Tuesday, December 7, 2021

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 4

The third and fourth categories deal with narrative presences who are dominantly known for being Subs, which means that they may possess charisma but have rarely or never possessed stature in any iteration. 

Since charisma is judged with regard to the ways in which audiences have received various presences, HIGH CHARISMA crossovers are usually seen in situations where two or more Subs, both of whom have earned considerable approbation from audiences, interact. In the last section I mentioned that the Joker has almost always been a Sub, and since his existence as a Sub largely places him within the cosmos of Batman's adventures, this status gives him no stature.



However, his charismatic qualities may be boosted when he comes into contact with other Bat-villains with similar pedigrees-- though this may depend upon when the interaction takes place. When the Joker first crosses paths with the Catwoman-- one of the first villain-crossovers in comics-- neither has made more than one appearance apiece. It could be argued that at the time this story appeared, neither one had accrued all that much charisma-- and so a better example of high charisma might be the first-time meeting of Joker and Penguin, from 1944:



By the same principle, teams of villains, often meant to parallel those of the featured heroes, also display the same charismatic crossover, as long as some of the members have appeared more than once, as we see with the Injustice Society.



In theory, one might also have a charismatic crossover just from crossing over other types of Subs-- a League of Sidekicks, perhaps, including Snapper Carr, Pieface Kalmaku, and Rick Jones.

Moving away from this type of High Charisma crossover, I want to return to the matter of "crypto-continuity" introduced in Part II, I asserted that "King Kong II," though not technically in continuity with "King Kong I," borrows enough motifs from the original that the later character may be seen as  what I term a "weak template deviation." 

However, there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.



For instance, the 19th-century outlaw Billy the Kid has a certain documented history, even if there's much about the real-life William Bonney (or whatever his real name was) that moderns will never know. But the cowboy-hero of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA borrows nothing from the historical personage but the name, I would tend to view this totally fictionalized Billy is the main character of the 1966 film, while Dracula, despite having originated as a Prime character in the 1897 Stoker novel, has been demoted to a Sub, Yet the film's Billy has no more stature than would any cowboy-character who'd had never appeared before. The effect of the title is to suggest that the titular characters intermingle their respective charismas, though only one of the two possesses any stature, albeit minor.



Even more problematic are characters who lack anything more than a circumstantial history. While Dracula is a fictional character whose depiction may change as any author pleases to change him, Jack the Ripper was at least one real person in real history-- but because he was never identified, he becomes in a narrative sense even more insubstantial than the vampire count. In this 1985 mini-series, reviewed here, Dracula and Jack the Ripper do indeed enjoy a crossover. But because the Ripper is different in every iteration, whereas the Count is comparatively stable, I don't think they possess comparable stature-- though they both do possess high charisma, which stems from the investment audiences have in their respective forms of monstrousness.



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