MYTHCOMICS: "THE DOLL'S HOUSE" (THE SANDMAN #10-16, 1989-90)

In the same year that Neil Gaiman began his long run on THE SANDMAN title, he also did a couple of (apparent) tryouts for the SWAMP THING title: scripts that appeared in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, reviewed here. One of Gaiman's stories, which revived DC's "Brother Power" character, posited a world of "doll elementals" as the reason for Power's existence, in line with the plant elementals Alan Moore had introduced as a rationale for Swamp Thing's existence.

Over the next two years the SANDMAN title showed Gaiman stretching his creative muscles, as he varied between "short dreams" (essentially stand-alone stories, often featuring Morpheus of the Dreaming as the "host") and "long dreams" (longer, more involved story-arcs, some of which did not bear fruit until the end of the series). The first long arc, "The Doll's House," also invoked the image of dolls, but, like the famous Ibsen play, with a somewhat negative connotation, in which dolls were seen not as magical non-living presences-- as in the Brother Power story-- but as metaphors for being helplessly controlled by another's will.

As rendered by then-current Mike Dringenberg, the world of the Dreaming was taking on increasingly more complex, almost Jungian connotations, and this in part accounts for readers' enthusiastic reception of a world where dreams were real. "Doll's House" is perhaps not the best exemplar of this unique perspective. Though it's a long arc, parts of it are still more like short stories than anything, particularly "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the plot of the arc, though it has a loose thematic relationship to the rest of the story.

At this point in the series Morpheus, having been released from magical captivity, is dealing with various problems in the dream-world he rules. Four entities, his "creations," have escaped the Dreaming, and there's an additional threat in the appearance of a "vortex," a rare phenomenon in which a mortal manifests the ability to wreak havoc on the dream-world. Morpheus must corral his errant creations and terminate the threat to his kingdom.

I said that Gaiman's conception was "almost" Jungian, because at this point Gaiman is still strongly oriented upon the Alan Moore model. In his early works for DC Comics, Moore helped pave the way for 'adult comic books" within the context of genre-productions, and one of his main strategies was to take an ironic or reductive view of key genre-fantasies. I won't attempt to recount the fine details of Gaiman's arc, particularly since they don't dovetail particularly well, but almost all of them relate to the ides of exposing some personal or cultural fantasy as deeply flawed or misunderstood. Taking them on an issue-by-issue basis:

#10-11 -- this issue introduces Rose Walker, the mortal vortex, who will in time learn that her everyday waking existence is actually a threat to the world of dreams.

#12-- Superhero Hector Hall, who took upon himself the identity of "the Sandman" within the pages of another DC comic, is exposed as nothing but a ghost with delusions of grandeur, manipulated by two of the nightmare-creations that escaped Morpheus' realm. The issue not only undermines the original Simon-Kirby conception of a "dreamworld superhero," from which Gaiman's Sandman was very loosely derived, it also features a few sequences in which a young boy experiences fanciful dreams evocative of Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo," but wakes up to ugly realities (a rat biting his face, for example),

#13-- the "Good Fortune" issue, in which Morpheus allows a mortal man to enjoy virtual immortality. During Morpheus' visit to Elizabethan England, it is revealed that a certain Bard owes his talent to having made a Faustian bargain with none other than the King of Dreams.

#14-- Morpheus tracks down one of his nightmare-creations, the Corinthian, to a very special convention, in which seasoned serial killers come together to discuss their avocation. In addition to destroying his creation, Morpheus forces all of the mortal killers to see themselves without the benefit of self-delusion. To some extent comic-book conventions and their attendees are the butt of the issue's satirical jokes, though it's reasonably clear that Gaiman isn't drawing a one-on-one comparison of comics-fans and serial killers.

#15-16-- Morpheus finds that the last of his errant creations, an entire dream-realm known as Fiddlers' Green, has taken mortal form and come into contact with Rose Walker. Though Morpheus' initial contact with Rose saves her from one of the serial killers, he then tells her-- within one of her dreams-- about her true nature, and that he must kill her to prevent her from destroying his world. He almost does so, but learns, through a very involved plot-line I won't recapitulate, that one of his supernatural siblings has been manipulating him to commit that transgression in order to destroy him  Although Rose survives, she lives on with the feeling that all of humanity are merely "dolls" to greater, merciless forces, echoing Shakespeare's theme in KING LEAR: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,." However, in his confrontation with his plotting sibling, Morpheus reveals a new wrinkle: that he and all of his metaphysical kindred are also merely "dolls," for they are brought into being by the passions and aspirations of mortal beings. At the end the sibling in question refuses to acknowledge the truth revealed by Morpheus, and the story ends with her thinking that she's "nothing like a doll at all."

It's a promising theme, that of the interdependence of mortals and their archetypal creations, but "Doll's House" doesn't live up to its potential. It's obviously an amalgam of separate story-ideas that Gaiman sought, only with partial success, to meld into a unified structure. Nevertheless, even if this early Gaiman work goes a little overboard with all of the "beautiful dreams hide nasty realities" schtick, there's still enough attention to the symbolic resonance of the dream-world that it isn't totally reductive in nature. One example is "Fiddler's Green," who is apparently the incarnation of an Earthly Paradise, without any attempt to reduce him to something else. Rose Walker is a little on the dull side, as if Gaiman wanted to make her as simple as possible for contrast's sake, but I found this simply made it harder to invest much conviction in her character.

It's a flawed story, but not so over-intellectualized as to fall into the category of the "null-myth," and it does prove to be of major importance in elucidating Gaiman's not-quite-Jungian concept of a universe of dreams.

JUST ANOTHER ADAM WEST ANECDOTE

I won't assert what many fans of "1966 BATMAN" have asserted: that Adam West-- who passed on June 9, 2017-- was the Only Real Batman. Over the years I've enjoyed the show and West's performance in it. Indeed, I shudder to think how the show would have been sunk had the producers decided to cast Lyle Waggoner in the role. But yeah, I could always imagine a Batman who was more true to the comics. Strangely, at some point-- possibly in his biography?-- West made the claim that the show did reflect what was going on in the BATMAN comic. Assuming he actually looked at some comic book before making that statement, what might he have seen that might've given him that impression? Some issue from the "Bat-Mite" period, perhaps?\

But that's merely speculation. Twice I saw Adam West, strictly from the POV of a fan attending a convention. The first time I went before him and got his autograph-- for a friend, since I don't collect autographs-- I found him a personable guy. I think I asked him something about his failed TV pilot LOOKWELL, but I don't remember what he said any more than I recall my question.

The second convention-encounter makes a slightly better story. West was taking questions from the floor and I was one of many in the audience. It seemed to me that the questions were either slow in coming or rather mediocre-- maybe both-- so I came up with one. Since I have a mild interest in how actors block out action for the camera, with or without the use of stuntpeople, I asked something about a scene from "The Bat's Kow Tow." At the end of the episode, Batman pursues Catwoman (played by the pneumatic Julie Newmar). Somehow she eludes him long enough to get up on a building-ledge one story up from the alleyway where Batman's running around looking for her. The camera cuts to make it look like she leaps down from the building, lands on Batman's back and knocks him to the ground, after which they play out the remainder of the scene.

So I asked about how the stunt was done, making the caveat that I was pretty sure Julie Newmar had probably just jumped off a ladder or something. I didn't think it was too likely Newmar would have had a body double for such a scene-- her body was pretty hard to double!-- but I thought West might have some little story about how the scene was done, even if he had to admit that some stuntman had taken the fall, not him.

While a straight answer might have been mildly entertaining, West then showed his ability to think on his feet and get a much bigger laugh out of the audience. Knowing that pretty much any straight guy in the audience would have loved to have had any physical contact with Newmar-- even that of having her fall on top of him-- West merely pointed over his shoulder, at his own back, and said simply, "See my back? SHE'S STILL THERE." And yes, he got his big laugh.

I suppose it's possible that West might have recycled some schtick he'd done before, in some other context. Any actor who makes the rounds of conventions cobbles together lots of jokes or tall tales with which to amuse listeners. But I'd like to think he was quick-witted enough to cut through the trivia-nature of the question in order to come up with something on the spot. It would go a lot toward explaining the intelligence with which West imbued the character. West's Batman could say the most cornball things, and yet, because West sold us all on the idea that Batman believed every word he said, there was a strange sense of conviction that served as a great counterpoint to all of the absurdities. And partly because of West's talent, a show that might have been pure silliness became a part of our entertainment mythology, in a way that not even good silly shows like GET SMART could ever emulate.

MYTHCOMICS: "BATTLE FOR WOMANHOOD" (WONDER WOMAN #5, 1943)

Since I just finished my review of the new WONDER WOMAN film this week, this week’s mythcomic will be another selection frojm the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN mythos created by Wulliam Moulton Marston.

Though I’ve analyzed other Marston stories here and here, both stories display a tendency seen during the first year-and-a-half of the feature’s existence: a lack of significant villains for the hero to battle. Prior to the 1943 story “Battle for Womanhood,” the Amazon’s only outstanding foes were the rather tedious spy-chief Paula Von Gunther and the evil scientist Doctor Poison, who was both the heroine’s first costumed enemy and her first transvestite opponent. There were also an assortment of villains from exotic cultures, outer space, and of course from the Olympian pantheon, but these evildoers tended to lack any strong character-traits. Nowhere is this better seen than in the otherworldly enemy who racked up the greatest number of bouts with the Amazon: the god Mars, who incarnated all the bad aspects of the male gender. But though Mars caused Wonder Woman a lot of trouble, he never became anything more than an abstract evil. However, the war-god indirectly gave rise to the heroine’s first major foe, Doctor Psycho, and this character opened the floodgates for one of the Golden Age’s best rogues’ galleries.

“Battle for Womanhood” commences with Mars receiving a report from a female slave (wearing leg-irons, no less). The report concerns the growing prominence of women lending their efforts to the Allied conflict with the Axis powers. Mars fears that women “will achieve a horrible independence;” further, once women are no longer considered “the spoils of war,” they will “grow stronger than men and put an end to war.” But because Wonder Woman has bested the war-god and his underlings in past encounters, none of them want to face her wrath again. One of the god’s underlings, “the Duke of Deception,” solves the problem, for he’s made contact with a mortal who hates women as much as Mars does. So the Duke—who looks like a short, wizened man in Greek armor—descends to Earth. Emulating the gods of Homer’s Iliad, who spoke invisibly to the Greek warriors in the field, the Duke appears at the side of the mortal cat's-paw, whispering in the man’s ear in order to egg him on—and that’s the last readers see of Mars or his servants in the narrative.

The cat's-paw is none other than a brilliant but embittered scientist, Doctor Psycho. The story implies that this is his real name, not an assumed cognomen, but it’s also probably a mild self-parody on the part of Marston, given that he held a PhD in psychology. Psycho—a short, ugly man with an over-sized cranium—is seen receiving an honor at a medical college. His specialty is never disclosed, though his research involves the use of radium. Psycho’s male classmates, mostly depicted as square-jawed swains, mock the runty fellow for his ugliness, calling him “pumpkin head.” Even Psycho’s own fiancée, a student named Marva, doesn’t want him to “get mushy” with her because he’s so homely, though she claims to admire his brilliant mind. Slightly later, Psycho even sees a college athlete, Ben Bradley, putting the moves on Marva, and it’s plain to both Psycho and the readers that her protests are weak at best. Psycho considers letting Marva out of her engagement, but before he has the chance, that same night someone steals radium from Psycho’s lab. He falls under immediate suspicion, and to make matters worse, Marva testifies that she saw Psycho leave the lab immediately after the robbery. Marva sincerely believes Psycho committed the crime, though the captions establish that she's simply mistaken: that the thief she saw was merely crouched down, not actually as short as Psycho. The scientist spends several years in prison due to Marva’s testimony, and when Psycho receives news that his former fiancée has married Ben Bradley, he’s convinced that the two of them framed him for the theft. As soon as Psycho gets out of prison, he captures Bradley and forces him to confess that he was the thief. Psycho gets his revenge by forcing Bradley to swallow a chunk of radium, knowing that it will burn holes in the man’s stomach. (Perhaps it’s an appropriate punishment, to attack the intestines of a specimen full of testosterone-fueled masculinity.) However, Bradley tries, without success, to save his miserable life by claiming that Marva masterminded the frame-up.

Psycho doesn’t want to kill Marva, though. Telling her that “death is too good for you,” the villain hypnotizes Marva, so that she agrees to marry him, and presumably no longer discourages him from “getting mushy.” However, Psycho’s main focus is that of using her as his own cat's-paw, to undermine the advancement of women generally. Though Psycho has studied the occult sciences, he apparently has no talent for channeling the ectoplasmic powers of the spirit world. However, he can tap such energies through a female medium. In all successive appearances of the villain when scripted by Marston, Psycho always needs a female to make his evil magic, so it may be that Marston was thinking of something along the lines of the legendary sorcerer Simon Magus, whose legend includes him traveling with a female companion who possessed mediumistic talents.

Psycho’s principal schtick is that he can, as he later tells Wonder Woman, “materialize a body and wear it like a cloak.” Thus he embarks upon a scheme to undermine America’s faith in its female workforce, which is presumably the goal that Mars’ agent inspired him to seek. He makes the public announcement that he and his medium can conjure forth the spirit of George Washington, the country’s founding father, to counsel the nation on its future fate. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor are both on hand when “George Washington” appears on a stage, though it’s really just an ectoplasmic shell inhabited by Psycho and conjured forth by Marva. (In keeping with Marston’s affection for bondage, Marva is both bound and blindfolded during the experiment.) “Washington” voices the fears of a patriarchal culture, claiming that “women will betray their country through weakness,” and predicting that feminine carelessness will bring about the destruction of a major artillery factory. Naturally, Psycho makes this prediction come true.

Wonder Woman tries twice to expose Psycho’s tricks, without success, and it’s hard to say what would have been her next move, if Psycho hadn’t chosen to enact a frame-up on three female secretaries at the same army base where Trevor works. Though the frame-up works, and the secretaries are jailed, Trevor takes it upon himself to investigate Psycho once more. This time Psycho, instead of playing a waiting game, decides to render Trevor unconscious. The villain then creates an ectoplasmic double of Trevor and uses it to summon Wonder Woman via her much-used “mental radio” device. In short order Psycho not captures the Amazon, he splits off her astral body from her physical form, keeping the latter in a cage and chaining the astral form to a wall with “bands of psycho-electric magnetism.” Psycho, though he debates killing Trevor before deciding to use him, never says what he plans to do with Wonder Woman. Maybe he thinks death’s also too good for her as well. Or maybe he’s content to double his bondage pleasure by causing her to be literally "beside herself."

For once Wonder Woman does absolutely nothing to win free. Psycho is only foiled because he imprisons Steve Trevor instead of simply killing him. Because of this, Trevor is able to send his own mental message to Wonder Woman’s sidekick girl-gang, the Holliday Girls. They show up on Psycho’s doorstep, and Psycho tries to get rid of them by assuming another disguise: that of a handsome Latino lab assistant. Possibly Psycho’s own buried desire for female regard betrays him in this, for his handsome disguise causes the girls to start pestering him for dates. (Indeed, it’s not entirely clear as to whether they still remember the mission they’re on.) Because the villain becomes distracted, he loses mental control of the devices imprisoning the heroine, who rejoins her body and then frees both Trevor and Marva. Psycho is captured, and Wonder Woman addresses Marva’s general wimpiness with an empowering homily: “the better you can fight, the less you’ll have to.”

Marston was apparently intrigued enough with his new villain that, in addition to giving him the first of the three stories in WONDER WOMAN #5, the evildoer also appears in the third tale, retroactively titled “Return of Dr. Psycho.” It’s a much simpler story, in which Psycho uses an ectoplasmic double to escape his execution in prison and to fake his death. The only interesting aspect of “Return” is the fact that the villain once again needs a woman to create his psychic shells, though he’s forced to choose someone other than Marva to achieve this task. This is nearly tantamount to saying that only the gender that possesses a womb can also create things in the psychic realm, which seems like a rather strange dictum for a male author to propound.

Dozens of academic papers have been written on the notion that “narratives of masculinity” in fiction always have conceptual holes in them that allegedly prove the impossibility of the whole narrative. By this logic, it ought to be possible to find just as many holes in “narratives of femininity,” if one wished to play such a one-upping game. I don’t doubt for a moment that Marston means it seriously when he foresees women becoming a beneficial force on society through legal and cultural emancipation. However, I find it significant that in this story about a man seeking revenge on the female sex because of perceived wrongs, the main heroine lacks her usual competence, and even the females who come to her aid only are brought in at the last minute, by the agency of another man. Moreover, while a lot of Marston’s female victims are sympathetic despite being one-dimensional characters, Marva is both one-dimensional and unsympathetic. Marston says nothing about her motives for remaining engaged to a man she doesn’t love, but I speculate that the motives could have gone beyond mere admiration for his mind, into the realm of the fortune hunter. Surely Marston was familiar in his time with women who went to college not for their betterment, but to marry men who might earn big bank accounts in future. Even putting that aside as sheer speculation, Marva also seems rather stupid in her conviction that Psycho committed the radium theft, given that she didn’t even see his face. Since she does marry Psycho’s rival later, one might argue that on some buried PSYCHO-logical level, she wanted to get rid of an unattractive fiancée, even if her conscious mind wanted to marry for money. By creating a male villain who sins only because he’s been “sinned against” by a woman, Marston pokes a sizable hole in his own anti-male rhetoric, and draws a picture of feminine fallibility that no empowering slogans can efface.

PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING

I reviewed both the 1987 STEPFATHER and the 1993 PRAYING MANTIS  in the same month in 2017, but it only recently occurred to me that the later film exemplifies what I said at the end of the first review:

While there's no question in my mind that Jerry is a "perilous psycho" in the uncanny mode, I had to think whether or not STEPFATHER also made use of the uncanny version of the "bizarre crime." Certainly Jerry's not an artful psycho: he clubs one victim to death with a board. But I finally decided that his motif of moving from family to family in pursuit of his twisted ideal qualified as a bizarre crime in itself-- though of course, like any uncanny facet of a narrative, it can be reconfigured to take on a purely naturalistic phenomenality, as one indeed sees in some of STEPFATHER's imitators.

I don't think that PRAYING MANTIS was an intentional copy of STEPFATHER, foi the later movie just doesn't seem to "quote" the earlier one the way a true knock-off emulates its original. It's interesting, though, that the movie to which MANTIS has been most often compared (on IMDB) is also from the year 1987: the Theresa Russell vehicle BLACK WIDOW.  In any case, here are the similarities and differences:

(1) Both narratives deal with a psycho who repeatedly moves from family to family, killing as he or she goes. However, Jerry Blake kills all the members of the family into which he marries, while Linda Crandell kills only the man whom she marries.

(2) In both films, the cops assigned to the case assert that the unknown killer must have a major trauma in his or her background. In both films, the trauma is never revealed to the audience.

(3) Both psychos are artless killers who display no more particular creativity in their methods of murder. Blake uses blunt objects or edged weapons, while Crandell uses poison.

(4) In both films, young members of the family into which the psycho marries are largely responsible for exposing each evildoer, though the initial person to suspect Crandell is the sister-in-law of the first wife of Crandell's intended victim.

(5) In my critical opinion, neither film does much of anything with the psychological potential of their scenarios.

Given that I've stated that there's no single element about the uncanny film that couldn't have appeared in a naturalistic film, it behooves me to ask then: what makes Jerry Blake an uncanny psycho, while Crandell's only naturalistic? I've alluded to at least part of the answer in saying that the "twisted ideal" Blake pursues gives his "bizarre crime" the tonality of the uncanny. In contrast, Crandell really doesn't have an ideal as such: she's merely compensating for her past trauma by trying to find someone who won't betray her, possibly in the form of a father-substitute. This would also accord with what I've written about the nature of all naturalistic fictions: that they must always seem to be "logical extrapolations from [the author's] observations of experience."

Since the physical phenomena in STEPFATHER and in MANTIS are essentially identical, the only thing that can possibly separate them is that the former is far more invested in the tropes of story-telling-- that is, in the principle of artifice-- as opposed to that of experience, a.k.a. verisimilitude.

"Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude...-- ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4.

But once again, I stress that I can only make such a judgment by imaging a *threshold* that separates the limitations of "affective freedom" in a naturalistic work from its more intense expression in an uncanny one. It's a subjective judgment that STEPFATHER just barely manages to step over that threshold, despite all of its similarities to PRAYING MANTIS; that STEPFATHER is more a figure of uncanny artifice akin to the much more outrageous-looking Jason Voorhees (in his early incarnation, that is). But I still favor this approach over a "recipe" mentality, in which, say, the presence of any psycho of any kind automatically crossed into the greater category of the metaphenomenal.

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 3

I'm returning to the topic of this brief "series," last seen in 2014, because one of the films I've just reviewed speaks so well to the "two forms of will" elaborated there:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other...

In my review of the 1971 Hammer film TWINS OF EVIL, I remarked that although it was part of a trilogy of vampire films based on Sheridan LeFanu's novel CARMILLA, TWINS did not center on the menace of the vampires, in contrast to most films containing vampires. Rather, the "star" of the story, played by the top-billed Peter Cushing, is a (17th-century?) witch-hunter named Gustav Weil.

(I should note that top billing in itself doesn't equate with the star of the story. The most extreme example of this is that Bela Lugosi gets star-billing in the serial THE WHISPERING SHADOW, but he plays neither villain nor hero, but simply a red herring-type.)

Weil is apposite to the matter of fictional characters whose creators have given them combinations of both the idealizing will, with its "glorious ideals," and the existential will, "devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence." As the film begins, the viewer sees Weil and his cohorts burning a young woman to death on the suspicion that she's a witch. This act makes it impossible for most viewers to assign him the status of the hero, so by my system he could still be one of three other personas: villain, monster, or demihero. Villains are suggest a devotion to the pure ideal of contravening good, but it's soon apparent that Weil thinks that his witch-hunting serves the purpose of his version of Christianity and of his community. It would be possible for a witch-hunter to be a monster who, in the name of pure survival, has become estranged from his community due to his obsessions: this formula appears in another Peter Cushing role, his "Baron Frankenstein" as portrayed in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN.   Yet Weil seems to blend in with his community, even though not all the locals approve of his witch-finding activities. Thus at first, Weil seems closest in tone to the negative form of the demihero: the type who I observed in this essay to be "a loathsome viewpoint character who deserves to be destroyed."

Yet, as the movie's plot unfolds, Weil's dedication to his cause is shown to be sincere even if he makes poor choices regarding the objects of his persecution. Further, vampires in Weil's world are real, and thus he's not totally unjustified in crusading against evil. But the new information still doesn't elevate Weil to the level of a heroic figure like the Van Helsing of Hammer's DRACULA series. It's not just that he's fallible, but he's fallible in a way that shows the negative consequences of the existential will. Thus, at the climax Anton, the "hero" (but not "star") of the story finally makes Weil aware of his failures, Weil still does not take on the stature of the hero, even when he leads his followers in an assault upon the castle of the vampire. Weil has some idealizing will in him, but it's been trumped by the existential will, the part of him that has been content to attack impotent victims rather than assail the true source of evil. I observed a similar admixture of "the two souls" in Cushing's Baron Frankenstein as well, as I chronicled here, but in the Baron's case he is estranged enough from the community to be deemed a "monster."

On a side-note, TWINS seems to be a rare example of a horror-film oriented on the demihero rather than the monster; to date I've analyzed only one other such film here. But in that film, the monster dies and the demihero survives, while in TWINS OF EVIL, it's the demihero and the monster who are the real "twins," in being diametrically opposed evils that are both destroyed by film's end.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PEERLESS POWER OF THE SILVER SURFER" (FF ANNUAL #5, 1967)

In my essay on the first appearance of the Silver Surfer, I wrote:

For all that the Surfer is not integral to the conflict's resolution, he combines some fascinating Judeo-Christian motifs. It's hard to say whether or not either Lee or Kirby drew any conscious parallels between the Surfer and the Christian Son of God, not least because the latter does not rebel against his heavenly father. Rebellion is more the department of Satan/Lucifer, who is generally characterized as being opposed to the good fortune of humanity. Nevertheless, I think it possible that Lee and Kirby's collaboration brought a fortuitous confluence of ideas, possibly one that neither creator could have pulled off alone. In the Surfer's later appearances, the character became more visibly an Imitatio Christi, though Kirby still tended to emphasize his inability to comprehend human mores.

The Silver Surfer made a few appearances in the FANTASTIC FOUR title before the character finally received his first solo appearance in a short tale in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5, about a year and a half after his first appearance. I have the sense that though both creators hoped to find some way to spin off the hero into his own series, they might not have quite known what direction to pursue. Yet this story-- the only solo-starring role for the Lee-Kirby Surfer, before Lee decided to launch a Surfer series in 1968 with John Buscema-- does touch on some of the same themes that Lee would explore without Kirby. For instance, many Kirby stories begin with a little gratuitous action, and this one is no exception: the Surfer is just flying around on his board when some duck-hunters fire at him.

After the Surfer sends the hunters running for cover, he moralizes on the unique penchant of human beings to hunt other creatures for sport. I recall that in the day this prompted a letter from a fan who's seen a Lee-Kirby tale in which the alien Skrulls were seen in hunting-activities, but even without this continuity-cop input, it does sound pretty unlikely that the Surfer has never seen any other sentient beings hunting for sport.

More successful on the next page is a moment where the Surfer, far from being a stranger to human emotions, now seems attuned to the massed emotions of humankind. I view this as the real beginning of the Surfer's "Christ complex," in which he takes on the appearance of a secular savior toward humankind. Prior to this story, the Surfer tended to keep his distance from the sufferings of humans, like a distant deity. But where Galactus took the role of a "destroying angel" in the Galactus trilogy, here the Surfer becomes a de facto  "creator-god."

The sky-rider's sensitivity to emotions leads him into the company of Quasimodo, a sentient computer created by the Mad Thinker, last seen in FF ANNUAL #4. The Surfer feels pity for the mechanical being, and liberates him from bondage.

However, Quasimodo isn't immediately impressed with the form he receives. Kirby, a long-time fan of the 1923 HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME film, clearly modeled the living computer on the tragic freak from the movie. But that Quasimodo, despite his crude upbringing, tried to show some kindness to the gypsy girl Esmerelda. This Quasimodo not only fails to thank the Surfer for the alien's act of largesse, he immediately starts bitching about how his "creator" didn't give him a better looking mug. Lee or Kirby may have also had in mind something like the attitude of Mary Shelley's Monster, when he quotes Milton about not getting a good break in the looks department:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Of course, Quasimodo is also the creation of a super-villain, so maybe the apple simply doesn't fall far from the tree. The villain blasts the Surfer, apparently killing the alien. Then Quasimodo goes on a rampage, tearing up New York (at least one King Kong visual quote appears here), until the Surfer shows up. Following a seesaw battle, the Surfer takes back his gift of life, and returns Quasimodo to stationary status-- though of course later stories resurrected the villain for further use.

It should be noted that there's a strong psychological motif here regarding physical appearance. Quasimodo is so sensitive about his looks-- even though he's only been ambulatory for a few minutes-- that during the battle he thinks the New York citizens are worried about the Surfer because "he is handsome, and I am ugly!" It's long been a commonplace trope in comics to pit ugly villains against handsome heroes, and even though the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR mitigates that trope somewhat with heroes like the Thing, clearly Kirby didn't mind playing up to the audience's tendency to equate ethical superiority with physical attractiveness. It's possible that on some level the rejection of the "ugly villain" also represented for Kirby-- and possibly for Lee-- the rejection of what are usually called "baser instincts," such as cruelty and envy. This would accord with the tendency of Lee and Kirby in their Surfer-collaborations to see the "handsome" Surfer as the embodiment of the "higher instincts," even though, truth to tell, a number of the Lee-Buscema stories portray the hero as being somewhat corrupted by his interactions with human culture.But that's another story.

POINTLESS ARGUMENT PRESERVATION

Some junk from the aforementioned BEAT post:

I admit I didn't know "sealioning," which sounded like it came from the same mindset that gave us "mansplaining," and sure enough, it is:

the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand

At least you should get your own jargon right. You're free to think me clueless, as I am to think the same of you, but there's nothing I've written here than connotes false sincerity. Arrogance, yes, impatience with narrow politicized thinking,yes. But the closest thing to false sincerity appears in your inability to admit that you made a bad comparison between Plummer's non-fictional essay and a completely unrelated fictional comic by Sophie Labelle. And once your mistake was pointed out, you assumed a pose of sincere disdain for anyone who chose not to acknowledge your supposed wit-- thus, "making it all about you."

By the way, can anyone explain to me why advocates of queer theory (as Plummer must be, since he's queering Dick Grayson) are so in love with Frederic Wertham? Isn't this the guy who was warning American parents about how their children were going to be corrupted by those evil comic books, which presented salacious images of smooth rich men luring young men into decadent ways? There's a word for people like Freddy Wertham, and it does have the word "queer" IN it, but it isn't "queer theorist." (HInt: the last part rhymes with, "tater.")