two bozos hitting each other."  Morrison at least is aware that the genre has other aspects beyond that of combative violence, though it will take a better organized book than SUPERGODS to address those aspects.

 

A TOPIC IS BEING BEAT-ED

The following is a reprint of my post on the BEAT regarding those ole debbils elitism and exceptionalism.  I may further develop these thoughts on the status of comics criticism later on.

____________________________

Larry Vossler said:

"As a recent “writer” for comics, the biggest problem is not the message (that is a problem no doubt) but who is reading the message and how it can be seen. While TCJ, CB, Factual, and HU have and continue to put out some great criticism, they’re mostly being viewed by the people who know about it. Instead of reaching to a bigger crowd in the States, the big two crowd, the message is mostly being spoken to the choir. And that choir is somewhat small compared to the mainstream comic crowd. And it’s that crowd that criticism should be aiming to get their attention. So it can A. expand their horizon B. Introduce new great works from other countries and from here C. To make them think differently when reading comic and apply that to their superhero comics and maybe in the process enhance the superhero genre."

I would agree but IMO the only way one can do so is with a synoptic approach; one that sincerely sees positive things in the superhero genre that are not "different in kind" from the positive things in the indie corpus of works.  In other words, it would have to be an attitude 180 degrees from the one expressed by Gary Groth when he recently explained that Fantagraphics did not publish its X-MEN COMPANION book because the publishers had a deep abiding love for the X-Men.  This bottom-line insincerity-- "we'll bring 'em in with appeals to the mainstream in order to introduce them to the good stuff"-- has had at best a checkered record, and not only with Fantagraphics.

How might a synoptic approach be synthesized?  Well, first it would help to know something about a few of academic criticism's efforts in that respect.  Of course I can quote Frye and Fiedler all the livelong day and it won't mean anything: critics have to make their own discoveries to form their own syntheses.  But the WILL to make such connections has to be there.

Noah said in response to Larry:

"Larry, I don’t really see HU’s mission as trying to get people to stop reading mainstream comics, or to tell them those comics are bad. We just had a long appreciation of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk, actually."

I can see how this would seem an adequate answer to the problem Larry raises but it really is not sufficient, any more than when TCJ's editors used to answer accusations of anti-mainstream sentiments by citing lots of positive mainstream reviews.  As long as the dominant attitude is one of elitism and exceptionalism-- that a given reviewer pays attention only to SHE-HULK or WONDER WOMAN when they reach some exceptional heights-- then that reviewer and his cronies will continue to project the aura of the aforementioned "self-jerk circle."

My argument should not interpreted as some sort of anti-exceptionalism: an apologia for bad work.  There is however a middle ground for which critics like Fiedler might be instructive-- and I'll leave it at that, as the vision of Tumblr afficianados trying to pore over LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL seems improbable even to me.  That sentiment about covers my pessimism about the possibility of the current indie creators-- or the mainstream ones, for that matter-- mustering enough chutzpah to write organized criticism.

ADDENDUM:

Adding in a second observation I made as the discussion, as always, tailed off into nothing much:

Osvaldo said:
“All this mainstream vs. “indie elitism ” talk seems so strange to me, if only because, until my recent interest in online criticism most of my critical reading on the topic of comics was in a variety of academic journals, surveys and anthologies, which seem to be just as likely to talk about The Falcon as Fun Home as Superman as Maus as Scrooge McDuck – though that is anecdotal experience and not based on any kind of rigorous examination of what’s been printed and the attitudes expressed.”


Correct, Osvaldo. It’s not that there are no elitists in academia, but the line between the popular and the literary/would-be-literary is not as firm as it used to be. It’s amazing to me that so many comics-critics have chosen to act as if they lived back in the 1930s, and ignore all the meritorious work that’s been done analyzing pop culture, from Robert Warshow to Gaylyn Studlar.

SUPERHERO IDIOM VS. COMBATIVE MODE, PT. 2

Rereading my first post about the superheroic idiom in 2008, I see that I didn't clarify one of its aspects sufficiently, though the relevant point arose in later essays like this one.  That fundamental aspect is that the superheroic idiom is a subset of what would be best called "the heroic idiom."  Superheroes, even if their only "super" nature is that of wearing a strange costume, belong to the same idiom that gives us "unsuper" crusaders like Dirty Harry Callahan, John Rambo, et al. 

What is a hero? As should be obvious to anyone who clicks on the term "hero-concept," I'm clearly not using it to be one with the idea of "hero as protagonist."  Narratologically, a hero is a definite persona, though also one most often tied to the idea of a countervailing persona-- the "villain"-- as if they were locked together into "concept-pairs," my parallel to Buber's idea of "word pairs." In practice the individual concepts are separable and can be used apart from one another, but in essence they remain locked together, much as when I originally suggested a similar interrelationship between the personas of the monster and the victim.  Significantly, one of my main comments in this essay was to note that a villain's dominant status in a narrative-- as with Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series-- does not keep that narrative from having the same *invigorative* effects as one centered upon a more standard hero.

As a result of my investigations of the mythographer Theodor Gaster and the philospher Schopenhauer, I advanced a theory of the hero and villain as dominantly positive or negative incarnations of a type of will, "the idealizing will," that aspires to go beyond the bare functions of the maintenance of life. In the above essay I linked the hero and villain in terms of being either positive or negative expressions of this will.

*Megalothymia* depends on filling oneself with elements of will excessive to normal functioning. The hero is filled with a positive, altruistic will to protect society, one that often goes beyond the dictates of society's normal functions. Like the monster the villain is filled with a negative will toward society or the environment, but he is the mirror-image of the hero in that he glories in his independence from society, rather than yearning after a lost "normalcy" as the monster does.

Because of that "concept-linkage," then at base the "hero-concept" and the "villain-concept" are intertwined so that one implies the other.  Thus the "heroic idiom" includes all those narratives that center upon either a plerotic hero or a plerotic villain as the narrative's focal presence, and the same symmetry applies to "the superhero idiom."  My aforementioned list of a "top 20 live-action superhero movies" included one such villain-centered narrative, the 1932 MASK OF FU MANCHU.

Had I been seeking to list twenty live-action films with a hero or villain with no "super" elements, then I might have listed heroic Harry Callahan alongside the equally obsessed-- but negative-toned-- Jack Carter from 1971's GET CARTER.

Thus the one commonality of all narratives within the superhero idiom is that its focal presence must be either a "superhero-like" figure or a "supervillain-like" figure.  This figure may belong to the "demotic group" commonly linked to the "superhero genre," which obviously includes figures like Batman and the Joker.  But it could also include types from other genres and other mythoi cognate with the superhero idiom.  Heroes like Harry Potter (drama mythos), Marshal Law (irony mythos), and Ranma Saotime (comedy mythos) would thus rub shoulders with Felonious Gru (comedy mythos) and that threesome I like to call "the Bitchy Trio" (irony mythos).

In contrast, however, narratives featuring focal presences who conform to either the "monster" or 'demihero" personas do not belong within the superhero idiom.  This is fairly obvious with assorted monsters who have sometimes enacted deeds associated with superheroes-- King Kong, Godzilla, Gamera-- but who remain apart by virtue of their monstrous nature in a way that types like the Hulk and the Thing do not.  It may not be so obvious-- though it is no less true-- of the demihero, since many of them are often seen as indistinguishable from the hero-concept.  I won't repeat my arguments for this category here, but will only note that most of Philip K. Dick's protagonists are unabashed demiheroes.  Interestingly, many of them retain this character when translated to combative films, as occured with both Rick Deckard in BLADE RUNNER and "Michael Jennings" in PAYCHECK.  However, as if to prove that it's not impossible to make a heroic purse out of a demihero's ear, one may regard the cinematic transformation of Dick's "Douglas Quail" into "Douglas Quaid."