THE READING RHEUM: THE RETURN OF THE KING (1955)

 When I began blogging about LORD OF THE RINGS, I specified that, for space reasons, I wanted to concentrate on the most mythic aspects of each of the three parts. And thanks to taking that angle, I found it fascinating that the last section, RETURN OF THE KING, feels like the least mythic book.

I don't mean that there's anything in RETURN that precisely compromises the amazing vision of Tolkien's world, which was, as he mentioned, a "subcreation," an attempt to create a world like our own but according to its own internally consistent rules. But one of the rules that Tolkien sets down is that the Age of Middle-Earth is fated to come to an end, and to be succeeded by the Age of Men. The latter is more or less our own profane world, bereft of such extraordinary entities as ents, elves, dwarves and hobbits, though also missing the orcs and trolls. Tolkien clearly believed that the real world was under the aegis of Judeo-Christian authority, but this had or has nothing to do with the fantastic mythology of gods and demons given full expression in THE SILMARILLION, sort of the Middle-Earth Bible.

However, the first two parts of the trilogy are the ones in which the author lavishes loving detail upon all of his fictional entities. RETURN, instead, must be devoted to wrapping up all the multifarious plot-threads, so there's not a lot of subcreation going on there. Instead, though Tolkien means to have good win out over evil, he was absolutely determined not to show the victory as having no cost for the representatives of good. While RINGS is not an allegory for the reasons the author himself discussed, there's little question that for RETURN he drew upon his own experiences in World War One, particularly the harrowing Battle of the Somme. War is endless misery even for the noble-hearted. That said, since I never identified with Frodo's buddies Merry and Pippin-- who have parallel experiences in the field, one with King Theoden and the other with Faramir-- these sections were a slog for me. Even Gandalf in his new whiter-than-white embodiment is rather boring. About the only genuinely mythic moment in these sections is the "Macbeth" like encounter between Eowyn and the Lord of the Nazgul, where the evildoer learns that the prediction of his invulnerability to mortal men does him no good against a woman of courage. (That said, Tolkien very nearly saps Eowyn of all her symbolic depth by forging a very decorous romantic link between her and Faramir.) 

In contrast, Frodo and Sam, obliged to carry the fatal Ring of Power to be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, are as mythic as in all their other appearances. And yet, I missed Frodo's "shadow-self" Gollum. I realize that the duo was not about to keep traveling with Gollum once he betrayed them to Shelob, and in any case Gollum had only one more plot-action to perform in the story. Tolkien needed to present readers with yet more barriers to the heroes reaching their goal, so that their success, however compromised, would not seem too easy. But the Orcs who menace the heroes are just penny-ante thugs with nothing memorable about them, certainly not their symbolic qualities.

Of course, the destruction of the Ring is one of literature's most renowned turnabouts. The heroes succeed in bringing the Ring to Mount Doom, but even a hobbit's unambitious nature cannot prevent Frodo from being seduced by the Ring's insidious power. But as Gandalf says several chapters back, Gollum has a special role to play, and his raging lust to be reunited with his "precious" both destroys the Ring and breaks the power of Sauron for good measure. 

The extended coda, in which Frodo and friends return to  the Shire and find it corrupted by the evil of Saruman, also takes some inspiration from Tolkien's war experiences. He was determined to show that even innocent back-country locales could be aversely affected by the tumult of armed conflict. This resolve is perfectly in tune with the verdict reached by Frodo and Sam toward the end of TWO TOWERS, where they realize that a lot of heroic stories give the heroes too easy a time rather than emphasizing what their ordeals cost them. Indeed, even after Saruman is vanquished, Frodo never really rests on his laurels, but instead passes out of Middle-Earth along with the Elves. Life goes for the hobbits and the rest of the world, though implicitly they too will pass in their time. Yet this downbeat ending does not cancel out the mythopoeic complexity of Middle-Earth, and what readers remember best is not that world's end, but the way it was "born," coming to life as no other fantasy-world ever had before.

NEAR-MYTHS: ["VILLAGE OF THE DOOMED"], PEP COMICS #4 (1940)

(NOTE: the title is an arbitrary one assigned by Grand Comics Database.)

"Village" is a rarity in several ways. One is that unlike the vast majority of Golden Age comics-stories, this one is part of an ongoing storyline, for as the copy explains, in the last issue villains hypnotized the hero into committing numerous crimes. The Comet threw off the spell and killed his manipulators, which didn't prove to be the best idea since that deprived Comet of anyone who could testify as to his fundamental innocence. It's also a rarity in that it's a "social problem" type of story. Jack Cole, who wrote and drew the early COMET tales, didn't attempt this type of story often, but this one's much better than the ones offered by Siegel and Shuster in SUPERMAN.

The Comet, tired of running, turns himself in. However, he gets a fine taste of lynch-justice and has to flee once again.

The wounded hero flies out to some rural area and collapses, but a kindly old man takes him in and believes his story. The old guy then shows Comet how the local mining-community is being exploited by cruel businessmen who refuse to provide safety measures. (Note the gut-punch when Comet can't destroy a boulder pressing down on a miner and has to amputate the man's limb to get him free-- which isn't the most logical course of action, but is surely meant to make readers hate the corrupt owners.) The mine owners claim that the safety measures would bankrupt them, but Comet proves that to be a lie, and in fighting the corrupt main guy Comet's "bouyancy" enables him to bounce off walls "like a rubber ball." (Plastic Man was about a year down the road for Cole.)

The bad guy tries to rub out Comet with poison gas, but again the hero escapes and ends up "unintentionally" executing the evildoer. Comet makes sure that the next guy in line makes the safety alterations, and he's off to the next adventure, despite still being hunted by the law (another element that Cole, reputedly a stickler for law and order, seemed to work into many of his stories).

THE SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES

There was a time when the majority of liberal thinkers distanced their political and philosophical statements from anything falling under the rubric of "myth." For much of the twentieth century, myth meant "untruth," and neither Lefties nor Righties wanted their thoughts to be associated with the fantasies of archaic tribesmen. Marxist Roland Barthes was particularly insistent about distinguishing his ideology from the "mythology" that he claimed pervaded his society, as I showed in this 2010 essay.

But the lure of money titillates a lot of authors, even ideologues. Even anti-Jungian Richard Noll, toward the end of THE JUNG CULT, admitted that Jungianism had gained ground over other psychological systems thanks to the "New Age" subculture. Jung was gone by that era, but Joseph Campbell rose to prominence in the sixties, and many of his books have remained in print for the past sixty years. I think it's likely that Campbell's success in the marketplace led to many liberal thinkers putting aside any qualms about myth and trying to draft the allure of mythic discourse to validate political ideologies. I've shown this by demonstrating the anti-mythic agendas both in 1998's DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME, which I view as a "proto-woke work," and in 2011's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, wherein the author tried to prove that fairy tales were all about Marxist dialectic.

Maria Tatar's 2021 HEROINE WITH 1001 FACES is at least partly honest, since her agenda is to break down the masculinist emphasis she claims to find in all of Joseph Campbell's works. (Strangely, toward the end of her book she cites a quote from a 2013 collection of Campbell essays, GODDESSES, but Tatar does not in any way engage with anything Campbell said in that book.) Her main target, as her book's title indicates, is Campbell's 1949 HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, in which the author promoted a "monomyth" that unified all the major motifs relating to male heroism, which left female heroes without any say in the matter.

Having a say is extremely important to Tatar, so much so that her volume might have been better titled "1001 VOICES." Tatar never critiques Campbell in depth, either fairly or unfairly. She only attacks those aspects of Campbell that she views as attempts to stymie or silence the voices of women, and she pursues the same strategy with respect to archaic myth and folklore. If the story's about men winning glory in battle, it's bad. If the story's about women exposing male perfidy through speaking out, it's good. It's no coincidence that an early chapter of HEROINE is subtitled "From Myth to #MeToo." At all times, Tatar remains lockstep within the boundaries of that ultra-feminist ideology. Thus, even though she sometimes evinces impressive erudition, everything she writes about is distorted by that determination to make her own monomyth that excludes the supposedly male province of glory and violence.

One amusing thing about HEROINE is that Tatar duplicates one of Campbell's minor vices: that of assuming a commonality of meaning between archaic fables and modern literature. I call it a minor vice because Campbell was a good enough writer that his comparisons were usually interesting if not always logically supportable. But when Tatar windmills from talking about the English folktale "Mister Fox" to modern works by such authors as Philip Pullman and Toni Morrison, she fails to build even a loose chain of associations.

If Tatar had merely claimed that there had been plenty of writings about male heroes and that she was simply going to focus on what she deemed examples of female heroism, she would have been on surer ground. But the #Me Too ideology requires the demon of toxic masculinity. Thus Tatar sprinkles her text with glib indictments of masculine myths. In her first chapter she inextricably associated archaic myths of male heroism which "we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity" (p. 20). No hero in Tatar's ideology ever protects a woman from rape; men are just in it to force women into servile bondage, keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

I will give Tatar this much: though many of her potential readers will assume that she's going to address the presence of martial heroines in antiquity and in present-day pop culture, Tatar gives this "face of femininity" short shrift. On page 258. she tosses out a short list of "pumped-up, tough-talking women," including Diana Rigg, The Catwoman, Wonder Woman,Lara Croft and the Bionic Woman,"  but then chimerically changes the subject to first GAME OF THRONES and then to Disney heroines. Why? Well, on page 26 she also listed martial heroines of antiquity, but opined that it was a "perversion of the feminine" to show female characters "usurping the power of the heroic." So at least she's consistent in her antipathy to a power she wants to view as strictly male and therefore toxic.

That's not to say she's consistent about anything else. Wonder Woman is the only martial heroine to whom Tatar devotes any extensive attention, but her analysis is wonky, even leaving out the outright error on page 152, when the Amazon is said to be "the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe," but that she owes her live-action cinematic debut to "DC Films." At the start of Chapter 4 she excoriates Frederic Wertham for his hostility toward Wonder Woman because Wertham believed that the Amazon might keep young girls from becoming homemakers. But how is that any different from complaining that such heroines are a "perversion of the feminine?" On page 232 Tatar claims that "the love of justice-- avenging injustices and righting wrongs-- is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes." Wait-- so aside from Wonder Woman, no other superheroes, even other female heroes, had any interest in avenging injustice or righting wrongs? I should note in passing that Wertham's ideology also could not see fictional violence as being anything but anti-social in its effects.

Her nastiest inconsistency, though, is that after having burned up a lot of hyperbole inveighing against male violence, she unleashes snark against the late Campbell in her first chapter, implying that he promoted his 1949 adulation of heroism as some sort of compensation for his having "sat out the war" (that is, World War II). This armchair psychology takes up about a page and a half, and amounts to nothing more than character assassination. (At least Richard Noll provided a detailed critique against Jung.) But this side-swipe shows Tatar's basic hypocrisy. Is it good to refuse the allure of toxic male violence, or is it not? 

Tatar doesn't care; any dirty trick will serve her ideological agenda, making her a kindred spirit with the #MeToo movement, whose leaders ranted about believing all women but decided to ignore a woman who leveled charges of sexual harassment against Presidential candidate Joe Biden. If one goes into HEROINE knowing that it's a snake pit, one may learn some interesting facts about serpent behavior, but not much more.

MYTHCOMICS" "TRALLA LA" (UNCLE SCROOGE #6, 1954)

I'm not an expert on either Carl Barks or his work on Disney Ducks, so I don't know exactly how many Uncle Scrooge adventures Barks had done before the millionaire mallard got his own comic in 1953. UNCLE SCROOGE #1 seems to have set the pace for future adventures, in that its lead story "Only a Poor Old Man" shows how Scrooge McDuck could be alternately admirable, for his great skill in making money, and yet laughable, for being so ineluctably tied down by the task of guarding his riches.

"Tralla La" (a name patently indebted to the famed "Shangri-La" of the 1933 James Hilton novel LOST HORIZON) starts with Scrooge being more desperate about his money than ever. Everyone wants a piece of his vast wealth, and he's become exhausted by the job of maintaining it. The bonkers billionaire even says he hates his money, so Scrooge's subordinates summon his nephew Donald to see what he can do. 

Because Scrooge needs a vacation from his responsibilities, he decides to seek out a remote Himalayan country called "Tralla La," a "place without money." So Scrooge, Donald and Donald's three nephews head for the Himalayas. With their scientific acumen, Huey, Dewey and Louie locate the hidden valley of Tralla La with ridiculous ease, and after some setup about the peculiar conditions of the country's unique geographic situation.

At first Tralla La seems to be everything Scrooge wants in a vacation paradise. No one uses money, so no one bugs McDuck for handouts or expenses. The high muckamuck boasts that "friendship is the thing we value most," and Donald observes that "nobody wants anything that anybody else owns." However, Ugly Duckbergian Scrooge is responsible for bringing a serpent into this Edenic world. Scrooge loses a bottlecap, and as soon as one Tralla-la-an finds it, it becomes valuable precisely because no one else in the land has anything like it. 

I should note at this point that Barks' story greatly resembles the premise of the 1984 movie THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY. wherein a group of African Bushmen quarrel over a Coke bottle, fallen into their domain from a plane. But there's a crucial difference. The Bushmen all want the bottle because it's useful in their daily lives, as a pestle and whatnot. The Tralla La-lans don't care that bottlecaps are trash; to them, they're rare curiosities because they're not common items. It's apparent that the only reason the natives weren't greedy was because everyone owned the same sort of things, so there was no opportunity for conspicuous consumption. The nephews assert that they can eliminate the rarity of bottlecaps if Scrooge hires a plane to bombard Tralla La with more of the rare items, so that they won't be rare any more.

Unfortunately, Donald orders far too many bottlecaps dropped into the valley, so that the alien objects begin to threaten life itself. In a quick wrapup, the nephews petition the ruler to release them, so that they can reach the outer world and cancel further deliveries. Since it is a kid's comic, Barks couldn't very well portray the Tralla-la-lans as having had their economy wrecked by modern-day outsiders, so the artist just loosely suggests that the natives will muddle through somehow (admittedly, through their own folly). The story ends with Scrooge briefly imagining that all the excitement has immunized him against the mere fear of being asked for money. But then the kids ask for their promised pay, and Scrooge is no better off than he was before-- though I imagine that his specific phobia, having served its comic purpose, simply doesn't show up again.

MYTHCOMICS: "ON THE HORNS OF PASSION" (URUSEI YATSURA, 1980)

There was a time when I would have deemed Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA "mythic" just because the creator was so skilled at creating bizarre characters. But over time I've realized that only in a handful of cases did Takahashi use those characters for what I deem a "symbolic discourse." 

The first adventure, given the English title "A Good Catch" in translation, was rife with such discourse about adolescent sexuality and the ways of Japanese "oni" demons (albeit reworked into science-fiction aliens). Ataru Moroboshi, the typical horny youth who wants every pretty woman he sees, is selected to save Earth fron an invasion of these alien oni, but only if he can defeat the aliens' representative, the vivacious babe Lum, in a game of "tag." Despite false starts, Ataru attempts to be a good guy and win the contest, in part so that his girlfriend Shinobu will marry him. By somewhat crooked means, the young fellow "tags" the elusive Lum, but he makes the mistake of yelling something about marriage. This causes Lum to think he's proposed to her, and the story ends with Ataru due to be frog-marched off to Lum's planet and put through a ray-gun wedding.

The second URUSEI story doesn't mention Lum at all, but by the third, the creative/editorial decision had been made that she was to be added to the cast. Lum comes back to marry her "darling," but he denies that he ever proposed to her. Legalities mean nothing to the lovestruck alien, and for assorted reasons she talks her way into staying at the Moroboshi house, decorously occupying Ataru's closet. No matter how many times Ataru proclaims that they're not married, Lum maintains that they are so bonded-- though over time she makes a point of trying to drag him to the altar, to make it official. 

"On the Horns of Passion," the twenty-fifth story in the manga, is the closest Lum ever comes to trying to wring a "secondary promise" out of her love-mate. At the time of this story, Shinobu-- who for half a year tried to get between Ataru and Lum whenever possible-- finally gives up on her inconstant Romeo. Not long before "Horns," Takahashi introduced to Ataru's class rich-boy Shutaro Mendou, who's just as girl-happy as Ataru but has both wealth and good looks with which to enchant high school girls. Shinobu is one of those who admire Mendou, though they're not yet dating in this story, and Mendou seems more interested in laying claim to Lum.

Lum, who has not yet enrolled in Japanese high school, flies to Ataru's classroom looking for her "darling." Informed that he was last seen in the company of Shinobu, the jealous alien goes looking for the couple. As she departs from a high window of the school, Mendou just happens to be in the process of showing his great wealth by parachuting onto the school grounds. The two of them get entangled and fall.

It just so happens that on the ground beneath, Ataru has been trying to talk Shinobu into forgetting Mendou and coming back to him, slamming Mendou for the upper class refinements that separate his kind from ordinary people. Shinobu buys the argument, but then the tangled bundle containing Lum and Mendou falls atop Shinobu and Ataru. Mendou in particular lies prone upon Shinobu, and though he doesn't make a pass at her like he does with Lum, Shinobu seethes with juvenile passion for the handsome millionaire and runs away. Ataru, deprived of his conquest, storms off, linking Lum and Mendou together in his mind as people far beyond the workaday world. Mendou tries to further the rift by telling Lum that she and he are "above the mundane world." However, for all her faults Lum isn't conceited, and she thinks of herself as an "ordinary girl" who just wants love and marriage. 

It's hard to credence that Lum's never noticed how often Ataru is turned off by all the weirdness she brings into his life, but as far as this story is concerned, this is the first time the thought occurs to her. So the affable alien dons a school uniform and uses a chemical to make her horns retract into her skull. She shows up at class next day, and no one recognizes her, so that all of the boys, particularly Ataru and Mendou, are mesmerized by the "new girl." Shinobu apparently thinks she still has a claim on Ataru despite having refused him earlier, so she gets furious at him, and then at Mendou, even though, as mentioned before, Mendou hasn't even asked Shinobu out yet.

Lum keeps the deception going a little longer, but Mendou, again seeking to undercut Ataru, mentions the fact that to date this new girl (whose name no one even mentions) would be "cheating" on current girlfriend Lum. Ataru, who can only focus on one hot girl at a time, offers to let Mendou take custody of Lum. 

Even though Lum's tigerskin bikini is concealed, it doesn't take much effort to see the "tiger" struggling to burst forth from beneath the facade of the "ordinary girl." There can only be one compensation for having heard her love-mate offer to callously trade her to another man like a baseball card. She must get him to willingly "swear to be faithful unto death," and Ataru, still besotted with passion, does so without a second thought.

Ataru pays for his lustful nature when Lum reveals her true nature, her normally tiny horns elongating three times their normal length, just to signal how mad she is. Yet she doesn't shock him or even punch him, but only pins him to the floor, repeating the promise he's now made to her, "Unto death, darling! Unto death!" The similarity to the English phrase "until death do us part" may not be in the original Japanese. But her act of pinning him down suggests that this time he's bound himself to her, as if she were a demon who had to be invited to take possession of her victim. And she's triumphed over Shinobu as well. At the start of the story, Shinobu may not be actively trying to win Ataru any more, but Lum sees that the Earthgirl has an advantage in being what an Earthman considers "ordinary." Lum's masquerade screens out all the extraterrestrial aspects that "alienate" the boy she's chosen for her own, and this proves that Lum can beat Shinobu in a contest of purely ordinary feminine charms. 

On a semi-related note, the last panel also sets up future "eternal quadrangle" action, in which Lum pursues Ataru, Ataru pursues Shinobu, Shinobu pursues Mendou and Mendou pursues both women, but Lum more than Shinobu.

In all likelihood, had I the ability to read Japanese, I strongly doubt that I would find a single later reference to this story anywhere in the rest of the URUSEI corpus. Takahashi has continuing characters noodle over past actions in her more soap-operatic MAISON IKKOKU, but not here. Still, though HORNS makes absolutely no reference to Ataru's non-proposal in the first tale, the overarching history of the characters makes HORNS more mythic than the average "current girl pretends to be new girl" folderol. I won't say that Takahashi felt the need to "justify" Lum's almost unshakable devotion to, and obsession with, her Earthbound choice. But I think it suited Takahashi's perverse sense of humor to put Ataru in the position where he has an immediate response, almost on an instinctual level, to Lum's insuperable glamour, once all of the associated weirdness is put out of the way. The very fact that Lum  affects Ataru so deeply may be part of the reason he keeps chasing women who can never mean as much to him.

DOMINANT PRIMES AND SUBS

In the CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS series I set down four configurations with respect to stature and charisma that could applied to individual crossover narratives. However, I made frequent references to judging stature and charisma with respect to the cumulative histories of a given icon, particularly in Part 3, where I dealt in part with how stature accrues in "rotating team" serial features. Now, to better distinguish between these individual and cumulative assessments, I've extrapolated four complementary configurations designed to be applied only to cumulative assessments.

Given that one cited example of a problematic stature-character was Batman's foe The Joker, I decided to use that character and one from Part 1, Fu Manchu, as exemplars of the four configurations.

FU MANCHU was, from his first conception, a STATURE DOMINANT PRIME. The prose book series from author Sax Rohmer may have been told from the perspectives of the devil-doctor's enemies, but even when the Chinese mastermind was offstage, he was always the star of the story. Most though not all adaptations of the character to film or television followed the same pattern.

Yet one of Fu's most enduring incarnations in pop culture was in the Marvel comic book MASTER OF KUNG FU, which starred the villain's heroic son Shang-Chi. I stipulated that though Fu became a subordinate icon in this series, such was the degree of his stature that it was not diminished by his becoming a Sub. Thus within the sphere of that series, as well as a handful of other Marvel Comics appearances, Fu Manchu was a STATURE DOMINANT SUB.

The Joker evolved in a roughly opposite manner. He swiftly became the most-often used villain in Batman's rogues' gallery, but in all of these multifarious appearances, he remained a CHARISMA DOMINANT SUB.

I confess I'm not conversant with many of the Bat-books from the 21st century on, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there have been assorted Joker-focused narratives over the years. But I'm acquainted only with the nine-issue JOKER comic series of the 1970s, which did little to counter the Clown Prince's Sub reputation. In those issues, Joker would be a CHARISMA DOMINANT PRIME. I might even extend the logic of this proposition to the 2019 JOKER movie, except that it's arguable that the script suggests the possibility that Arthur Fleck may not be the canonical clown who becomes the bane of Gotham City and the Wayne Who Will Be Bats.

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD PT. 2

(Note: in writing this sequel to my one essay on the topic of novelty and recognizability, I've decided to replace the latter term with the term "familiarity." Accordingly I've altered the tag to reflect the change, but not the text of the first essay. I will try to replace the unwanted term in any other essays written since the first one, though.)

My meditations on the linked concepts of novelty and familiarity, beginning here, lead me to correct one of my earlier statements: that all crossovers are interactions of two or more familiar icons, with or without subordinate icons of their respective "universes." 

One of my main examples from Part 1 contradicts this: Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE. Whether the individual reader experiences Scott's story in its original prose form or in some adaptation within some other medium, Ivanhoe and all the subordinate figures in his orbit (which, as I said earlier, may even include historical figures like Richard the Lion-Hearted) comprise their own universe. And since that universe never appeared anywhere before, and since Scott wrote no sequels, the novel is forever characterized by novelty. The only elements of IVANHOE that possess familiarity are those relating to the universe of Robin Hood, and thus IVANHOE is a crossover between one "novel" universe and one "familiar" universe. Further, as mentioned in the CONVOCATION series, this stand-alone novel became such a major literary event that its universe possesses a high level of stature of the Qualitative kind, which means that despite only appearing once Ivanhoe is the same exalted company as those icons more dependent on Quantitative Escalation, such as Batman and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Books of Pellucidar.

(Parenthetically I will note that other authors created serial versions of the Ivanhoe universe-- a 1958 TV show starring Roger Moore, and a 2000-2002 teleseries with lots of XENA-style action. But, while it's possible for adaptations to outstrip their source material in terms of stature, neither of these shows did so.)

So IVANHOE is a crossover meeting of two icons, one characterized by "eternal novelty" and the other by "eternal familiarity." It qualifies as a High-Stature Crossover because the two icon-universes interact in a significant way, even though the stature of one results only from Qualitative Escalation, while the stature of the other arises from both Qualitative and Quantitative forms.

The 1972 BLACULA provides a comparable example of the intersection of a novelty-icon and a familiarity-icon, but in a mode of lower stature. Though Robin Hood and his Merry Men are subordinate icons within the story of Ivanhoe, they are important to the narrative, which affects the stature of the crossover. Dracula, despite having a Qualitative Stature as great as that of Robin Hood, exists in the 1972 film only to spawn Blacula and to bestow on him a familiar if somewhat risible cognomen. From that point on, Blacula is only slightly dependent on the mythos of Dracula, for the whole project of the film is to re-interpret that mythos in keeping with seventies cultural concepts, such as "Black Pride." Blacula, unlike Ivanhoe, has one more installment in his universe, but two entries in a series do not confer much Quantitative Escalation. Blacula has a certain degree of Qualitative Escalation, but not enough to raise the level of this crossover above a low position. 

Proto-crossovers within a serial context offer a slightly different view of novelty, in that the novelty of a newly introduced character can suggest an aura of "future familiarity." AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #14 is from the get-go a hero-crossover for the presence of starring hero Spider-Man and his admittedly fractious "guest star" The Hulk. But I've also argued that it's a villain-crossover between The Enforcers, who were familiar from one previous appearance in the title, and The Green Goblin, who made his debut here. Yet though the Goblin can only possess formal "novelty" at this point in his career, it's clear from the narrative that the authors intended for him to become a regular opponent of the hero. But The Goblin only possesses a "future familiarity" because later readers know how significant he proved to be within the Spider-mythos.

But authorial intent only counts when the intent is made manifest. A 1942 Batman story introduced a new Bat-foe, a thief named Mister Baffle (clearly modeled on the prose character Raffles). The story ended with the villain's escape and the suggestion that he might come again, though he never did, so the suggestion of his re-appearance counts for nothing in the Escalation game. In contrast, the villain Deadshot, appearing just once in 1950, was also characterized only by pure novelty. But thanks to his mid-70s reworking, he became not only a regular Bat-foe but one who was involved in a "static crossover" series, THE SUICIDE SQUAD-- though almost all of the characters had been, like Deadshot, subordinate icons within the universes of various heroes.

THE READING RHEUM: THE TWO TOWERS (1954)

 

Although Book 1 of LORD OF THE RINGS concludes with the sundering of the Fellowship, this turns out to be a "fortunate fall." All three divisions of the Fellowship end up making new allies that help them in the overall goal of defeating Sauron: allies they might not have made had they not been parted.

This is easiest to see with Merry and Pippin, kidnapped by a band of Orcs. During the first book these two Hobbits had little to do but to function as homey comedy-relief. But the upshot of their being kidnapped by the Orcs is that the Hobbits come across the Ent Treebeard. Although the Hobbits only know of Saruman's perfidy indirectly, they are able to convince the slow-moving forest shaman to rouse his fellows against the wizard. To the extent that the subtitle "Two Towers" causes one to anticipate the archetypal fall of a tower, Tolkien delivers on this expectation by having the Ents raze Saruman's citadel of Orthanc, even if Saruman himself remains free to cause more trouble.

Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas do not manage to overtake the kidnapped Hobbits, not even after a reborn Gandalf joins them. But arguably their plot-action is more important, as they come into contact with the Riders of Rohan. After freeing aging King Theoden from the influence of his advisor Wormtongue, secretly a lackey of Saruman, Gandalf and his allies are able to bring about the first victory on the field of battle for the Three (non-hobbit) races with the Battle of Helm's Deep. Then, and only then, is there a partial reunion of the Fellowship, when Gandalf's group once more encounter Merry and Pippin. To further illustrate the penchant of evil to accidentally aid good, Wormtongue, holed up in Orthanc with his master, actually gives the heroes a new resource by throwing the Palantir at them.

The successful enlistment of Rohan to the cause also gives Tolkien the chance to introduce Theoden's niece Eowyn, who will play a pivotal role in RETURN OF THE KING. In the last post I noted that female characters do not typically engage in male affairs of state, but the war with Sauron is something of a special situation. Eowyn is put in charge of Rohan in Theoden's absence, and though she herself mentions the atypicality of a woman serving in such a capacity, no one else does. No one questions either her puissance or her authority, thus illustrating that Tolkien had no issue with women being in authoritative positions, though he probably did not think it was optimal in the sort of traditional society he describes in his trilogy.

In the final part of TOWERS, Tolkien, having built up suspense as to the fate of Frodo and Sam, shows them making the most unlikely ally of all, Gollum. Gollum, memorably introduced in THE HOBBIT, has been more talked-of than seen in FELLOWSHIP, but his psychic bond to the One Ring forces the pathetic fiend to follow the two Hobbits into Mordor. This is another way in which the Forces of Evil trip themselves up, for Sauron allowed Gollum into Mordor earlier in order to glean information from him. The Dark Lord never contemplates that Gollum could learn any dangerous secrets of Mordor, secrets that could be turned against Sauron's campaign. But of course that is what happens when Gollum, unaware that Frodo and Sam journey to Mordor to destroy "the precious," guides the two heroes into the book's second tower, Cirith Ungol. 

To the best of my recollection, Cirith Ungol-- the best if not the only candidate for the second tower-- does not fall here or in RETURN OF THE KING. Nevertheless, with Gollum's help Frodo and Sam get the chance to circumvent the legions of Mordor. There's a price for the devil's  help, though, sinceh Gollum gets the chance to cross up the champions of Good by leading them into the lair of the giant spider Shelob. Gollum also has a history with Shelob, having fetched her food during his stay in Mordor, and he knows that if the spider triumphs she will have no interest in the Ring, unlike Sauron's guardian Orcs. Shelob is defeated but again a segment of the trilogy ends with separation, as the Orcs capture Frodo and Sam must figure out a means of rescue.

It's worth mentioning that for all his evil actions, Gollum is the one character not precisely tempted by the Ring's illusions of power. The Hobbits in general don't get tempted to become Princes of the Earth. Yet both Frodo and Bilbo come close to becoming mere stewards of the Ring, and if either were to keep it as long as Gollum did, it seems likely they would become as degraded. Gollum merely wants an eternal symbiosis with the thing that makes him feel powerful, the object over which he commits murder of his own kind, but he doesn't harbor any desire to USE the power to dominate others. Gollum is the evil extension of the normal Hobbits' desire to enjoy the peace and quiet of home life. Ironically, even though Gollum ends up becoming the Fellowship's most unwitting ally, his contribution would not be possible if he were capable of the vainglory seen in the Three Races of Men, Dwarves and Elves.

Note: as I conclude this post, I'm starting the re-read of RETURN, so it'll be a little while before I post on the last segment of LORD.

THE READING RHEUM: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (1954)

In recent years I reread Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS with the intention of blogging about it, only to bog down because even the individual segments have too much detail to cover in a blogpost. However, for my more recent re-visit to Middle-Earth, I decided only to cover the elements I found to be the most mythic in the trilogy, and to make the assumption that anyone who reads my posts here is likely to know the basic story of LORD, even if only from the movies rather than from Tolkien's books.

One mythic opposition with which FELLOWSHIP opens is the one between Bilbo Baggains, the protagonist of the previous HOBBIT, and his younger relation Frodo. In the HOBBIT, a more cheerful and escapist story, Bilbo is a fusty and settled inhabitant of the Shire, who can only be "called to adventure" by an appeal to the pride he takes in his more venturesome ancestors. Frodo, however, is more serious, in keeping with Tolkien's graver concerns throughout the trilogy. Once Gandalf has convinced Frodo of the world-spanning danger represented by the One Ring, Frodo is motivated by sober responsibility, and other characters throughout FELLOWSHIP also reflect the resolve to "do what must be done." Late in TWO TOWERS, Frodo and Samwise get into a slightly "meta" conversation about what it means to be a character in a story rather than a reader reading the same story, and Sam rejects his earlier opinion that stories about adventurous heroes came about because the heroes wanted "sport" as an anodyne to the dull round of regular life.

Tolkien's conception of the One Ring, the nexus over which Good and Evil contend, is also more sophisticated in FELLOWSHIP, though nothing in the later book precisely contradicts anything in HOBBIT. Bilbo has a grand old time turning invisible in HOBBIT, but after having the Ring for many years, he confesses in FELLOWSHIP that it's made him feel "stretched" in that his long life doesn't feel quite natural. Later Gandalf will tell Frodo that when one continues to use the Ring for the power of invisibility, the user will himself start to "fade" as he yields his actual self to the dark power created by Sauron. I speculate that this was Tolkien's way of saying that the childish desire to escape scrutiny by one's fellow man has the effect of cutting oneself off from humankind. Indeed, one of Frodo's key uses of the Ring's invisibility power occurs when he subconsciously dons the ring in front of a crowd at the Prancing Pony. Frodo's disappearance not only alerts one of Sauron's agents in that town, so that the Ringwraiths bear down upon Frodo and his friends, the careless use of dark power violates the fellow feeling that the hobbits are enjoying with the men at the inn. 

Gandalf is absent from this exploit because at the time he's been imprisoned by his former superior in the magical council, the traitor Saruman. In the exchange between the two wizards, which Gandalf relates to the proto-fellowship after escaping, Gandalf makes the significant remark that "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." Saruman is in many respects a "Sauron manque," willing to bend the rest of the world to his will out of a perverse (and reductionist) will to control all reality. Of course in Book Two Saruman's ambitions are foiled by the Ents, the embodiments of the natural world against which Saruman has transgressed. Yet the forces of Sauron himself are far more formidable, as is illustrated by Gandalf's apparent death at the hands of the Balrog.

Indeed, the novel is entirely pessimistic about the chances of any mortal to master the insuperable power of the One Ring. Gandalf and Galadriel are both sorely tempted by the Ring's power, but wisely refrain, while the human Boromir strays from the correct path by trying to steal the Ring from Frodo, even though he redeems himself afterward. This incident leads to one of Tolkien's greatest innovations; after the author has gone through hell and high water to establish the Fellowship of man, elf and dwarf to defend Frodo's quest, the author then separates Frodo and his loyal servant Sam from that company-- as they indeed remain until the main action of the plot has been finished. I should note that the strange immortal Tom Bombadil alone stands outside the dark power of the Ring, but the very essence of his power makes him impotent to control or destroy the Ring as well.

To briefly address the matter of female representation in RINGS, Tolkien hews to a traditional depiction of male agency in affairs of state, while the few female characters are more symbolic figures. Still, it's interesting that FELLOWSHIP is loosely bookended by two seemingly passive female figures. The first is Goldberry, companion to Bombadil, who is explained only as a "daughter of the river," as if she were one of the Greek river-nymphs. Goldberry does not actually do anything but provide Bombadil with a haven, and so the two of them may incarnate the familiar trope that "men hunt, women nest." 

Galadriel, though, is subtler in her influence. She may not speak before all the male representatives at the Council of Elrond, but she too provides a spiritual center for the quest, and of course lends some of her power to Frodo and Sam for their later confrontation with Shelob, the incarnation of negative femininity (also a "nester" in her way). Galadriel rejects the Ring's power in FELLOWSHIP for the same reason that Gandalf does, but I find it significant that Tolkien pictures Galadriel, under the Ring's influence, becoming something like an evil goddess. Still, she refuses the temptation, and thus accepts that she will someday "go to the West" yet will retain her identity. This reinforces FELLOWSHIP's early point about how identity is lost through the ambition to control others, and TWO TOWERS continues to explore that theme in greater depth.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #12

One of the earliest Asian protagonists created for comics was the detective Fu Chang, debuting in PEP COMICS #1 (1940). Fu had the odd talent of being able to summon tiny statuettes to do his bidding. Odd though the talent might be, the notion of a traditionally heroic Chinese character-- handsome, intelligent, and good with his fists-- would be a good thing in general. However, by accident or design, the colorist made the hero and the lady he rescues "Caucasian" in color, while only the criminal called "the Dragon" is given the standard hue for Far Eastern Asians, that of canary-yellow. Sort of like giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

TAKING STOCK OF 2022

 Year 2022 was dominantly my "year of the crossover." Though I started my first systematic analysis of the phenomenon in late 2021, most of my key writings on the subject took place in the newly departed year. Among other things, I believe I finally came to some conclusions about what separates a crossover from a mashup.

Although I'd devoted an earlier post to the subject of the "Asian claw imagery," I gave the subject a thorough investigation here, ranging from Sax Rohmer's novel THE YELLOW CLAW to Marvel Comics' various iterations of their same-name villain(s). Only an equally Rohmeresque subject, it was fun to re-examine the author's 1918 GOLDEN SCORPION, which for me encoded some clues as to why the author might have played down his best known creation Fu Manchu for roughly a decade.

I finally came up with serviceable names for the quanta of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities here.

In the year of George Perez's regrettable passing, I was finally able to isolate a story from his WONDER WOMAN run that I could designate as a mythcomic. Similary, though for years I'd known that Ra's Al Ghul was a strong villain, 2022 was the first year I learned that he was also a mythic villain.

I learned about some interesting dichotomies in the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein thanks to reading and reviewing one of Stuart A. Kauffman's books.

I concluded my reviews of Dennis Wheatley's four most renowned occult novels in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER. And while I may never get around to reviewing *all* of the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN novels, I was moved by O'Neill's passing to review the first and the last, which together offer some interesting data as to what the authors did and did not accomplish.

Lastly, I enlarged upon an earlier concept, consummation, so as to illustrate what makes fiction different from reality, and why the former is most desirable when it's least like the latter.

As for the NUM blog, some key reviews in terms of giving me good mental exercise in their analysis include:

The 1931 DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE.

The anime AQUARION and the two seasons of HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY.

The 2022 BATMAN.

The four ALIEN films, starting here.

The psycho-thriller WHAT THE PEEPER SAW.

The bizarre BLINDMAN.

The 2001 METROPOLIS, a good version of a mediocre Tezuka work.

TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, even if it was a poor version of a good book.

And in December, I finished reviewing all the ATOR films, with the pleasant surprise that the only one with mythic resonance-- despite still being riddled with goofy inconsistencies-- was IRON WARRIOR, which I'd seen once and barely remembered. WARRIOR was also the last film reviewed for the year, which at least took away the taste of the HE-MAN/SHE-RA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL.

Finally, though I usually don't play up the things I put on my "junk-drawer blogs," I devoted several posts to surveying the sadism tropes found in the HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY manga, starting here.

As for the current year will bring-- quien sabe?