NEAR MYTHS: THE CLAW (1939-1944)

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay!" declared Lord Tennyson in the 1842 poem "Locksley Hall," crystallizing his people's belief that China, aka "Cathay," was the antithesis of European progress. Almost a hundred years later, American funnybook-makers distilled a vision of the claw-fingered Oriental beyond even the most fevered dreams of Sax Rohmer-- though of course comic book creators like Jack Cole thought of American democracy as the perfect counterpoint to Eastern tyranny.

In A PAUSE FOR CLAWS I addressed some of the cultural reasons as to why Western people may have started picturing evil Orientals with long, bony, taloned fingers. I plan to investigate the Marvel character "The Yellow Claw" more in future, but no comic-book character has concentrated the archetypal image as well as The Claw, a villain starring in his own series from the company Lev-Gleason. 

I mentioned Jack Cole, but though he did create The Claw in SILVER STREAK #1, he didn't create the villain's most well-remembered opponent, the original Daredevil (from SILVER STREAK #6). But according to Don Markstein, Cole was the one who conceived of making the mocking, super-acrobatic mystery man into the Claw's nemesis for the space of a five-issue continuity (though other hands than Cole's finished the crossover). 

If Daredevil was to some extent a typical hero of the period, the Claw was like nothing else. Asian evildoers had haunted the pages of pulp magazines and popular books long before comic books were viable, but not only did the Claw exaggerate other racial motifs-- pointed ears and fangs for teeth-- he also brought in the fairy-tale appeal of the Evil Ogre. The Claw could be a man of ordinary size, but he had the power to grow to Godzilla-like heights. Throughout his five-year run, the tyrannical villain frequently maltreated his own henchmen, gorily crushing them in his taloned fist or stomping them beneath his sandaled foot. Even after Cole left the series, the Claw was unremitting evil, devoted to subjugating America to his will.

The last part of the five-part tale strongly implied that The Claw was in the service of Satanic powers, though strangely, he calls on the powers of "Lucifer the genii" rather than the standard Judeo-Christian tempter. Lucifer sends monsters and flaming meteors to help the Claw against Daredevil, and yet the hero perserveres. The Claw is defeated, but generously, Lucifer only confines him to Asia, which was as good as saying that he wouldn't be allowed to cross Daredevil's path in America again. 

However, the two did encounter one another one more time, the injunction clearly forgotten. The crossover made Daredevil popular enough to get his own title, and to start the new book with a bang, Daredevil enlisted the protagonists from SILVER STREAK in a running battle with the worst real-life villain possible: Adolf Hitler. So Daredevil brought together such disparate characters as the speedster Silver Streak, Dickie Dean Boy Inventor, the pilot Cloud Curtis, and jungle-man Lance Hale to fight the Nazi menace. 

The one partial exception was The Claw: he collaborated with Hitler, but only while planning to eventually to betray the dictator. The two fall out thanks to Daredevil's maneuvers, and the Asian villain even does "his bit" for the Allies by allowing Hitler to deplete his resources to ransom his life. 

Following that stellar issue, The Claw remained one of the features in DAREDEVIL, which was filled with a variety of other crusaders (my favorite being the blind hero "Nightro," whose name was a pun on "nitro.") The Claw then continued trying to conquer America, being most often opposed by a new costumed athlete, The Ghost, who never managed to escape the Claw's gargantuan shadow. For the next thirty issues, the villain tried many different schemes, the most inventive being one in which he transformed several of his Asian henchmen into winged monsters called "clawites." The splash above shows the giant malefactor astride an equally huge unicorn; it's nowhere in the actual story, but it sure does make The Claw look like a Oriental version of an apocalyptic horseman.

He even got an origin: he was fathered by a Tibetan brute and a woman named Zola, who by some freak of nature possessed huge fangs. Shortly after being born, The Claw somehow forces both of his parents to commit suicide, and he grows into the scourge of Asia, though his ability to become a giant is never really explained. By 1944, though, some of the villain's ogre-ish appeal had worn off, and in DAREDEVIL #31 he was given a very anti-climactic execution by a scientist's "electric ray."

 He made one more Golden Age appearance in a 1953 four-part story within the continuity of a Lev Gleason space-hero, "Rocky X," in which it was posited that the inhuman looking villain was really of alien origin. After a few more decades, The Claw was revived by Americomics as a peripatetic opponent for the super-ladies of FEMFORCE. But to the best of my knowledge, The Claw has not surfaced again.

In conclusion, while I would concede that Lev Gleason's Claw did appeal to certain racial myths, particularly with respect to the source of his name, the very thing that made him unique among Asian villains-- his ability to turn into a skyscraper-sized colossus-- distances himself somewhat from more mortal representatives of the species, thus making him a little harder to see as a purely sociological construct.

CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS

 My attempt to distinguish between ideas and concepts in terms of narrative tropes isn't even four months old, and I've already decided to jettison those terms for another pair.

Though I labored with might and main to find a logical way to distinguish between ideas and concepts-- with the former leaning toward the mythopoeic potentiality, and the latter toward the didactic one-- the fact is that the two words have been used interchangeably for so long that nothing short of a major revision of all future dictionaries could dis-entangle them. This was borne out to me recently in a conversation with a friend who referred to science fiction as a "literature of ideas." I'd heard the phrase many other times, but hearing it once more convinced me that the word "idea" is conflated with "didactic utilitarian construct" as much or more than is "concept."

So I'm now using the words "correlation" and "cogitation." In keeping with my various observations on the combinatory mode, the mythopoeic is dominated by the process of correlation,  of bringing together disparate phenomena for the sheer pleasure of forging interesting combinations. Cogitation, however, is guided by a rational desire to suss out the imaginary relations of the phenomena in order to make some didactic point. 

I could cite examples of each mode, as I've done in other essays, but I've already cited various opposed examples of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities in earlier essays, so there's no pressing need at this time. The point is merely to distinguish the different ways in which the tropes are formed as well as how they are used in fictional narrative. Didactic cogitations may be profitably aligned with Jung's concept of "directed thinking," while mythopoeic correlations are more in line with the psychologist's concept of "fantasy thinking." Somewhat more abstrusely, a similar dichotomy obtains with regard to Whitehead's distinction between "prehensions" and "apprehensions," an observation I reprinted in this essay:

Of central importance is Whitehead's idea of "prehension," which is dramatically defined, following Whitehead's specifications, "as that act of the soul, reaching out like an octopus to digest its experience." Fixing on "prehension" as the basic act in existentialism, an act carefully to be distinguished from "apprehension," which is based on intellectual rather than soulful understanding, Wilson rests his own case.

For that matter, though I've not written about Kant for some time, I might also align the pure pleasure of correlation-activity with the philosopher's notion of "the free play of the imagination," whose freedom stands in contrast to the restraints upon that imagination by what Kant calls cognitive understanding. But for now, I've probably put forth plenty of correlations for cogitation.

ADDENDUM: I haven't finished listening to this podcast in which Jordan Peterson hosts a discussion with Richard Dawkins. However, at one point, after listening to Peterson's Jungian rap for a while, Dawkins asks Peterson if he thinks more "in symbols or in ideas." Peterson says "symbols," and when he turns the question back on Dawkins, the latter says that he tends to think more in "ideas." 

MYTHCOMICS: WOLVERINE: ORIGIN (2001-02)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

 As a biographical aside, I was never aware of this six-issue series back in the day. I had become disenchanted with the various X-Men serials in the eighties and nineties, and so only followed the odd arc or single issue. I knew that bits and pieces of Wolverine's origin had been tossed out over the years, but I thought that the only in-depth treatment of the mutant hero's early years had been the 1991 series by Barry Windsor-Smith, WOLVERINE: WEAPON X, which was a good read but not an adequate origin for the relatively complex character.

ORIGIN, however, is a tale worthy of Marvel's most popular Bronze Age hero. Paul Jenkins plotted and scripted the epic, with plotting input from Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada, while Andy (son of Joe) Kubert provided the luscious linework. I have no idea whether or not the narrative is considered canonical these days, but I'm impressed by how many disparate bits of Wolverine-lore Jenkins et al managed to weave into this ambitious tale. 

WHAT'S IN A NAME DEPARTMENT: Now, in this review I can't very well speak of the main character as "Wolverine," since from start to finish he's many years from running around in a costume with the X-Men. And though in the early sections the character's true name of James Howlett is consistently utilized, for most of the story he goes under the assumed name of Logan. Thus I will speak of him in the first section as James, after which he'll be the only character designated as "Logan," since it's something of a transitional identity between the boy and the superhero he becomes.

Young James debuts as the only surviving son of a wealthy Canadian family, the offspring of John and Elizabeth Howlett. Having money doesn't necessarily make life OK for the Howletts: John is frequently chastised by his father "Old Man Howlett," Elizabeth lives in seclusion after having recovered from depression following the loss of her first child, and James himself is weak and sickly. The viewpoint character for the early section of ORIGIN is Rose, a young Irish orphan brought to the Howlett estate to tutor James, and it's through her eyes that  viewers meet the only two servants who become important to the doomed Howlett saga: groundskeeper Thomas Logan and his young son Dog. Astute readers will notice that the groundskeeper bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Logan of mature years, but Jenkins' script, while not denying the possibility that Thomas may be the real father of the Howlett heir, throws out just enough suggestions to let readers come to their own conclusions.

Since James-Logan, Dog and Rose are the only children on the estate, they bond for a time, though the alignments of class suggest that James and Rose leave young Dog on the outside looking in. But Dog's greatest problem is his father. Thomas is a mean drunk, forever carping about how the wealthy Howletts look down upon his kind, and beating his son for any presumed infraction, even after Dog saves James from drowning. 

Thomas's brooding resentments eventually bring about the first tragedy for James. Dog tries to get overly friendly with Rose. James tells his father, and John expels both of the Logans. Thomas and Dog come back armed at night, allegedly to rob the Howletts though vengeance is the more likely motive. In the ensuing confusion, Thomas shoots John dead, and in the struggle the anguished James manifests his mutant power as bone claws erupt from his hands. He claws Dog and kills his maybe-father Thomas. The half-mad Elizabeth takes her own life, but Rose becomes James's functional new mother, taking him to another Canadian province to keep clear of the law. 

It's in a dingy mining-camp in British Columbia that James becomes Logan-- initially, because Rose simply bestows that name on him to conceal his real heritage. While Rose assumes clerical duties at the office, Logan must push around heavy carts of ore, forcing his weakly frame to take on muscle. Logan and Rose pretend to be cousins to allay suspicions from the other workers, and their family nucleus is somewhat supplemented by rough foreman Smitty. Initially Smitty only signs Logan on to give the weakling the hardest grunt-work, but over time Smitty takes some loose paternal interest in the youth, and even defends him twice from the tender mercies of the camp's malicious cook. That Logan begins to have some reciprocal feelings toward the foreman is indicated by the fact that latter-day Logan picks up Smitty's habit of calling other individuals "bub."

But in a sense the true parent overseeing the tutelage of Logan is Mother Nature. Since the camp is near the omnipresent Canadian woods, Logan's savage instincts come to the fore, and he begins hunting game at night. He's forgotten that he even possesses retractable claws of bone, but he gets a vivid reminder when cornered by a pack of wolves out in the wild. He then begins to run with the wolf pack, a Tarzan prompted by mutation rather than being reared by animal parents. 

Smitty provides at least one other link in the Logan mystery, when he introduces the surly youth to the stories of Japanese samurai, whose legacy will also be imprinted on the future hero. But Rose, after living with Logan for years in the role of a functional "brother," has also grown during this time, and when she as a young woman turns to look for a mate, it's not toward Logan.

Logan-- nicknamed "Wolverine" by his camp-mates-- tries to hate Smitty and Rose, and fate seems to set him up for an Oedipal contest, when Smitty, desperate for money to marry Rosa, enters a cage-match with "Wolverine." Logan's inherent decency makes him not only spare Smitty's life but throw the fight as well. However, in place of the father-sacrifice, a sacrifice of mother/sister is set up when yet another sexual competitor for Rose, Logan's maybe-brother Dog, comes looking for vengeance.

I mentioned Tarzan earlier, and despite all the surface differences, this saga of the "wolverine-man" probably takes some inspiration from the narrative of the "ape-man." Logan is born with a savage nature symbolized by his mutant talons, but civilization saps his energies, making him rich and sickly. In his original setting, James Howlett is somewhat like William Clayton, the weak cousin of Lord Greystoke from RETURN OF TARZAN: a decent human being but not capable of coping with danger. Tarzan does not witness the horrors that end the lives of his parents, though to some extent the death of his ape-mother stands in for this trauma. Logan witnesses the murder of his father and (subliminally perhaps) the suicide of his mother, but he largely forgets the chaos in his new identity, with Rose taking on a roughly maternal role while Smitty becomes a new father-imago. Tarzan's only competition for Jane is his cousin, a brother-analogue, while Rose is pursued both by Logan's maybe-brother and by Logan's surrogate father.  It's interesting that while Logan may not actually be the child of two aristocrats, he patterns his ethical outlook on Father John, for during his maturation Rosa remarks that Logan is "a leader by example, much like his dear father." This may be an evocation of the "noblesse oblige" found in Tarzan, who, despite his savagery in combat, always has a firm moral grasp of his circumstances. Even if James Howlett was the by-blow of Thomas Logan, the man called Logan did not slide into degradation as did the self-pitying groundskeeper-- which might be a repudiation of the very "class conflict" suggested by the story's opening chapter.

A PAUSE FOR CLAWS

At the end of my YELLOW CLAW review, I said:

...in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

What "racial myth?" The one I suggested in my 2016 review of the first story that introduced "Shang-Chi, son of Fu Manchu." In part I focused upon not one but two racial myths represented by the debut cover.

Of the depiction of Fu Manchu I said:

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Now, though I reviewed all of Rohmer's Fu Manchu books in recent years, I wasn't specifically checking to see when if at all the early books showed the devil-doctor with either pointed ears or claw-fingers, nor have I checked to see whether or not the early covers for the books utilize such iconography. But there's not much question that the 1915 YELLOW CLAW does use the latter image to signify its barely-seen villain "Mister King."

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

 

And later in the same novel:

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him.

So whether Rohmer or any other predecessor used the "Asian claw" motif, it's definitely there in the 1915 CLAW novel. Rohmer's "Mister King" is not that memorable a villain, being nothing but a mundane drug-dealer, and so he cannot be said to share the "aristocratic" background attributed to Fu Manchu. But since he doesn't have a background of any kind, readers also can't see him as anything but a vague spectre of evil. In the second King section, Gaston Max thinks of King in this way:

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Did Rohmer really mean to suggest that King was "a Thing," like something out of Lovecraft (or even a Robert E. Howard rewriting of HPL?) Nothing in Rohmer would support such a thesis. But his visual focus on King as a pair of nearly disembodied yellow hands has a certain mythic appeal. It suggests that King's "hold" over London's criminal demimonde also constitutes a "stranglehold" upon the daylight world of London, inhabited by sensible Brits. 

Though Rohmer gives King a racial connotation, the image of "evil hands" is certainly not CONFINED to Asian characters. One year before the publication of YELLOW CLAW, the American serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE debuted a character that some scholars consider to be "cinema's first mystery-villain"-- and this character, The Clutching Hand, was also visually characterized as little more than a disembodied pair of evil hands, at least until the final chapter's reveal.

Now, I mentioned in the YELLOW CLAW review that most Marvel Comics fan only know one character named "Yellow Claw"-- though even that reference is qualified by the fact that this 1956 character wasn't the first of his comic-book kind. Instead, in 1942 we see the company's first Yellow Claw, who battles Captain America and Bucky with his "petals of doom." Neither the original story nor GCD attributes a name to the writer, though it's possible that editor Stan Lee wrote it. (Lee served in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1945 but stated that he continued mailing scripts to his company during that period.) 

The second page definitely utilizes the "clutching yellow claw" image:

Lee certainly could have derived the name of this villain from having read or even just seen Rohmer's novel. However, nowhere in the story is it explicitly stated that the Claw is any sort of Asian. Here's his first clear depiction from page ten:

The Claw is mostly colored Caucasian, and he doesn't have slanted eyes, though the fanglike teeth were typical for negative Asian depictions. Only his hands are yellow, but no one in the story comments on this anomaly. The villain is given no solid motive for sending poisonous flowers to members of the U.S. military. Why not make him Japanese, since the country was at war with that Asian country? But this would have conflicted with the big reveal: that the blonde-haired villain is actually a previously introduced Caucasian, one "Captain Elliott." Maybe his hands only turned yellow from working with poisons? It's worth remembering that Fu Manchu, unlike Mister King, makes frequent reference to using flowers to produce sedatives.

I doubt Stan Lee, even if he scripted this weird story, consciously remembered the character when he greenlighted the 1956 YELLOW CLAW comic book. Still, maybe he suggested to the book's scripter the use of the name for the title villain, recalling less the Captain America tale than the Rohmer title. And throughout the first issue, Yellow Claw, unlike Mister King, emulates the established iconography of Fu Manchu, who I believe did have in some depictions excessively long (and hence aristocratic) fingernails. None of the other Asians in the first issue are given any exaggerated features, so Yellow Claw is also imposing, as the cover copy says, because he's something hard to identify: "who-- or what-- is he?"

I had planned to work in a reference to the Yellow Claw's quasi-revival in the 1960s, but now I think I may give that revival separate attention in a future essay. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE YELLOW CLAW (1915)

Though I've read two of the four Sax Rohmer detective novels starring Gaston Max, I'd never got round to the work in which he debuted: 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW, a serialized magazine-novel that was published as a book about four years after the first Fu Manchu stories, also serialized in a magazine, began in 1911. One reviewer asserted that this was the first attempt by Rohmer to start a second "Oriental mystery" franchise, perhaps to be focused on the novel's villain, the mysterious "Mister King." This online essay by William Patrick Maynard notes that Mister King did not manage to capture the reading-public's imagination as did Fu Manchu, for all that the "Yellow Claw" novel got a movie adaptation before any of the Devil-Doctor's stories did. Maynard also discusses the possibility that both villains MAY have been inspired by Rohmer's near-encounter with a real-life criminal figure-- though it's just as possible that this encounter only existed in Rohmer's imagination.

Long-time readers of Marvel Comics might look at the novel's title and think that it concerns an actual villain of that name, possibly one comparable to the Marvel Comics super-criminal. But YELLOW CLAW is merely a symbol of the murderous propensities of Mister King, who is barely seen in the novel-- appearing far less than does Fu Manchu in his series-- and, when King is seen, he's signified only by his yellow-hued hands, poised to kill in some fashion, as seen in this early scene.

Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table swept a silvern beam of moonlight. It poured, searchingly, upon the fur-clad figure swaying by the table; cutting through the darkness of the room like some huge scimitar, to end in a pallid pool about the woman's shadow on the center of the Persian carpet.

Coincident with her sobbing cry—NINE! boomed Big Ben; TEN!...

Two hands—with outstretched, crooked, clutching fingers—leapt from the darkness into the light of the moonbeam.

“God! Oh, God!” came a frenzied, rasping shriek—“MR. KING!”

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

Gently, noiselessly, the lady of the civet fur sank upon the carpet by the table; as she fell, a dim black figure bent over her. The tearing of paper told of the note being snatched from her frozen grip; but never for a moment did the face or the form of her assailant encroach upon the moonbeam.

Batlike, this second and terrible visitant avoided the light.

This sounds like a ripping beginning to one of Rohmer's fevered pulp-nightmares, but unfortunately, as Maynard also notes, Rohmer's trying a little too hard to stay grounded in reality. Some uninteresting regular-Joe characters get implicated in this murder, an uninteresting Scotland Yard inspector investigates, and, many chapters later, Rohmer finally introduces a new hero, the Dupin-like Surete detective Gaston Max. To be sure, Max is not as beguiling here as he is in the next two novels (which I may review in due time), and I can't help feeling that Rohmer didn't really have his creative heart in  this endeavor. Not only does the villain remain offscreen for most chapters, none of his aides are any more interesting than the good guys, and at base King's just a mundane drug-dealer. Without the slight suggestion of an unearthly power in his hands, CLAW would not register as metaphenomenal in any way.

Though in essence CLAW mutates into a "Gaston Max" book rather than one starring "Mister King," Max barely shows up more than King, though Max does assume some Holmes-like disguises from time to time. There's never a climactic battle between the two antagonists, but Chapter Thirty-Eight does include a struggle between King's clutching hands and Max's pure desperation.

A short, staccato, muffled report split the heavy silence... and a little round hole appeared in the woodwork of the book-shelf before which, an instant earlier, M. Max had been standing—in the woodwork of that shelf, which had been upon a level with his head.

In one giant leap he hurled himself across the room—... as a second bullet pierced the yellow silk of the ottoman.

Close under the trap he crouched, staring up, fearful-eyed....

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him. As he leaped, the hand was depressed with a lightning movement, but, lunging suddenly upward, Max seized the barrel of the pistol, and with a powerful wrench, twisted it from the grasp of the yellow hand. It was his own Browning!

At the time—in that moment of intense nervous excitement—he ascribed his sensations to his swift bout with Death—with Death who almost had conquered; but later, even now, as he wrenched the weapon into his grasp, he wondered if physical fear could wholly account for the sickening revulsion which held him back from that rectangular opening in the bookcase. He thought that he recognized in this a kindred horror—as distinct from terror—to that which had come to him with the odor of roses through this very trap, upon the night of his first visit to the catacombs of Ho-Pin.

It was not as the fear which one has of a dangerous wild beast, but as the loathing which is inspired by a thing diseased, leprous, contagious....

A mighty effort of will was called for, but he managed to achieve it. He drew himself upright, breathing very rapidly, and looked through into the room—the room which he had occupied, and from which a moment ago the murderous yellow hand had protruded.

That room was empty... empty as he had left it!

“Mille tonnerres! he has escaped me!” he cried aloud, and the words did not seem of his own choosing.

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Like predecessor Fu Manchu, King gets away after his operation is broken up, and according to Maynard Rohmer only invoked King's name in one later novel. But CLAW proved a very dull read even for a Rohmer fan like myself. I can't imagine that the novel itself, even though it probably appeared in various reprintings, would have resonated strongly with any of the later comics-makers who worked on the 1956  YELLOW CLAW comic book from Atlas (later Marvel) Comics. However, in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES PT. 2

This post has nothing to do with the earlier essay of the same title: I just decided to recycle the title for this "short history of events leading to the Civil War" that I wrote on a political forum.

_____________

The topic (of the Civil War) is not finished because of the inaccurate narrative of the event. From your previous posts I'm sure you don't have any more to say about the topic that any of the one-sentence wonders here, but since you wrote more than one sentence here, your post makes a convenient launchpad to review what the non-ideologues out there could discover on this thread. 

(1) The Constitution, ratified in 1788, does not mention the topic of secession. Given that the whole purpose of establishing this new rule of law was to empower the federal government that had been ineffective during the Articles of Confederation period, why not say that this is one of the powers that should be expressly delegated to the Fed? Why not clear that up from the first? Because, in all likelihood, many of the States would not have signed the Constitution if they knew they were signing away their potential for independence for all time. The politicians who favored a strong Fed were playing a shell game: once the stronger government was in place, then they could bring any dissenters back into the fold by force. One online essay wrote of Madison: " despite his reservations about the new system, he wanted to see it in operation before thinking about how it might be reformed."

(2) The Tenth Amendment was passed in 1791, just three years later. By stating that all powers not delegated to the Fed devolve to the states, the amendment is clearly intended to limit the power of the Fed. However, it too worked as a shell game, given that throughout the ensuing years proponents of Federalism simply talked around the Tenth, claiming that its statement of limitations did not matter when faced with anything that actually threatened the Republic.

(3) Though anti-slavery abolitionists campaigned for the end of the institution even before the signing of the Constitution, Northern politicians did not become highly invested in anti-slavery rhetoric until the 1830s-- which just happens to coincide with the establishment of the "Tariff of Abominations," whose purpose was to make Northern goods more appealing than the lower-priced European goods, all of which led to the Nullification Crisis.

(4) The Nullification Crisis, of course, had nothing to do with slavery, though any number of people have tried to link slavery and tariff resistance. South Caroline threatened to secede from the Union over the tariff, and this prompted Andrew Jackson to mount the first legislation that ignored the Tenth Amendment and proposed to answer secession with force through the appropriately named "Force Bill" of 1833. At the same time, Jackson modified the tariff so that South Carolina dropped the idea of secession.

(5) The growing controversy over slavery in the 1850s coalesced around the struggle for power between North and South. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, which offered the fig-leaf of parity on the theory that both slave and free states would be admitted from then on, was repealed in 1854. While politicians did begin utilizing more abolitionist-style rhetoric, at base their concern was to have more free than slave states in the Union in order to nullify the Congressional power of the South. Modern liberals assume that had the Union become dominated by free states, they would have soon banished slavery out of hand. There is no conclusive evidence that the Northern politicians would have taken that step, given that the South's use of slaves made a lot of money for the Fed.

(6) When the CSA seceded in April 1861, in response to the 1860 election of Lincoln, outgoing President Buchanan clearly diverged from the position of Andrew Jackson, stating that the Fed did not have the power to compel states to return to the fold. Lincoln said little about slavery when he entered the Presidential office, but he did talk about money:

Lincoln takes office March 4th, 1861 and on his way offered in several speeches, his solution to the Number One Issue - Lost Revenue. Lincoln Offered on Day One that he was going to Collect Revenue in Southern Ports, or more commonly known as Impost Duties on Foreign Goods arriving in this Country. We know them as tariffs. From March 4th to April 12th - LINCOLN day by day focused on Collecting Tariffs in the Seceded Ports. He was most concerned that any day, England and France would 'Recognize' the new Confederacy, and that meant War, if he tried to Coerce the Seceded States back into the Union.

After roughly a year and a half of fighting, Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which in theory settled for all time the question of Federal power over State power. By so doing, Lincoln contravened the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution

(7) Finally, after roughly a year and a half of fighting, Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which would eventually put the controversy about "slave states" to rest, but also extending the authority of the Fed government as never before. But the liberation of slaves was never more important than the hegemony of the North's power to control the flow of money.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 2

Another type of doppelganger that cannot be deemed a "template deviation" and so qualifies rather as a "derivative," would be the "replacement character." All of these doppelgangers are always diegetically distinct from whatever character they replace, as opposed, say, to being "retconned" as distinct individuals. The 1950s version of Captain America was not a replacement, since the original idea of the writer was that Cap and his pal Bucky were just slightly older versions of the WWII heroes. A later retcon then claimed that these costumed crusaders were distinct from Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes, which clearly was not the original intent.

In the Golden Age, it was rare for a writer to bother having a new version of a character replace another. Often, as I noted in THE THREE CAMILLAS, a creator would just try out different versions of a same-name series-star, barely if at all caring that this played merry hob with "continuity." 

A rare Golden Age example of an overt replacement occurred in the magazine PRIZE COMICS. In the first issue of PRIZE, playboy Doug Danville elected to play superhero, first using the forgettable name "K the Unknown" for his debut, and then changing it for the next thirty-something adventures to "The Black Owl." In issue #13, the magazine introduced the juvenile twin-heroes "Yank and Doodle," whose father Walt Walters was not aware of their double identities. Then in issue #34, someone decided to jettison Doug Danville and to have Walt Walters take over as The Black Owl. This allowed for a little melodrama as the father-hero sometimes crossed over into the adventures of his sons, and vice versa, without the kids knowing who the new Black Owl actually was. I imagine, though, that after a short time the young PRIZE readers probably forgot that there ever was a Danville version of this owlish hero.

In the Silver Age, it was common for villains to be be endlessly recycled, and barely any super-crooks ever succumbed to either imprisonment or death, no matter how seemingly irreversible. A notable exception, though, was the Lee-Kirby creation The Molecule Man. Despite making a powerful debut in FANTASTIC FOUR #20, neither his creators nor anyone else rescued him from his fate at the end of the story: that of being exiled to another world by the heroes' friend The Watcher.

A replacement version, however, showed up in 1974, for the debut issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE. Writer Steve Gerber showed readers the previously undisclosed fate of the villain, first seen dying on an alien world and charging his unnamed son to take over his mission to gain vengeance on his old foes, the Fantastic Four. To the best of my knowledge, this is substantially the only Molecule Man extant at Marvel.

Why didn't Gerber decide to simply revive the original malefactor? I theorize it's because he wanted a new angle on a rather colorless original. After Molecule Man Two duplicates the experiment that gave his late father his molecule-altering abilities, he travels to the Earth-plane. However, once he gets there, he finds that because he grew up in a different time-continuum, on Earth he ages rapidly when he doesn't have his wand to replenish his body. This makes for a stirring conclusion when he fights both the Thing and the Man-Thing, and the former hero deprives the villain of his revival-tool.

Molecule Man Two survived his temporary death in the approved comics-fashion and went on to other adventures, and without checking, I assume that the aging-on-Earth angle was quickly dropped. But his relevance to my idea of replacement characters is to ask what if any "cosmic alignment" he had, according to the principles I laid down in this essay. The original Molecule Man was aligned with the Fantastic Four, and no one else. But though his replacement goes looking for The Thing to satisfy his father's grudge, Molecule Man Two is not his father, and so he's not any more aligned to The Thing-- who he meets for the first time in his debut-- than to The Man-Thing. In the long run, Molecule Man Two didn't end up being aligned with any hero in particular, and so became an example of what I've termed "floating alignment." Given that in his debut Molecule Man Two has a weaker charisma than his father, he doesn't provide even a low-charisma crossover when intersecting with the stars of the team-up title, as would be the case whenever two or more team-up characters encountered a villain foreign to both of their mythoi. Here's a quick example of a valid low-charisma crossover, MARVEL TEAM-UP #22, in which another all-purpose villain, the living computer Quasimodo, tilts his lance against both Spider-Man and Hawkeye, neither of whom had met the villain before.

Next up: non-distinct replacements.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 1

The essays in this series will deal with general permutations of the practice of crossing over previously established characters.

I'm henceforth replacing the term "total template deviation," put forth in this essay, for the simpler term "derivatives." Derivatives may include not only faux versions of well-known fictional characters-- some named earlier being Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Captain America-- but also separate characters who in some other way ride on the coat-tails of an established fictional figure.

Now, when discussing the 1966 film BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA in this essay, I called that version of Dracula a "strong template deviation" because the character strongly deviated from the depiction of the king-vampire in the original source material. However, the same producers who came out with BILLY also inflicted upon the world JESSE-- that is, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, patently another crossbreed between western and horror film-tropes. 

Now, the latter-billed character in the film, Doctor Maria Frankenstein, certainly can't be called a "total template deviation" with relation to the original Mary Shelley Frankenstein, because she's supposed to be the mad scientist's equally mad daughter. But she is derived, very loosely, from the history of the original character, and so that makes her in my book a "derivative." The same holds true for the "Frankenstein" creature who appears in the 1965 FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER, who is only likened to the Shelley monster by the title of the film. The l965 film would not be a crossover, but JESSE would be at least a "low-charisma" crossover, because both title characters are only loosed related to their supposed originals.

Moving to a somewhat higher level of filmmaking, the word "derivative" also applies to the 1936 film DRACULA'S  DAUGHTER. The titular monster, Countess Zaleska, is not mentioned in the 1931 film DRACULA, to which DAUGHTER is theoretically a sequel, nor is there any sort of reference to any such offspring in the pages of Bram Stoker's novel. 

Further complicating the 1936 film is that, because it follows fast on the heels of the events of the 1931 film, Dracula-- or rather, his staked corpse-- does appear briefly in DAUGHTER. Is the film a crossover between the new character and the old one? But no, I determined that being a dead body in a given work carries no more crossover-potential than had Dracula merely been referred to, or shown in a flashback. Now, had Dracula been walking around doing something for a few minutes, I might have at least deemed the 1936 film a "low-charisma" crossover, based on the brevity of the vampire-lord's appearance. But in the absence of any "real-time" activity, DAUGHTER is a derivative but not a crossover.

The idea of having one character appear just long enough to introduce a newer one has precedent in a film like the 1972 BLACULA. In this movie's opening scenes, the original Dracula is around for ten minutes or so at the outset, talking turkey with Prince Mamuwalde. Then the vampire decides to make the African prince into an undead creature, sticks the newly vampirized unfortunate into a tomb for the next seven decades, and even gives the neo-vamp a sarcastic version of Drac's iconic name. During the main action of the film, when Blacula revives in the early 1970s, the Count does not reappear, nor is he mentioned again. To the extent that any viewer thinks about the matter, said viewer probably assumes that the racist vamp gets knocked off some time before Blacula revives in 1972. But because Dracula is such a major fictional figure, BLACULA (but not SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM) is a crossover-- though again, a very low-charisma type, since the iconic vamp makes only a token appearance.

More to come.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.

MYTHCOMICS: CARNIVORA (1994)

 

Some time back the Italian album-series DRUUNA was recommended to me, and I finally found time to read the series, this time on COMIC ONLINE FREE.COM. 

My first thought is that it would have been easy to read the albums out of order, because creator Paolo Serpieri wasn't especially concerned with inter-album continuity. While keeping in mind that the literary term "picaresque" may have been misused in many instances, the adventures of the titular heroine Druuna would seem to conform to that model. That model focuses on the wanderings of unattached protagonists seeking to make their way in the world, whether by hook or by crook-- often crook, since the genre takes its name from the Spanish word "picaro," meaning a rogue who lives by his (or her) wits. Female protagonists may tend to be somewhat more innocent as they flee the attentions of lustful predators; some can be fairly called rogues, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, while others exist to be repeatedly attacked and abused, like the 1965 parody-character Phoebe Zeitgeist.  Serpieri's Drunna follows the latter model, and like Phoebe she spends an inordinate amount of time being stripped of her clothing and being subjected to numerous indignities-- though unlike Phoebe, Drunna seems to be able to "relax and enjoy it," even though she doesn't seem to be a syndromic masochist.

I found Volume 4, CARNIVORA, to be the volume that most succeeds in assigning a psychological mythicity to Drunna's circumlocutions-- a psychology that I associate with the nightmarish conviction that one can never know where reality begins and dream ends. To the extent that continuity matters, earlier volumes established that Drunna originally occupied a space-faring generation starship, though like most of the ship's occupants, she thought she lived on a regular planet, specifically a city infected by a devastating plague. By the time of CARNIVORA, Drunna has been taken aboard another starship, but everyone aboard this ship is aware that they are descendants of a devastated Earth, and that they are searching for a new planet to colonize. Druuna becomes a chess-pawn to various parties aboard the ship, sometimes being used for sex, sometimes as a means to fight against a tyrannical computer-intelligence. But whatever victories Druuna achieves in earlier volumes are abolished here, in a recursive world where, as the Einstein-looking scientist above says, dreams and reality can become confused.

The POV shifts from the scientist to that of Druuna herself, imagining herself back in the plague-city. She experiences the possible hallucination of being murdered by weird surgeons, then awakes in a bedchamber unharmed, where she meditates on her unexplained pregnancy (which is also apparently an illusion) and on "the perverse pleasure of waiting, that strange obscene desire." A strange man enters the room and abuses her, after which his phantom-like associates gather to cheer him on. 

But then Druuna finds herself back on the starship, awakening from the first of many demonstrable dreams. The ship's computer addresses her, and she learns that Shastar, her deceased lover from the plague-city, has had his consciousness merged with that of the computer. She meets Terry, a female crewperson, who informs her that many of the other inhabitants have been devoured by a carnivorous alien intruder (presumably the "carnivora" of the title). The creature imprisons its victims in membranous webs, but Terry avers that these crewpersons are as good as dead. 

Then Terry's supposed identity goes out the porthole. Two crewpersons appear and shoot her, revealing that she's a "replicant," a copy of the original female created by the invader. Druuna, though not a fighter by nature, kills the monster born from phony-Terry's guts with a weapon, saving the life of one crewman. The other crewperson, the real Terry, regards Druuna as another possible menace. She divests Druuna of her few clothes and chains her up in a room where some of the ship's degraded inhabitants, "the prolets," swarm forth to manhandle the bare-assed heroine.

While Druuna suffers the fate of the perdurable female, the captain of the ship, known as "Will," is seen on his own, meditating on the oppressiveness of  the universe. Druuna, or a replicant thereof, joins him. He has sex with false-Druuna a couple of times, but it doesn't do anything to lessen his mordant musings on the relativity of time. Awakening from post-coital sleep, he finds Druuna missing. Will wanders about looking for her, has a dialogue with an unnamed crewman imprisoned in the alien's webbing, and then finds fake Druuna-- and also fake Will, a replicant of himself. 

Meanwhile, real Druuna seems to awake, no longer tied up as she was before. However, this awakening is yet another engineered dream, as she converses with a hologram of dead lover Shastar. The hologram gives Druuna such helpful information as "Beyond this wall the universe is reflected upside down and time is inverted." Shastar tells Druuna to communicate the ship's peril to the crew, since the captain's been destroyed by the alien beasts. Then she awakes for real (or as real as things get here), though she finds that her assailants have apparently left her unbound and the door to the chamber open. She finds another crewman dead, while not far away, Terry encounters the false Druuna.

Perhaps because more crewpeople have died, Terry doesn't go off half-cocked this time, but this only permits Fake Druuna to accuse Real Druuna of being the alien copy. After tricking Terry into shooting Druuna, albeit non-fatally, the replicant summons one of its beastly allies to overpower Terry, who takes her own life so as to avoid becoming a hors d'oeuvre.

The ship's doctor finds the wounded Druuna and barricades the two of them in the computer-room. The doc pulls a sheet over Druuna's head, since she's apparently died, while outside the replicants order him to let them in, for they are true life and he is only "death and negation." Doc blows up the ship, but his consciousness is propelled into his own past. Then he somehow fast-forwards to a period before the ship ventured near the aliens' domain, and he talks the captain into reversing course. Druuna is alive again, but the doc can't help wondering if he actually succeeded, or if everyone he's encountered might be a fiendish copy of the real Earthpeople.

If TWELVE MONKEYS hadn't come out one year later than CARNIVORA, I would have said that this story was something of a cross between that mind-bending time-travel flick and 1982's THE THING. Druuna's sexcapades play a somewhat less direct role in the narrative here in comparison to other installments. However, it did occur to me that the recursive nature of dreams and illusions throughout CARNIVORA might be profitably compared to the ecstatic (and repetitive) nature of human sexuality, which also have, however briefly, the effect of abolishing the participants' consciousness of commonplace reality. In the end, though the reader can go on to witness more adventures of the picaresque heroine, those narratives also continue to de-center both Druuna and her world so that the idea of a shared reality seems as illusory as the dream of Chaung Tzu.