NULL-MYTHS: "VAMPIRES OF THE VOID" (ALL-STAR COMICS #26, 1945)

For this week's mythcomic, I selected the second of two "Bug-Eyed Bandit" stories scripted for the Silver Age ATOM comic by Gardner Fox. In the essay I stated that I didn't rate the first "Bug-Eyed" story to be a mythcomic, but I suppose that had I examined it in depth I would have rated it a "near myth."

Over twenty years previous, Fox scripted "Vampires of the Void," in which the Justice Society contended with "metal men" from space. Apparently these aliens were not robots but had evolved as entities with a penchant for nourishing themselves by eating solid metals. Each of the segments of the story sends an individual Justice Society hero up against a small cadre of metal men, all intent upon eating up whatever metals they find. None of the heroes can beat the aliens in one-on-one confrontations, but in each segment, a given group of aliens become obsessed with consuming just one metallic element, be it copper, gold, silver, etc. Once the aliens have filled themselves with Earth-metals-- Fox calls the process "imbibition"-- the heroes are able to defeat each separate group of metal men by exploiting some weakness inherent in the Earth-metal.

For instance, Hawkman fights robots who have "imbibed" silver, so he charges them with electricity, so that he can short-circuit them.

Doctor Mid-Nite, perhaps as a contrast to his status as a healing physician, gives his group of opponents "lead poisoning." 

And the Atom exposes a bunch of iron-eating metalloids to oxygen, causing them to rust themselves to death.

Now, I mentioned in this week's ATOM-analysis that I didn't consider the first "Bug-Eyed Bandit" story by Fox to incarnate a cosmological myth even though the author inserted a bunch of factoids about insect life at the beginning. In "Void," Fox has at least spread out his factoids, so that they're are a functioning part of the story.

But do they function as cosmological myths? I would still that they still do not, more because of presentation than content. Every single episode in the story is practically a duplicate of every other, except for the supposed humor of the "Johnny Thunder" segment. Thus none of the "epistemological patterns" possible for a juvenile superhero story about metallic elements really develop. I would also say that this story fails in terms of "underthinking the underthought."

In contrast, I did validate Robert Kanigher's 1967 "Plastic Perils" METAL MEN story as a mythcomic. Despite all of the indications that Kanigher was far from serious in his attitude toward the story, he did a little more than simply research the properties of a bunch of plastics. He gave a little thought as to how to exploit those properties in terms of their potential in a fantasy-combat situation, and so each of the heroes' encounters with this or that form of plastic carried a quality of active, rather than passive, imagination.