NEAR-MYTHS: "REQUIEM FOR A TITAN" (TEEN TITANS #14, 1968)

 

In this essay I distinguished three general periods in the first run of the TEEN TITANS feature: "Wacky Titans," "Relevant Titans," and "Spooky Titans." But "Requiem for a Titan" was an odd game-changer for long-time DC scripter Bob Haney. "Requiem" didn't mark a sea-change for the feature-- future stories still utilized a lot of wackiness revolving around the alliance of the teen sidekicks-- so it seems like Haney just had a sudden desire to thrust the innocent barely-adults into the chaos of guilt and moral breakdown.     

In a haunting sequence-- or as haunting as a comic with brightly clad superheroes can get-- artist Nick Cardy outdoes himself. Robin the Boy Wonder meets a new fiend, The Gargoyle, in a graveyard that includes prominent markers for Robin and his teammates. At the white-clad villain's command, Robin divests himself of parts of his costume, as if surrendering parts of himself. He balks at removing his mask, but the Gargoyle conjures up giant phantom images of the other Titans, all of whom mock the Boy Wonder. Robin capitulates and removes the mask, upon which action the villain projects a ray from his ring. Robin vanishes as the Gargoyle cackles that "the Teen Titans are embraced by Limbo-- and in Limbo rule I, the Gargoyle."

So what is Limbo, before it was the name of a Trinidadian dance? Early Catholic theology, particularly that of Augustine, posited Limbo as an intermediary realm between Heaven, which was a reward for believers, and Hell, a punishment for unbelievers. Since Bob Haney never defines the nature of the otherworldly dimension he calls Limbo, it's fair to speculate that Haney wants to get across the idea that the place is somehow an exception to the norms of good and evil, even if Limbo's under the control of a demonic-looking master.

A long flashback then transpires, as we are told how the Gargoyle came into the Titans' lives. Though none of them ever saw him before, the costumed figure claims that he went to prison, and that one of the Titans sent him there by falsifying evidence. Though Gargoyle produces zero evidence for his claim, three of the Titans-- Aqualad, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl-- simultaneously place credence in the notion, and all three suspect the detective member of their group of the malfeasance. But nothing about the Gargoyle's story is anything but gaslighting; he fed the heroes his phony story in the hope that all of them would suspect one another. Robin alone did not suspect his teammates, but the doubt nurtured by three of them allows the Gargoyle to consign them to his domain. 

Further, after exposing the doubt-ridden heroes to the influence of Limbo, Gargoyle can bring them back as giant phantom versions of themselves, but with their morals reversed, so that they now hate Robin and everything in the "real world." Gargoyle leaves the noble-minded Boy Wonder to perish in a fire, but he survives, though the world thinks the other Titans dead. Robin then seeks out the security of the Titans secret HQ, only to learn that Gargoyle and his "phantom titans" have taken it over, with the fiend claiming that he and his allies will "wreak crime and evil for the greater glory of the Gargoyle." (Note that nowhere in the story does Gargoyle ever disclose any simple, mundane motive for gain or power.) Robin escapes again, but he refuses to reach out to any other heroes, such as his mentor Batman or the Justice League. Though he's done nothing of which to be ashamed, he's immensely guilt-ridden by his failure to stop Gargoyle-- which is more regret than one sees in the story from the three "faithless" Titans.

After a couple more pages the flashback ends, and we see how Robin, after being hit by the rays from the villain's ring, has entered the free-form world of Limbo, now transformed into another giant phantom. However, the Boy Wonder tricked the villain into merely thinking he Robin had filled his mind with evil thoughts. (Gargoyle's raison d'etre seems to be the opposite of Peter Pan's, where "happy  thoughts" conferred power.)

  After Robin clobbers his ensorcelled teammates, he and Gargoyle have a battle in the bizarre Limbo-realm. Robin cleverly sabotages Gargoyle's ring, which action conveniently strands the villain between dimensions, but delivers all four Titans back on Earth and none the worse for wear. The three "traitors" have forgotten all of their evil deeds, and there's no firm evidence in the story that Robin tells any of them what happened.

Haney, like other DC writers of his generation, must have executed dozens of "scientific-Gothic" story-resolutions, wherein an apparently supernatural phenomenon is neatly explained by some technological gimmick. Not only is Gargoyle's true identity never revealed here, one sees no firm denial that he may indeed be some extra-dimensional being. Now, there are a few concessions to the possibility that he's just some clever Earthman. Nick Cardy's Gargoyle has claws on his hands and toes, but he also seems to have seams separating what might be gloves and boots from the rest of the silvery body. Robin calls the Gargoyle's appearance a "getup," meaning he sees it as a costume. But as I said earlier, Gargoyle certainly acts as if he just worships evil for its own sake, and as if he takes pleasure, like a medieval devil, in corrupting pure hearts. The Limbo-ring may be some form of "magical technology," and since Gargoyle admits he has no "power to remain in Limbo" without the ring, that mitigates against any view that he was actually a native of that dimension. Gargoyle did return for a small handful of stories, but no one, not even his creator, ever again gave him this level of mythic ambivalence.                             

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 3

 

I started thinking once more about the topic of "story-hosts" after re-reading Batman's visit to "The House of Mystery" in BRAVE AND BOLD #93, courtesy of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. In a previous installment of this essay-series, I had talked about how certain issues of that rotating team-up title, because those stories paired Batman, a superordinate icon, with such subordinate icons as The Joker, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, none of whom have ever progressed beyond the subordinate level (in contrast, say, to a rare character like The Catwoman, who made her superordinate mark in the 1990s and who has kept that stature thereafter). 

But at least all of the villains so featured were actual icons. In the story "Red Water, Crimson Death," the two "headliners" are Batman and Cain from DC's "House of Mystery" title-- but not only do they not interact with one another, the latter character has, as far as this story is concerned, no power to interact with Batman or anyone else. He might best be termed a "null-icon" here, as he is in most if not all of the horror-stories he hosted. Thus, in contrast to what I wrote in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6, in all such narratives Cain would be neither Prime nor Sub. I'm aware that he becomes a Sub in the SANDMAN comic, which parallels what I also wrote in the above essay about the EC story "Horror Beneath the Streets." In that tale the three EC horror-hosts come into "reality" to berate the comic-book makers-- but only to make the humans assign the hosts to their already established venues. Technically they are Primes and the comic-book authors are Subs-- though the categorization is made more difficult in that story-hosts are essentially identical with their authors. They serve the same purpose as omniscient narrators, but as "null-icons," they convey a sense of personality absent in such narrators.

So in my book, "Crimson" is essentially a Batman story, concerning his adventure when he tries to take a vacation from being Batman. He meets a young Irish boy, Sean, during an ocean voyage , and though Bruce Wayne has no idea that Sean is involved in a criminal case, he ends up accompanying the boy back to his small fishing-isle, and thus, getting some necessary exposition-- and an introduction to a supernatural manifestation.          

I won't recount the whole story here, but suffice to say that there's a human agency behind the so-called "red tides" and the never-specified deaths of Sean's parents. However, there's also a superhuman agency that manipulates the Gotham Guardian into intervening to capture the criminals and save Sean's life. And yet, though as scripted this is a Batman story, with no crossover elements, O'Neil and Adams structured the tale as the sort of thing that could have run in HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And suppose that it had been reworked to be just such a story, with Batman ejected and replaced by just some basic one-shot viewpoint character? Then the centricity would have shifted from that POV type to either King Hugh, the ghost that renders aid to the boy's protector-- or even to Sean, since O'Neil's backstory slightly suggests that the boy, still grieving for his lost parents, may have subconsciously summoned the spirit of his dead relative to enact vengeance.

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE TRILLION DOLLAR TROPHIES" (SUPERBOY #221, 1976)

 

This story, one of the last Jim Shooter wrote for The Legion before he became an assistant editor at Marvel, is a curious venture into "quasi-adult" subject matter for both Shooter and for a feature associated with the Superman mythos. That, more than the story's formal qualities, are its foremost features, and the tale garnered a degree of negative response for its appatrent employment of B&D elements.

Short version: the Legion-heroes are the "trophies" of the title. Two criminals, Grimbor and Charma, seek to capture the heroes for purposes of reaping a ransom from the group's rich patron. Charma is in some ways the "dominant" member, for she has the power to dominate any male and make him her subservient slave. However, this same talent evokes titanic rage in any female, even though Charma may not be impinging on anyone's particular mate. Charma thus needs a powerful male protector, so she enslaves the reluctant lock-maker, Grimbor the Chainsman. The duo seem like castoffs from a William Moulton Marston story, though I tend to think they represented a "one-off" idea for Shooter, rather than any syndromic obsession.

          First, while Grimbor takes on Colossal Boy, Charma gets beat on by Shadow Lass.

 

Timber Wolf and Light Lass try to separate their enemies, but as Charma takes another beating from the female Legionnaire, her cries cause both Grimbor and the male Legionnaire to come to Charma's aid, so these heroes are also captured.

Later, when Charma is about to kill off some of the captive heroes, Shrinking Violet, one of the weakest Legionnaires, comes to the rescue. Though Violet is governed by the same compulsion to punch out Charma, the heroine does so with an eye to making the captive males so angry they break their chains and accidentally clobber Grimbor. The story closes on the revelation that at some point Grimbor planned to get back in the driver's seat by making special chains to restrict her domination-power.

It's not a very good story, nor a deep story. But one must admit- it's not a dull story.  

  

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE MUTINY OF THE SUPER-HEROINES" ( ADVENTURE COMICS #368, 1968)

 

There's no way to be sure whether or not Jim Shooter read Jerry Siegel's 1964 "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires." There are no direct callbacks in "Mutiny," and so it's just as easy to believe that Shooter came up with his tale purely as his own take on "the war between men and women." But whereas Siegel had used the trope of "Delilah conquering Samson with sex and guile," Shooter's trope is more like 'what if Male Samson meets Female Samson"-- which is pretty much what the cover depicts.

The narrative opens on a violent male activity, although it turns to be merely a training exercise, in which Karate Kid's "murdered" sparring-partner is the invulnerable Superboy in disguise. We don't see how the female Legionnaires occupy their free time until page 7. 

Extreme feminists would be irate that the girls are all seen cooing over fashion and furniture decorations. Princess Projectra poses an interrogative about their recent encounter with Thora, ambassador from a matriarchal world, Saturn Girl seems to think female dominion absurd, Light Lass provides some pushback by claiming that their Kryptonian XX member is as powerful as any old XY version, and Supergirl herself demurs, suggesting that at base her super-cousin is probably her superior in pure strength.

   

  

Shooter weaves no mysteries around Thora: she's immediately shown using special technology to artificially boost the powers of the Girl Legionnaires. She doesn't immediately employ brainwashing techniques, but is content to sow dissension as the males find it difficult to accept the change.

Things soon come to a head-- or maybe, bonking heads.

Despite the fact that the Legion's leader Invisible Kid claims to have figured out Thora's plans, he and the other males just bull their way into fighting her female pawns, and, in contradistinction to the Siegel stories, the power-boosted XXs stomp the XYs into the ground. Supergirl is actually the one who foils Thora's plans, after which she commits suicide and everything goes back to status quo. But what causes Supergirl to break Thora's brainwashing? We see it in an earlier scene:

  Some quick background: for several 1960s stories, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 dated off-and-on, but in the two-parter introducing Shadow Lass (AC #365-66) the new girl makes a very mild overture toward the cerebral Legionnaire, though it goes nowhere. Issue #368, appearing just one issue after Shadow Lass's debut, the blue-skinned heroine seems to have some sort of grudge against the green-skinned boy, as she fantasizes about forcing Brainiac 5 to be her servant. Supergirl's memories of romance with the brainy youth cause her to be offended by the theoretical assault on Brainiac's dignity, and it's her feminine protectiveness toward a boyfriend-- even though the two of them are never precisely "serious" -- that saves the day-- though there's also an element of feminine competition involved as well. There's not a big symbolic lesson here, unless it's that women are the best weapon men can have in "the war between men and women."      

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE REVOLT OF THE GIRL LEGIONNAIRES" (ADVENTURE COMICS #326, 1964)

 I decided I would dedicate this day to the recently passed Jim Shooter by writing about Jerry Siegel. Well, to be more precise, I've wanted for some time to sit down and cross-compare the respective takes each author took toward the trope of "the war between men and women," as expressed through a series both raconteurs worked on: The Legion of Super-Heroes. One might argue that Siege's shortcomings in this case shine a brighter light on Shooter's bushel-- or something like that.

  

The first page of "Revolt" shows some of the Girl Legionnaires shows them occupied with mundane activities, but the second ramps up the action, revealing that the six female Legionnaires have sent six male members of the group off on a phony errand. They then discuss their plans to lay traps for the remaining males in order to destroy them all and claim the club only for Girl Power.  

First, Light Lass mousetraps Element Lad. "Thrilling," right, EL?

Then Triplicate Girl splits herself in three, makes up to three separate males, and forces them all to admit that size does count.

Saturn Girl makes only a token effort at seduction, but then tricks Superboy into a rescue mission that gets him trapped.

Supergirl, who could easily twist any form Chameleon Boy might take into knots, feels it necessary to use some arcane formula to block his shape-changing power.

  And finally, Phantom Girl goes back to the Delilah-mode, liplocking Star Boy before she makes him imprison himself with his own powers.

-

There's not much myth-material in all of these simplistic "betraying women" scenarios, but there is a little bit in the Big Explanation. Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz (paging Rush Limbaugh) brainwashed all of the girls into hating men, because for many years the Female Femnazians had become obsessed with war-games, to the extent that they exiled their pacifistic males. Jerry "hurry-up-the-damn-exposition" Siegel conflates the Femnazians' desire for warfare with their ritual of shooting rockets at the moon-- which, in Earth cultures, most often represents feminine intuition and periodicity. Apparently shortly after the tyrannical women exile their men, they also decide to spread their desires for female supremacy to the Legion, if not to Earth generally, and use magical jewels to infect the Girl Legionnaires with man-hatred. But the other male Legionnaires, whom Saturn Girl sent on a false errand happen to pass by Femnaz, and two of the members keep the planet's moon from colliding with the planet. The heroes also reunite the chastened, no-longer-overaggressive females with their (presumably still pacifistic) males, while the Girl Legionnaires release all of the Boy Legionnaires from their traps, and good times are had by all.

The repetition of the Samson-and-Delilah seduction-trope is pretty repetitions, as if Siegel were indirectly suggesting that the girls had to resort to duplicity in most cases because girls just couldn't conquer boys (with the exception of Light Lass, who really does overcome Element Lad in a power-over-power struggle). However, there's more complexity when Siegel reworks elements of the Superman-origin for this little jaunt. Instead of a planet exploding, it's the moon of Femnaz, though the planet is saved by two Superboy-like heroes. Instead of a noble mother and father dying together as their child survives, there's a whole group of Amazons who kick out their wimpy males for being too tolerant, though the two groups are brought together, and an exile ends rather than an adoption of one survivor by a younger culture. But Siegel's conflation of two conflicting myths-- that of the martial Amazons and that of the seductive Deliah-- work agsinst one another here. In my next essay, I'll show that Shooter's pursuit of this theme was at least more unitary.               

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THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.

              

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 As a quick coda to CROSSING GODS PT. 3, it occurs to me that. although I may find uses for the terms I introduced there, there's a simpler line I might draw in the sands of shifting alignment, at least with respect to modern usages of all types of traditional narratives, be they myths, folktales, or legends. 

If a given modern narrative attempts to substantially represent a traditional story's plot action-- that is, making some attempt to be "canonical"-- but alters the scenario by bringing in extraneous elements, or rearranging elements within the actual canon, then that is a crossover. Thus, of the earlier examples cited, the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA would be a "re-arrangement" type, in which the (probably political) martial alliance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reworked so that Sheba never marries Solomon but rather hooks up with the king's son Rehoboam, who's in the Solomon narrative but not with that role. The examples with extraneous elements would include the movie NOAH, which imports Tubal Cain from a different Biblical story to serve as the story's villain, and the 1980s CLASH OF THE TITANS, which the story of Perseus is merged with elements from the narratives of Achilles and Bellerophon.

However, if there is no substantial attempt to be canonical, then what one has is an "open canon" created of whatever elements appear in an aligned set of traditional stories. Thus Marvel-Thor can meet any character from Norse mythology or folktales, and there is no crossover-tension. Even though the Thor of Myth may never have encountered the Surtur of Myth (so far as we know from surviving texts), Marvel-Thor can meet any Nordic traditional figure, from any time period, and it won't be a crossover. However, when he meets Hercules or Shiva, traditional figures from other myth-cosmoses, that's a crossover.

The "open canon" principle would also hold for my example of THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES from the first CROSSING GODS. The entirely fictional hero of this series, Atticus, is a master of Celtic magic, so any purely Celtic myth-figure he encounters is a null-crossover. But when he meets the pale horseman of Christian Revelation, that's a crossover of the innominate kind. Ditto Marvel's Daimon Hellstrom meeting any entity purely native to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Null-crossovers would include Satan and all traditional figures from that cosmos, probably including even icons from other pantheons who were demonized by early Jews and Christians (Baal, Astarte), but would NOT include icons from completely different traditions, such as the Egyptian Anubis and the Celtic Morgaine LeFay.