NULL VS. NASCENT STATURE/CHARISMA

(NOTE: I posted this yesterday but belatedly realized I needed to correct a few things, so the continuity may be a bit rocky.) 

In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I sought to establish some ground rules for my conception of stature as it operates either through what I termed either Qualitative or Quantitative Escalation. The theory's best summation would be that at times a given literary character can ascend to a certain height of popularity purely through quality irrespective of the number of times the character appears, but that it's more common for characters attain popularity through repeated appearances.

I began by giving two examples: one of a famous literary character who only appeared once, and another who appeared several times. 

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

For the present I believe that the contrasting example of Quantitative Escalation is clear enough for my purposes at present. Yet as I've studied my previous statements on crossovers, I've decided that there are occasional exceptions to the Qualitative Rule that evoke the matter of "quality" without involving what I called above "cultural significance"-- and this "quality" stems from the author's success in giving his characters a relatively high level of stature over time, in comparison to those authors who are not so successful. In this essay most of what I'll be writing about both stature and charisma will concentrate on how they operate within the context of crossovers. Wherever I speak of stature and charisma in this context, I will use the terms "c-stature" and "c-charisma," since I've already stated that Primes and Subs both possess certain amounts of stature and/or charisma even when they are not in a crossover context.

In the above-cited essay, I also wrote:

...I noted that I deemed the now obscure Golden Age heroine Miss Victory to have accrued a moderately high level of stature-- one related purely to how often she appeared-- so that when she was revived in the 1980s series FEMFORCE, her original stature "crossed over" with the new heroes created for the series, even if this "crossover" existed only in the initiating episode of the FEMFORCE series, since the character, re-dubbed "Ms. Victory," became thereafter absorbed into the Femforce mythos.

 

But the question comes to me: can I truly regard FEMFORCE #1 as a "crossover" if the renamed "Ms. Victory" is the only one with stature accruing from Quantitative Escalation? The other three heroines seen on the above cover-- The Blue Bulleteer, Tara the Jungle Girl, and the She-Cat-- are all familiar riffs of earlier superheroine types, but to my knowledge none had previously appeared in commercially published comic books or in any other professional medium. So at the time of this issue's publication, doesn't that mean that these three heroines actually had no more stature than any other character who appeared just one time-- say, no more than a hero who just got one story and never appeared again? And if they did not possess stature within the first issue, then one might reason that none of the "regular" issues of the magazine would possess "c-stature." (I say "regular" because some issues were devoted to reviving other public domain Golden Ages like Miss /Ms. Victory.)

My answer is that such a combination of a "established character" with "newbie characters" can possess "c-stature." However, the presence or absence of "c-stature" can only be determined once the feature or franchise has accrued some history as a recurring venue in which the established character and the newbie characters continue to interact and in which the newbies are free to "spin off," if only temporarily, from the parent concept. In such a feature, the author's intent to launch a "new universe" has been realized, and so I conclude that all three "newbies" in the FEMFORCE comic book start out with what I call "nascent c-stature."

The opposite type of "c-stature," one in which the stature-potential is not realized, is what I call "null c-stature." This type would appear whenever there's an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new starring character (or characters) with help from an established one. The best example can be found in the television concept of the "back-door pilot," in which a producer would seek to foment a new series by having the proposed series' principal(s) interact with the characters of an established series. In 1968 Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a concept for a new SF-series by having its characters, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, encounter the characters of STAR TREK in the episode "Assignment Earth." If a series had eventuated from this encounter, I would have deemed the characters of Seven and Lincoln to share Prime stature with the TREK characters, and so both newbies would have "nascent c-stature" until their series actually manifested. In earlier essays I suggested that Norman Lear's character Maude had stature even prior to getting an actual series, having only appeared on two episodes of ALL IN THE FAMILY, but I did not have a distinct term for this particular type of stature, which is, again, "nascent c-stature." In those two episodes of FAMILY, Maude shares Prime c-stature with Archie Bunker and the other regulars, but only in a nascent sense. But no series for Seven and Lincoln eventuated from "Assignment Earth," and so the characters only possess "null c-stature," but only from the standpoint of a crossover analysis. For those who watch the episode without knowing that it was a back-door pilot, Seven and Lincoln are perceived to be just like any other Sub supporting characters on the show, possessed of charisma but no starring stature of any kind.

The same principle applies to null and nascent c-charisma. A character who appears just once and never again-- such as this 1947 Bat-villain The Glass Man-- has a base level of ordinary charisma, but he has no claim to any sort of c-charisma.

Now a character who appears only once may debut under circumstances that make it more POSSIBLE that he could be revived. Also in ESCALATION PT 2, I focused upon the 1996 multi-villain crossover BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN, writing:

The same [principle of charismatic crossovers] applies to a multi-villain crossover like THE LONG HALLOWEEN-- but only to those villains-- Joker, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow et al-- who have "made their bones." This same story introduces a new villain, Holiday, but since he never appeared prior to that story, he has negligible charisma and so is not part of the charisma-crossover per se. 

Given that close to twenty years have passed, and that Holiday, like the Glass Man, was slain in his debut, it seems at this point that Holiday also possesses ordinary charisma in that he achieved neither Quantitative nor Qualitative Escalation. Still, if someone did revive Holiday, I *might* judge that he retroactively possessed "nascent c-charisma" within the LONG HALLOWEEN narrative in a manner analogous to the newbie heroines of FEMFORCE possessing "nascent c-stature." But I'm not holding my breath for that to take place.

Of course a number of low-charisma characters were reinvented over time to have either high charisma or even high stature, both of which improved their chances to accrue either "c-charisma" or "c-stature." During the Golden Age of Comics, the Batman villain Deadshot only appeared once while the Riddler appeared only twice. But the Riddler's first appearance in the Silver Age led to his adaptation to the 1966 TV show, and he was almost instantaneously promoted to being a first-rank villain. One might say that this promotion also stemmed from quality rather than quantity, since Frank Gorshin's performance gave the character greater appeal to audiences than he had ever garnered from comic-book readers as the result of his three appearances in comics.  Eventually he would become notable in respect to both Quantitative and Qualitative Escalation, and even branches out to "cross over" with other DC heroes like the Elongated Man-- probably his first "c-charisma" crossover.

As for Deadshot, he certainly became Quantitatively more significant. The 1970s Englehart-Rogers redesign of his costume and modus operandi made him more popular with fans, and further articulations, particularly by John Ostrander in SUICIDE SQUAD, gave Deadshot a more well-defined character. I would not say that Deadshot became as Qualitatively exceptional a figure as did the Riddler. However, unlike the Riddler, Deadshot accrued high Prime stature through his membership in the eighties SUICIDE SQUAD (and, I  assume, later incarnations of the franchise as well). By definition,  of course, SUICIDE SQUAD was a crossover of many characters, almost all of whom had started as Subs, and this change resulted in all of them obtaining both regular stature and c-stature. 

The relevance of the "null and nascent" categories with respect to "charisma crossovers" also means that only from a historical perspective can I consider a story a crossover if it contains the association of a "first time villain" with a "repeat offender." In SPIDER-MAN #14, the "repeat offenders" are The Enforcers, though they had made but one previous appearance. The Green Goblin was the "first timer," and though his creators patently intended for him to be a repeat villain, his first appearance can only be seen as having "nascent c-charisma" from the perspective of knowing that the Goblin made further appearances. But from the current historical perspective, most comics-fans know that the character became far more iconic as a Spider-villain than the Enforcers ever could have been, and so SPIDER-MAN #14 also can be deemed a charisma-crossover. 

As I begin to wrap up yet another convoluted concoction of categories, I may as well circle back to a series that runs counter to that of the opening example. In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT 5, I outlined three types of ensembles, concluding with what I called "the semi-inclusive ensemble." The earliest example of this known to me was the Golden Age series "The Girl Commandos," in which the feature's creators picked up an established solo character, Pat Parker, and "included" her in a team made up of "newbies." Now, the pattern here superficially resembles that of "Femforce," where only one established character with a bunch of newbies. However, "Girl Commandos" was not a crossover in my judgment as "Femforce" was, because the female allies of Pat Parker were not designed to operate independently of the "Girl Commandos" feature. The heroines of "Femforce," however, were over time frequently spun off into individual features, however short-lived, so that they began to resemble a purely inclusive ensemble, but one where team stature came first and individual stature came later. 

Semi-inclusive groups became far more prevalent in the 1970s. The  1960s X-Men team was entirely exclusive in its members were meant to remain in their own feature aside from very rare individual guest-shots in other features. However, the 1970s X-Men combined a group of newbies with one legacy character from the first series (Cyclops) and a smattering of mutant characters who had only appeared in supporting roles. The newbies for the most part became the most popular characters, along with one-shot Hulk-antagonist Wolverine, and the characters' association with the X-Men largely effaced any piddling associations that Wolverine or anyone else-- except Cyclops and, slightly later, Marvel Girl-- had accrued, so I would not tend to judge the X-Men to be an ongoing "static crossover" series as I would FEMFORCE and SUICIDE SQUAD.

NOTE: Some of the terminology in this essay has been discarded since its writing.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #10

 Here's a rare example of a comic-book Black guy (African? Aborigine?) who's not made the goat for his dialect, from a 1943 issue of SPEED COMICS, in the feature "Padlock Holmes" by Ed Whelan.

And from a slightly later issue, here's The Black Cat encountering an African medicine-man whose intellectual attainments (and his resentment of Euro-culture) would fit him to appear in the next BLACK PANTHER movie.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5

 I might well have placed this post under a title like ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLED, but I chose the above series-title instead because the premise is rooted in some of the crossover-notions I've introduced here.

For instance, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2, I mentioned that a solo Golden Age character, Miss Victory, had been inducted much later in the Bronze Age super-team Femforce, and that I did consider this to be at least a static crossover, because Miss Victory had accrued a certain stature in her original appearances.

This led me to the realization that team-features as a rule fell into three ensemble-configurations.

The one most popular during the Golden Age was The Inclusive Ensemble, in which a team was composed entirely of protagonists who had their own features. A few of these teams were one-shots, as with this Black Cat story, but the most memorable such teams were the long-lived ones like THE MARVEL FAMILY and THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA.

Less prevalent in the 1940s was The Exclusive Ensemble, whose members all debut in the same team-feature and for the most part remain confined to that feature. The best known example would be THE BLACKHAWKS, none of whom appeared in other features, though one member, Chop-Chop, appeared for several years as a humor feature-- but this was always in magazines wherein the BLACKHAWKS were the stars. 

The last type was barely ever seen in the Golden Age, and I term this the Semi-Inclusive Ensemble, in which either one featured character gains a group of new characters to share the spotlight. I only know of one in the period, THE GIRL COMMANDOS. A solo character, "Pat Parker War Nurse," had appeared on her own for about eight stories, and then the editors put her in a girl-group for the remainder of her career. Much later, though, comics from the Bronze Age onward began cobbling together new teams out of characters who had appeared elsewhere, often in failed solo features.

ADDENDUM: On reflection, there are probably a lot more Exclusive Ensembles than Inclusive ones in the Golden Age, but many of the former were short-lived, and even those that enjoyed longish runs have been forgotten. A few old comics fans may recall Jack Cole's "Death Patrol." But "Red, White and Blue?" Or "The 3 Xs?" Not so much.

NEAR MYTHS: "HOLLYWOOD ATTACKED" (SPEED COMICS #23, 1942)

I might have listed this hero-crossover under "curiosities," but there's a little mythic appeal to the idea of having all the Harvey heroes in SPEED COMICS come together in one story, even though Lev Gleason had executed the same idea the year before  with DAREDEVIL BATTLES HITLER. 

Just as the Lev Gleason story was technically a Daredevil tale in which all the other featured characters were guest stars, this story stars the Black Cat, whose spy-busting adventures mostly took place in and around Hollywood. The idea of both the Japanese army and navy invading Hollywood, and only Hollywood, is amusing by itself, as is the idea that the Cat and her fellow stars-- Captain Freedom, Shock Gibson, disguise-artist Ted Parish and the Girl Commandos-- thwart the invasion without any help from U.S. armed forces.

That said, the unbilled writer did put a little thought into his premise, as seen on this page, where one hero suggests that they play the Japanese army and navy off one another-- an idea I can't remember having seen in WWII comics before. There's also a little "girl power" involved as the Black Cat and the Girl Commandos team up.

One other tidbit: at one point, a Japanese soldier uses the term "shimatta," which has more than one meaning but seems in context to mean "shit!"

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 4

 I first laid out my criteria for the terms "distributive" and "non-distributive" in STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5:

Now that I've put forth "charisma" as a term that better approximates the creator's organization of narrative elements, my other two terms apply to the process of whether the charisma is bestowed upon just one focal presence, or is distributed to more than one. The first would be "non-distributive," given that the charisma is not divided up, as with the Superman mythos, while the second, as seen in the Batman mythos, must be judged as "distributive" on the whole, since the Bat-mythos has a history of allotting narrative charisma to more than one presence in a sustained manner.

I later reversed my use of the terms "stature" and "charisma" in EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2, but the terms "distributive" and "non-distributive" are unaltered.

Since my arguments about the functions of stature and charisma in crossovers depends on the past history of the characters crossed over, I'll note that the distributive/non-distributive dichotomy may also apply to teamups of heroes and villains.

For instance, I said that BATMAN changed from non-distributive to  distributive as soon as the Crusader acquired Robin as a regular partner. Some characters who did not have their own features, such as the Barbara Gordon Batgirl, functioned only as guest-stars until such time as they acquired their own berths. Once Batgirl II had enjoyed her own backup strip for several years, I would tend to judge every appearance of Batgirl II in the BATMAN feature to be a "static crossover," because the character had acquired sufficient stature from being a centric character. 

Oddly, though, before getting that stature, one might argue that Batgirl-- a non-distributive character in her comic book berth-- debuted as a distributive type in the 1967-68 season of BATMAN. Every episode of that TV show's third season presented Batman, Robin and Batgirl as regular co-combatants, and thus they were as much a team in that season as Batman and Robin were in the previous two seasons.

More on these recondite matters later, perhaps.

NULL-MYTHS: WONDER WOMAN WAR OF THE GODS (1991)

George Perez stated that one reason for his doing the WAR OF THE GODS four-issue mini-series-- the core of a multi-crossover, naturally including WONDER WOMAN-- was because the Amazon's fiftieth anniversary came to pass in 1991, and he was also planning on concluding his sixty-plus run on the title at that time. But I can't help but wonder if part of his motivation was to see whether or not he could top his most famous crossover-work, 1986's CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, which he created alongside writer Marv Wolfman. In my review I noted that CRISIS, while it was governed by commercial considerations, Wolfman and Perez managed to come up with certain characters that endowed the "jumbled mosaic" of the story with mythic significance:

These three characters all play roles that bear a striking resemblance to characters associated with the Christian Passion. This observation does not speak to what either of COIE's creators thought about religion. COIE is a secular comics-story and all the Judeo-Christian allusions are secular as well, just as were (Jewish) Marv Wolfman's uses of Christian mythology in the TOMB OF DRACULA series. But the fact that Wolfman and Perez invoked such complex associations at all speaks to the likelihood that they were attempting to endow their commercial endeavor with the significance of a great mythic tale, rather than just tossing together a crock-pot full of super-dudes and letting the chips fall where they might. 

WAR OF THE GODS, though, has no "master thread" to unite all the chaos. The TPB referenced collects only the four issues of WAR and Perez's last five issues of WONDER WOMAN, and therefore it leaves out various other tie-ins to the main narrative. This means that the WAR TPB suffers from several storytelling lacunae, though at the same time a lot of the complementary stories, such as those of SUICIDE SQUAD, probably didn't really have much impact on the overall structure.

The main menace in CRISIS was the Anti-Monitor, who was gobbling up all the "alternate worlds" in the universe, and when he was stopped, the DC Universe ended up (however temporarily) with just one unitary universe. But since Perez wants to build up Wonder Woman's concluding storyline, the Amazon's old foe, Circe the Sorceress, unleashes an assortment of spells designed to destroy Gaea, the Goddess of Earth, for some vague reason. Circe not only framed the Amazons of Themiscyra for various crimes, she also foments a big purposeless martial conflict between the gods of various Earth-pantheons. Regardless of whether these deities are from ancient Africa or from the planet Thanagar, they're all pretty much thick-headed brawlers straight out of Jack Kirby, and not "godlike" in any way I recognize.

 That said, there might still have been some potential in this setup, if the fight-scenes had been as vivid as what Perez gave fans in CRISIS. However, Perez only contributes various layouts to the project, and none of the people brought in to finish the pencils provided any really kick-ass scenes. Further, the most extended god-battle is the most problematic: a duel between the gods of Greece and those of Rome, which had all the charm of seeing superheroes fight their doubles. This idea that the Roman gods have some existence independent in the Universe allows Perez to revive "the Son of Vulcan," an obscure Charlton character whom DC purchased in the eighties-- a revival I feel confident no one was asking for. On a somewhat more satisfying level, the articulation of a Roman mythology allows Perez to provide a new origin for the diverse powers of Captain Marvel. This is also something no one was demanding (maybe Roy Thomas?), but if you have to have a retcon to explain a sloppy yet fun Golden Age formulation, you could do worse.

I seem to remember having a vague liking for the WAR story back in 1991, even though I wasn't reading most of the tie-in books, least of all Perez's WONDER WOMAN. I didn't remember that Perez is nowhere near as good at organizing fifty-something guest-star characters into one narrative as Wolfman and Perez were in CRISIS. One accepts that in multi-crossovers there will be numerous "walk-ons" who only appear to acknowledge their existence. Yet even the few characters who get more sizable dialogue-exchanges don't have actual character-arcs. Most if not all of the characters sound exactly the same and barely make reference to their individual lives. But even the five issues of WONDER WOMAN, in which Perez is dealing with a regular cast of characters, are marked by tedium and poor dramatic construction.

The closest Perez comes to valid myth is a sequence from the WONDER WOMAN title, in which the demigod Hercules visits Themiscyra. I can't remember if Perez's version of the hero had the same checkered history with the Amazons that appeared in the Marston canon, but if so, no one remarks on it. The island is assailed by earthquakes, and when Hercules ventures into caves beneath the island to learn what's going on, he learns that the island's being supported by that little old earth-supporter Atlas. After the two of them go back and forth on their contentious history, Atlas disappears and Hercules has to take over the role of supporting the giant's burden. However, Hercules' problem is apparently solved in one of the comics not collected here, which provides the most annoying lacuna in the narrative. 

Oddly, The George Perez Website preserved a comment from an interview with the late artist , commenting on two of the projects Perez was working on at the same time, the other being INFINITY GAUNTLET, which Perez had to depart in order to finish WAR.

George also mentioned that he was itching to leave DC Comics (contract expires in 1990 but extended for WW's 50th): "I do not plan to ever sign another exclusive contract."

The story behind this is that he ended up working on War of the Gods (in celebration of Wonder Woman's then-50th Anniversary), but also working for Marvel Comics' Infinity Gauntlet AT THE SAME TIME. The result is that George had to drop IG to finish WotG.

It's strange how everybody loved Infinity Gauntlet (hot back issues and a popular movie)... while War of the Gods are typically quarter-bin comics.

I wouldn't necessarily validate the tastes of comics-fans across the board, but in this case, I think the fans were right. Whatever the flaws of GAUNTLET, it's a unified story with a beginning, middle and end. WAR OF THE GODS, with or without its crossovers, is just the aforementioned crock-pot of super-dudes-- and dudettes, of course.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "LEGACY" (WONDER WOMAN #45, 1990)

Less than two weeks ago, celebrated comics-creator George Perez passed away due to a long struggle with cancer. I had liked Perez's work since I had encountered it in the 1970s, where he put as much work into delineating a toss-off character like Marvel's "Man-Wolf" as he would later devote to Fantastic Four, Avengers, Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths and the 1987 re-launch of Wonder Woman. FWIW, I even reviewed the first three issues of the Amazon's rebirth for THE COMICS JOURNAL. Without looking back at the old review, I remember stating that I admired the writer-artist's updating of the Marston origin for comics of the eighties and nineties, though I found that the next two issues slumped back into standard superhero fodder-- and I tend to think most of his Wonder Woman scripts, whether he drew them or not, fell into the same rut. Thus, though he worked with superheroes for over forty years, it's my reluctant evaluation that his immense creativity was focused largely on design of spiffy looking new characters, but that he didn't bring to those characters the sort of mythopoeic personality I can find in the creations of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox.

Nevertheless, the WONDER WOMAN title pushed Perez to incorporate archaic myths into the type of stories he told, and "Legacy" from issue #45 seems to be one of his best ventures into the mythopoeic realm-- even though, oddly, the starring character is barely in it.

One relatively obscure archaic myth-figure whom Perez brought into the WONDER WOMAN mythos in the first issue was Harmonia, daughter of Ares. The Greek war-god, usually given the Roman name of "Mars" in the Marston continuity, was a frequent opponent of the peace-loving heroine, but Marston didn't devote much space to the offspring of either the war-god or any other Greek deity. I won't explore the full history of Harmonia in the Perez Wonder Woman stories. However, issue #45 makes clear that one reason Perez chose to build up this character was because in archaic Greece Harmonia was one of many incarnations of "the Fatal Woman," one who brings bad luck to men without even intending to do so-- not unlike another Greek myth-figure of greater modern renown, Pandora.

"Legacy" opens with Harmonia seeking the counsel of the famed dispensers of mortal fates, the Moirai. Harmonia has overheard various intimations from both her father Ares and from the forge-god Hephaestus about some mysterious identity between the archaic Pandora and the modern heroine Princess Diana. The goddess's desire to resolve the mystery gives Perez the excuse to expatiate upon the heritage of the archaic Pandora, with an eye, naturally, to explaining her significance to modern readers.

Perez then weaves two stories of Pandora. The first follows many familiar tropes of the story from the Greek poet Hesiod, the main source for the tale of the lady and her box, though Perez mixes in his fair share of tropes designed to heighten a feminist interpretation. His first break with tradition is that he depicts how, following the Greek gods' triumph over the Titans, a man named Prometheus-- mortal, and therefore not a Titan himself-- infiltrates Olympus and steals fire for the benefit of his fellow mortals. As in most renditions of the traditional tale, Zeus then has Hephaestus craft a woman of clay, calling her Pandora, which name was said by some to mean, "the gift of all" because a variety of gods bestowed assorted charms upon her. (It's of some interest that when Robert Kanigher rewrote the Wonder Woman in the 1950s, he had her getting her powers from various Greek deities as well.) As in the Hesiod story, Zeus sends Pandora as a peace offering to Prometheus. Prometheus smells a rat and won't receive the gift, but his not-so-bright brother Epimetheus marries Pandora. A second divergence appears, however, in that Pandora brings with her the Box of Evil Fate to which her name was ascribed. In the original tale Prometheus has custody of the container from the first, which is why Pandora's opening of the box rates as a great betrayal.

Perez's version also spreads the blame by borrowing from the Adam and Eve story, in that Pandora doesn't open the fatal box on her own, but incites Epimetheus to do so. However, after the world becomes overwhelmed by multitudinous evils, Epimetheus is not penalized the way Adam is, by getting blamed for his sins. Only Pandora gets cast forth, and presumably dies alone, though the end of the story seems to indicate that her clay may get "recycled" into the prima materia from which Princess Diana is conceived.

Then Harmonia's conversation with the Moirai provides a segue to the second Pandora story, which is far more in line with the way modern feminists would rewrite the story to contradict Hesiod's misogyny. The Moirai speak of a time before either Titans or gods ruled Earth, implicitly "caveman times." The only deity was Gaea, a goddess coterminous with the Earth, who looked upon struggling humans as her children. By some process of "virgin birth"-- yet another shout-out to Marston-- Gaea conceived Pandora, who was not the recipient of gifts but the bestower of only good things from the jar she carries. (Scholars have asserted that the "box" attributed to Pandora, "pyxis" in Greek, was in the original text a "pithos," a storage jar.) 

Yet, for reasons not made clear by Perez, the "Age of Titans" comes into being, followed by the Titan-god conflict which razes the Earth even though Later-Pandora has yet to unleash the evils of her box. Humankind at this point seems to lack any agency to be wicked, so Perez elides the traditional reason for the Greek deluge: that Zeus chose to wipe out most of humankind because of their sinful ways. Instead, most of humankind dies because kind-hearted Gaea weeps "ten thousand tears" at the carnage. Perez keeps the idea that two mortals survive the flood, a son of Prometheus and a daughter of Pandora--thus, like Hesiod, making modern humanity the descendants of a "marriage" that didn't happen between the sires of each progenitor. Perez then observes that the later Pandora story was  a repudiation of the true, earlier one, so that Woman became not "the Inspirer" but "the Tempter." Following the conclusion of the second story, the last few pages set up later WW storylines, and so aren't relevant to the mythopeic "meat" of the two conflicting narratives. 

"Legacy" has a fair number of weaknesses. The artwork-- contributed by three female artists and one male-- is only fair overall, though the artists can't be faulted for a sequence in which Perez shows fierce gryphons guarding Zeus's sanctuary, but never explains how mortal Prometheus gets past the monsters. Perez also notes that the two survivors of the flood fling stones behind them when they survey the wasted world, but he fails to explain that this is the magical method by which the two humans repopulate the world-- an omission so major than one suspects editorial meddling. But overall "Legacy" is still a creditable entry into the ranks of modern mythcomics, and a tribute to George Perez's own legacy.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DEMOCRACY SMASHER" (MARVEL FAMILY 67, 1952)

 In the last few years of Fawcett Comics' existence before the lawsuit with DC forced them to shut down their superheroes, premiere writer Otto Binder showed no sign of flagging creative powers. In CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES #125 (1951), Binder and artist C.C. Beck introduced a new villain, King Kull, the last survivor of a race of ancient beast-men. 

He was also supposedly the source of all mortal legends about "boogiemen," though I have to say that this character-- whose name may owe less to the Robert E. Howard hero than to a traditional king of Irish myth-- doesn't really look like he could terrify anyone. In his original appearance, Kull pops out of the Earth for the first time in decades and immediately starts trying to kill off modern mortals, the descendants of the ancients who slew his people (admittedly in self-defense). Kull, who possesses incredible technology for a caveman type, starts unleashing a cataclysmic doom on the world, and Captain Marvel comes to the rescue. The hero wins but the villain escapes.

I'm not sure if "The Democracy Smasher" from MARVEL FAMILY #67 was Kull's second outing or not, but the book-length script shows a much greater concentration by Binder on the thematic thread of ancient horror menacing modernity. 

This time, before Kull strikes, the three members of the Marvel Family just happen to be taking part in a newly minted local holiday, "Democracy Day," in which Billy Batson and his buddies celebrate the historical tradition of democracy. Slightly later, Old Shazam summons the Marvels to his sanctum, claims that he gave Billy the idea for the new holiday, and shows the heroes three statues of "three torches" that "are the world's hope for democracy and peace."

Kull, once again emerging from the chthonic womb of the Earth, swears to destroy the democratic way of life, and tries to make the statues of mankind's great evils help him crush his enemies. 

Batson and friends transform into their heroic identities, but while they're saving themselves, Kull not only steals the torches, he extinguishes them with a pill filled with "distilled evil" in a nearby subterranean river. Kull escapes and lights a "torch of evil" that makes modern humans despise their democratic traditions. 

The Marvels figure out that the only way to re-light the three beneficial torches is to travel back in time to each of the three times when democracy's light was kindled. First, they go back to Athens, and manage to ignite one of their magical torches from the original one, though they have to fight an earlier incarnation of King Kull to do so. Binder of course was writing for children, so he oversimplifies the extent to which Greek philosophers championed democracy, to say nothing of conflating that supposed tradition with the practice of "torch races" in the early Olympics. 

While Mary Marvel takes her lighted torch back to 1951, Captain Marvel and his junior partner journey to England to light another torch during the signing of the Magna Carta. Naturally this idea of a "flame of freedom" from that historical period is based in nothing but Binder's imagination, and thus this is the least interesting of the three voyages. Still, Marvel Jr gets to light his fire and he also returns to 1951.

Captain Marvel soldiers on alone to 1776, for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and we finally get to the heart of all this torch-imagery: that of the torch held by the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps to get around the fact that the authentic statue was not erected until 1886, Binder imagines that three of the grey eminences supposedly present at the signing-- Ben Franklin and the country's first two presidents-- just happen to have a simulacrum of the Statue of Liberty there in the room. Kull raises his beastly head again, but the hero sends him packing and re-lights the last of the magical democracy-torches. (One witty line: Washington remarks that they've been "saved by a redcoat.") Then, back in 1951, all three heroes return and douse Kull's torch of dictatorship, but can't prevent the sub-man from returning to his subterranean domain. The story ends on a predictable but still pleasing denouement, in which the heroes once more affirm the traditions they hold sacred.

NEAR-MYTHS" "FANTASY ISLE, CHAPTER 6" (AMAZING MYSTERY FUNNIES #22, 1940)

 Most of the fantasy/SF comics-features of the very early Golden Age are pretty forgettable, and as I was scanning through the Centaur publication AMAZING MYSTERY FUNNIES, I had the same impression of  this strip, FANTASY ISLE, in which a fellow with the risible name of "Tippy Taylor" keeps tumbling through various fantasy-scapes.

Chapter 6 at least steals from better sources than the usual feature of the period, though. In this installment, he comes across a vase, opens it, and is almost killed by a genie with a sword. However, the genie changes his mind and decides to give Tippy a magical summoning rin. Both the murderous genie and the obedient genie are taken from prominent English-translated stories from the 1001 Nights. 

The same "Queen of the Underworld" whom the genie mentions brings Tippy to her palace and proposes marriage to him. Tippy doesn't like girls (or at least overly forward ones) and refuses. She keeps him around until he wanders into a remote room and finds that she embodies another story-trope, that of BLUEBEARD.

On top of that, the royal bitch also likes to borrow tropes from the 1920 novel L'ATLANTIDE, whose queenly protagonist had the habit of killing her lovers and preserving them in statue form. One might expect Tippy to use his genie-ring to escape, but the idea never even passes through his tiny brain. However, a helpful serving-maiden helps Tippy escape with a pill that just happens to duplicate the famous motif from ALICE IN WONDERLAND, shrinking Tippy so that he can go on to some other thoroughly derivative adventure. But I'll give the strip this much cachet: it wasn't good, but at least it was eclectic in its swipes.

NOTE: I explored all the features published on DIGITAL COMICS MUSEUM and Tippy the Twit never does use any of his wishes. These early comics do however include a mildly interesting work by Tarpe Mills and some incredibly formulaic work by later wunderkind Will Eisner.

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE BEAST WOMEN OF ZARGA"] SHEENA #12 (1951)

Given how deeply Edgar Rice Burroughs tapped the depths of myth in the jungle-adventures of Tarzan, I might have hoped that I'd come across even a fair smattering of near myths in Golden Age jungle comics. However, I'd have to say that most of the ones I've encountered were far too formulaic to allow for that much symbolic discourse.

Still, I found one mythcomic for Fantomah, and one near myth for Sheena, so I decided to blow an afternoon scanning through online reprints of the latter Queen of the Jungle to see if I could find anything worth writing about. The result is this story, which appeared in 1951, close to the end for both the Sheena comics of the Golden Age and their publisher Fiction House.

We begin with jungle-queen Sheena and her mate Bob agreeing to help an eminent scientist investigate the superstition of strange "beast-women" who rule over "devil beasts." Oddly, though, the jungle duo don't just meet the doctor the ordinary way. Lightning knocks them off a cliff and into a raging river, and it's just by dumb luck that eminent Doctor Crane happens to be there in his boat to pick them up.

By this time it was practically de rigeur that the "devil beasts" would be a bunch of prehistoric survivals, though at least the artist didn't just cadge the images out of some high school science text. First the expedition encounters a tentacled "serpoquid" (Sharktopus, take note). Then along come the hairy-armed (but still comely) Black Amazons known as "the Beast Women of Zarga."Sheena gets separated from her comrades, and almost killed by giant spiders known as "spidrons." The Beast-Women take Bob and the other men to their giant idol Zarga, who by his silence agrees that the intruders must die. On a peculiar note, Doctor Crane thinks that the women-- whose men are never seen-- are "offshoots of some ancient race, preserved by the glowing rocks." What glowing rocks, you ask? The ones the artist forgot to draw, apparently.

The Beast-Women are just about to have their reptilian mounts trample the captives to death when Sheena intrudes, insisting that in a duel of true queens, "queens cannot die." This provokes the Beast-Queen into a one-on-one duel, which she of course loses, causing the other hairy ladies to retreat further into the cave. Then everyone-- just goes home. That's it? They disturb an ancient people for their curiosity, and then, curiosity satisfied, they just leave? I mean, the Beast Women weren't nice people, but they weren't really bothering anyone. But of the hundreds of jungle stories in which I've seem depictions of Amazon tribes, I have to admit that I've never seen anyone depict a tribe of hairy ladies. For a myth-maniac like myself, this detail suggests that these ladies are more beast than human and thus able to command all the monsters of prehistory-- and that alone makes this weird tidbit worth writing about.

SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH

 I mentioned in PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS some examples, mostly from Classic TREK, wherein certain episodes emphasized one potentiality more than any other. But it occurs to me that it would be interesting to show in greater detail how a given story works out a dramatic "short-range" problem in a hyperconcrescent fashion, but does not venture into the deeper level of abstract thought that would promote a mythopoeic "long-range" conundrum, particularly in the realm of a psychological epistemological pattern.

The manga NAGATORO is my subject this time, and for the most part its principal emphasis is that of the dramatic potentiality. One of this manga's most interesting aspects is that author Nanashi is as careful as any novel-author to introduce dramatic problems early in the manga that are not "solved" until they appear again in a much later arc.

Here is a key scene from the third installment of the official NAGATORO manga. The set up is that, after the young woman has emotionally bullied the introverted young man whom she calls (with subtle sarcasm) her "senpai," he finally forces himself to ask her what her name is.

Now, an American reader might not know that in Japan it's customary for high school students not to call each other by their first names as casually as do Americans of the same age. First name address between male and female implies the familiarity of boyfriend and girlfriend, so using a surname, as Nagatoro does here, is common. Nagatoro does not even offer her given name, and before the young man can offer either of his names, she shuts him down, asserting that she prefers to keep calling him "Senpai." Even much later, after the young girl has heard other persons use Senpai's full name, she declines to call him that.

Nothing more is said about the matter of names until Nanashi finally begins a full arc on the subject in Chapters 61-62. When Nagatoro stays out of school with the flu, Senpai visits her at her home. Nagatoro accuses him of trying to snoop on her secrets:

While Nagatoro brings up the subject just to rag on him about his supposed perversions, Senpai blurts out that he wants to know "your name... and stuff." Nagatoro is mildly flummoxed to realize that she never did disclose that information to him.

Without going into specifics about how this scene plays out, Senpai does find out that Nagatoro's given name is "Hayase." That said, even though he feels mildly stoked by having that knowledge, he doesn't start using the given name since that would imply a possible romantic connection. 

Then in Chapter 66, Senpai gets sick with the flu he caught from her, and she visits him at his home. However, he falls into a semi-delirium in which he imagines a new familiarity with Nagatoro-- and he actually thinks he's dreaming when he calls her "Hayase" to her face. 

Senpai then promptly passes out, and Nagatoro becomes stoked by this indirect expression of intimate feeling, so much so that she almost kisses him in his sleep-- only to get interrupted by exigent circumstances. 

This arc more or less concludes in this same chapter. Senpai recovers from the flu and goes to school the next day, confused as to his memories of his "dream." But Nagatoro not only remembers everything that happened, she suddenly shows extreme resentment of the feelings he invoked in her. She punishes him for her own reactions by kicking him, and her line, "You're just Senpai" is clearly her attempt to thrust him back into a completely subsidiary relationship. 

This arc appears to conclude the whole "what's your name" business. The most current installment of the series, Chapter 104, depicts a closer relationship between the potential romantic couple, but they still address each other as "Senpai" and "Nagatoro." IMO Nanashi just wanted to explore the drama of two young people with considerable ambivalence about their feelings toward one another. 

But is there any way in which Nanashi's insight into teenaged psychology could be deemed what I would term a psychological myth? 

It might be argued that Nagatoro and Senpai's feelings for one another are being channeled through a matrix of cultural expectations; that of the expectation that only possible romantic partners use first names with one another. However, in my estimation this custom has no deeper resonance. The name-custom is the equivalent of a "stop-sign." Such a sign has one meaning, and one meaning only, so the custom doesn't compare, say, to a more multivalent custom. For instance, the idea of an enduring relationship between a samurai and his leader may be said to be based in custom. But it's a custom that can take on a range of meanings in literature, and thus manga as different as DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND and ROSARIO + VAMPIRE can use that resonance for very different purposes.

Thus, when I search for a psychological myth, I look for an elaboration of symbolic resonances into mythopoeic concrescence, which is only possible when the author is a "long-range" mode. A dramatic concrescence can be formed from any number of "short-range" emotional states, but that concrescence does not depend on any abstractions as does the mythopoeic type. 

ROHMER REFLECTIONS

 

At the end of my review of THE GOLDEN SCORPION, I idly wondered as to whether Sax Rohmer might have meant to do something else with Fu Manchu, given that character's guest-starring appearance in the novel. I said:

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...

Though it was a fair question, I was aware that professional writers don't live in a hothouse; projects are initiated or dropped according to whether or not they put food on the table. So I consulted the only book-length biography of Rohmer, the 1972 MASTER OF VILLAINY, written by Rohmer's widow and by his secretary Cay Van Ash. (In all likelihood Mrs. Rohmer just provided the information and Van Ash did the writing,)

I haven't finished re-reading the biography, but I sought out the chapters relevant to my main question: why had Rohmer deserted the character of Fu Manchu for roughly fourteen years, the period between the serialization of HAND OF FU MANCHU in 1917 and that of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU in 1930?

VILLAINY is a chatty bio, filled with stories of Rohmer and his wife making their way in life and traveling from place to place, with only occasional anecdotes about when Rohmer worked on this or that novel or story. No one could use this bio to chart the development of Rohmer's works generally or of the Fu Manchu character specifically. However, the chapters I read suffice to clear up some of the mysteries of the fourteen-year delay.

Though Van Ash doesn't specifically address the question as to why Rohmer allowed Fu to go dormant in the late 1910s, he does comment that the author had other fish to fry, both joining the army during WWI and later becoming involved in theater (where Fu Manchu was considered for a play-adaptation that somehow didn't come off). Van Ash supplies no anecdotes as to why Rohmer didn't follow up the intimations of a Fu-return in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION.

The biographer does, however, supply a convoluted clue about the process of the devil-doctor's recrudescence. In 1925, the American magazine Colliers apparently contacted Rohmer about a follow-up to HAND-- meaning that the true lacunae is more like eight years, not fourteen. Van Ash does not speculate as to why the magazine wanted some new Fu, though I would suggest that the editors' interest might have sparked by the two silent serial adaptations of the Chinese villain, respectively coming out in 1923 and 1924. 

Rohmer agreed, but he did so expecting that the magazine would pay him separately for each segment of the novel he delivered. To the writer's consternation, Colliers was determined not to pay until they had the whole novel. Rohmer was short of cash and could not work that far ahead without income, so after delivering his first installment of DAUGHTER, he started a new project and submitted that to Colliers. This was the novel that eventually became THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA, and though Colliers only accepted this work reluctantly, the first installment caught on with readers. Van Ash remarks that later, when Rohmer was more flush and was ready to continue with his work on DAUGHTER, Colliers then became much more bullish on further installments of EMPEROR!

Thus, my earlier speculation, though accurate based on what info I possessed at the time, is incorrect insofar as I hypothesized that Hollywood's first sound-era movie with Fu Manchu, 1929's MYSTERIOUS DR. FU-MANCHU, had encouraged Rohmer to return to his best-known character, not to mention the unnamed "daughter of Fu Manchu" who had just barely put in an appearance in 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU. Not all the blanks are filled on this matter, but for the time being, "tis enough-- 'twill serve."