MYTHCOMICS: "REMEMBRANCE" (RUROUNI KENSHIN, WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP, 1994)

In this essay I provided a writeup of the circumstances under which former "samurai assassin" Kenshin Himura came to reside in a small Japanese town in the late 1800s, and how he made a small coterie of friends who also became his aides in battle. I won't repeat any of that information here, in large part because the arc examined here is almost entirely a flashback to the "origin of Kenshin." The hero relates this narrative almost non-stop to his allies in order to prepare them for an anticipated assault by one of the samurai's deadliest enemies.

About thirty years previous to the main continuity, Kenshin, an orphan of no high estate, has become allied to the Ishin Shishi, a reformist movement in Japanese politics, one aimed at overthrowing the conservative shogunate. Because the reformers lack martial forces to equal those of their enemies, Ishin Shishi seeks to undermine the shogunate through assassination of various functionaries. Kenshin, though a man of conscience, has dedicated his life to paving the way for reform in this bloody manner, and the men that he slays one night in 1864 are just three more of his usual targets. Only one factor stands out: one of the three men, Kiyosato, manages to leave a mark upon the samurai-- a facial scar Kenshin bears from then on-- despite the fact that Kiyosato possessed no skill comparable to Kenshin's.

Much later, Kiyosato's death will have more extensive consequences for the samurai. Shortly after intervening to drive off some drunks hassling a woman at a local bar, Kenshin is attacked by shogunate assasssins. He kills them all, but the woman witnesses the killing. Kenshin knows he's expected to kill any witnesses, but instead he takes her to Ishin Shishi headquarters. 

Kenshin's cohorts are quick to point out that the woman Tomoe, though somewhat older than Kenshin, matches him in her dispassionate demeanor. She breaks his ethos down into "bad people carry swords and good people don't" in order to show its absurdity. Yet she recognizes his pain, and tells him she will become "a sheath, to hold back your madness." And eventually, due to her calm insistence, the two of them are married.

For the first time, Kenshin gets a taste of happiness that's more than merely theoretical-- in part because the forces of Ishin Shishi have been routed, and the reform movement is in tatters. The shogunate enforcers are aware of Kenshin's retiring ways, and they plan to execute him, in part with the help of Enishi, Tomoe's little brother.

This revelation leads inevitably to one of even greater consequence: Tomoe too is a shogunate agent, though only out of circumstance. She had been engaged to Kiyosato before Kenshin killed him, so with the help of the shogun-agents, she inserted herself into Kenshin's path, beguiled him with her seeming indifference, and then married him-- all with the aim of setting him up for murder. But though she didn't love Kiyosato so much as feel gratitude toward him, she fell in love with Kenshin. Kenshin forgives her, but she naively seeks out the assassins in the neighboring "Forest of Barriers" with the intent of misleading them.

However, the assassin-leader gleans that Tomoe has turned against them, and instead he uses Kenshin's wife as bait for the samurai. Kensin plunges into the forest to rescue his wife, only to find that, because of magnetic anomalies in the area, his "sixth sense" of samurai intuition has become dulled. This doesn't keep the hero from slaying his first attacker, but as he continues, the assassins use other methods to assail his hearing and his sight.  

One of the assassins-- who has a remarkable resemblance to Marvel Comics' Venom-- escapes to be a thorn in Kenshin's side later on. But when only one assassin is left, the blinded and deafened Kenshin engages the killer in battle. Tomoe tries to intervene on Kenshin's behalf, and thanks to his sense-deprived status, he kills both Tomoe and the assassin with one stroke. On top of his grief, the Ishin Shishi reach out to Kenshin once more, requiring him to kill for the cause. Though Kenshin agrees so that all his previous executions are not without purpose, he swears that when the "new age" comes, he will never kill again. And this is the oath he keeps once the shogun declines, for the Kenshin who comes to settle at Kaoru's dojo does indeed refrain from killing, even under the most onerous temptations. And the next arc sets up one such temptation, as thirty years later Enishi seeks vengeance on Kenshin for his sister's death. 

The consequences of that arc are outside the concerns of this essay. Taken by itself, "Remembrance" exemplifies one of the enduring themes of RUROUNI KENSHIN. There's no flinching from the fact that history is always built upon the slaughter of both the guilty and the innocent, and not just in feudal Japan. But, to borrow some terms of Francis Fukuyama, this historical setting gives creator Nobuhiro Watsuki the chance to portray a transition from the old way of *megalothymia* to the more egalitarian way of *isothymia." In THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, Fukuyama wrote:

Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifestations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood.

"Remembrance" appeared about two years after END OF HISTORY was published, but no direct line of influence seems likely, or even necessary. Watsuki, writing about Japan's last feudal period, engages with the transition to modernity in terms of emotional valence. Kenshin is the epitome of the master swordsman, having reached a pinnacle of discipline few of his contemporaries can attain. Yet, though he says that he loves the sword-art but not killing, he's drawn into the life of an assassin in the hopes of putting an end to the old, megalothymotic ways. His own emotional needs are soothed by embracing the simple life of marriage-- the life of the "common man" of isothymic relationships-- but ironically, he would never have met the first love of his life had Kenshin's enemies not been using her as a pawn against him. Additionally, had Kenshin not been an assassin, Tomoe probably would married Kiyosato and enjoyed a pleasant if passionless existence. Thus Watsuki puts his hero in a position where he's caught between the two opposing principles of human desire and history.

ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA)

 I confess that my fascination with categorization sometimes gets the better of me. This is in no way a rejection of my critical methodology, nor an endorsement of the lack of critical thought in most comics-critics of my experience. But any practice can go in the wrong direction occasionally.

For instance, I'm mostly rejecting the theories I promoted in May of this year, in the essay NULL VS. NASCENT STATURE/CHARISMA. The biggest problem with this essay is that I now think I was trying too hard to "back-door" the concept of crossovers between characters possessed of either Prime stature or Sub charisma. 

In this, I believe I accepted, without adequate consideration, the tendency to lump together crossovers and spinoffs. This site, Poobala's Crossovers and Spin-Offs Master List, is one such exemplar of this tendency. However, in the NULL VS. NASCENT essay I think I went too far in eliding the biggest difference between the two forms.

--a CROSSOVER depends on the association of two or more characters (or other focal entities) from established properties. The prospective reader may be familiar with all of the crossover figures, only one, or none at all, but the appeal is to pull in the reader who wants to see the association of established characters.

--a SPINOFF depends on the association of one or more completely new characters (or focal entities) who "tailgate" on the back of one or more established characters/entities. The usual intent is to create a new franchise, usually one in serial form, that then stands for the most part independent of the established franchise. At best, then, a SPINOFF is a DEMI-CROSSOVER, using "demi" less in the exactly proportional sense of "half" than with the equally valid connotation of "lesser."

Another way of framing the difference is to state that the FULL STATURE CROSSOVER is oriented on THE PAST in the sense that, even if one franchise is newer than the other, the producer has already launched both franchises and is trying to increase the appeal of both. With the DEMI STATURE CROSSOVER, the producer's orientation is on THE FUTURE of a brand-new franchise, given greater fame thanks to its association with the established franchise. 

Obviously either strategy can be a success or a failure for whatever reasons. DC's Metamorpho had already begun his 1960s series when he was given a Full Crossover over in the Justice League, but the association didn't do anything for the relatively short run of the Element Man's first series. In contrast, Marvel's Daredevil, who was never a major seller in the same Silver Age decade as that of Metamorpho, was probably boosted to some degree by his Full Crossovers in more popular serials like SPIDER-MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR.

As for demi-crossovers, my frequently cited example of the  teleseries MAUDE would be one that successfully capitalized on its two-episode association with ALL IN THE FAMILY, and continued its independent success without (to my recollection) ever mentioning the FAMILY connection again. The most unsuccessful form of demi-crossovers are those in which the new franchise never gets launched at all, with the result that the unsuccessful franchise-characters just became Subs within the cosmos of the established franchise. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN had two back-door pilots, entitled "Enemies" and "Radio Free Tremaine," which went nowhere, and a third, "Top of the Heap," which did air for six episodes before cancellation. (The show was retooled under another name, but that only lasted seven episodes before it too bit the dust.)

Having made this distinction for stature-type crossovers, I'll try to keep things with regard to charisma-crossovers and demi-crossovers.

FULL CHARISMA-CROSSOVERS are also rooted in THE PAST. The reader of Batman comics is principally concerned with Batman, or with Batman and Robin, but a constant reader will be familiar that certain villains get more fame than others. Thus, when a story depicts the meeting of two Bat-villains, Joker and Penguin, the appeal to the reader rests in past associations of the two criminals.

DEMI CHARISMA-CROSSOVERS attempt to boost a new Sub villain for THE FUTURE by association with an established one, as I described in the scenario of SPIDER-MAN #14:

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. 

 

I made some convoluted attempts to view the Goblin as having regular crossover-potential based on a "historical" view, but now I consider this (and all the null/nascent terminology) unnecessary. It's enough to say that the Goblin was being "spun off" via his association with The Enforcers, even though Lee and Ditko ended up using the Goblin far more than they did The Enforcers. After the Goblin became an established figure, he did have a demi-crossover with a new villain, the Crime-Master, who only appeared in one two-part story and then died. 

Though I've addressed heroes and villains for the most part so far, and will probably continue to do so, I will note one case in which a one-shot villain from the SPIDER-MAN series went on to greater fame as a demihero support-cast member. Fred Foswell started out in SPIDER-MAN #10 as a minor employee of Jonah Jameson, but in that same issue he was revealed to be the criminal mastermind The Big Man, also the boss to his flunkies The Enforcers. Foswell never again appeared as the Big Man, but Lee and Ditko teased readers by having Foswell return to work at Jameson's paper. When the newspaperman began taking up a secret identity as an underworld informant, "Patch," there was the possibility that he might again take up the super-villain game. Instead, some time after Ditko left and Romita became the resident artist, Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

ADDENDUM 8-27: I'm contradicting the above statement for reasons I'll enlarge upon elsewhere, but I'm now of the opinion that demihero support-characters don't forge any sort of crossovers with any other persona-type.

NEAR MYTHS: UNDER THE RED HOOD (2005), RED HOOD THE LOST DAYS (2010)

Jason Todd, the second Robin, never did anything noteworthy in the first phase of his career until he died-- and even then, his death didn't take on any real resonance until he arose from the world of the dead.

Or rather, the IDEA of his resurrection began to take on said resonance before DC Comics finally decided to bring Todd back for the first time since he was murdered by the Joker in BATMAN #357 (1983). After his overblown termination, Jason was left in dead-guy limbo for the next twenty years, until there was the SUGGESTION that he had been resusciated in the 2003 series HUSH. The HUSH storyline teased Jason's return, only to back off and say that the "Jason" who appeared was a clone-like entity constructed from living matter taken from the metamorphic villain Clayface.

I'm going to guess that "Phony Jason's Return" grabbed regular readers enough that writer Judd Winick successfully pitched a BATMAN continuity in which Jason was miraculously returned to life, only using a new identity. The former Robin now called himself The Red Hood, a name taken from an early identity of the villain who callously murdered Jason with a crowbar. As if imitating the coarse, un-Joker-like method of Jason's execution, the former hero's new modus operandi is to callously murder as many of Gotham's hardcore criminals as possible. Jason does so specifically to twist Bruce Wayne's tail; to reject Batman's credo of extending mercy to even the worst felon. 

This 2005 continuity rambles quite a bit, as Winnick works in over a half dozen familiar faces from DC history, most of whom are extraneous to the main story. (Amazo? Captain Nazi? In the same comic as down-and-dirty scuzzballs as Black Mask?) The core of the story ranges from Batman's initial disbelief regarding the apparent resurrection to his gradual acceptance that for reasons that are never too clear, Jason has indeed come back and is seeking to contravene Batman's ethos. Jason's motivation smacks of personal affront: he doesn't resent having been killed, but he's angry that Batman didn't decide to end the Joker's life after the villain committed such an enormity. The story would have been quite a bit better cut in half and focused only on the Bat-family.

UNDER THE RED HOOD blames Jason's resurrection on the arcane phenomenon known as "Hypertime." As for the question as to what happened to Jason following his resurrection, Winick rings in familiar Batman-luminaries Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia. The two villains stumble across Jason, initially believing him to be a hoax, possibly perpetrated by Batman. Eventually, Ra's loses interest in the undead Jason, but Talia-- who presumably has not yet conceived her own child by Bruce Wayne-- becomes a surrogate mother to the memory-stricken young man. She betrays her father by giving Jason access to a Lazarus Pit, which brings back Jason's lost memories, and thus causes him to lust for vengeance against his surrogate father. 

But before sending the future Red Hood forth to become Batman's new bane, Talia takes a curious action: initiating a quickie romance with Jason. Winick doesn't give the reader access to the thoughts of either participant. However, earlier in the continuity Ra's has lectured his daughter, telling her "the detective" will never truly love her. In the scene above, Talia encourages Jason to "punish" Batman for having brought about the (temporary) demise of Talia's father. But it would be fair to suspect that she might really want to punish the hero for not fully returning her love, by making love to his surrogate son. I don't know if this quasi-incestuous encounter was utilized in later stories, but I find it interesting in that it showed Winick's willingness to take risks with the Talia character. I confess I have no idea how well this version of the DC character dovetails with Grant Morrison's version, who unsurprisingly gets killed at the end of his opus but is resuscitated by some other raconteur. I also have not tried to follow what has happened with Red Hood since these two series, but I have the impression that his massive slaughter of Gotham gangsters was pretty much forgotten so that he could become a regular ally to the Bat-family.

THREE STRIKES FOR BAD BOOKS

This may be the shortest book review I'll ever post, because it's actually a review of the reasons I will NOT read the book.

I knew nothing about Cassandra Khaw's ALL-CONSUMING WORLD except that an acquaintance said that it was a modern-day space opera. So I checked out a library copy.

The blurb on the cover provided the first potential strike against Khaw, as the blurb-ist said: "Profane and gorgeous... the angry queer space opera you've been waiting for." But I didn't stop there, since after all the author was not responsible for what a blurb-writer said.

The second strike was all the author, though. The back cover ballyhoo for the author certainly had the author's approval, inasmuch as it stated of Cassandra that "THEIR short stories can be found" in such-and-such places. The use of the term "their" for some individual who didn't want to be typed as male or female strikes me as the height of idiocy. If transgenders want to come up with a new pronoun for themselves, don't borrow one that's familiar and distort it. It's as if they're trying to see what ridiculous crime against grammar "they" can get away with.

I read five pages, none of which established characters or settings, until I came to this winning phrase:

It's fortunate that this day and age has surrendered homophobia to the firing squad of basic human decency, because Maya would have had to gun down the bigots otherwise. Not that she wouldn't have shot them up anyway for being terminally wrong.

And with that third strike, I was made aware that, regardless of my opinions for or against queer identity, the author intended to subject me to a lecture, not an adventure. 

In one way, Cassandra's name is apt. No matter how good her arguments might be, once she strikes out with me three times, I won't believe anything else she says. 

MYTHCOMICS: BIRTH OF THE DEMON (1992)

 I posted two essays about Denny O'Neil the week after he passed in 2020. One was a mythcomics appreciation of one of his QUESTION stories. In the other essay, I wrote the following:

When considering my favored subject, that of “myth in literature,” O’Neil certainly doesn’t rank alongside the creators who tally up the greatest quantity of mythcomics, such as Fox, Broome, and Kirby. Of course, even the best myth-makers, in order to stay gainfully employed, had to craft many, many stories that appealed to the reader’s desire for easily comprehensible lateral meaning, whereas the more difficult vertical meaning proved hit and miss. Indeed, a lot of the stories in which I’ve observed a high symbolic discourse seem to have done so without much conscious intention. I would’ve thought that, given his considerable investment in the Caped Crusader, there might’ve been a fair sampling of myth-tales during O’Neil’s various outings with the character. But even the stories with O’Neil’s most celebrated creation, Ra’s Al Ghul, only rate as near-myths.

Happily, I recently learned that this was inaccurate. Though I tried to keep abreast of most major developments of commercial comics in the 1990s, I've missed some things without intending to do so. Just as I never heard anything about the WOLVERINE: ORIGIN series of 2001, I entirely overlooked BIRTH OF THE DEMON, a stand-alone graphic novel in which O'Neil related the origin-story of Ra's Al Ghul, aided by Norm Breyfogle. Breyfogle's selection for this project  was almost certainly predicated on his professional inspiration by Neal Adams, with whom O'Neil co-created Ra's Al Ghul in BATMAN #232 (1971). The selection of an Adams-like artist suggests to me that O'Neil aspired to recapture the elan that he and Adams captured in their attempt to move Batman away from the gimmicky stories that had dominated the character for many years-- not only in the tales of raconteurs like Fox and Robbins, but even from co-creator Bill Finger-- and back to his earliest roots in pulpish thrills.

Though BIRTH is devoted to the story of Ra's Al Ghul, it's framed as a Batman story. The crusader becomes obsessed with the possibility of finally ending the villain's menace by finding and destroying all of the Lazarus Pits scattered around the world. By so doing, Batman can at last prevent his enemy from being able to continually resuscitate himself-- which Ra's has done for many centuries, giving the immortal evildoer resources beyond any of the other criminals in the hero's rogues' gallery. In a non-diegetic sense the famous Bat-villains are of course as immortal as Ra's, as is Batman, but within the diegesis, an ever-recrudescent villain suggests the futility of the hero's war against crime. Additionally, Batman is emotionally entwined with Talia, "the daughter of the demon," whose off-again, on-again loyalty to her father further compromises the crusader's dedication to his crimefighting cause.

The main part of the story is a chronicle of the early life of Ra's Al Ghul, recited by both Talia and Batman as she tries to keep the hero from destroying another Lazarus Pit. The chronicle was compiled by Huwe, one of the future villain's few comrades in medieval Arabia, though in the sequence above Huwe relates a scene at the birth of the man who would be Ra's-- whom I will henceforth call "the doctor," since he's given no proper name and does not take the demonic cognomen in his early years.

O'Neil does not devote any time to the doctor's childhood, and only says that at some point in his studies, the doctor formed a preternatural aversion to the fact of Death. He becomes so skilled that he rises to the position of royal physician to a prestigious ruler, the Salimb. However, the king's son heedlessly injures an infirm townswoman, and though the doctor is not at fault, he offers himself as a sacrifice to the old woman's son. The young fellow, Huwe by name, almost accepts the sacrifice, but later becomes the doctor's companion throughout the majority of his ancient exploits.

The Salimb's unnamed son falls ill, and even though the doctor has only contempt for the prince, he journeys to the place where he the doctor was born. There he goes into a trance, and beholds a bat-like demon whom he associates with Death. He imagines himself being immerses and strengthened by a pit of liquid, though he has yet to actually experience a Lazarus Pit.

Using this visionary experience as a guide, the doctor revives the moribund prince by uncovering a real Lazarus Pit. The doctor pays dearly for this hubris, for upon rising the prince goes berserk, as do all such reborn individuals-- and the mindless royal slays the doctor's wife. The Salimb cares no more for the deceased doctor's wife than his son did for the old woman, and in fact he condemns the doctor for the act of murder. The prince provides the icing on the cake, ghoulishly confining the doctor in a cage with the dead body of his beloved.

Huwe saves the doctor and the two flee into the desert. The doctor guides them to the camp of his uncle, and despite initial resistance, the uncle makes it possible for the doctor to achieve vengeance-- the first time the reader sees evidence of the doctor's uncanny ability to plan the doom of his enemies. This time the physician imagines the bat-demon of his previous dream helping him slay the corrupt prince, though the full scheme-- once more depending on the use of the Lazarus Pits-- also brings doom to the Salimb as well.

Following the overthrow of the city's rulers, the formerly merciful physician leads his uncle's raiders against the city, slaughtering dozens of innocents. The doctor himself is wounded, and for the first time he uses a Pit to save himself from Death's grasp. Now that he feels himself the very incarnation of the power of the Pits, he overthrows the idol of the demon Bisu, whom the locals venerate as the representation of the desert's unforgiving cruelty. There are some intimations that the bat-demon seen in the doctor's visions may be covalent with Bisu rather than with Death, but O'Neil does not commit himself one way or the other.

Though the doctor uses the Pits to keep Huwe and his uncle as immortal as he is, the association goes sour after several centuries, when the doctor catches Huwe recording his chronicle. He ends up slaying Huwe, but the uncle preserves the chronicle so that it can fall into the hands of the Batman. Returning to modern times, the hero and the daughter of the demon discuss the similarity of Ra's obsessions and those of Batman himself. But in the end, Talia has to step back from the confrontation-- for Ra's himself has been listening to the conversation, and he demands access to the Pit being blocked by the Caped Crusader.

There is, inevitably, yet another climactic battle between the adversaries, and it ends with the mysterious maybe-death of Ra's, though of course no reader believes him truly destroyed. Batman survives as well, apparently having been succored by none other than the demon Bisu-- though of course only the readers, not the hero himself, may choose to believe that. 

I'll conclude by noting that not only does O'Neil provide a full-blown mythic origin for the best-known character of his creation, he also revises the origin of the second-best known O'Neil character, the demon's daughter. In the 1987 graphic novel SON OF THE DEMON, Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham purveyed a rather mundane backstory for Talia's mother Melisande. The O'Neil-Breyfogle narrative rewrites that as seen above, asserting that Ra's met Talia's mother at Woodstock. In his massive Bat-saga, part of which I reviewed here, Grant Morrison shows his respect for O'Neil by endorsing O'Neil's version of Talia's genesis, though Morrison does keep Barr's name for the mother, Melisande. I don't know what O'Neil thought of other writers' elaborations of his most famous characters. But I'm happy to see that, just as Morrison gave life to a full-blown myth for Talia Al Ghul, the Demon himself got his finest myth-narrative from the man who conceived him.

THE MASTER THREAD OF DISNEY'S "STAR WARS"

If one wanted a cogent, concise summation of the many failings of the Disney STAR WARS trilogy from 2015 to 2019, I for one would recommend this Youtube video by "So Civilized," entitled THE STAR WARS SEQUELS: DISNEY'S ANTI-TRILOGY. SC lays out the many missteps made by the creative teams, which I will abbreviate to the respective directors: J.J. Abrams for THE FORCE AWAKENS and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, and Rian Johnson for THE LAST JEDI.

I fundamentally agree with SC on his essential thesis, which I'll boil down to "Abrams was too respectful of Lucas's NEW HOPE and EMPIRE; Johnson was too disrespectful of the whole mythos with nothing to put in its place." He doesn't elaborate what virtues of George Lucas these two latter-day creators fail to emulate, though a separate video, THE PERFECT STORYTELLING CLARITY OF STAR WARS, provides a good counterpoint to the ANTI-TRILOGY essay.

But, now that I've agreed with SC about all the storytelling flaws of both Abrams and Johnson, how do I make them line up with my own estimation of the three Disney flicks, since I rated the mythicity of LAST JEDI as "poor" while I deemed FORCE and RISE as "good."

Of course, I've championed a lot of works that have all sorts of surface flaws-- as seen recently in my reviews of grungy trash-films like BLOOD SABBATH and BLINDMAN-- because I consider that mythopoeic discourse can be formed even in the near-total absence of dramatic or didactic excellence. My criterion for mythopoeic discourse is that I have to be able to find a "master thread" around which the author(s) organize(s) his symbolic correlations, as explained in my essay series on the subject, starting here.

Interestingly enough, So Civilized has nearly nothing to say about the thread that most interested me, as I noted in my review of FORCE:

... it’s an interesting psychological touch that the script, by having Luke be Kylo’s teacher, makes him the symbolic offspring of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle

And this concatenation is echoed in Abrams' conception of Rey:

 ...Rey displays aspects of all of her parental influences, combining Han’s talents for piloting and scrounging, Leia’s feminine hauteur, and Luke’s instinctive connection with the Force.

I didn't comment in the FORCE review about the intimations of a romance-arc between Kylo and Rei. Yet this comes to fruition in JEDI, and I find it significant that even though Johnson downgrades almost every conceit Abrams raised-- Rei's mysterious parentage, the future significance of the Jedi, et al-- he never seeks in any way to tear down the blossoming quasi-romance between these two offspring, both literal and figurative, of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle.

 I failed to note this thread's development in my 2019 review. But in my recent re-screening, I must admit that Johnson seems fully aware that he cannot undo the growing "fellow feeling" between Rei and Kylo, even though she's seen him ruthlessly cut down a man who was Kylo's real father and Rei's wished-for surrogate parent. Johnson seems at least moderately aware that when he has Kylo betray and murder his mentor Snoke and invite Rei to join him in ruling the galaxy, he has fulfilled the intimations of a similar ambition voiced by Darth Vader to Luke in EMPIRE-- even though RETURN OF THE JEDI patently ignores Vader's earlier scheming against his mentor Palpatine.

In RISE, Abrams re-asserts his trope about Rei's special destiny, though in much the same way that Luke's destiny had dark roots. Just as Luke found out that he was the seed of an evil father, Rei learns that she's the granddaughter of the source of all Sith evil. I didn't feel that Abrams cared that much about that big revelation, and Palpatine's whole rap about "strike me down with your hate and I'll be reborn" fails to carry much resonance. But the repeated encounters of Rei and Kylo make up the trilogy's master thread, and Abrams puts far more effort bringing this trope to life than any of the pallid plotlines about Finn or Poe or even Threepio's supposedly comical loss of memory. In my review of RISE I noted:

As soon as renegade Kylo Ren encounters Rey, it's clear to every SW-savvy character that he's going to seek to convert her, as Palpatine successfully swayed Anakin Skywalker and as Anakin, in the guise of Darth Vader, failed to suborn Luke Skywalker. I suspect that Abrams may have formulated some specific ideas about Kylo's personal motives, and that Disney executives didn't want to delve into LOST-style psychodrama, so that in a psychological sense Kylo appears half-formed at best. However, Abrams does succeed in making Kylo a metaphysical complement to Rey, particularly when Kylo himself tells Rey that they comprise a "dyad," like the two sides of the Force. This yin-and-yang unity, though true to some of George Lucas's real world inspirations for the fictional Jedi, resembles nothing in the way Lucas treated the interactions of Palpatine-Anakin and of Vader-Luke, where it was clear that one character would dominate the other. Kylo, in his ceaseless attempts to draw Rey into his sphere, seems to be seeking some deeper consummation. To be sure, Abrams backs off on making the sexual aspects explicit, save for a suggestive final kiss between young Jedi and young Sith as the latter is about to perish.

I don't know how much of a Freudian J.J. Abrams may be now or has been in the past. He's written scripts that suggest Freudian content, particularly for LOST, but he's certainly done other scripts that don't pursue that sort of content. But it seems logical to me that either he or his collaborators on FORCE looked at the way Lucas had resolved the romantic angle of his original trilogy and wondered what might have happened had some of the offspring of both Light and Dark sides of the Force came together as Luke and Leia had not. I'm not saying that Abrams was engaging in nothing more than "shipping" forbidden romances, though there were be nothing wrong with it if he were. Rather, I think he had some notion of showing the dramatic costs of Rei's choice to pursue the rigorous destiny of a Jedi, which arguably put her apart from ordinary humankind. This gave Rei a kindred nature with the obsessed Kylo, who certainly had been all but overwhelmed by the weight of his heritage, and who may have chosen to imitate Darth Vader as an act of rebellion against his father, mother and uncle. I'm not saying Abrams totally succeeds in evoking all the dramatic potential of this psychology, but there's something more than mere imitativeness in his attempt to capture the complexities of Lucas's wonder child.

NULL-MYTHS: SPIDER-MAN * THE HULK AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS (1980)

 Since I just reviewed CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS, I took a quick first-time look at the Marvel Treasury Edition that preceded it, #25, in which Spider-Man and the Hulk found themselves brought into a conflict centered around the Winter Olympics. 

It's an even more average story than CONTEST, with the same story-concept stemming from Steven Grant, Mark Gruenwald and Bill Mantlo, with Mantlo scripting dialogue and the always dependable Herb Trimpe supplying pencils. The two heroes are largely pawns in a war between two underground-dwelling villains, Queen Kala and the Mole Man, and the story, unlike a lot of the Treasury stories, is firmly in mainstream continuity, following up a story featuring both villains in the pages of the FANTASTIC FOUR. For good measure Mantlo also thrown in another Lee-Kirby creation, the subterranean Lava Men, as well as three real-life Olympic champions turned into super-powered combatants and a handful of mutant characters whom I don't think ever appeared again. So the crossover of Marvel's major down-under characters is the main feature of interest here.

NEAR MYTHS: CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS (1982)

I wondered if a review of this 1982 curiosity-- put together when Jim Shooter still ruled Marvel Comics with an iron editorial hand-- might be the first to show up on the Internet, at least by Google search. I didn't remember much talk about this three-issue mini-series on any of the boards I used to visit, even though it precedes the more famous mega-crossovers of 1986, Marvel's SECRET WARS and DC's CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. However, I did find one essay here, which articulated a few facts not present in the explanatory writeup furnished in issue #1 of the actual comic.

From the comic itself, I knew that writers Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant and Bill Mantlo conceived the CONTEST storyline (with Mantlo alone credited with the dialogue). I did not know before reading the Science Fiction.com essay that the same threesome had authored a 1980 Marvel Treasury Edition which had Spider-Man fight the Hulk with the Winter Olympics as a background. For CONTEST this team brought together all, or nearly all, extant Marvel heroes for a contest that also would have been  Olympic-themed had the U.S. not withdrawn from 1980's Summer Olympics. This was at least one reason that the completed John Romita Jr. art for this planned Treasury Edition was shelved for a couple of years, until Marvel finally published it as a limited series in regular comics format-- albeit after many corrections to the art were made to bring it in line with 1982 continuity.

The most interesting thing about CONTEST from a contemporary POV is that John Romita Jr's art looks nothing like what readers expect of his work today. At this point in his career, Romita Jr.'s art didn't even look that much like that of his famous father. If only because of the need of stuffing dozens of heroes into one narrative, here he looks a lot like George Perez, particularly in this two-page crowd scene:

(Note: in the real Marvel Universe, Sub-Mariner would probably squash Ant-Man if the latter stood on his shoulder. And maybe the Werewolf, off to the far left, is relatively calm because his human half in control, though the script never says so.)

The art on average is just adequate, though it's still better than the Mike Zeck pencils on SECRET WARS-- though it's been rumored that Zeck was obliged to follow thumbnails from his scripter-and-boss Jim Shooter. I can see Shooter advocating such a project because he was aware that Marvel's strength was its shared-universe of long-underwear characters, and he may well have modeled SECRET WARS on this mini-series-- with one important difference.

In SECRET WARS, every character abducted to "Battleworld" has something to do, no matter how banal the actions might be. Here, nearly all the 1982 heroes are abducted to partake in a game played between two cosmic beings-- but of those dozens of heroes, only twenty-four are active participants. The two game-players, the Grandmaster and a mysterious entity revealed to be the Marvel incarnation of Death, decide that they will play four games with Earth superheroes with their pawns, pitting three of Grandmaster's choices against three of Death's in a treasure-hunting schtick. All of the other characters apparently just chill out in some bunker until the four games are done, and eventually everyone's allowed to go home.

The motive for the game is that the Grandmaster wants Death to revive his brother The Collector. Mantlo et al try to give this boring idea a twist at the end, but clearly the only real attraction of the story is the crossover aspect. And because Mantlo et al were modeling this selective conflict on the real-world Olympics, they created a bunch of newbie non-American heroes-- Australian, French, etc.-- who get heavily featured in the match-ups. I interpret this as the authors' awareness that the New X-Men's success was partly attributable to its multi-national makeup. However, to the best of my knowledge none of the newbies went on to great fame, at best showing up as guest-stars here and there-- so the writers didn't quite manage to tap into Marvel's new mythos of Superheroes, International Style. 

Though the story is routine and the characters deliver long expository lectures at the drop of a hat, Mantlo does keep the characterizations relatively consistent and even pens a few funny bits here and there. And for my purposes, CONTEST provides an apt illustration of my theory about the  difference between superordinate and subordinate ensembles. In other mega-crossovers that I've analyzed, I have to show how particular "starring" characters stand out from "supporting" characters. But in CONTEST, it's clear that only twenty-four characters comprise the serial's superordinate ensemble, while everyone else, no matter how winsomely Romita Jr draws them, is relegated to the subordinate bunker.

THE READING RHEUM: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1933)

 

One of the most interesting thing about Doc Savage's first novel is how much of the mythology was in place from the first. 

Naturally, I knew that author Lester Dent-- billed throughout the hero's pulp-magazine run as "Kenneth Robeson"-- established right away the backstory of Doc Savage and his "Fabulous Five" aides in basic nutshell-fashion, which "shells" he and other raconteurs would continue to re-use for most if not all subsequent stories. But I'm rather surprised to note that Dent articulated the idea of Doc's "Fortress of Solitude" in the first novel. In contrast to the use that DC's Superman made of the idea-- where the fortress was just sort of a "Superman museum"-- Dent's hero states that this refuge was "the secret of [Doc's] universal knowledge," because the hero needed intense "periods of concentration." One assumes that this concentration was the source of his polymath facility with all of the sciences, though a cynic might say that it was also a way of distancing himself from common humanity. 

BRONZE is also all about establishing the righteous quest of the six heroes, even if it's framed in somewhat juvenile terms, as Doc tells his men, "We first got together back in the War [i.e., World War One, though none of them ever seem old enough.] We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we got back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures." This account slightly skirts a separate motive, in which it's asserted that Doc's father, a rich philanthropist, subjected his son to intensive training in physical and mental development for the express purpose of having Doc become a world-beating do-gooder. In any case, at the beginning of BRONZE, Doc and his men learn that the senior Savage has been killed, thus giving the sextet a concrete case to investigate.

Not coincidentally, the solution to the elder Savage's murder also leads the six champions to an almost endless fortune in gold that funds Doc's endless supply of crimefighting toys. The heroes journey to Central America and find that their enemies are linked to a Mayan civilization that, in true Rider Haggard fashion, has remained intact and isolated from the vagaries of colonist incursions. Yet though that bald summary suggests that Doc and friends may take the form of "ugly Americans" joining in the colonial project, Doc himself is very outspoken about disagreeing with said project. 

It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of deal, you know.

When the good guys meet the Mayans, the natives are mostly well-bred and intelligent, including a sexy princess named Monja, who immediately falls for the unapproachable Doc Savage. The only exceptions are a corrupt warrior class who are behind various assassination attempts on Doc and friends, all with the long-range goal of taking control of the Mayan redoubt away from the rightful rulers. The villains are easily the weakest aspect of the novel, though it's an interesting sociological motif that Dent made ambitious professional warriors his bad guys, in marked contrast to the knightly purity of Doc's group. In the end, once the villains are defeated, the Mayan rulers become the de facto sponsors of Doc's war against evil. This sponsorship is certainly is a fate better than their getting annihilated just to make the hero look like a tough guy, which was a common fate for lost civilizations in thirties pop fiction, as seen in 1935's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE.

A minor surprise: I remember groaning when I watched a scene in the 1975 DOC SAVAGE film wherein Doc pays a sort of left-handed compliment to the beautiful female lead by telling her, "Mona-- you're a brick!" It was a corny line, but its derived from a scene in the book, where Doc says much the same thing to Monja. But it does have a little more psychological heft in prose. Doc is also a chaste knight who won't engage with the female sex to avoid threatening his mission, and since he's slightly aware of Monja's affections, he seeks to distance himself from the sexy young woman by treating her like one of the boys.