MYTHCOMICS: "THE EARTHBOUND" (AXA, 1979?)

In my incomplete reading of the British comic strip AXA (1978-86), I've generally found the feature to be a tolerable but unexceptional "future apocalypse" saga, in which a doughty hero navigates a wildly transformed terrain full of mutant monsters and bizarre societies. AXA's main distinction in comics history is that its hero was a buxom heroine, given to frequent unveilings of her upper chest, though Axa was not any less heroic for her tendency to unveil. Indeed, all of the plots are generated by Axa's mission, which stems from a loose mandate, given her by the city in which she was raised, to explore the ways in which humankind's past mistakes have changed the world.

The strip was created by writer Donne Averell and drawn by Enrique Badia Romero, the latter having made comics-history with a previous femme formidable, Modesty Blaise. Whereas Modesty had a regular partner in her follower Willie Garvin, Axa wandered her future-Earth with a variety of male lovers, including a devoted robot (with whom, so far as I know, Axa did not have sexual relations, unlike the heroine's French predecessor Barbarella). "The Earthbound," however, shows Averell and Romero giving a deeper mythic resonance to the apocalypse-adventure subgenre-- in large part by drawing upon the Biblical scenario that is directly opposed to the scenario of the End of Days: that of the Garden of Eden.

As "The Earthbound" commences, Axa is accompanied by two of her devoted followers from other cities she's visited in past adventures: her human lover Dirk, an ex-gladiator, and Mark, a robot with human feelings who bears an impossible love for the busty heroine. Dirk is Axa's only current lover, but he's a jealous devotee, disliking it whenever Mark comes galumphing around.

Axa comes across a forestland which appears, to her eyes, to have avoided the contamination of past human wars. However, the more cynical Dirk observes that the forest is mostly dead after all.

Nevertheless, Axa continues to explore the forest, dragging Dirk and Mark along with her. A full page before there's any mention of Edenic metaphors, this "Adam and Eve" are attacked by a living tree-creature, albeit with no mention of whether it's a Tree of Life or one of Good-and-Evil. After the couple's robotic servitor drives the monster off with its laser, Axa realizes that Dirk's been wounded and needs care. An extended search leads her to a secluded house which has an uncontaminated garden of food-plants growing within it (though later the reader learns that this area was a particular site for government military experimentation in the pre-apocalyptic era). Within the house Axa meets the house's sole occupant, a blind old woman with the name "Joy Eden." (It's surely no coincidence that "Eden" is sometimes translated as signifying "pleasure," "rapture," or "joy.")

Author Averell was apparently not satisfied with Edenic metaphors alone, for though Joy does tell Axa that her long-vanished family did call their house "Garden of Eden" due to the family's evocative surname, she also calls her domicile "Seventh Heaven." She cites a mundane explanation for this name, though it seems likely that Averell was referencing the most common use of the metaphor: that one's being in "seventh heaven" is also a state of rapture. At the same time, the "seventh heaven" would be the one most removed from Earth, and thus probably as hard of access as the mythical Garden.

Blind Joy has one shadow marring her solitude: the fact that she will die one day, and, with her family gone, she has no one to inherit her domain and her wisdom. Joy's invitation that Axa stay in Seventh Heaven implicitly resonates with the young heroine, given how much she wanted to believe in an untainted paradise. Dirk remains the skeptic, wanting to move on and distrustful of Joy's sanctum.

Dirk's suspicions prove justified. Axa witnesses the blind woman calling out to "spirits of the earth, of fire, of water," and moments later, another bizarre monster, a humanoid made of slime and water, attacks Dirk. Again the robot's laser drives off the creature. Joy claims to know nothing about either of the monsters but suggests that they may be wandering mutants that have been "squatting" in the abandoned laboratory, where human scientists unleashed "the Great Contamination." Mark argues that "mutants don't leave traces" like bits of mud and water, but Axa determines that she will investigation the old lab. There she, Dirk and Mark are attacked by a third monster, a man made of straw, and though the straw-man is driven away, the monster gives Mark an acid-bath. Axa's compassion for the damaged robot is expressed when she cries, "I'm not just rescuing Mark because he's useful! I love him!" Dirk could care less about his potential competition and still wants to leave the forest. A little later Mark becomes one with the horrors of the Garden, for his damage causes him to attack Axa, though the possibility of jealousy frying his circuits is mentioned. Axa repels her former protector with his own laser-gun, after which Mark staggers away into the mists, disappearing from Axa's world, at least for a time.

Moments after Mark leaves, Axa is drawn back to Seventh Heaven by Joy Eden, and when Dirk tries to stop Axa, she lays him out with a deft karate-chop. However, Axa comes back to herself once she confronts Joy, and she finally realizes that the attacking creatures aren't mutants, but supernatural forces conjured up by the old woman. Joy Eden has become demented by her long solitude, being unable to see that the "old gods" she's summoned up bear nothing but resentment for all humans, judging all to be equally guilty of having ruined the cycles of nature.

Joy Eden can't bear the notion that the old gods now hate all of humanity, including her, and the very idea causes her heart to fail. The vengeful spirits fade away once their summoner is dead, so Axa and Dirk leave the old woman in her burning domicile-- "the pagan shrine her funeral pyre." Despite this doleful conclusion to the adventure, Axa closes the story with a protestation of her own hopes: "perhaps there's another Seventh Heaven-- another Garden of Eden-- pure and unspoilt, beyond the horizon."

(Note: the whole story can be read here.)

Though other SF-flavored mythcomics have referenced the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for humanity's "fall" away from a paradise-world-- notably 1955's "The Inferiors" and 1980's "Planet Story"--  "The Earthbound" is the first I've found that concentrates upon the Garden-myth with respect to its feminine characters, with Axa roughly standing in for the "great mother" Eve while Joy Eden bears more similarity to Lilith, Eve's sorcerous predecessor (in the Talmud at least). Joy wants Axa to inherit her maintenance of an already corrupted garden, but this "Eve" escapes the enclosure not by eating an apple but by causing the blind old woman to 'see" her own folly.