THE READING RHEUM: THE GOLDEN SCORPION (1918)

 

In my review of Rohmer's 1931 novel DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted a Wikipedia article about the fourteen-year gap between that novel and 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. However, this was a slight oversimplification, for two novels appeared after HAND that indirectly invoked the devil-doctor. This may mean that in the late nineteen-teens Rohmer had not yet decided to abandon the Fu-series. One of the two novels, which I may review in future, is 1913's QUEST FOR THE SACRED SLIPPER, though the allusion to the doctor is circumstantial. However, 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION makes much more than an allusion, though Fu's appearance is still in the nature of a "guest-starring role,"  of the type I addressed in this crossover-essay.

GOLDEN SCORPION takes its title from a scorpion-shaped token by which members of a criminal organization recognize one another, though the proximate reason for using the icon is that the group's mastermind is named "The Scorpion." GOLDEN is also the second of four prose novels whose main hero is the French detective Gaston Max, following directly on the heels of 1915's THE YELLOW CLAW. The two novels make an interesting contrast in that in the 1915 work, the villain is named "Mister King" and he's never seen except for his hand, which is the "yellow claw" of the title, for all that a few later comic books used the phrase for the names of super-villains. The Scorpion may be one of the few Rohmer characters who resembles a *costumed* super-villain in that he's always seen in a concealing robe and cowl, and he like Fu Manchu-- implicitly a mentor-- commands an array of super-science weapons. Further, though "Mister King" escapes at the end of CLAW and apparently never resurfaces, Gaston Max hypothesizes that both King and the Scorpion work for a great Oriental organization, albeit in different capacities. Strangely, Rohmer does not drop the name of the Si-Fan, which had just appeared in HAND, but calls the overall organization "the Sublime Order."

GOLDEN opens in a manner familiar to Rohmer readers, with an ordinary British man, medical doctor Keppel Stuart, finding his ordinary life invaded by Oriental intrigue. Significantly, because Stuart is a bachelor at age 32, Rohmer mentions that Stuart got left at the altar, a detail inserted to reassure anyone who might harbor ill suspicions of a thirty-something bachelor. Unbeknownst to the doctor, he was surreptitiously visited by famous disguise-artist/criminologist Gaston Max, who left an item of interest in Stuart's care. This causes the Scorpion's organization to target Stuart by having a comely Eurasian beauty, Miska by name, spy on the doctor by becoming his patient. As is usually the case, Oriental intrigue also breed Oriental romance, as both Miska and Stuart fall for each other. This eventually breeds retaliation in the form of a disintegrator ray that blasts into Stuart's house and almost zaps the doctor's head off. (The ray is linked to a missing scientist, Henrik Eriksen, and both the name and the creation show up much later in 1939's DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, suggesting that Rohmer had thoughts of introducing such super-science early in the series but didn't end up doing so.)

Gaston Max contacts Stuart and the local cops and relates a long story about how he Max first began investigating the Scorpion's misdeeds. causing him to encounter both Miska and her assigned guardian Chunda Lal. Max mentions that even though the Hindu is not that large, he's able to subdue a larger opponent using "jiu-jitsu," which seems to be one of the few times Rohmer ever mentioned any form of Asian martial art. During Max's consultations with the police, he manages to talk about the Si-Fan in a roundabout way, even though he's familiar with the cases investigated by "Inspector Weymouth," whose history with Fu Manchu dated back to the first novel. 

Some time after this conference, Miska contacts Stuart and warns him to keep clear of The Scorpion's menace. By this act, she shows that, like Karameneh before her, her passion liberates her from her slave-like status under an Eastern master. It's during Miska's backstory that she details not only her first encounter with the cowled Scorpion, but also with the Scorpion's superior in the Order. Miska only beholds Fu Manchu-- denoted by both his emerald-green eyes and his avowed status as "the greatest scientist in the world"-- because Fu stops by the Scorpion's HQ to inspect Miska as a new acquisition for the Order's usages. (Ironically, though Fu approves of the Scorpion's choice of Miska, the devil-doctor has no more luck with his female pawns than does the Scorpion; both end up losing said pawns to the charms of sturdy Brit males.)

Stuart of course keeps pursuing the villain, and ends up working with Max and the cops in investigating an opium-house. This is the novel's dullest part, though the section concludes with an interesting scene: Stuart is taken prisoner by a Chinese thug who strangles the doctor unconscious with the thug's long queue of hair (!) Stuart wakes up a captive in the Scorpion's lab, and like his mentor, the villain's lab combines such visceral "Asian" horrors (a pit full of killer ants) and hyper-advanced marvels (a special chair rigged to disintegrate anyone who sits in it with the Eriksen ray). While waiting for the preparation of a serum to fling Stuart into catalepsy, the mastermind informs the physician that he will soon be transported to China, where he will be brainwashed to serve the Order. Stuart asserts that he will see the villain hanged, and the urbane evildoer calls the gallows "cruel and barbaric," contrasting that Western method of execution with such a "poetic" concept as his "Throne of the Gods." This remark is in keeping with the methods of the Si-Fan, which use exotic and clever gimmicks to carry out their crimes.

I won't disclose the exciting climax, though anyone reading this will probably intuit that Miska will end up choosing to betray her master in favor of her new amour. A further connection with the Fu-series is seen when Chunda Lal attempts to kill the Scorpion to save Miska, and the mastermind resorts to a 1918 version of a Jedi mind-trick, mentally dominating the Hindu with the arcane powers gained from the Tibetan arts of "Rache Churan." When Max and the police come to the rescue, the Scorpion ends both his life and all resemblance to Fu Manchu, taking his own life through the agency of the disintegrator-chair. He unlike Fu Manchu never returns. Still, even without my having read the last of the Max novels, I imagine the cowled super-criminal rates as the foremost opponent of the French detective. 

ADDENDUM: I should also mention that at the beginning of the chapter "The Red Circle," the author, speaking through Gaston Max, attempts to distance himself and his characters from what one of the cop-characters calls 'that defunct bogey, "the Yellow Peril.''' Max responds to this jibe:

'No, I speak of no ridiculous "Yellow Peril," my friends. John Chinaman, as I have known him, is the whitest man breathing...'

Despite the incorrect nature of the phraseology for today's audience, the speaker's intent is to place the average "yellow man" on the same level of the average "white man," at least in terms of being a law-abiding citizen, unlike the Asian criminals that Max and his allies are discussing. 

Even in those early days, had Rohmer received enough negative response about Fu Manchu to make him disassociate himself from the Yellow Peril? And did any such negativity play a role in Rohmer's decision to table Fu Manchu for the next decade, until Hollywood showed some interest in a revival? Only the foremost Rohmer experts may have a clue...

MYTHCOMICS: "LET IT COME DOWN" (LOEG: CENTURY #3, 2012)

 

Although my title references only the third part of the Moore/O'Neill CENTURY trilogy-- one of the last few offerings in the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN property-- I'm actually going to discuss all three parts, albeit briefly for Parts One and Two.

The title "Century" references the time-span of the three books, in which the three central characters attempt to head off a magical apocalypse. All three had appeared in earlier LOEG comics, with Mina Murray (of DRACULA fame) and Allan Quatermain having been charter League members, while Orlando, an amalgam of the medieval Roland and the immortal Virginia Woolf character, appeared slightly later. For most of the story Mina and Allan have become as immortal as Orlando, but their longevity doesn't seem to be of that much help. They spend most of their time chasing vague clues around London and getting railed at by their Blazing World boss Prospero, while Moore and O'Neill devote copious space to side-plots.

Part 1, dated "1910," is the least interesting of the chapters, largely because of Moore's peculiar conceit of subordinating his pop-fiction characters-- some semi-original, like the daughter of Captain Nemo-- to a long and pointless homage to Bertolt Brecht's THREEPENNY OPERA. The overbearing didacticism of Moore's script reduces this segment to the status of a null-myth, though Moore and O'Neill work in a ton of "occult investigator" types to set up the main menace. The most consequential homage is Oliver Haddo, who in Somerset Maugham's 1908 book THE MAGICIAN, creates supernatural entities called homunculi. Moore melds this Maugham concept with a "moonchild", a concept from real occultist Aleister Crowley and with the Antichrist of the Bible.

Part 2, dated 1969, takes place after both BLACK DOSSIER and a 1964 text-story I chose to bypass. Mina, Allan and Orlando return to London to pick up the trail of Haddo once more, but again there are a bunch of side-plots about gangsters and drug-addled musicians that don't come to much. In contrast to the three immortals, Haddo has managed to survive by continually transferring his consciousness into younger bodies. Mina foils Haddo's plan to transfer his mind into the body of a rich rock-star, but he still manages to take refuge in someone else's form, while Mina accidentally gets packed off to an insane asylum. Her disappearance estranges Allan and Orlando and they break up, with no intervention whatever from their mystic master. Moore and O'Neill don't succeed in emulating any aspect of the 1960s but the emphasis on psychedelia, though without getting into the reasons psychedelia was significant to the culture. Still, there's enough good psychological interaction between the principals that I'd term this a "near-myth."

With CENTURY #3, dated 2009, Moore and O'Neill finally get down to brass tacks. Prospero conveniently waits until the Antichrist Apocalypse is almost nigh to belabor Orlando for having lapsed in his duty. During that time, immortal Mina has remained in an asylum for forty years, and the bereft Allan has become hooked on drugs again. But thanks to Prospero's tardy bitching, Orlando decides to call upon British intelligence to find Mina. This plotline works because it follows logically from a subplot from BLACK DOSSIER, as Orlando encounters what is essentially a doppelganger for TV's Emma Peel. (In fact, all of the female characters from the two AVENGERS serials make appearances in CENTURY #3.)

Thanks to MI-6's information, Orlando finds and liberates Mina Murray. Unable to elicit further help from Allan the addict, the two heroines try to track down the Antichrist, who was born over twenty years ago and cultivated in what sounds like the other-world of Harry Potter-- all under the manipulation of the continually reincarnated Oliver Haddo. Finally Orlando and Mina confront the monstrous Moonchild, seeking to delay the demented creature until Prospero can send help, and Allan comes to their aid at the eleventh hour, only to meet his doom. The Moonchild, by the way, has some brilliant lines: seeing the two mortals challenging him, he complains, "I thought you'd at least be Jesus or an angel or somebody." 

Though the Moonchild/Antichrist isn't a pop-fiction character, Moore sagely chooses just such an icon to vanquish the abomination: a never-named female who is in essence a cosmic version of Mary Poppins. (She destroys the Moonchild by reducing him to a chalk outline.) Orlando and Mina are left to mourn Allan, though their ally "Not-Emma-Peel" helps them return the adventurer's body to his adopted land of Africa. I assume that this denouement is an indirect tribute to the second Quatermain book by Rider Haggard, in which the hero dies (despite getting about six "prequel novels" afterward). Oddly, the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN film contrived a similar death for Quatermain, but I think it axiomatic that Moore, who has expressed antipathy for all of the film adaptations of his work, probably did not mean to homage this movie.

Of the four or five remaining LEAGUE works, I've read one and found it below par. I may force myself to read the rest in due time, but I'd almost like to imagine that the series ended with "Let It Come Down," despite all the damned Brecht references.

UNTIMELY RUMINATIONS #2

Here's another blast from the past, taken from AMAZING HEROES #51 (1984), when Steve Gerber was hyping VOID INDIGO:

Gerber believes that contemporary examples of popular culture that attempt to recreate myths do not truly do so. "One of the qualities of myth is that it looks at both the light and dark sides of humanity, and the escapist mentality is incapable, really, of looking at the dark side...There's a certain ugliness in every one of us that we all have to face and confront at some time or another"-- and that, Gerber says, in myth we recognize and condemn in ourselves, therefore achieving a catharsis.

To be sure, the first sentence of this quote makes clear that Gerber isn't trying to define myth overall, unlike some of the myth-theorists I've critiqued on this blog. But he's also putting forth an overly rationalized notion of a supposed facet of myth, because it jibes with the particular work he's expousing. I wouldn't say that his observation is completely untrue. But the very mention of "catharsis" in this context makes it sound as if Gerber has a didactic view of myth-- which is ironic given that many of Gerber's works meet my definition of literary myths, precisely because they don't have an overly didactic organization.

I can see, though, why an intelligent creator like Gerber would become seduced by the Didactic Side of the Force, for as I noted elsewhere, the tropes of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities not infrequently intermingle with one another:

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. 

Given that in the primary art of fiction there can be so many permutations in the interaction of these two potentialities, it's not surprising that they also become confounded within the secondary art of criticism.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE ETERNALS (2006-07)

 

Prior to the original run of Jack Kirby's ETERNALS, there were a couple of attempts to revive the franchise. I read one and not the other, but have the impression that neither one particularly grabbed the Marvel audience. If anything, the EARTH-X appearance of the Celestials, the "space gods" of the series, might be the most mythic use of any element from Kirby's concept. Neither the eight Eternals who comprised Kirby's ensemble nor their devilish foes the Deviants really caught on in the Marvel universe, despite Roy Thomas having brought them into contact with Thor and other Marvel-cosmos deities.

Neil Gaiman, no stranger to mythic motifs himself, took his shot at finding a new approach to the wonky premise. Gaiman decides to attempt re-introducing the main characters by having them all subjected to the diaspora of memory loss, so that for many years they've become integrated with humans. Their more numerous foes the Deviants are still out there, and some of them are attempting to knock off the Eternals before they regroup. For once the Celestials, except for a particular one, are offstage during the conflict.

Ikaris, who was most often the focal hero during Kirby's run, is one of the first Eternals to begin reviving the others in his quasi-family. The battles between Eternals and Deviants are punctuated by appearances of a handful of Avengers, who don't have much to do except to spoof the "Civil War" tropes of the time. 

Gaiman has to take a lot of time both introducing the Eternals' current identities and re-establishing the quasi-mythic personas they held in quantity, and the result that the plot drags. Some of the characters are moderately interesting, but the size of the ensemble mitigates against developing any of them. Possibly Gaiman could have done more with the heroes and their opponents had he come back for an encore.

Yet toward the end, Gaiman and artist John Romita Jr do summon some of that old Kirby awe as Eternals and Avengers bear witness to the resurrection of the so-called "Dreaming Celestial," whom Kirby introduced toward the end of the original series. The Celestial's revival ends without a proper resolution, though I imagine some other Marvel raconteur followed up on it.

Since I haven't read all of the ETERNALS reboots that followed Kirby, I'm not sure whether or not Gaiman introduced the most daring wrinkle: that the Celestials actually bred the Deviants as fodder. This might be deemed a reversal of the H.G. Wells trope of the Eloi and the Morlocks from his TIME MACHINE, for instead of the gross humanoids eating their fairer-looking kindred, we have the handsome humans being kept on a pedestal by their creators, while the ugly ones are the Celestials' livestock. But the idea isn't developed, and I will be surprised if anyone else has done so since 2006.

MYTHCOMICS: "CYCLONE AT THE CENTER OF A MADMAN'S CROWN" (MASTER OF KUNG FU #33-35, 1975)

 [NOTE: The summary title I chose for this three-part MOKF adventure is taken from the title of issue #34, because I felt it summed up the psychological theme of the narrative.)

When composing my reviews for serial comic books, I never attempt to read the series as I originally did when I followed it in real time (if I was able to do so). In this case, however, I had decided to attempt re-reading the whole MOKF series from beginning to end. I wasn't sure that I would post on the individual comics when I started the project, and now I know that most of the issues I've reread so far don't merit much "cyber-ink." 

I noted that the first issue of the series provided a potentially great opposition between two racial myths: that of Mandarin China as represented by Fu Manchu, and that of the cinema-manufactured image of the Asian martial artist, exemplified by the devil-doctor's son Shang-Chi. Unfortunately, most of the later stories with Fu Manchu, whether by Steve Englehart, Doug Moench, or anyone else, proved unimaginative and underwhelming. Paul Gulacy began working on the title frequently during this early era, but his vivid pencils did not make an impact on the series until MOKF #29 (May 1975), when Gulacy and Moench decided to transform the series into something like a James Bond comic book as drawn by sixties luminary Jim Steranko. (The tableau above is a typical example of Gulacy emulating a Steranko visual trope.) Though Fu Manchu would continue to make periodic appearances, Fu's old antagonist Nayland Smith became both a regular support-character and a symbolic father-figure to Shang-Chi. Additionally, the rather flat character of Black Jack Tarr was given a more dynamic personality, while Moench and Gulacy introduced a younger agent, Clive Reston, who would be able to engage with the main hero on a more personal basis. "Cyclone" also introduces Leiko Wu, the first regular female support-character, and Shang-Chi's first full-fledged romantic pairing. (The youth had enjoyed a first brush with love in an earlier story, but the woman practically had "Red Shirt" written on her forehead.)

In this quest for modernization, the creators had to discard the main template for Shang-Chi's character: that of Kwai Chang Caine from the 1972-75 KUNG FU teleseries. For many issues writers had kept the hero as a sort of "earth angel" who was too good to be true. But Leiko, the former lover of Reston, functioned in part to bring the angel back to his earthly origins.

Issue #33 starts off with a literal bang, as a killer robot attempts to assassinate Reston, only to be stymied by Shang-Chi. Nayland Smith then briefs his agents about similar assassinations of MI-6 operatives. The similar killing-methods, which have the capriciousness of "a child's game," prompts Smith to attribute the murders to a never-identified master killer known only as Mordillo. Further, Mordillo's long game is to take control of "Project Ultraviolet," an English invention that makes it possible to channel the power of the sun into a selective super-weapon. (To himself, Shang-Chi is deeply repelled by using the sun, "the source of all life," for purposes of murder.) An additional complication is that one MI-6 man, Simon Bretnor (whose surname even sounds like "Britain"), has simply gone missing, and Bretnor had a checkered past in that he seduced Leiko away from Reston some months before Bretnor's disappearance. However, Moench doesn't wait long before dropping the other shoe, revealing that Bretnor is the assassin Mordillo, and that he's captured Leiko, believing that she is the key to his possessing command of the solar death weapon (which the villain renames "the Solar-Chute").

Now, though Part One of this narrative might've been seen as something out of Ian Fleming, the next two parts veer into the loony-tunes terrain of the British spy-series THE AVENGERS. Mordillo, despite being a master of spycraft, has an obsession with children's toys, and the "madman's crown" of the title is an island surrounded by mountain peaks that resemble the encircling spikes of a crown.

 Reston and Shang-Chi mount a two-man mission (albeit one later joined by Tarr) to rescue Leiko and take down Mordillo, and when they first land on the island, they meet assorted constructs-- a cartoonish train, mechanical soldiers, and Mordillo's main confidante, a robotic yes-man named Brynocki. Given that Moench and Gulacy labored to center MOKF in a slightly more naturalistic cosmos than one found in most Marvel comic books, Mordillo's recapitulations of childhood images is clearly meant to suggest the depths of madness into which he's sunk-- even if, as Shang-Chi opines, "all thoughts are madness to him who is not the thinker."

Mordillo displays his credentials as a super-villain by trapping Shang and Reston and forcing them to watch as Leiko gets suffocated in a giant hourglass. However, it's at this propitious point that Black Jack Tarr makes his appearance by masquerading as one of the villain's mechanical men-- and the rebellion of one of his creations offends him more than physical peril ("You can't attack me-- not me!") He then escapes, and calls upon a resource more affiliated with the adult side of his personality: his lover Pavane, who had appeared in MOKF #29-31, and who was forced to tolerate his romance with Leiko-- much as Reston will soon be forced to tolerate a budding relationship between Leiko and Shang-Chi.

Pavane does not cross the path of Shang, though she does get a brief catfight with Leiko, while Shang gets the honor of pursuing Mordillo and Brynocki as the Solar-Chute ascends to begin its reign (rain) of solar death. Mordillo isn't able to score any physical points on the Master of Kung Fu, but he does seed some doubts about what Nayland Smith and MI-6 were going to do with the solar-chute, particularly against enemies of Chinese ethnicity. And when Mordillo claims that of spycraft that "it's all a game," this gives a new intonation to his taking refuge into a childhood-themed madness, and the idea reinforces Shang's early assertion that madness is relative to the thoughts of the individual thinker.

Shang-Chi of course destroys the solar-chute so that no one can use it again, while Mordillo's insanity precipitates his death. However, upon reuniting with his allies, Shang is embraced by Leiko, and it's obvious that she's become fascinated with him, and he with her. This is the crux of the new, non-angelic vision of the martial hero, as he himself meditates, "I should refuse her embrace-- But it is not within me to do so-- Rather, it is within me... to return her embrace, to concede that I am not perfect, that I am only a man-- capable of hurting another man." And this love affair, though often rocky, lasted the entire length of the MOKF original run-- though it was never quite as "strange" as the love between the late Mordillo and his faithful cartoon-creation.

NULL-MYTHS: "GHOST RIDER VS. FRANKENSTEIN" (GHOST RIDER #10, 1952)

Given my enthusiasm for crossovers, I allowed myself to get my hopes up for this one. Yet even as I started the story, I was pretty sure that this Golden Age GHOST RIDER story was going to resort to the old "guy pretending to be a monster" schtick, and sure enough, that's all it was. But this encounter certainly had a lot more mythic potential than, say, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.

One amusing detail: the theory about how the monster escaped death references not the Mary Shelley monster, but the 1931 Universal FRANKENSTEIN film, wherein the creature is almost slain in a burning windmill. I guess the story's writer didn't want to bring in any of the other monster-slayings in the Universal Frank-series-- least of all, the one that really ended the series, where the lumbering horror perishes thanks in part to the efforts of Abbott and Costello.

The full story can be read at THE HORRORS OF IT ALL.

NEAR MYTHS: "VENGEANCE OF THE FIRE GOD" (JUNGLE TALES #3, 1954)

Without denying that almost all jungle comics have focused on Caucasian protagonists, there have been a smattering of non-white characters as well. In an earlier post I mentioned Dell's backup strip BROTHERS OF THE SPEAR, and a little after that came this eight-issue feature, WAKU, PRINCE OF THE BANTU.

This jungle-tale took place in a corner of the jungle that implicitly never has any contact with Europeans or North Africans. The titular Waku is a noble young man who helps his Bantu fellows overcome such threats as hostile warlords and the occasional zombie-raising usurper.

Truth be told, the stories, credited on GCD to Don Rico, are largely formulaic. "Vengeance of the Fire God," though, is interesting in that it posits a world where one of the pagan gods worshipped by the Bantu is a real being, and not some medicine-man's hoax.

Waku, who has inherited his rulership from his late father, counsels his people to believe that the fire-god is benevolent. However, a series of accidents cause the Bantus to think themselves cursed, and a guy named Jobu advises Waku to step down to placate the mob. Waku makes the interesting comment that the fire god destroys people who fear him, but "if they stand up to him, he lets them alone." This would seem to run contrary to the usual belief about how gods handle disrespectful mortals, but it's at least an interesting variation on the theme.

The denouement is pretty ordinary: Jobu faked all the "fire-accidents" to gain power. However, the story ends by validating the belief that the fire-god is real, and ends with the deity conferring approval on the honest, forthright hero.

RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER PT. 2

 At the end of my previous half-a-review of John Lyden's FILM AS RELIGION, I wrote:

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

I've now finished the 2003 book, and I can appreciate that its author kept true to his objective, rather making contradictory claims, as did the authors to which I compared him earlier. I strongly disagree with his methodology, but I respect that he stuck to his conceptual guns.

As noted earlier, I approve of Lyden's attempt to steer clear of the reefs of reductionism. Though he provides cogent analyses of an assortment of various religious critical attitudes, such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Otto, Clifford Geertz is his main guide, though he does tip his hat toward one of the anthropologist's precursors in Chapter 2:

In distinguishing art from religion, [Geertz} accepts Susanne Langer's view that art deals with illusion and appearance, imagining how the world could be, whereas religion claims to represent the world as it really is. But religion also imagines how the world might be, and as Geertz's own theory indicates, religion links together what "is" and what "ought" to be in its ritual structure.

This idea of religion binding "is" and "ought" within a ritual structure is Lyden's sole justification for seeing a wide variety of commercial films as "religious." What Lyden oversimplifies is that when the "is" and "ought" dichotomy appears in actual religious narratives, it's usually to  illustrate a contrast between the phenomenal world that everyone experiences and the noumenal world which underlies the "illusion and appearance" of ordinary life. Lyden eradicates this core aspect of religious narrative so that he can bring under his scrutiny all sorts of films in which some "illusion vs. truth" dichotomy exists. Thus a film like 1989's WHEN HARRY MET SALLY falls within the compass of Lyden's idea of ritualized entertainment, because its narrative opposes one narrative illusion-- a world in which Harry and Sally don't realize their essential rightness for one another-- with a narrative truth, one in which they find one another. 

I notice that though Lyden mentions Susanne Langer to gloss Geertz's theory, Langer's nowhere to be found in the book's bibliography. Had Lyden read Langer, he might have gained some appreciation for the ways in which mythic and religious symbolism can be used to form narratives that are fundamentally distinct from those which are largely about conflicts in the naturalistic world. As I have not read Geertz as yet, it may be that he too is a little too cavalier with the "is/ought" dichotomy.

I don't particularly like downgrading Lyden, whereas I took some pleasure in identifying the foolish fallacies of the authors of the SACRED TIME book. I admire that he's trying to value fiction not for its supposed representations of literal truth, as has been the case with the majority of literary criticism since the days of Classic Greece. Rather, Lyden appreciates that fiction can be used to describe situations that do not exist, and may not ever exist, as a way of considering all possibilities. In this his position resembles mine as I've expressed it in essays like AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

But good intentions are not the only measure of a critical work, and once again, I'll point out that an author like Jung-- whom Lyden rejects-- has been instrumental in pointing out that the human psyche has "many mansions," so to speak. A film like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY has nothing to do with the symbolic correlations one finds in mythic and religious discourse, but it's perfectly valid within the sphere of the dramatic potentiality. Because Lyden tries to extend his definition of religious ritual narrative far beyond its scope, his reviews of various films, whether possessed of mythic content or not, have a bland, all-cats-are-grey sound to them.

It is amusing, though, that a modern scholar champions just the sort of non-mimetic possibilities that used to throw earlier generations into hissy-fits, as one sees with a "critic" like Frederic Wertham, who was so married to representational reality that he picked at a SUPERBOY story because its representation of George Washington at Valley Forge wasn't the way the real history of things went.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 3

 At the end of A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PART 2 I said I would next discuss "non-distinct replacements," but a better term would be "non-differentiated replacements."

In Part 2 I mentioned two examples of differentiated replacements from comic books: the forties hero The Black Owl and the Marvel villain The Molecule Man. I paid particular attention to the latter, noting that even though the first and second versions of The Molecule Man had no personal names in their debuts, and barely any personal history, they are nevertheless differentiated in that the reader assumes that they are living human beings with distinct backgrounds. Such differentiations are harder to make, though, with respect to non-human entities, because their non-human nature confers an aura of otherness that obscures differentiation. 

The most visible example of such a non-differentiated replacement is that of Godzilla, King of the Monsters. The first monster to go by this name perished at the end of his debut film, presumably because his creators had no idea that he was going to be bigger and more sequel-worthy than any other giant monster from any country. When the 1954 GODZILLA scored big, Toho Studios quickly followed up with GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. Instead of finding some way to reconstitute the dissolved body of the original King, the producers simply had another "Godzilla-saurus" emerge from the bowels of the Earth, and for the remainder of the original series, this pinch-hitter became, to all intents and purposes, the only Godzilla whose adventures anyone followed, even though hardcore viewers were entirely aware that the first rough beast had long passed on. A much later film purported to revive the first Godzilla, but for a couple of decades, no one cared about the debut creature.

Aliens are even more susceptible to becoming non-differentiated characters. The Martians of H.G. Wells, the archetypal alien invaders, are not differentiated from one another in either the original novel or in latter-day creations like Marvel's KILLRAVEN serial. Thus if Killraven fights a horde of Martians in New York, and then travels down to Tallahassee to fight a separate horde, both sets of Martians are essentially coterminous. The same principle applies from the ETs from the ALIEN film franchise, even though there are some morphological differences between particular representatives of the species, such as the male warrior from the first film and the Alien Queen from the second. 

The ETs of the PREDATOR series have the potential to be more individualized, though the hunters in the first and second films are not significantly differentiated from one another. I recall one comic-book story which made a minor attempt to distinguish two Predators within the context of that story, making one a "hero" and the other a "villain." But from what I can judge, the Predators' appeal lies in the fact that they're cookie-cutter menaces, whose raison d'etre stays the same regardless of any particular movie, even when played off against another "swarm" type of ET in the ALIEN VS. PREDATOR films.

Other examples include the various sharks in the JAWS franchise, at least two loosely related "killer bee" movies, and assorted fantasy-creatures like Al Capp's Shmoos.

Of course, it's not impossible for one film to coast on another's rep, using the name of a somewhat-established monster but substituting a beast of a different origin. The producers of the 2000 DTV film PYTHON in 2000 came out with another giant snake film, BOA, in 2002. Then the filmmakers engineered what looked like a crossover of the two serpentine beasties in 2004's BOA VS. PYTHON. However, though the Python used was essentially coterminous with the one from the 2000 film, the script provided a distinct version of a modern-day Boa that had no functional relation to the prehistoric giant from the 2002 film. 

RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER

The title of this essay functions as a companion piece to SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER, my largely negative review of the 1998 book STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. In my review I faulted the book's authors for having reeled out a "Cook's tour" of prominent views on the analysis of archaic and modern myth, and for having claimed that theirs was a "pluralist" vision, only to turn around and deluge the reader with nothing but Far Left interpretations of the TREK franchise. The authors claimed that they were going to "serve two masters" by appreciating the arguments of both those who criticized mythic content in fiction and and those who "venerated" it, but they were really only serving one of two putative masters and shortchanging the other.

John C. Lyden's 2003 FILM AND RELIGION follows a similar course to DEEP SPACE insofar as the author sets up his critical rationale by comparing and contrasting a wide variety of critical views on the interwoven topics of myth and religion. As of this writing I've only read the first three chapters of Lyden's book, and I have two more to go that are focused purely on his methodology, before even getting to his specific analyses of different films-- some of which are well-known metaphenomenal works, while others would seem to be remote from the average conception of myth-and-religion, such as WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

Lyden's estimations of various myth-and-religion scholars are, perhaps inevitably, a mixed bag for me. In my 2019 essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I criticized Jung for too often reducing mythological stories to purely psychological projections, and Lyden holds the same opinion. Yet whereas I found it possible to use certain insights by Joseph Campbell to correct Jung's error, Lyden makes it clear that he has no use for Campbell at all, dismissing the author largely because he finds Campbell's concept of "the monomyth" too restrictive. In truth, I have no more investment in that particular conception than did Lyden-- it's one of Campbell's weakest ideas-- but it's clear from Lyden's bibliography that he only read three of Campbell's later works, which doesn't give him much authority to analyze Campbell accurately.

Overall, though, Lydon seems to be broadly fair even to writers with whom he disagrees. I confess that I like the fact that he opposes the very thing I disliked in the DEEP SPACE book: the tendency to confuse sociological purpose with poetic creativity. In MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS  I wrote:

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.”

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

 

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE YELLOW CLAW'S RETURN"] (STRANGE TALES #159-167. 1967-68)

At a time when all the other comics-publishers believed that their audience wouldn't support funnybooks with continued stories, Silver Age Marvel succeeded in capturing juvenile imaginations with a wealth of mini-epics-- the Master Planner storyline in SPIDER-MAN, the "Galactus Trilogy," and many others. Arguably, Jim Steranko's two long continuities in the NICK FURY AGENT OF SHIELD feature were just two more among this august company. Yet whereas the stories of the Lee-Kirby FURY had just been traditional comic-book shoot-em-ups, Steranko brought an approach that combined traditional thrills with experimental touches.

Of the two long stories Steranko did when he took over from Lee and Kirby (and occasional fill-in personnel), the first, "the Death Spore Saga," is still fairly routine, and I won't discuss that one here. But the second long continuity, to which I've given the semi-ironic title of "The Yellow Claw's Return," shows a greater audaciousness in its mining of adventure-tropes from earlier fiction. Indeed, in one of the main hero's few meditations on his past life, Fury recollects that he was raised in New York's Hell's Kitchen, right at the time when "the talkies" were coming in, and that he idolized such transitional heroes as Tom Mix and Joe Bonomo. Patently Steranko was trying to adhere to the established history of the character, who had to be in his early twenties by the time America entered WWII. But the artist's mention of serial-heroes, even those unknown to patrons today, suggests that he wanted to stress a common heritage between these heroes of cinema and the Marvel superspy.

Steranko also had a vast knowledge of pulps and comics from the early 20th century, including the works of his artist-predecessor on FURY, Jack Kirby. Steranko and Kirby had worked together on FURY, with the younger artist provided "finishes" to Kirby roughs, and there was some degree of mutual admiration between the two. I don't know at what point Steranko came across the short-lived YELLOW CLAW title that "Atlas-Marvel" published in the mid-1950s. Yet as I've shown in this brief overview of that title, Kirby's three issues of that feature weren't exactly his best work, even if one only compares those issues to other Kirby-works of that decade. So why did Steranko choose to revive-- and I use that word advisedly-- a character whom few if any of his contemporary readers remembered?

First of all, anyone who reads Steranko's two-part HISTORY OF COMICS (1970/1972) would have noticed that the artist possessed a near-encylopedic knowledge of adventure-oriented pop culture dating back to the early 20th century. Because he was a fan-turned-pro in a more methodical manner than his predecessor Kirby, he probably remembered Kirby's YELLOW CLAW series better than Kirby did back in The Day. Not only does Steranko revive a version of the central villain, a patent Fu Manchu emulation, he also brings back the other support-characters from the series: the Claw's aide Voltzmann, his niece Suwan, and the evildoer's Asian-American opponent Jimmy Woo (with whom Suwan was in love, providing the only real trope-link to the prose works of Sax Rohmer). 

Still, there are clear departures. Steranko borrows some elements of the original costume-design for the villain (originated not by Kirby but by Joe Maneely), the character from the 1950s series looks like a reserved older man despite his reputation for uncanny long life. Steranko's Claw is lanky and powerful, clad in body-armor and a skullcap reminiscent of the Lev-Gleason CLAW, and whereas all Asians in the 1950s series had canary-yellow skin, the 1960s version is the only one so colored. Steranko's Yellow Claw has a bony face, heavy eyebrows that emphasize his epicanthic folds, and bony fingers with inch-long nails-- the latter visual trope taking us back to the whole "Asians with claws" trope I examined here. Further, unlike the fifties Atlas character, Steranko's villain has a nodding resemblance to the forties actor Richard Loo, seen above playing a mean Japanese officer in 1944's THE PURPLE HEART.

The only strong resemblance between Kirby's Yellow Claw and that of Steranko is that under Kirby, the 1950s Claw channeled a lot more wild super-science. But in the Lee-Kirby NICK FURY, both the good guys and the bad guys were constantly hurling dozens of super-science gadgets against one another, and Steranko, by taking over the custody of the feature, did the same. Did Nick Fury have a "sonic shatter cone" and a "magnetic repulsor watch?" Well, then, the Yellow Claw can have an "id-paralyzer," an "infinity sphere" with a "nucleo-phoretic drive," and an "ultimate annihilator,"-- well, OK, he does steal that one from the organization AIM-- but still! 

Now, Steranko's Claw is occasionally more recherche in his use of Asian tropes than the 1950s character was. The new version speaks in a flowery, pseudo-Oriental lingo, and when Fury briefly disguises himself to be Asian to hoax the villain, the hero thinks to himself that he got all his dialogue from "old Charlie Chan flicks." Yet one good effect of all the techno-overkill is that this Yellow Claw doesn't really have any roots in the world of any Real Asians, aside from his long nails and his dialogue. (Only once does Steranko make an egregious all-Asians-are-alike goof, by having the Chinese fiend address the hero as "Fury-san.") I theorize that to Steranko, Asian villains were simply a useful, familiar trope dispersed all through pop culture, with no particular political content.

As breakneck as Jack Kirby's pace could be in his action sequences, Steranko barely allows for any characters to take a breath in the eight installments of RETURN. The pace of the narrative is akin to that of the most raucous Republic serials, with frequent use of teleportation tech to send Fury and his opponents zooming from one locale to another. Fury has various aides-- many familiar faces introduced in RETURN for the first time, such as The Gaffer, Clay Quartermain, and Fury's gal-pal Countess Val-- and there are even some superhero crossovers, such as Captain America and two members of the Fantastic Four. But Fury's really the whole show, careening through hordes of heavily armed killers with his forty-year old hardbody and his handful of super-gadgets. 

I won't go into the many ways in which Steranko incorporated contemporary design-elements and artistic tropes into RETURN, but if one moment most captures Steranko's channeling of the swinging sixties mood, it's the conclusion to RETURN. After Fury's tumultuous battle with the Claw, it's revealed that this Claw was a robot, as were Suwan and Voltzmann (but not Jimmy Woo, who came back only to see a simulacrum of his love get killed). The entire battle between SHIELD and the Claw's forces was an enormous chess-game that the diabolical Doctor Doom played against a robot chess-master. This was the closest Marvel Comics could come to something like 1967's THE PRISONER, in which the viewer sees the whole game of genre-battles exposed as a "magic shadow-show." 

About five years later, the real Yellow Claw came out of retirement in a CAPTAIN AMERICA continuity, and Steve Englehart gave this version a lot more of that old Sax Rohmer exoticism, mere months before the same writer linked up the Marvel-rented property of Fu Manchu with the new character, Shang-Chi Master of Kung Fu. But though the real villain mouthed a few lines about getting even with whoever had played game with his image, I don't believe the "revised original Claw"-- who of course looked just like Steranko's robot-- even crossed paths with Doctor Doom. The revived character never really became a major player at Marvel Comics, and later got substantially revised so as to purge him of any fiendish Asian tropes. Naive though Steranko's mini-epic might be, it's still the high water-mark for this curious character.