This is definitely the last of the essays I wrote in this format: starting out with a summary of the narrative's action and then analyzing said action separately, like the first "official" mythcomics I produced for this blog.
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QUICK SUMMARY: Superman encounters Zha-Vam, a mysterious
eight-foot-tall villain whose name is an anagram of six Graeco-Roman gods—Zeus,
Hercules, Achilles, Vulcan, Apollo and Mercury—whose powers the villain
possesses. In addition, Zha-Vam wears a
belt studded with “buttons," each of which is inscribed with a letter (in
English!) When a button it pressed, it temporarily gives Zha-Vam an extra power
associated with some myth-entity whose name starts with that letter (for
instance, the first button he presses is “T,” which makes him a gigantic
“Titan” who flings Superman out into space.)
Zha-Vam shows no interest in power or gain, but merely
exists to constantly one-up the Man of Steel.
Superman finds himself unable to cope with the vast array of powers the
villain can call forth, but determines that Zha-Vam not only possesses the
invulnerability-power of Achilles, but the “Achilles Heel,” as well. But when Superman seeks to vanquish the
“Super-Olympian” by attacking his heel, the hero finds that Zha-Vam has
protected it with a “sock” of Kryptonite beneath his leaden boot. Zha-Vam almost kills Superman, but decides
to spare the Man of Steel for further humiliations. At last Superman journeys back to ancient
Olympus and learns that Zha-Vam was created from a body of clay by certain
Greek gods who foresaw that their glorious legends would be obscured by the Man
of Steel’s great fame. To counter
Zha-Vam’s advantage, Superman seeks out other gods who have quarreled with the
Olympians, and these gods bestow on Superman a belt containing their powers. Superman and Zha-Vam duel until Zha-Vam
resorts to his Kryptonite weapon. However, Superman calls up Atlas, who having
lifted the Earth is stronger than Zha-Vam.
After disposing of the Kryptonite and knocking out the villain with a
blow to his heel, Superman returns Zha-Vam to Olympus, whereon the gods turn
the villain back into clay and resolve not to attack Superman again.
If one knows something of the history of the story’s
writer Otto Binder, one might be tempted to ask, “What the SHAZAM got into
Binder when he created ZHA-VAM?”
The simple explanation is that Binder, one of the most
prolific contributors to the mythos of the Golden Age Captain Marvel, was doing
what all longtime writers do: re-visiting old concepts, whether out of
sentiment, creative economics, or a little of both. And in this case the concept was one of the
keystones of the Captain Marvel mythos—though not one Binder originated—that
is, the anagram of “Shazam” that gives Captain Marvel his god-derived
powers. For the uninitiated, Cap Marvel’s
mythic donors were Solomon, Hercules, Achilles, Zeus, Atlas, and Mercury. Four of them also appear in the name of
Zha-Vam, and one is invoked by Superman, but tellingly neither Solomon nor any
other Judeo-Christian figure makes an appearance in the Superman tale. Still, creative economics aside, one cannot
help but think that Binder would’ve found it ironic to invent a character based
on Captain Marvel to battle Superman, since Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and DC’s
Superman also contended during the Golden Age—albeit in a legal battle, in which
DC claimed that Fawcett had derived the Captain from the Man of Steel. Indeed, the lengthy suit certainly
contributed to Fawcett ending its use of adventure-characters in 1953 (the
company dabbled in comics in later days, most notably with a DENNIS THE MENACE line). Fawcett’s capitulation was
the first “victory” of Superman over the “World's Mightiest Mortal”—a victory
recapitulated by the Zha-Vam saga.
However, such was Binder’s mythopoeic imagination that he made much,
much more out of this faux “battle of the comic-book gods” than one could ever
have expected for what seems a simple children’s comic.
Even discounting legal wranglings, the literary process by
which characters derive from one another, play off one another, and sometimes
even cannibalize one another are not far different from the way archaic gods
frequently absorbed one another’s characteristics, occasionally making a total
turnabout from their original natures.
Not a few critics have pointed out that during the Golden Age Captain
Marvel’s magical origins allowed for more fairy-tale-ish whimsy in the
Captain’s adventures than were seen in those of the SF-based Superman. And yet, with the demise of the Captain,
some sort of cannibalization did seem to take place, as during the late fifties
and early sixties Superman’s mythos became much more consciously “mythic” than
it had been in the forties. But though
some critics have credited Binder with this rennovation, he was only one of
several writers employed by editor Mort Weisinger, and for that matter, other
extrinsic sources may have helped midwife the change in emphasis. Indeed, one could as easily say that, if
Hercules and cognate figures began to appear more often on Superman covers, it
could also stem from the growth of fantasy-films of the period, also aimed at
the same juvenile audience—Harryhausen’s “Sinbad” and “Jason” films, the
Italian “Hercules” movies, and so on.
But, even having said that, Binder was one of the key figures in putting
new wine in the old bottle that was the Superman mythos.
Oddly, though Superman and Captain Marvel were both
figures with multitudinous wondrous powers (one of the aspects that Zha-Vam
plays upon), they developed in diametrically opposing ways. According to an anecdote in Steranko’s
history, Captain Marvel was first conceived as a team of heroes with varied
talents, but the success of Superman led to the “team” being re-conceived as a
solo hero with assorted powers of mythic donors. However, once conceived, Marvel’s powers
remained fairly steady, while Superman, who started off as simply an embodiment
of strength (including super-tough skin and super-strong legs for jumping),
accreted over the years a veritable cornucopia of wild powers. In the Binder story,
Superman seems outclassed by a foe with powers far more multitudinous than his;
powers drawn from the storehouse of archaic myth of many lands (although most
of those named are from the Norse or Graeco-Roman pantheons, excepting only one
Hindu deity). It might even be said
that Zha-Vam is that very storehouse, from whom both Superman and Captain
Marvel take their natures, even as modern-day myth-figures.
To be sure, Binder plays fast and loose with many of the
myth-figures he invokes. (He sometimes even footnotes his own changes, such as
noting that Zha-Vam’s “Jason” power allows him to sow dragon-teeth that give
rise to real dragons, not human warriors as in the Argonautica
tale). And the device from which
Zha-Vam draws his powers, though possibly indebted to the archaic Thor’s “belt
of strength,” could as easily be derived from the precedent of Batman’s utility
belt. (The 60’s show was still on the
air when this saga debuted in 1967.)
Yet the way Binder uses the belt is more resonant of archaic myth-stories
than most comic-book uses of such gimmickery (such as the aforementioned
utility belt). For instance, the first
part of the three-part tale, Action #351, merely establishes for Superman the
endless variety of his opponent’s powers, but the middle part, in #352, Zha-Vam
invites Superman three times to press a belt-button himself, to choose which of
Zha-Vam’s powers the hero will grapple with.
This motif aligns Zha-Vam with the myth-figure I call the “Task-Setter,”
since he/she often gives the hero some impossible task to achieve (sometimes
even associated with the task-setter’s own defeat). Two times Superman tries to choose an “easy”
power to contend with, but he is bested and humiliated both times. The third time, though, he tries to
circumvent the task and attack the villain’s Achilles Heel, not unlike
Alexander “solving” the puzzle of the Gordian Knot by cutting it. Though the hero is defeated thanks to
Zha-Vam’s kryptonite back-up plan, it does get the superhero thinking “outside
the box,” so that his next major move, in #353, is to discover Zha-Vam’s
origins.
Said origins are perhaps the most symbolically resonant of
Binder’s hidden mythopoesis. For
instance, nowhere in the story does Binder mention the story of how the
Olympian gods overthrew their forbears the Titans (even though the name “Titan”
is the first power conjured by Zha-Vam).
But clearly Superman (whom the gods call an “upstart”) is to the gods
what they themselves were to the Titans; the new kid in town. And even though Binder could have had any or
all of the six donor-gods actually create Zha-Vam (indeed, the classical
Vulcan/Hephaestus was said to have had his own “manmaking” talents), the script
has Zha-Vam brought to life from clay by the Titan Prometheus (drawn by artist
Wayne Boring to be physically taller than the gods, and as tall as his
“offspring” Zha-Vam). Apparently,
though the Prometheus of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound is best known as
an arch-rebel against Zeus, this Prometheus is reconciled to serving Zeus (an
event loosely foreshadowed in the same Greek play). Or, if Binder did not know his Aeschylus, he
may just as easily have patterned his villain’s creation on a less far-removed
invocation of the Prometheus myth, for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is
subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.”
Certainly the visuals of Zha-Vam’s birth from a clay body recall the
filmic birth of the Frankenstein Monster--
who is, like Zha-Vam, a “man of
parts.”
Perhaps the most mythopoeic theme of the story’s third
section, though, is that, though Superman wins the battle, he does not do so
with his own powers, but by taking on powers analogous to Zha-Vam’s. Faced with a villain who uses a Zeus-given
belt full of powers, Superman seeks out a similar belt from Neptune, brother to
Zeus. And the last figure Superman
calls upon is the Titan Atlas, whose feat of “supporting the world” is a
punishment for rebellion against Zeus—in other words, it takes a Titan to
defeat the creation of a Titan (note: in Aeschylus, Atlas is brother to
Prometheus.) But perhaps the most
telling trope is that Superman’s calling upon the reservoir of myth to defeat
his enemy could be viewed as a comment on the aforesaid “cannibalization” of
Captain Marvel’s mythos, by Binder and others, to feed the mythos of
Superman. Personally, I consider the
melding of the Shazam-style whimsy with Superman’s science-fictional settings
to have resulted in the best version of the character yet seen. And while not all critics equally esteem the
Weisinger-edited period of the Superman feature, most are agreed at least that
this period birthed the greatest number of characters and situations that are
still considered to be the touchstones of the Superman mythos, making the
Weisinger years the feature’s most “myth-friendly” period.
Admittedly the Zha-Vam saga may in some particulars appear
a bit too whimsical to many contemporary
critics (I found myself chuckling a bit at the notion of the kryptonite
sock). But one can also read the saga
as a sort of a comic-book version of Star Trek’s “Who Mourns for
Adonais,” in which an ancient deity makes a bid to regain lost fame in
contemporary times. It’s a given that
by the story’s end such gods must pass away, but in the Star Trek tale, one is
still filled with regret for the lost glory of the gods. Superman himself does not mourn the demise of
the gods. To him, they are dangerous
menaces to his career, rather than being
the perceptors they were to Captain Marvel. Yet it’s hard to believe that
Binder didn’t script this story as a way of delving into the phantasmagorical
creations of archaic myth-makers. As a
modern writer, he might never truly be among their company. But he does, in this critic’s opinion, hew
closely to their spirit.
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