MYTHCOMICS: ['HELL NIGHT"], GHOST #7-9 (1995)

 (NOTES: "Hell Night" is technically the title only for the story-section in GHOST #7; I'm using it here as an umbrella title for all three stories. Pencil-artists varied widely in this arc, going from Scott Benefiel in #7, George Dove in #8, and H.M. Baker in #9.)

Of all the titles Dark Horse introduced for its imprint "Comics' Greatest World," the character Ghost came closest to engrossing the direct market audience. In contrast to the many transitory "bad girls" who enjoyed popularity in the nineties, Ghost was a relatively complex character, and in her original 1995 series, scripted by Eric Luke, she tempered a thirst for vigilante justice-- she believed (incorrectly) that she was a real ghost, killed but unable to remember who'd killed her-- with a certain ambivalence toward her mission. One of her few surviving memories was that she bore a decided antipathy for the male of the species. But where some modern heroines take male toxicity for granted, for Ghost her feeling was both a response to real injustice and a false opinion that she had to overcome.

As the cover to Part One makes clear, the story takes place at Halloween-- note the kids dressed as three characters made famous at Dark Horse-- and, not surprisingly, Ghost finds herself at a transitional point in her adventures. Having elected herself as a vigilante crusader in the Art Deco city of Arcadia, she's made more than a few enemies, and "Hell Night" brings about a "super-villain team-up" designed to send Ghost to her final rest.

Her mood at the beginning of Part One has the spectral superheroine in full vengeance-mode:

If I meet somebody tonight and I don't like what they're doing-- I'm REALLY going to enjoy it.

This desire for violence stems in part from an earlier encounter with one of those villains, name of Hunger, but the first evildoers she encounters are just pawns of a greater power, a family of heist artists who have somehow been given Ghost's power of insubstantiality. She saves the thieves' victims and leaves the crooks to their fate. Meanwhile, the architect of the heist, the appropriately named "Doctor October," confers with her new allies: the aforesaid Hunger, a telepath named Snake, and a cyborg with spikes all over his body, Joe Yimbo (a pun on the Japanese samurai flick YOJIMBO).

October uses Snake's psychic powers to pull a memory from Ghost's mind: that of herself and her sister as children, dressed up for Halloween. Ghost obligingly follows the images and gets trapped. The villains then pool their powers and send Ghost to Hell-- more specifically, a demonic realm the heroine has encountered earlier, and which she believes to be a creation of her own mind.

Part Two forces Ghost to confront these internal demons. After fighting some of the local demons, she's rescued by herself-- that is, a mental analogue of herself, before she became Ghost. She encounters her whole family, also mental illusions, living by themselves in a suburban neighborhood. But she also meets another old foe: Cameron Nemo, an urbane fellow clad in a smoking jacket and a devil-mask. Nemo manifests through Ghost's reflection in a mirror and says some rather masculinist things:

There's just a special tension about young women, don't you think? They're so scared and so fearless at the same time-- so curious!

Since Nemo is reaching for the heroine's younger self as he says this, Ghost responds by shooting him. However, Ghost's own violence makes it possible for the demons to invade suburbia. Though she continues firing at the invading demons, the heroine eventually figures out Nemo's scheme. When Nemo next appears, hoping to entice Ghost into shooting at him again, she tosses him her gun and foils his plan by not being violent. The demonic images are purged so that the neighborhood becomes "heaven" in comparison, Ghost departs without telling her "family" that they're all just illusory creations of her own mind.

Part Three finds Ghost back in Arcadia, and as she flies to the villains' hideout she has a rather different perspective from the opening of Part One: "Now it's time-- to do some good."

She invisibly spies upon the evildoers, who, in her absence, are no longer united. "Now that the Ghost is gone," Snake tells Doctor October, "you're just another broad with a loud mouth." Moreover, Snake and Hunger are eager to return to their previous crooked enterprise: shooting porn videos with non-consenting "actresses." The cyborg Joe Yimbo remains loyal to October, but only because she's used her feminine wiles to keep the pathetic creature mesmerized. Ghost then determines that she's going to set up her enemies to thwart one another.

I'll hold off on detailing how she does so, but I will note that after the real nasties are out of the way, she does extend mercy to Joe Yimbo by giving him access to the purged "hell," as an alternative to his miserable existence. But he chooses to return to the real world and take vengeance on the one he thinks killed his "love" October. In doing this, Yimbo comes off as less toxic than October. Th latter tellingly admits that her reason for hating Ghost is Textbook Lex Luthor: because she October is disfigured while Ghost, even dead, is still beautiful. (Try to find those sentiments in a modern "toxic-male" narrative like the MCU "She-Hulk."

And so the narrative ends with the last villains blowing themselves up. Ghost's fellow crusader X shows up, and she says he can't blame her for the mess, because "I never fired a shot." Of course, being in the vigilante business, Ghost wouldn't remain so hands-off in future adventures-- but Luke's tale was a good meditation on the advantages of forbearance.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." His definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

OH CAPTAIN! BLACK CAPTAIN!

I stated some of my opinions of "Black Captain America" in my review of THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, but here's another take on it that I wrote for a political forum.

________

Disney/Marvel devoted a whole series to the idea that it was terrible to have a white guy be Captain America, and that having a Black Cap would be the best solution to intersectional injustices of the past.

On the contrary, though, if your vision of America is one of White guys making everyone else go to the back of the bus, then what does a Black Captain America say about that? The fantasy is that it says, "we're overcoming all the intersectional injustices by casting a Black person in this role." But it could also say, "we, Black Americans, are claiming all of the power White people accrued when they conquered this country, but we don't accept any of the guilt of those acts." 

The advantage of a White Captain is that it captures the way White Americans thought about themselves at a point in history, when they were unquestionably the dominant racial group in America. Now you can take that idea and play it straight, as most conservatives would, or you can satirize it, as liberals would. But the idea of Black Captain America doesn't lend itself to any multivalent interpretations. You either follow the Lib program of what it's supposed to mean, or you don't. 

And frankly, I liked the Falcon. He's the first Black American superhero, so why is that heritage so easy to put aside for a mere gesture of phony intersectional triumph?

ADDENDUM: And if the showrunners were really trying to sell the idea of the new Black Captain-- why didn't they entitle the series CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER?

RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS PT. 2

 I'm reviving this essay-title after having not used it in roughly thirteen years, because Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment seems so appropriate to these times. Here's what Big Friedrich said in "On the Genealogy of Morals:"

“While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself (gennaios 'of noble descent' underlines the nuance 'upright' and probably also 'naïve'), the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait, how to be provisionally self-deprecating and humble."

And here's what modern nerd Kevin Feige said in an egotistical comparison between himself and Stan Lee:

In July 2021 he detailed to Rotten Tomatoes, “Representation is important across the board. And the comics has charted…charts the path in almost all ways for what we do in the MCU and in the comics there are many LGBTQ characters and we want to showcase that on the screen as well. We want to bring those characters to life on the screen.”

“We also, as Stan Lee used to say, Marvel represents the world outside your window. And outside of our window, there are all different types of people in all different types of places with all different types of preferences and we want that reflect in the MCU and in our fictional world as it is in our real world,” he continued.

Feige then stated, “So it is of utmost importance that when people go in and see one of our films or log on to Disney+ and watch one of our series that it represents the true world outside their window when it comes to the types of people portraying the heroes and the characters.”

To say the least, I doubt that Lee shared Feige's concept of representational realism. Lee may well have made a few statements about realistic depiction of certain aspects of life, but he was first and foremost a fantasist. Not even in the sixties could anyone have said with certainty how much Lee expoused liberal causes out of personal conviction, and how much he was influenced by a will to appeal to liberal readers. Maybe even Lee himself could not have said with certainty. But even though he must have made the conscious decision to increase Marvel's diversity-- almost exclusively in terms of more Black characters, ranging from superheroes to support-characters-- Lee never forgot that he was crafting fantasies for kids. He was never a preacher of political ideology, and in many of his stories with political content, he would come off to ideologues as being (to borrow Nietzsche's term) "naive." But any naivete on his part would have informed by a concomitant "upright" belief in telling good if simple stories.

Feige has none of this noble nature. He pretends to be the humble servant of liberalism, showing "the true world outside [one's] window," but he shows his covert egotism in his advocacy of a particular political agenda. I'm surprised that he doesn't default to his avowed passion for generating scads of new heroines. Given that in the US there's usually a 50-50 distribution of males and females in the populace, it would fairly logical to state that if half of the population is female, there should be more heroines in the MCU. But because he wants to make himself look even more the staunch Progressive, his first reference to diversity is to "LGBTQ characters." This effectively destroys his point, for only in tenderloin districts can one look out one's window and see people sporting overt signifiers of their sexual preferences. 

Feige represents the most extreme representation of nerd ressentiment: the idea that he's being open and honest about things when in truth his true ideal is manipulation. Nothing shows this better than the covert dishonesty at the heart of the MS. MARVEL series, in which the series misrepresents the history of the Partition just to bag on Evil White Colonials. Of course, Feige, lacking any of the creativity of Stan Lee, could never have originated any of the icons he so casually trashes for his political ends. Maybe his very lack of creativity is the thing that makes him popular with his fans?

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE END OF MISTY MAGIC LAND"], TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2 (2006)

NOTE: There is no particular title to the "Little Margie" story appearing in TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2; I have imposed one for clarity's sake. 

The complicated background of this story merits enumeration. (1) Alan Moore collaborated with J.H. Williams III on the series PROMETHEA for Moore's imprint America's Best Comics. The title character is a multi-faceted entity from "The Immateria," a land of pure imagination, and thus Promethea has existed in various independent fictional incarnations. (2) In one such incarnation, the heroine is a tutelary figure in a comic strip, "Little Margie in Misty Magic Land," where Promethea guides the little girl Margie through a host of fantasy-realms, the two women accompanied only by a comedy-relief "China boy." (3) "Margie" was Moore's pastiche on Windsor McCay's 1905 comic strip, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," whose installments were full Sunday page comics with no individual titles-- which is why there were no titles when Alan Moore and Eric Shanower created a full "Nemo" pastiche for AMERICA'S BEST COMICS SPECIAL #1 (2001), and no titles for this second and last pastiche from TOMORROW STORIES, executed by Shanower and Moore's colleague Steve ("no relation") Moore. 

Alan Moore's pastiche was pleasant but not particularly well organized. Since Steve Moore probably scripted his tale knowing that the days for America's Best were numbered, he provided a final "Little Margie" story that effectively concludes not only the character's series but also her childhood.

It's a common enough trope that as humans grow older they began to lose the imaginative freedom of their juvenile years, and Steve Moore (henceforth the only "Moore" I'll reference) practically broadcasts this theme on the first page of "End." (He also shows himself the equal of Promethea's creator in coming up with torturous puns, like the above "Prophetta Doom.")

Once Margie, her guide Promethea and comic-relief Chinky have received suggestions of a danger to Misty Magic Land, they seek to learn the danger's source. It does not take long for them to receive the first intimation from a clockwise individual named Thomas Tick-Tock, who discerns that Margie herself may be the problem, since she is a mortal who does not belong to the magical world, yet has not aged in nineteen years. "Perhaps I have not aged because I did not want to," muses Margie, "but should I have wanted to?" Promethea tries to lighten Margie's mood by taking her to the Chuckling Orchard, but Margie remains morose. 

The girls have better luck in the Menagerie of Moods-- but only briefly, for after some brief cheer, Margie falls into first depression, and then conceives race hatred for Chinky (encouraged by a mood-creature in a red Ku Klux Klan robe). 

Then Promethea moves to a deeper theme, though not one with much resonance for childhood: showing Margie how lack of emotional control results in the Horror of War. Margie flees the spectres of war, and it's at this point that Chinky diverges from Margie's of him, renouncing his role as "funny foreigner" and returning to his own realm, a fantasy-China realm.

The exit of the male presence in Margie's world leads her to a fairground, where she enjoys her first kiss with what looks to be Little Nemo himself. She quarrels with Promethea, acting as if the goddess is a controlling mother, and with that, Margie begins to age as she would in the real world, growing out of Misty Magic Land. So the danger to the dream-realm has always been Margie's attunement to it, and this is the last of the author's "Margie" stories, because, as she tells her own little girl, she's lost her connection to her juvenile self, and no longer has any stories to tell.