INTERROGATING ICY HARRIS

Years ago, when I was discussing the application of symbolism to comic books with a friend, said friend said something like, "But that's not what I think I think of as a SYMBOL." Asked what she did think one was, she responded, "Something like Moby Dick, or the Scarlet Letter..."


While I can understand that this is the way a lot of U.S. students learn about symbolism in their high-school lit-classes (since I probably got the same introduction), it's certainly incorrect to think that a symbol has to be something Big and Important, much less something exclusively from works of Canonical Literature. If there can be any aspects of symbolism that can be codified into a "law" of linguistics or psychology in the manner that we speak of the "laws" of biology, then one would expect said that "law of symbolism" to apply to high and low alike, just as any "law of biology" applies as much to a barnacle as to a blue whale.


And speaking of barnacles, here are a pair o' parasites for consideration:





The one on the left should be familiar to most comics-cognoscenti, as it's perennial Superman villain The Parasite, created by Jim Shooter for ACTION COMICS #340 (August 1966). Shooter's Parasite starts life as a lab technician named Jensen who gained, thanks to exposure to hazardous waste products, the power to draw power and/or abilities from other living organisms. In his inaugural story he found that he could become almost as powerful as the Man of Steel by stealing the hero's super-powers, but he got greedy, sapping far more power than even his mutated body could sustain, so that he was blown to atoms. In the comics, this fate did not stop the villain from returning for more go-rounds with his Kryptonian adversary and others.

The second parasite, however, suffered a parallel but more final fate, appearing just in one episode of THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, titled "The Pernicious Parasite" in December 1966. The scripter, one Oscar Bensol, rang in a few minor changes: this parasite is a crook who breaks into a lab and gets mutated, and even after his transformation he remains an ordinary-looking fellow. But scripter Bensol changes one other thing in an interesting manner, for now the villain's original name became "Icy Harris."

Though the original Shooter tale gave fans a new and durable villain, it didn't do anything more than that. Though Jim Shooter had a penchant back then and in later works for tossing out references to myth and legend in his characters, the original Shooter Parasite meets my criterion for a null-myth: one where any mythopoeic characteristics remain merely potential. One might have drawn parallels between the Parasite, a minor science-fictional villain, and numerous figures from Greek myth who aspire to take on the powers of the gods and are destroyed because they are mortals, too weak to assimilate godly powers. Some of these figures include characters who directly aspire to godly powers, as do Bellerophon and Phaeton, and some simply go beyond the proper boundaries of what men can do...

Like Icarus, who, given wings by his father Daedalus, used them to fly too near the sun, so that the wax binding the wings melted and he fell to his death.

Back in the essay "Political Potty" I said:

'the presence of mythicity is not in the least dependent on whether it proceeds from the conscious mind or from what is better called the "subconscious."'

When I recently re-watched the Bensol-scripted SUPERMAN cartoon, I noticed the obvious myth-reference: "Icarus" clearly became "Icy Harris." I do not know anything about Oscar Bensol except that he wrote a lot of Superman and Aquaman cartoons for Filmation in the 1960s. The name could be a nom de plume for practically anyone: it could be a pen-name for Jim Shooter himself, for all I know. But what I find interesting about this mythopoeic nugget is the fact that it's hidden away in a minor cartoon like a DVD's "Easter egg," but in such a way that no one in the original TV show-audience was likely to pick up on it (certainly I did not, and I was a member of the original audience). The myth-reference may have been a private joke on the part of the author, or he may have been entirely unaware that he had so refurbished a name from classical myth into modern terms.

But here is the nub of the argument: whether the name "Icy Harris" was formulated consciously or subconsciously, it remains a valid mythologem, because it displayed a poetic insight-- however minor-- into the type of "mythicity" underlying the figure of the Parasite, a supervillainous version of the classic "overreacher."

And though this sort of mythologem is a minor one next to a White Whale or a Scarlet Letter, it is as governed by laws of literary formation as both barnacles and whales are governed by laws of biology.

But, as one messboard querent once asked me, "Does that mean that all it takes to make a 'myth' is to reference a myth?" The short answer would be "not in the least," while the long one will take another essay at very least.