...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
But as I've consistently emphasized, this "greater whole" only comes into effect when the various *quanta* belonging to a given potentiality reinforce one another. For instance, an author doesn't create a cosmological myth just by trotting out a handful of cosmological factoids in a given story.
Gardner Fox does just this at the opening of the story that introduces DC-comics readers to the awkwardly-named villain, "the Bug-Eyed Bandit." (To be sure, in THE ATOM #26 the felon isn't given this name in Gardner Fox's script, but only on the cover-- though Fox falls into line by using the "bug-eyed" name in the character's second and last Silver Age appearance.) Long before Ray (The Atom) Palmer has any inkling that he's about to meet an insect-themed villain, the scientist holds forth to his fiancee's nephew about the wonderful aspects of our buggy friends, like the aphid and the atlas moth. Afterward, the scientist stumbles across a burglary, and changes into the Atom just in time to fight the burglar's aide, a mechanical flying insect.
To be sure, the Bandit (real name "Bertram Larvan," which sounds a bit like the name of comic Bert Lahr) has created his robot insect as a model designed to kill real insects, but he resorts to robbery to make said model. Once he starts stealing things and fighting superheroes, though, Larvan's project of mechanized mini-exterminators is pretty much forgotten, and he becomes just another super-villain. However, though the Bug-Eyed Bandit is the same sort of "theme villain" that I described in this essay, Larvan doesn't incarnate a cosmological myth, because he doesn't pattern his mecha-insect after the capacities of real insects, aside from the thing being able to fly.
The Bandit's second appearance, though, shows Fox exploiting the cosmological appeal of the "theme villain" for all it's worth. It starts out with Larvan in prison for his crimes, though he's forgotten his experiences with the Atom due to an amnesia-gas. (If he doesn't remember his crimes, couldn't his lawyer have pleaded temporary insanity?) Amnesiac-Larvan actually seems to be a nice guy, making toy insects for kids.
However, Larvan's memory comes back, and the first thing he does is to use the robot-insects' powers to break him free, (Why toys for kids can bite through prison-bars is not enlarged upon.) Then he does everything a good theme villain should do, unleashing a tide of crimes with other robot insects who also imitate the properties of real insects, like a robot centipede (which carries a lot of "cents," ha ha) and a robot grasshopper.
Inevitably the Atom tracks down his insect-happy adversary, and once again the major part of his battle takes place against the same size-changing robot he met before, This time the robot even has a buggy application, entangling the hero in a spider-web. It also has the ability to make the Atom sneeze, but this is just an unhappy accident, having nothing to do with any particular insect-power.
Toward the climax Larvan captures the Atom and accidentally reverts him to his Palmer form. He works in one last insect-themed weapon, threatening to crush Palmer in a contracting "cocoon." The hero escapes, of course, and both defeats the villain and returns him to his amnesiac state, so that he can't reveal the Atom's secret ID.
I should note in passing that, just as the first Bandit story contained a dramatic subplot about Larvan's former girlfriend-- who just happened to be a Jean Loring lookalike-- "Atom Assassin" has a subplot in which the hero gets some minor aid from a little girl, "a Korean war orphan." I suppose there were still orphans from Korea emigrating to America for adoption in 1967. But that was over ten years after the Korean War, so I can't help but wonder if Fox had some idea of making the kid a survivor of the then-current Vietnam War, only to be overruled by the editor.
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