MYTHCOMICS: THE SANDMAN OVERTURE (2015)

 

Some million years ago, I wrote some essay for THE COMICS JOURNAL which included observations on the conflict between what I then called "altruism vs. selfhood." I'm reminded of that sense of conflict-- the need for community with others versus the need for a conviction of one's own stand-alone importance-- as I read SANDMAN OVERTURE for the first time. This work by SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman and PROMETHEA artist J.H. Williams III was originally published in six continuing issues in 2015, but I first encountered in a huge, coffee-table reprint replete with essays about all of the creators (even celebrated SANDMAN letterer Todd Klein) and with a supplementary reprint of the six issues' art sans coloring, the better to show off Williams' consummate sense of design.

OVERTURE is in one sense a "continuity catch-up" work, in which an author returns to an earlier concept and reveals things he either left out or hadn't thought of earlier, not unlike H. Rider Haggard's WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, a quasi-revision of SHE. In 1989 Neil Gaiman began the saga of his main character Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, by showing him weakened by some undisclosed conflict, so that he was captured by a mere human sorcerer. This imprisonment was principally a device by which Gaiman could allow the reader to learn about Morpheus' world once he broke free of his confinement, sought to regain control of his dream-dimension once more, and became acquainted with all the ways his world and others had changed in his absence. The reader thus also was painlessly introduced to the other members of Morpheus' family, who were also incarnations of cosmic principles-- such as Desire and Destiny, who alone play crucial support roles in OVERTURE. 

Within his dream-dimension, Morpheus is supreme, but he is inevitably tied to the community of mortal beings-- both Earth-humans and all other species who dream. This makes for a dichotomy that's less one of "selfhood vs. altruism" that of "solipsism vs. universalism." Morpheus is always conscious of his connectedness to the rest of the cosmos, and yet his persona is aloof and haughty, as of one who's seen it all. OVERTURE gives Gaiman the chance not simply to tie up some loose ends from the original SANDMAN series, but to examine the dichotomy at the heart of his best-known character.

Also, btw: end-of-story SPOILERS.

Very little of Earth, even DC-Earth, is seen in OVERTURE. The original comic series established that Morpheus's sovereignty extended to the dream-worlds of other species, but this is without question The Sandman at his most "cosmic." The first page gives us an alien world inhabited by three species, one of whom is humanoid "who believed that their planet was alone in the universe" (which POV will seem like a form of naive solipsism by the time the epic's over). But it's not any of the humanoids who witness the Death of a Dream-Lord, but an intelligent plant.

We never meet any inhabitants of this planet again, but we see the impact of the death on Morpheus, for the death of the Dream-Lord-- an "aspect" of Morpheus' own identity-- instantly draws him from his familiar haunts to a convocation of a few dozen other Dream-Lords, all deeply concerned that one of their own has died. I actually don't recall the regular comic book giving us anything like this "multiversal Morpheus"-- seen at the center of the two-page spread wearing his finest Wesley Dodds helmet; I thought Morpheus himself just "morphed" into an alien Dream-Lord whenever he encountered an alien. But even at this point in the story it's a better use of multiversality than I got from the MCU series LOKI, so I can roll with it.

What follows is structured less like a whodunnit than a "Meetings with Remarkable Beings." After conferring with his other selves, Morpheus eventually finds his way to an entity called "Glory," possibly in some way related to God. Glory informs Morpheus that a star has gone mad, creating the chaos that not only destroyed the Dead Dream-Lord but also several inhabited worlds. Morpheus more or less tells Glory "that ain't my department," but Glory spurs him on in the quest by saying that the chaos is occurring "because a child lived and a world died, long ago." 

After the conversation with Glory, Morpheus is joined by one of his other Dream-selves, whom for the time being I'll call the Dream-Cat. Morpheus and Dream-Cat consult with the Kindly Ones, a version of the Greek Moirai. And then, as if to give the series just a little more grounding in common humanity, Morpheus and Dream-Cat pick up an orphan girl named Hope, whose cognomen is sort of a "call-forward" to one of Gaiman's first stories for the regular series, issue #4's "A Hope in Hell." 

Morpheus and Dream-Cat undertake other meetings-- with a city of sentient stars, and with both Time and Night, the respective father and mother of Morpheus, but they serve more to illustrate the cosmos in which the Sandman moves than anything else. In essence, Morpheus is no longer seeking to solve a mystery, for he knew as soon as Glory spoke of a "child spared" that he Morpheus was responsible for the chaos of the mad star. The madness was created by a woman on an alien world who, through no fault of her own, was born a "dream-vortex," a concept Gaiman had dealt with in a "later" story in A DOLL'S HOUSE. Morpheus sought out the unnamed woman long before she began to create any chaos, but he declined to act because, as his present-self says, "I thought myself too wise, too noble, too gentle, to murder."

This forbearance, then, is what costs Dream one of his dream-selves and lots of collateral damage to boot. Upon confronting the mad star Fomalhaut, the star subjects Morpheus to the ultimate solipsism, propelling him into a black hole, in which there is "no light, no information, no dreams." Morpheus is only "rescued," if one can call it that, by his conceptual brother Destiny, who pulls Morpheus from the black hole because Destiny's own garden has been invaded by a mysterious ship. Morpheus does not recognize the ship, but he acknowledges Destiny's intuition: that the ship belongs to him. Boarding the ship, Morpheus finds it inhabited by Dream-Cat, a ghost-like version of Hope, and a few thousand alien beings, whose purpose is to erase the chaos of Morpheus's mistake by "re-dreaming" the cosmos into a "new continuity." Morpheus succeeds in getting his "do-over," but he's so exhausted by his efforts that-- wait for it-- he's weak enough to be captured by a mere mortal sorcerer, thus setting the entire continuity of the original comic into motion. Then there's a coda, a little on the confusing side, revealing that "Dream-Cat" never existed, for "he" was Morpheus's sister, the aforementioned Desire, who assumed the masquerade because she knew that he was too self-absorbed to accept help except from a being who seemed to be another version of himself.

OVERTURE is a good metaphysical romp. Both writer and artist deliver a breadth of extraterrestrial manifestations that suggests the prose works of Olaf Stapleton, albeit one tied to a previously established continuity, as much as any other "DC crisis." I don't think a reader not acquainted with the SANDMAN mythology would get a lot out of OVERTURE, though.

A small personal digression: as I was reading the section in which the multiversal Dream-Lords confront Morpheus, for some reason I thought of the encounter between Superboy's dog Krypto and "the Space Canine Patrol Agents" from a few of the goofier issues of SUPERBOY in the sixties. There was no literal resemblance between the depictions of Dream's other selves and Krypto's encounter with other anthropomorphic superhero dogs, and yet, that's where my mind took me-- a little before reading the page in OVERTURE #3 in which Gaiman and William humorously depicts the SCPA as a viable entity. I suppose it's possible that I either saw the OVERTURE page if I flipped through the book-- though I don't think I did-- or that on some occasion I read about the SCPA's appearance in some online essay. Or maybe I just-- dreamed it all?

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE GOOL STRIKES" (MARVEL TALES #93, 1949)

The cover of MARVEL TALES #93-- which was the first issue of that title, taking over its numbering from MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS, one of Timely Comics' major superhero mags-- seems to introduce a standard horror story. But the story inside anticipates the vogue for titanic monsters mutated in some way by radiation, which for most pop culture mavens started with 1953's THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. That film in turn spawned the far more consequential figure of Godzilla within the next year. I'm not sure how unique the Gool was in 1949. It's quite possible that there were many titan-sized critters bustling around horror comics prior to 1953, since so few stories from this period have been collected. I'm aware of a story from the 1950s incarnation of Timely's Human Torch (not published by Marvel until 1968) in which the hero encountered a colossal alien called "the Un-Human." But this beastie was not said to be the result of an atomic mutation. 

Though the titular creature's name on the cover bears the familiar spelling "ghoul," all through the story inside the monster is called "the Gool." No writer is billed, and GCD theorizes that the pencil artist may have been Ed Winiarski.

The story opens on a conversation between an American scientist, Professor Clark Dane, and the commander of a detachment of soldiers on a Pacific island, apparently assisting the doctor in some unnamed research project. The light-orange humanoid figure of the Gool-- so named by the caption-maker-- steps onto the beach, and is immediately attacked by army gunfire, with no effect on the monster. Dane then belatedly reveals to his confidante that his whole purpose in being here was to investigate consequences of the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, beginning in 1946. On barely any evidence, Dane insists that the spongy-looking being must have emerged from "the inner core of the earth," and then he takes time out for a long flashback. This segue mixes Dane's reminiscences with the narrator's observations as to how the Gool was awakened by the atomic testing. However, it's suggested that the Gool may be intelligent, or else that he had intelligence and lost it, for he doesn't just push his way to the surface like Godzilla and his fellow beasties. Instead, the Gool has a drill-machine with which he ascends to the surface, despite the fact that the captions just told us that the being "possessed no sense or intelligence." Possibly the idea was that the Gool was, like his possible model the 1933 King Kong, the last survivor of a species.

As it happens, the subterranean denizen, dimly thirsting for some sort of "conquest," emerges just in time to be struck by an atom bomb test on the Atoll. Dane makes the scene afterward and remarks that if anything survived blast, it would be "supercharged with electro-rays"-- a gobbledygook way of saying that the radiation would mutate said survivor. 

Then, the story jumps back to the present, showing again that no modern arms can stop the juggernaut. But the writer, realizing that he has no more pages to spare, delivers a deus ex machina by having the Gool encounter Professor Dane. The Gool sends a telepathic message to Dane, but all he communicates is, "I am the Gool" (making him only slightly more locquatious than Groot of the Galaxy Guardians). The Gool makes no demands and issues no explanations, and then just wanders back into the sea (again, like Godzilla), though a final caption warns that he will re-appear "in the next issue of Marvel Mystery." (Guess the editors didn't inform the writer of the title-change in advance.) However, there were no sequels to the Gool's rampage. The story definitely fits the pattern of "atomic hubris" stories of the time and actually catches that doomsday mood better than BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS.

Oddly, the only other named person in the story is an older scientist who exists merely for Dane to talk with, and by an amusing bit of luck, the older fellow is named "Doctor Kirby." Since Jack Kirby had been absent from proto-Marvel for about seven years prior to this story's publication, the use of the name is probably coincidence. But it's amusing because the first popular works Kirby produced for almost-but-not-quite Marvel in the late 1950s were numerous giant monster-stories, most strongly indebted to the Godzilla template. 

Oh, and just because I looked it up, here's the Torch's slightly later foe The Un-Human, who unlike The Gool gets the chance to tear up some city-property, possibly written (though not published) a little before Godzilla got to ravage Japanese real estate.

ADDENDUM: And as long as I'm mentioning gigantic comic-book characters who tear up real estate, I would be remiss not to mention Jack Cole's size-shifting villain The Claw from the late thirties and early forties, discussed here.

THE RETURN OF THE TWO ELITISMS

 Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. 

(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)

Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."

Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."

Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.

Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."

Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role." 

Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.

I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #11

 Never mind all the fuss about whether or not the Joker has a boner... here's a villain whose name now means "an oral sex act."

On a more analytical note, Mister Scarlet's foe "The Hummer" can be considered an example of a "freakish flesh" villain for the same reason as two Dick Tracy villains, Mumbles and Gargles, because he makes weird sounds rather than having anything unusual about his physical appearance.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE WITCH OF METROPOLIS" (LOIS LANE #1. 1958)

This post by A. Sherman Barros reminded me the cover story for LOIS LANE #1, whose winsome witch-incarnation appears six years before a similar and better known image in the BEWITCHED TV series. However, even on an image-to-image basis the LOIS LANE cover is more interesting. Not only does the cover-copy suggest that witchy Lois is going to one-up her super-powered swain at last, artist Kurt Schaffenberger puts her in ragged clothes, as if to suggest that by so doing the sorceress-reporter has put herself outside the bounds of standard attractiveness-- though she does have enough feminine modesty to ride side-saddle only.

In my comments-response to Sherman I said I saw this story as a near-myth, but on reflection, Otto Binder's "Witch of Metropolis" plays into a rich tradition of "the war between men and women" that began with Superman's debut in ACTION COMICS #1. The fact that Lois doesn't really become a witch-- and I doubt any adult reading this blog will find this much of a spoiler-- doesn't take away from the story's ability to play to the main character's resentment of her often elusive boyfriend.

Within the decade of the fifties, this first issue of Lois Lane's own comic had been preceded by two tryout issues in the SHOWCASE title. Those issues and the other two stories in LOIS LANE #1 quickly established that Fifties Lois was going to be a lot like Fifties Jimmy Olsen, a somewhat admirable protagonist who nevertheless got involved in a lot of wacky escapades, often prompted by egotism. Yet one thing interesting about "Witch" is that the story doesn't begin with Lois doing anything wrong or unseemly, unless one counts laughing at old superstitions. And some of Lois's scorn is justified, since I strongly doubt that any "Jekyll and Hyde" witches existed outside Otto Binder's imagination. One might argue that Lois's imagination is also working overtime, since page 2 shows her imprudently sniffing the fumes of an experiment involving a "youth serum"-- and yet she, unlike even the more clever kid-readers of the comic, ought to have known that her getting old might have a little something to do with said serum.

Even her next-page encounter with Superman doesn't show Lois in a foolish light; at most, one might say that she lets her feminine ego keep her from confessing her embarrassment to the Man of Steel. Having totally bought into the idea of a curse passed on to her from the long dead witch Molly Todd, she also buys into the idea that she has magical powers.

I'll jump ahead a bit and reveal that Witch-Lois doesn't have supernatural powers. Superman has seen through her charade, and he uses his powers to keep her delusion going, for the usual hard-to-believe reasons. Later in the story, the hero's rationale will be that he played along with her fantasy so that she wouldn't have a hypothetical breakdown. However, even though the girl reporter isn't the victim of a curse, the idea of having magical powers does bring out her inner Hyde. After exulting in her ability to ape one of Superman's powers, she uses her "magic" to spy on a film project to get a great scoop. It's only at the end of this page that Lois expresses some invidious emotions toward colleague Clark Kent, who "gets the juiciest jobs."

While Lois didn't spy on the film-set with any idea of one-upping Clark, it's her express reason for doing so when she swipes the documents Clark was assigned to pick up. From there, it's just one step to making an assault upon Superman's most prized secret, by conjuring up kryptonite to discover his double identity. 

Obviously, the whole dumb-show of Superman managing to anticipate every one of Lois's whims is absurd, particularly giving her fake kryptonite. (And what was going to be his plan, if "Miss Hyde" won the internal struggle and tried to zap Clark Kent with her fake chunk of Kryptonian real estate?) The moral of the story is that even though Lois's "Miss Hyde" personality is totally the result of her own fantasia, she does manage to resist the urge to cause harm to her beloved, even if it means he continues to exclude her from his confidence. However, on a mythopoeic level "Witch" serves to put on display some of Lois's feminine resentment of her often manipulative love-interest, which even extends to the desire to expose and at least wound him. Superman's not nearly as much of a dick here as he is in many other Lois-stories, and Lois isn't as much of a blockhead-- and for those reasons this feels like a variation, albeit a minor one, on the "men and women at war" theme.

On a side-note, though other artists depicted the lady reporter in the SHOWCASE stories, all three stories in LOIS LANE #1 were illustrated by Kurt Schaffenberger, the artist who would be most associated with Silver Age Lois-- though he was much better known for making her a glamour-puss than a glamour-wielding sorceress.

NEAR MYTHS: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 1999 (1999-2003)

Though I gave higher mythicity ratings to two later iterations in the LEAGUE franchise, BLACK DOSSIER and the last third of CENTURY, I must admit that the first two episodes of the series, featuring both the formation and dissolution of this 19th-century "Justice League," are the most fun to revisit. 

The main reason for the greater fun quotient is almost certainly that in these stories Alan Moore was far more focused giving the reader the thrill of adventure rather than the Olympian perspective of satire. Moore and O'Neill still work in a sizable number of cross-references involving both fiction-history and real history, but herein there's no unwieldy attempt to weave together a couple hundred such quotations into a super-pastiche, possibly the most ambitious crossover of all fiction. Here the creators of LEAGUE concentrated on charting the interpersonal relationships of the five protagonists: Allen Quatermain of KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Mina Murray of DRACULA, Edward Hyde of DR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Captain Nemo of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, and The Invisible Man of the Wells novel of the same name. There's such a rich tapestry of dramatic interactions that in this work alone, Moore effectively usurps the title of "Master of Melodrama" from its preceding title-holder, and so wins the coveted award of "The New Stan Lee."

 

I joke, of course. Though I would consider such a title  complimentary, it would direly insult Alan Moore to be considered like Stan Lee in any way, since he's made it clear (particularly in the final pages of TEMPEST) that he holds nothing but contempt for the late Marvel writer-editor. And of course there are many differences between the dramaturgical strategies of both Lee and Moore. Yet the give-and-take between the often quarrelsome "Gentlemen" resembles nothing in comic strips or books-- not Caniff, not Eisner, not Kurtzman-- so much as it resembles the trailblazing "heroes with problems" mindset of Stan the Man. It's possible that Moore had some notion of deconstructing Marvel Comics, as he had in the "1963" series from 1993. If so, Moore was spectacularly unsuccessful, and for that many readers can be profoundly grateful.

LEAGUE does approach myth-status insofar as it crystallizes Moore and O'Neill's often contradictory feelings about their native country. On one hand, the United Kingdom was, if not the womb from which modern popular culture was born, the midwife to its creation, and this is reflected in the fact that four of the five Gentlemen were created by UK subjects, with Nemo standing as the lone representative of La Belle France. On the other hand, from the 17th century through the 19th, the UK was also a major player in the spread of imperialism, and LEAGUE's creators constantly remind the reader that they should never forget the jingoism and material exploitation that stemmed from the British Empire. And yet the quintet of heroes, despite their uneasy alliance to the Empire, never fall into the trap of being spokespersons for sociopolitical causes. Nemo is the great rebel who finds himself helping the Empire because he wanted adventure in his life once more. Quatermain is more or less dragooned into espionage by the officious Miss Murray, which ends up being a prelude to their erotic encounters. Monstrous Mister Hyde largely subsumes his alter ego Jekyll but evinces a more profound form of humanity than the good doctor did, while The Invisible Man betrays his comrades in order to forge his own empire.

   

The creators choose the opponents just as deftly, and also from the pages of British fiction-writers. The first six-part adventure unites the Gentlemen against two master criminals vying for power, Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty and a devil-doctor who is clearly supposed to be Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu (but whose name is still trademarked and so can't be casually invoked even for pastiche purposes). The second six-parter, which chronicles the dissolution of the unstable team, is arguably even better as the Gentlemen cross swords with the heat-rays of H.G. Wells' Martians. Some of the dramatic turns are all the more impressive given that Moore has testified (in an interview for Jess Nevins' A BLAZING WORLD) that he did not have a long-term plan for both sequences. He suggested a future conflict between Hyde and Invisible Griffin in Book One before he even knew how said conflict would play out in Book Two. Mina Murray, the former victim of Dracula, bore the wounds of the vampire's brutal assaults on her throat, and this visual depiction later dovetailed impressively with certain parts of Allen Quatermain's backstory as elucidated by original creator Rider Haggard.

There are a few dozen "guest-stars." Some are preludes to more famous figures of later eras, such as the unscrupulous Campion Bond, whose perfidy prefigures Moore's trashing of his descendant James later on. But most of the guests are icons from famous fictional works, with even a few American ones, like Auguste Dupin and John Carter, making the cut. In the later volumes I could complain of Moore and O'Neill's treatment of Ian Fleming's Bond, and even more, of their maltreatment of Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. But in GENTLEMEN 1999, I found their every choice note-perfect, just as I found that O'Neill's art captured the mythic vraisemblance of the Victorian era. 

I should note that crossovers, like popular fiction, really took off in the 19th century, with Scott's IVANHOE ringing in as one of the first, combining its fictional hero's exploits to those of Robin Hood. Haggard and Verne each wrote one famous crossover, with the former having Quatermain meet She, while the latter revived Nemo to encounter the castaways of the Mysterious Island. But GENTLEMEN 1999 is definitely one of the greatest pastiches, even if it's arguable that the "super-pastiche" of later years may turn out to be just as overburdened as... 

(Yes, I will say it...)

...THE MARVEL UNIVERSE!!!!

NEAR MYTHS: LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: TEMPEST (2018-19)

I put off reading the final collaboration of Alan Moore and Kevin O"Neill on LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in part because of the extraordinary un-evenness of CENTURY, which managed to shuttle from very bad to very good without any sense of transition. That said, a part of me wanted TEMPEST to be as good as the third part of CENTURY, if not BLACK DOSSIER.

However, this was also the project with which Moore and O'Neill purported to end their careers in comics (though O'Neill actually worked in the medium a little longer). I suspected that TEMPEST would wrap up the LOEG universe much the same way Moore concluded the PROMETHEA series, of which I wrote:

One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.

Given the above sentiments, one might think I'd welcome Moore committing to an actual apocalypse, in which he and O'Neill decisively "let it all come down" for not one but two fictional planets, Earth and Mars. But one would be wrong, for the simple reason that Alan Moore is much better at creating worlds than destroying them. 

Since the final book is named TEMPEST, and since the Moore-O'Neill version of Prospero stands behind the scenes pulling various strings, it was to be expected that the writer would abjure all the "rough magic" he used to create his world. This too he also did after the conclusion of an apocalyptic SWAMP THING run, where Moore, after a major crossover of DC's magical heroes, then spent pages lecturing his readers about the importance of ordinary life. And that's what Moore does here as well. He's not infrequently expressed ambivalence about delving into the archetypes of popular fiction, even though one can't imagine him having made such a mark in American comics had he sought to emulate Harvey Pekar. So here once again, Moore follows his dive into the archetypal subconscious by a renunciation of his fictional powers. Prospero is Moore's self-insert, bringing about the destruction of Earth and Mars for ill-conceived reasons, just to provide closure. Such closure isn't technically necessary. Unlike both SWAMP THING and PROMETHEA, Moore and O'Neill could, even after their respective deaths, legally ban any further iterations of the LEAGUE property. So in my opinion the real motive was that of desiring an end to the franchise that would distinguish it from the many endlessly-proliferating serial concepts.

Earlier episodes discoursed on the 20th century's development of costumed superheroes, but in contrast to the artist's general fidelity to the many creations of prose literature, Moore and O'Neill offer nothing more than an aimless concatenation of superficial pastiches. Marsman? Electrogirl? Hard to believe we got such bland spoofs from the co-creator of WATCHMEN. All of the stuff with the superheroes is a waste of space, and because CENTURY ended with the death of Allen Quatermain, Mina Murray doesn't get a very good character arc, though a little better than that of Orlando. In compensation, Moore and O'Neill give us the resolution of BLACK DOSSIER's conflict between their versions of Emma Peel and James Bond, both of whom gain their youth in time to greet the space-age delights of 2010 and beyond. But even if I didn't dislike Moore's jaundiced take on Ian Fleming's creation, this wouldn't be enough to hold my attention.

So in the end, it's mostly about Moore and O'Neill using their loose plot as an excuse for as many crossovers and references as they can fit in. And no one can accuse them of skimping. Some characters are named outright, like the Thinking Machine and Stardust the Super Wizard, while Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty are worked into the continuity once more for this last hurrah. Many other characters just make unidentified cameos: the Beagle Boys, Tower Comics' Iron Maiden, a gorilla with a bandolier (probably Monsieur Mallah) and a house that seems to be "Usher II" from the Ray Bradbury story of that name. All of these O'Neill renders in his unique style, but I didn't get the sense that their parts contributed to a greater whole, as I did with BLACK DOSSIER.

The basic problem with TEMPEST is that it doesn't really depict the development of pop culture icons the way the first two volumes did. Possibly no one could manage to cope with the astounding proliferation of such icons not only in comic books and strips, but also in movies and television as well. Thus Moore and O'Neill just stuck in whatever characters caught their interest, be it a version of 1904 comic-strip obscurity Hugo Hercules or Grandpa Munster. There's some fun to be had with such freewheeling association, but they didn't manage to make a myth this time.

And I would be remiss not to comment that Alan Moore's tired anti-Stan Lee jeremiad is on display in a "funny" sequence riffing on a sequence from the Silver Age wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. The tiresome joke didn't make me mad, and I might even examine its presumptions in a separate essay. But I will end by saying that it shows Moore's animus toward the very "century" in which he was born, toward his inability to make the world work the way he wants-- to which his fantasy-impulse is, of course, to blow it all away.

QUICK OBIT ON KEVIN O'NEILL

I liked Kevin O'Neill's art on such works as NEMESIS THE WARLOCK and MARSHAL LAW. He seemed, to my American eyes, to be aligned with the punk aesthetic of the 1980s, though I've not come across any statements by O'Neill to that effect. Everything in his universe seemed, to coin yet another word, "hyper-steroidal," full of twisty figures and bulky muscles-- though if so, it was a "steroidism" with a very different agenda than, say, the Image muscle-fetishism of the 1990s. Many of the latter artists became grotesque by accident as they sought to "soup up" the bigfoot aesthetic of Jack Kirby. But O'Neill wrought grotesque forms as if that was the only type of thing worth drawing: a horse-headed alien (Nemesis), a future cop wearing barb wire on his arm (Marshal Law). 

At the same time, much as I admired his devotion to grotesquerie, I tended to think of O'Neill as an intense one-trick pony. In the debut stories of MARSHAL LAW, his collaboration with writer Pat Mills, several characters are put through the wringer, all in keeping with the mythos of the irony, where there's no value that can't be sullied. But future installments had nowhere to go beyond finding new ways to bag on superheroes.

But happily, O'Neill collaborated with Alan Moore on THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN-- and in so doing, I believe O'Neill pushed his art into new directions. It was more than just the discipline required to replicate the myriads of settings and physical body-types needed to pull off the "Victorian Justice League" concept. Since Moore and O'Neill were aping the characterizations found in the 19th-century prose-fiction that defined Western popular fiction for the next century, both of them had to "up their game" if they hoped to convince readers that they could come up with something as impressive as their pop-fiction ancestors.

Take the above scene between Edward Hyde and Mina Murray. The Hyde of LEAGUE is not Stevenson's Hyde, just as LEAGUE's Mina is not Stoker's. But there's an attention to characterization that goes beyond the average pastiche. Moore had produced exemplary characterization before in works like SWAMP THING-- though, to be sure, he could sometimes be as lazy and dilatory with his characters as any nineties Image-writer. But LEAGUE gave O'Neill a chance to execute visual characterizations as no earlier project (that I'm aware of) did before. In the above scene, Hyde is no less grotesque here than elsewhere, and even the demure Mina is rendered with some pop-eyed cartoonisms. But there's an unsentimental tenderness between the two that makes them seem real, or as real as such characters can seem. 

Of course, verisimilitude was not LEAGUE's primary appeal. O"Neill and Moore shared a fascination with the history of popular fiction, predominantly that of the British Isles, with the creations of America and France coming up second and third. I have this or that quarrel with the ways they rewrite that history, but I can't imagine any artist but O'Neill managing to bring so many pastiched characters and locales under his aegis. O'Neill had to draw beauty as often as ugliness, and the result is a sort of weird enchantment that combines the appeal of both artistic modes.

I had put off reading TEMPEST, the final LEAGUE work, since I felt the series had to some extent "jumped the shark," more for reasons relating to Moore than to O'Neill. But because O'Neill passed this week, I descended into the last LEAGUE, and though I have my usual complaints about Moore, I give him all respect for having conceived a template on which Kevin O'Neill's art could realize its utmost potential.

THE INFORMAL POSTULATE

 As I started the prologue of the 2007 film criticism book HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY, I encountered this justification of the book's premise:

Many viewers have observed that Alfred Hitchcock focuses on ideas in the construction of his films. The French director-critics Claude Chabrol and Eric Roemer... claimed that each of his classic films is based on a sort of "formal postulate."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of Hitchcock's signature works are "idea-centered," but it's certainly fair to say that certain ones, particularly ROPE and VERTIGO, have a sort of ordered intellectual approach that I tend to line up with what I've termed "the didactic potentiality." However, I don't see so much focus on ideas in such films as 1943's SHADOW OF A DOUBT or 1960's PSYCHO. To invoke my own terminology once again, the latter two seem to belong to the mythopoeic potentiality, in that the films focus more on correlations than cogitations.

But I can understand the editors of the Hitchcock book seeking to draw parallels between the popular productions of the director and the high-toned cogitations of philosophy. In fact, even though I don't agree with Chabrol and Roemer, I'm glad that they advanced the term "formal postulate," because this fits in with the rational discursiveness of the didactic potentiality. In contrast, works heavily invested in the mythopoeic potentiality might be said to be more concerned with "informal postulates." This notion reminds me not only of my own notion of "half-truths," but also the way film-critic Raymond Durgnat summarized the appeal of the Frankenstein Monster terms of symbolic oppositions:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

But when one wishes to convince others that a given work, medium or genre deserves respect, it's a lot easier to persuade an audience using the idea of formal postulates than informal ones. Informal postulates communicate, "I think this hidden complexity is there,"  while formal postulates make it sound as though the complexity is there for anyone to see. 

I also encountered this preference, possibly expressed on an unconscious level, when I finished Jess Nevins' interview with Alan Moore in the 2004 concordance A BLAZING WORLD. On page 254, one reads Moore claiming that his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series is predicated, at least in part, in "pulling down the barriers between High Literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that." Makes Moore sound like he's kissing-cousins with Durgnat's advocacy of "the poetry in pulp," right? But then on page 267 he advances this lofty sentiment:

Art is not about reassuring people. We don't read Art to be reassured, we read Art to be challenged and to challenge our assumptions and to maybe extend our ideas in certain areas, which you really can't do without challenging them.

No poetry here, despite the fact that Moore has produced some of the most resonant poetic-pulp in the annals of the comics medium. This "formal postulate" rather sounds a lot like what Northrop Frye wrote of those critics he called "Iliad critics" with respect to their idea of literature's purpose:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

Without repeating myself too much, I've also noted that Frye's two breeds of critic, "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics," seem to line up, respectively. with the mythoi of drama and irony for the first and with comedy and adventure for the second. One might agree with Moore that the former mythoi emphasize the challenging of assumptions, but if so, that would only be because those mythoi depend on putting their characters in deeply conflicted situations. In contrast, it's evident that a great deal of comedy and adventure does offer a kind of "reassurance," though maybe not in the way Moore imagines that reaction. That reassurance might be better compared to Tolkien's concept of "consolation."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(I note in passing that in the course of the interview Moore expresses a distaste for Tolkien's signature work in the context of complaining about "big, stupid clashes between good and evil.")

In conclusion, I realize that to some extent the preference for intellectual directness over intuitional indirectness is an individual one. However, knowing that does not make me amend my preferences in any way.

ADDENDUM: I thought I might expand further on the "formal/informal" dichotomy accidentally implied by the editors of HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY. However, upon re-reading my own CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS, I see that I included a reference to Whitehead's concept of "prehensions and apprehensions," glossed by another writer's assertion that the former focuses upon "soulful understanding" (aligned in my system to the mythopoeic potentiality), while  the latter focuses "intellectual understanding" (aligned in my system to the didactic potentiality). That's probably enough expatiation on the "formal/informal" dichotomy for now.

CURSED FROM THE EARTH

 In the comments for my essay on THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST, AT-AT Pilot posted the following:

What is the mythical significance of the fire-fall crystals and Kryptonite? Why is it that the remaining fragments of his doomed planet hurt Superman? Is it supposed to be interpreted as a painful reminder of a past that he wishes he could forget? But of course, Superman has been written to be appreciative of his Kryptonian roots, with the Fortress of Solitude serving as a museum for his mementos. (The one time I can recall Superman distancing himself from his Kryptonian self was the last issue of the Byrne series, where--if I recall accurately--Superman asserts that he is now earth's son, not Krypton's.)

Kryptonite may have the most involved backstory of any element in the Superman mythos. 

One of the most egregious mistakes about kryptonite is that it was introduced because Superman was so mighty that he had no weaknesses. That may be true of Superman as he had developed in 1949, when kryptonite officially entered the comics-canon in SUPERMAN #61 (1949). However, the Superman who had been produced for DC by the studio of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster did not need a specific weakness. Throughout the eight-or-so years that the studio elaborated the nature of the Man of Steel, the hero was occasionally seen being stymied by energy-rays or mental powers. (The moderately famous "Powerstone" story even shows him being briefly mesmerized by the hypnosis of guardian serpents.) I don't know at what point the hero became so godlike that he could fly into the heart of Earth's sun without taking harm, though I'm reasonably sure that it took place after DC kicked Siegel and Schuster to the curb in the late 1940s. But the point is that Siegel himself never thought of his pre-eminent creation as being invulnerable in the way later DC editors defined the term.

And yet, in 1940 Siegel birthed the basic idea of kryptonite in a story rejected by DC's editors and then squirreled away in a vault for the next fifty-plus years. "The K-Metal from Krypton" only came to the light of day because in 1994 Mark Waid, working on staff for DC, encountered the story in the files and made known its contents to comics-fandom. It's been further theorized that though DC never published the story (except for a very brief excerpt in a 1960s annual), Whitney Ellsworth made all Superman material available to the writers of the 1940-51 SUPERMAN radio serial, and that one of those writers used Siegel's K-metal story as a template for the 1943 episode "The Meteor from Krypton," in which the name "kryptonite" was first used for the radioactive mineral that could bring death to Krypton's only surviving son.

Since the Siegel story was not completed at the time of its composition-- though the aforementioned site provided a modern interpretation-- we can't know exactly why Siegel introduced the K-metal. But as I mentioned above, Siegel's Superman did not need a specific weakness, because he was already vulnerable to a handful of esoteric menaces. The most likely reasons are that (a) Siegel wanted to inject a new level of drama into Superman's adventures, in part by revealing his identity of Clark Kent to Lois Lane, and (b) to get that drama, the hero would find his mighty powers endangered by metal from his homeworld. Siegel could have conjured up any kind of power-draining entity or material, but I'm sure that on some level he appreciated the irony of Superman being weakened by a fragment of his own world. Indeed, on page 15 of the modern interpretation, Clark Kent muses that originally he derived "great strength and powers from the planet," which might be the only time Siegel had ever advanced that particular explanation of Superman's powers.

I'm not aware of any examples from folklore or myth in which a hero's strength is either increased or depleted by contact with native soil. The only example in which native soil increases a character's mojo would seem Bram Stoker's 1897 DRACULA. To the best of my knowledge, Stoker made up the idea of the vampire needing to rest in his native Earth out of whole cloth. But there can be no question that Stoker gave the idea special significance, for I just happened to cover the matter in depth in my 2008 AA essay A MOVABLE FEASTER. I wrote in part:

Early in the novel, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker:

"Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders."

Naturally, at that point in the novel, the vampire does not dwell on how this "blood-enriched" earth is going to make it possible for him to pick up stakes (so to speak) and invade merry old England. But much later in the novel, Van Helsing goes into greater detail about Dracula's literal need for earth that has been sanctified (as well as ensanguinated) by the past:

"There have been from the loins of this very one [Dracula] great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."

So in Stoker's mythos the sacred earth of Dracula's Transylvania is replete with both "the blood of the heroic dead" and "memories of great men and good women." Blood, then, is not just plasma and platelets in Stoker's cosmos, but rather the objective correlate of life itself, a sort of vitality that doesn't vanish with the deaths of individual humans but which seeps into the earth and sustains the life of a vampire quite as much as feeding off the blood of the living. This "sacred earth" explanation may explain how Dracula and his vampire brides managed to survive without exsanguinating every last mortal left in the region, especially given that Stoker's Transylvania often seems like a barren Hades-on-Earth, lacking the vitality that Dracula praises in past generations of his land. Stoker, in formulating this notion of the vampire needing to take his native soil with him when he departed for other climes, was thus overcoming the folkloric notion that a vampire had to return to his grave. Thanks to Stoker, Dracula could take his grave with him as he travelled.

To be sure, Stoker never has any scenes which directly prove Van Helsing's assertion about Dracula's dependence on Transylvanian soil-- that is, scenes like having Dracula try without success to sleep in English soil. But apparently whatever "blood-memories" in Dracula's native soil nourish the vampire, that vitality can be trumped by a greater vitality, as Van Helsing uses holy wafers, presumably blessed by the Catholic Church, to make some of Dracula's earth-filled coffins useless to him. (Side-note: the "holy water" device popular in many later vampire-tales appears nowhere in the original novel.) Still, the original folklore-limitation does crop again with respect to Dracula's only vampiric convert in England, for apparently Lucy Westenra can't just go anywhere she likes, but is obliged to return to her mausoleum at daybreak. Stoker does not emphasize her dependence on being close to English soil, but one must presume that she has some such dependence on returning to her original grave.

 I think it's pretty likely that by 1940 Jerry Siegel had read DRACULA, though I don't know that he ever committed to posterity any comment on Stoker's greatest work. A long time ago I read a vampire story Siegel did for his 1930s series DOCTOR OCCULT, but I don't recall any special Stoker quotes therein. But writers are packrats, and I think it very likely that he picked up the symbolism of "beneficial earth" from Stoker and later transformed it into "inimical earth" for his superhero.

Oh, and though it has nothing to do with the derivation of kryptonite, the title of this essay I rook from the King James Bible, wherein God tells the murderous Cain that he's "cursed from the earth"-- meaning not that the earth is literally poisonous to Cain; just that the earth won't give him sustenance. Readers of this blog should know that a day without a myth-quote is like a day without sunshine.