THE FIRST MARVEL CROSSOVER PT. 2

So in the first part of this two-part essay series, I analyzed all the stories in "Marvel's first shared-universe, multiple-series crossover," and I came to the following conclusions.

All of the stories are ordinary at best. There's no significant content in the stories that Stan Lee-- whether he wrote all of them or orchestrated a few through other writers-- was trying to promote.

Of the four stories, only one is definitely situated to be a "hype-job" for a new series: the PATSY WALKER tale which advertises Marvel's recently debuted LINDA CARTER STUDENT NURSE title. The other characters had all been around in some form over the course of years. Lee, having worked in the comics business for most of his life, surely knew that the majority of his customers were what might be called "browsers," who did not keep track of things like crossovers, and would not be likely to increase purchases of titles because of such "big events." In the very early 1960s comics-fandom was in its infancy, and most of those fans were both male and focused on superheroes, so none of them would have noticed the interaction of the protagonists of "girls' comics."

I also pointed out that Lee did not seem overly invested in character-crossovers for the first year or so when he began writing and editing Marvel's new superhero line. In 1963, once FANTASTIC FOUR was a definite success, he at last had characters like Hulk and Ant-Man guest star in the title, as well as making the foursome guest-stars in the inaugural issue of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. Because of this hesitation on Lee's part, I tend to doubt that his motives for the "girls' comic" crossover had any relevance to the editor's later, very business-oriented focus on crossovers after 1963.

So I can conceive of but one real motive: boredom.

Consider: we know Lee claimed in his most cited reminiscence about the early, pre-hero Marvel period because he said he was thoroughly bored with his job as Marvel editor and was strongly thinking about quitting. There's no way to know whether or not this recollection is true in every respect, but there certainly doesn't seem to be much evidence of Lee feeling creatively engaged with much of anything published in 1961, with the possible exception of his collaborations with Steve Ditko. In 2009 Lee recollectedL

"All I had to do was give Steve a one-line description of the plot and he'd be off and running. He'd take those skeleton outlines I had given him and turn them into classic little works of art that ended up being far cooler than I had any right to expect"

Lee evidently liked the Ditko stories enough that he transformed AMAZING ADVENTURES, one of the standard horror-mystery titles that had run for six issues throughout most of 1961, into AMAZING ADULT FANTASY. The first issue of AAF, continuing the AA numbering and thus starting with issue #7 was, like the girl-crossover comics, cover-dated Dec 1961. AAF was subtitled "The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence," and emphasized Lee-Ditko collaborations. However, the new version of the magazine was not successful and was placed on the chopping block-- which, ironically, led Lee and Ditko to launch the chancy concept of Spider-Man in the fifteenth and last issue of the title, cover dated August 1962.

So around roughly the same time, Lee debuted FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and issue  #7 of AMAZING ADULT FANTASY, which would seem to be comics he found less boring than most of what he'd been doing, at least within recent months. And in that same time, he also came up with the girl-comic crossover.

Since the four stories in this "shared universe" were not at all ambitious in any way, I theorize that Lee's use of the crossover-concept was not intended to be profitable, just a good gimmick to fill pages. 

In this OUROBOROS DREAMS post, I mentioned a crossover between two war-themed Fawcett characters, Commando Yank and the Phantom Falcon. Though one or both characters probably got their character-names on the covers of WOW COMICS (their only venue), neither was a high-profile figure. Since their teaming up would not be likely to make customers buy more issues of the exact same comic, it's likely that the writer of the interlinked Yank-Falcon stories just thought of the crossover as a "gimmick to fill pages." Following the growth of Marvel's GENUINE shared universe, dozens of writers would write hundreds of comics-stories in which crossovers were just gimmicks that took the place of writing compelling stories with new characters. And this is most likely to be the only reason Lee wrote three of these four inconsequential stories, with the fourth being motivated, however weakly, by the rationale of hyping a new feature.

I'm sure that even if any fan has asked Lee about the girl-comics crossovers a few years after he'd done them, he probably would not have remembered them. For my own satisfaction, though, I wanted to work out whatever significance The First Marvel Crossover might have-- and the only take I find satisfactory is the idea that it shows Stan Lee as the spiritual perceptor not only to all the good crossover stories-- many of which he personally wrote-- but also to all of the bad ones as well.

 

THE FIRST MARVEL CROSSOVER PT. 1

I didn't get much out of Douglas Wolk's 2021 book ALL OF THE MARVELS, an admittedly yeoman effort to observe how Marvel Comics used its chosen tropes both in a historical, synchronic sense and in a developmental, diachronic sense. Ironically, if I'd actively disliked it, I probably would have reviewed it here. But as things stand, I'll confine myself to praising Wolk for pointing out what he called "Marvel's first shared-universe, multiple-series crossover, which was published immediately after FANTASTIC FOUR #1." 

Some histories speak as if the initial issue of FF marked the transition between the new Marvel brand and such older (sometimes tenuous) publishing-entities like "Timely" and "Atlas." However, the company changed its branding status--denoted the letters "MC," stylized to form a barely noticeable insignia-- on the covers of two magazines dated June 1961, PATSY WALKER #95 and JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #69. A quick scan of both comics online shows that all of the stories in these issues are indistinguishable from other monster-tales and teen humor antics that the company had been publishing for several years, so whatever purpose the re-branding served for the company, it was not to indicate a new approach to the type of material published. Indeed, these would probably be the sort of stories Lee was reacting against when he set out to do superhero yarns to suit himself (at least in part), rather than confining himself to anticipating the tastes of a perceived audience.

There is of course no hint of a shared universe in the earliest issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Issue #4 revives the Golden Age hero The Sub-Mariner as a recurring opponent for the quartet, but Lee and Kirby don't stress Namor's history as a previously published icon. In issue #5 the Human Torch is seen reading a HULK comic and baiting the Thing about his resemblance to the Green Goliath, but the first true crossover, with the actual Hulk appearing in the FF's pages, doesn't take place until issue #12, dated March 1963. Other features launched in 1962 display no great hurry to acknowledge any connections in Marvel's slowly evolving superhero line.

Yet in late 1961 and early 1962, Lee apparently took it into his head to suddenly tie together the protagonists of three "girl humor" comics and one "female professional" comic. It seems unlikely that the only person in authority over Lee, publisher Martin Goodman, would have ordered this unusual stratagem. By all accounts Goodman was largely concerned with his more profitable publishing ventures and only rarely interfered with Lee's editorial decisions. 

In Part 2 I'll devote more space to why Stan Lee might have chosen to institute the first Marvel Comics crossover, but for now, I'll confine myself to the content that appeared in this initial "multi-issue crossover."

KATHY #14 (dated Dec 1961)-- The titular "teen-age tornado" (who's really just a standard "nice girl") alerts her friendly enemy Liz to the fact that the comic magazine PATSY AND HEDY #78 has just reached newstands. Kathy anticipates that the comic will spotlight a fashion design she sent to the company to be reproduced for one of the characters to wear, which was a standard real practice in "girls' comics" dating back to the forties. Snarky Liz becomes irate because she too sent in a design, but she wasn't contacted. Liz insists that they go to Patsy Walker's house and beard her in her lair because, in a trope also later used in FANTASTIC FOUR, the characters in published comics actually have a lived existence on this Earth. The teen girls are received by both Patsy Walker and her boyfriend Buzz (who in the 1970s  will be transformed into super-heroine "Hellcat" and super-villain "Mad Dog"). Liz yells a lot, and is mollified when Patsy tells her that her submitted design will be used in future. In this silly story's only witty joke, Buzz flirts with Kathy by asking, "how come you aren't in a comic mag of your own," and the poor teen-age tornado can't find the words to tell him that they're in her comic at this very moment.

LIFE WITH MILLIE #14 (also dated Dec 1961) -- Kathy then jumps books not to guest-star with either Patsy or Hedy, but with Marvel's oldest "girl humor" comic character, Millie the Model. The above cover stands in for the story well enough, depicting the travails Kathy goes through trying to get the autograph of the world-famous model.

PATSY WALKER #98 (ALSO dated Dec 1961)-- This time it's Patsy, who in theory is a high-school teenager, who decides to attend a costume party dressed up as the world-famous Millie. Even though Millie is theoretically an adult and ought to look rather different from a teenager posing as her, Millie's boyfriend Clicker encounters disguised Patsy and is totally fooled. (Fun fact: the boyfriend's name was originally "Flicker;" can't imagine why the publishers decided to change it...) 

PATSY WALKER #99-- Though it's the very next issue of PW, its cover-date is Feb 1962, but I think it's reasonable to assume that Lee either scripted the issue (or assigned the scripting) around the same time as the other three stories. Of all four stories, this is the only one that strongly looks like hype for a new series, since the first issue of Marvel's LINDA CARTER STUDENT NURSE (dated Sept 1961) had just debuted a few months previous. It's an odd story since it lacks any humor except for snarky remarks by Patsy's friendly enemy Hedy. Linda Carter simply turns up at Patsy's class and talks to girl students about the importance of nursing as a career, and a final hype-box encourages readers to check out Linda's own comic.

In Part 2 I'll discuss possible motives for this comparative orgy of crossovers, but I'll state right now that Lee certainly wasn't trying to be ambitious in any way. All of these are really bad stories for their genre, and I speak as someone who has a minor liking for "girl humor" comics-stories. I didn't try to read all the other stories in the cited issues, but by chance I did read a separate tale in LIFE WITH MILLIE #14. This isn't a crossover, but it's metafictional like KATHY #14. Millie's parents show up at her studio and inform their daughter that they've been reading her comic, and they've decided to upbraid her fellow model Chili for constantly messing with Millie. However, Chili overhears Mom and Pop discussing their intentions, and she moves to defuse their anger by shamelessly flattering both of them. The two rubes are so stoked by her praise that they end the story by criticizing Millie for not appreciating her nemesis. I'm not saying this is a GOOD story either, but it looks forward to oddball superhero stories like FF #10, in which Lee and Kirby are seen creating a FANTASTIC FOUR magazine with at least partial input from Reed Richards.

Before I address the crossover-situation more in Part 2, I will note that Stan Lee wrote a ton of these humor comics, and though none of them are extraordinary, they did help him hone his skill with witty badinage so that he became renowned as the best writer of verbal humor in comics, albeit with considerable backup from his artist-collaborators. Every time I read the endless sniping between one of the Nice Girls and her Nasty Girl counterpart, I hear Lee whetting his wit for the endless yakkety-yak between the Thing and the Human Torch.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE TOWER OF BABEL:THE DELUXE EDITION (2021)

This is not my standard review of a "near myth" work, since I'm not going to dissect in detail the stories collected here, which appeared in a couple of JUSTICE LEAGUE titles in or around the period when Grant Morrison transformed the title. Most stories in the collection were written by Mark Waid, who in my view has always been a sort of dull version of whoever he chose to emulate, be it Kurt Busiek with KINGDOM COME or Morrison with his follow-up JLA stories. Thus Waid is significant only as a negative reflection of Morrison, and, for that matter, the JLA writer whom Morrison most challenged during his run: original Silver Age scribe Gardner Fox.

In this mythcomics post I recapitulated the history of the dominant writing-strategies of Silver Age DC Comics vs. Silver Age Marvel Comics thusly:

The JUSTICE LEAGUE comics title of the 1960s has never received a lot of respect even among Silver Age comics-fandom, and one reason may be that the early comic, for several years written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, is perceived as being too "old school." Most team-features in both the Golden and the Silver Ages followed what I'll call a "plot-based model," in which "character moments" are kept to a minimum, as the author concentrates on the events of the plot, usually showing how the members of the team work to overcome some common enemy. The plot-model seems like an easy row to hoe, as indicated by countless spoofs of the model, but DC Comics pursued it almost exclusively, even when Marvel Comics in the 1960s advanced a "character-based model" that over time become the dominant paradigm.

Calling those strategies "the plot-based model" and "the character-based model" was a bit of an oversimplification, though many fans over the years have used similar terminology. Certainly the raconteurs who wrote superhero comics in the early Silver Age did not intend to follow such rigorous models; they were in large part "riffing," trying to find profitable ways to re-invent superheroes for a post-Comics Code readership. DC Comics started its efforts with re-imagined revivals of its most successful costumed characters from the 1940s. But Marvel, the rebranded version of the entity variously called "Timely" and "Atlas," had fewer such major successes, so that the key Marvel creative personnel had to create more original characters. DC initiated the Silver Age with single-character features like The Flash, Green Lantern, and (arguably) the Martian Manhunter, and then launched a team of said heroes in the Justice League. Marvel's superhero line was not initiated until roughly five years after DC's example, and it began with a quasi-emulation of JUSTICE LEAGUE, a team book made up of all-original characters, and only within the next year did the company launch such single-character superhero features as Hulk, Ant-Man and Thor. 

While no reader's experience of the elusive "sense of wonder" in SF/fantasy is paradigmatic, team-books arguably oblige the creators to increase the quantity of SF/fantasy concepts in order to provide multiple threats for multiple protagonists. Thus it's my experience that the first Silver Age team-books, the JUSTICE LEAGUE of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky and the FANTASTIC FOUR of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, offered the greatest opportunities for stimulating the readers' sense of wonder. Lee and Kirby certainly did not neglect the "plot-based model" of superhero scripting in conceiving of their menaces, whether they were strong concepts like Galactus or weak ones like the Enfant Terrible. Fox, for his part, concentrated on plot more when he conceived of foes for the Justice League, but there are interesting if minor character-moments even in the earliest JLA stories.                                 

I've sometimes expressed to other fans that in terms of raw creativity I deemed Fox's JUSTICE LEAGUE the equal of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and the reaction I got was usually a negative one. What I believe those fans were favoring in the Marvel team-title was the fact that Stan Lee perfected a strategy of building on his concepts so that they began to seem like part of a larger tapestry of interconnected wonders. Most of Fox's concepts were confined to whatever story they first appeared in, and so they had less cumulative effect than, say, the recurring concepts appearing in DC's single-character features (Green Lantern's "Guardians of the Universe," for example).

Raw creativity, of course, is just one element in communicating the sense of wonder from author to reader; an element that gives the reader the impression of "richness and profusion of images," as referenced in this essay. Based on my formulations there, said profusion provides the potential for the development of fantastic content into the even richer forms of myth, but the actuality of mythicity stems from articulating the raw material into organized patterns of conceptual thought. 

As noted above, Lee and Kirby had their share of so-so concepts, but FANTASTIC FOUR became a testing-ground for all of their best"sense of wonder" ideas. In contrast, what keeps Fox's JLA concepts from attaining their greatest possible development is the fact that each of them was largely isolated from all the others.

Grant Morrison's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a vision of what the Fox-cosmos might have looked like if many of the one-off concepts had been given the same inter-referentiality seen in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics. In contrast, Mark Waid's JLA feels like a regression to Fox's least inspired concepts. Waid trundles out abstruse concepts with potential, all right. In the titular story of the collection TOWER OF BABEL, the Leaguers are put through a series of transformations just as weird as any Fox ever devised. Said transformations are brought about when Batman's enemy Ra's Al Ghul implements strategies Batman himself devised to nullify the abilities of his fellow heroes in case any of them were suborned by evildoers. But even though Waid devotes considerable space to the character-conflicts that evolve as a result of this predicament, he doesn't really invest the proceedings with an independent "sense of wonder," as Morrison did with comparable concepts. In many ways Waid resembles Fox at his least inspired, when he simply churned out this or that concept to meet a deadline, and so failed to make those particular concepts emotionally resonant. Thus "Tower of Babel" is not much better, in terms of evoking the sense of wonder, than an inferior Fox-tale like the 1966 weird transformation tale "The Plague That Struck the Justice League."

Ironically, even though in his JUSTICE LEAGUE stories Morrison eschewed the soap opera dramatics that one often associated with the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, he came closer to the emotional resonance Gardner Fox successfully executed in stories like "The Justice league's Impossible Adventure." Thus Waid fails both the tests of good drama and sense-of-wonder in his lack of inspired work.

NULL-MYTHS: SHI / CYBLADE: THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENTS (1995)

While looking around for a second "woman-themed" mythcomic for this month, I came across this one-shot from Crusade Comics. I was minimally aware of both Cyblade and Shi, but I'd never heard of their having crossed over. And, crossover-enthusiast though I am, I definitely hadn't heard of a project that guest-starred a host of other characters from what nineties comics-fans called "independent comics"-- hence, the project's punny subtitle, "The Battle for Independents." 

Such conceptual battles had generated comics-projects before. The 1982 one-shot DESTROYER DUCK united the talents of Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby to lambaste the exploitative nature of Marvel Comics (against whom Gerber had filed a suit over the ownership of Howard the Duck). But SHI / CYBLADE is a little closer to the model of SPAWN #10 (1993), in which Dave Sim penned a jeremiad against the foolishness of artists signing away their works to big corporations. 

The deliberately thin plot, co-written by Crusade publisher Bill Tucci, has Cyblade and Shi wake up in front of a wall, which Shi's inner monologue has already referenced as a wall she built to keep her dreams from interfering with her reality. That's about all the symbolism we get from them, for it's soon made clear that the two heroines have been called here to exterminate a threat to human creativity.

Cerebus pops up to tell the girls about "the bad thing out there that wants to eat us," much the way Dave Sim encouraged independent artists and publishers to avoid the rapacious maws of the Big-Two-Who-Purchase-All-Rights. He magicks the ladies over the wall (aren't they both super-athletes?) and lands them in a swamp called "Wallace Woods," which includes a gravestone for Kirby and a sign stating "Ditko Was Right." There the heroines meet Mr. Spook of BEANWORLD, who more or less repeats Cerebus' dire warnings and then disappears.

The heroines behold a great golden tower where their unnamed enemy dwells. An equally nameless blonde guy calls out for help, so Shi and Cyblade scale the tower-walls to help him. In a big narrative hiccup, both of them get captured somehow. They're next seen hanging in a laboratory while a megalomaniac rants at them about how easily he can crush all the creative voices that rebel against his control. (Maus and Omaha the Cat Dancer are marginally seen in viewscreens). Some characters I've never heard of rescue Shi and Cyblade and they all escape, making for the safety of the wall. (So the wall's GOOD now?)

The tower turns into a ray-blasting mecha-robot to chase them, but Fone Bone of the BONE comic shows up to trip the mecha. "That seemed a bit too easy," opines one character, and this notion is reinforced by the way a cavalry of mostly obscure independent characters appear out of nowhere to fight the robot. I did recognize Usagi Yojimbo, Megaton Man, Katchoo and a half dozen others. Most characters only get one-panel cameos, though there's a concordance for the curious in the back of the comic.

Just so no one forgets who are the stars of the comic, Shi and Cyblade deliver the finishing blow and reveal that the mastermind is a literal weenie. 

Whereas Dave Sim's screed for SPAWN #10 was concise and affecting, this self-indulgent rant is all over the place-- which is probably a big reason I never heard of the comic back in The Day. I for one would be interested to read a fictional treatment of both the good and evil aspects of corporate entities, since their existence seems pretty much an immutable aspect of modern life. I'd like to see something that was neither a superficial rant like this or a one-sided apologia a la Ayn Rand. But I suspect this desire will never be realized.

MYTHCOMICS: "DRACULA STILL LIVES" (VAMPIRELLA #18, 1972)

 

During Archie Goodwin's run of Vampirella stories, which concluded with "And Be a Bride of Chaos", the writer revised the origin of Vampirella from what Forrest Ackerman had written. Turnabout being fair play, T. Casey Brennan, who took over as regular scripter of the Vampirella stories in issue #17, then revised what Goodwin had written about Dracula in issue #16. The result was, among other things, a stronger evocation of the Superman-myth than either Ackerman or Goodwin had managed.

"Lives" picks up directly from the conclusion of "Chaos," where the master vampire was buried when the chaos-gods he had worshiped brought his castle tumbling down. However, in the midst of the bloodsucker ranting about his plans to seek vengeance upon Vampirella, an apparition appears before him.

Contrary to what the editorial notes claim, the Conjuress did not appear in VAMPIRELLA #16. Possibly Brennan recycled her from some other script which I've not read, but what happens in the Goodwin script is that Dracula, a native of Vampirella's homeworld, commits a mortal sin by preying on his fellows, rather than drinking the blood supplied by the planet. The Drakulonians sentence the transgressor to disintegration, but the device actually propels Dracula into the realm of the chaos-god. That's the only entity the vampire encounters in the Goodwin tale, but Brennan counts on 1972 readers not to obsess about those details, and finds a totally different path to associate Dracula with the domain of chaos.

Meanwhile, Vampirella has been having some melodrama with her boyfriend Adam and Adam's father Conrad Van Helsing. Then the elder vamp-slayer gets a psychic hotline, informing him that Drac is back. Those psychic senses also tell Conrad that the master vampire is not on Earth, so the resourceful slayer uses Merlin's Mirror to send the hot-blooded heroine after him.

In the other dimension, Conjuress tells Dracula that he can only renounce the evil in his heart by lying on the "altar of repentance" and reflecting on his sins. Then she leaves, and Vampirella shows up, expecting a fight. What she gets is a revised origin for Dracula--which in essence, recasting the Count as Jor-El from the Superman mythos, the lonely voice trying to convince his people that their planet is doomed.

Dracula seeks to save his world with ancient witchcraft, summoning the Conjuress. She obligingly reveals a ritual that can be used to renew the planet's rivers of nourishing blood. However, the Conjuress leaves Dracula alone to complete the ritual, and his altruism has become tainted by his lust for the beauteous goddess. Because of Dracula's wayward spirit, the God of Chaos tempts him to abandon the path of goodness. Not only does this faux Jor-El not save his world, he preys on his fellows, and that's what gets him executed. Chaos then sends Drac to Earth to gather more sacrifices, which is how he crosses paths with Vampirella. Having heard the reboot origin, Vampi tries to put an end to Dracula's evil. 

However, she can't bring herself to do it, not least because she herself has committed similar sins. Back in the real world, Conrad decides to smash the mirror-portal to protect his son from the bloodsucking beauty. However, the Conjuress shows up to reveal to Vampirella that she could not have killed Drac had she tried, for the experience in the other dimension was a test of Vampi's ability to conquer her "animalistic instincts," as much as giving Drac the chance to repent. So the mystic maiden sends the heroine back home.

However, moments later, Dracula comes to and becomes incensed at having been vulnerable to his enemy. He ignores the Conjuress' blandishments about reformation and re-dedicates himself to being "the personification of evil."

The parallelism of Drac and Vampi here is somewhat undercut by the next three Vampirella stories, in which the Conjuress talks Dracula into getting back on the path of atonement. These are all decent stories, but they lack the symbolic density that makes "Dracula Still Lives" a memorable mythcomic, combining the metaphysical tropes of world-salvation and self-abnegation with the psychological tropes of forbidden love and the deep attractions of transgression.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this series, I established that one can imagine, in keeping with Stephen King's reading of Samuel Coleridge, a special "muscular effort" the reader must make in order to entertain metaphemomena in fiction, given that metaphenomena go against what most readers "deem the expected phenomena of this world." But was King right about the nature of said effort? Once more, here's how King interpreted Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief:"

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

One problem with this extrapolation is that Coleridge did not say much about the nature of the "disbelief" that must be "suspended" in order for a reader to entertain "shadows of imagination." I hypothesized that one might compare this disbelief with Cassirer's "naive realism," the human tendency to believe only in what one can perceive through the senses. But though it's possible to read that in King, Coleridge doesn't generalize so much. It's possible he meant this "disbelief" to be something purely characteristic of his historical era.

So is King right that disbelief that "has to be hoisted, and held up by main force?" That might be the case with individuals' disbelief in metaphenoma occurring in the real world, and indeed, King's dichotomy about belief and disbelief takes places in a chapter where he narrates an experience in which a relative demonstrated the apparent reality of dowsing to Young King. But is the same effort necessary when an individual faces fictional phenomena that don't accord with what he expects?

Many individuals who don't believe in the existence of anything but material objects will prefer fiction that coheres with their beliefs; fiction which does not portray any "shadows of imagination" as real. But many readers may share that materialist philosophy, and yet they indulge in metaphenomenal fiction precisely because it does not resemble the real world, and so affords them an escape from reality's demands. Further, whereas as some people may earnestly believe in such rural fantasies as sprites and brownies, no one truly believes in hobbits, because hobbits are self-evidently the fictional creations of a particular author.

Given all these contingencies, I think that what Coleridge and King call "disbelief" is really "disengagement." 

As I observed previously, isophenomenal fiction does not have to establish ground rules for its phenomena, but both forms of the metaphenomenal, the marvelous and the uncanny, must do so, however implicitly. 

The marvelous, as I established in CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN, rebels against the isophenomenal formula of "one cause yields one definite effect." For example, in the real world, there are no chemicals that can cause a person to turn invisible, but in H.G. Wells' INVISIBLE MAN, such chemicals are imagined into existence, and so Griffin's "invisibility formula" is a "shadow of imagination" given reality. A reader may choose either to engage with that shadow on its own terms or not, but the reader's credence in the concept does not affect the work's ground rules. The uncanny does not overtly challenge the causal order, but its creations carry the semblance of multicausality (is the House of Usher really alive in some fashion, or is it just a non-sentient building upon which people project their delusions?)

Historically, some readers have found it easier to engage with works of the uncanny than with marvelous ones. Early Gothic fiction, such as VATHEK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, traded heavily in marvelous content, patently following models supplied by Arabian Nights fables and European knight-romances. But though Ann Radcliffe might not be the very first author to invent the "supernatural rationally explained," she supplied a new paradigm for those who didn't want to credence, even in fiction, the more outrageous imaginative shadows. Yet it's a major error on the part of many critics (not least Tzvetan Todorov) to believe that Radcliffe's "rational Gothics" had anything to do with realistic fiction, in which the possibility of ghosts and demons can't even be entertained for a moment.

Most uncanny fictions require a lesser "muscular intellectual act" for a reader to engage with their content, simply because the uncanny conveys the superficial appearance of adhering to rules of casual coherence. By contrast, overtly marvelous fictions usually formulate their own ground multicausal ground rules, ranging from a Tolkien, who imagines a world full of elves and trolls and angel-like entities, to an animated cartoon that can depict any bizarre transformation, "as long as it's funny." However, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK stands as an example of an uncanny work that requires just as much intellectual musculature as the most sophisticated marvelous fiction in order for a reader to fully engage with its ground rules. So, in essence, both the uncanny and the marvelous are equally capable of providing heavy-lifting exercise for a reader's imaginative muscles.

MYTHCOMICS: ELEKTRA BLOODLINES (ELEKTRA #1-5, 2014)

Though Frank Miller's Elektra had a somewhat rocky beginning in the pages of DAREDEVIL, he and his collaborators produced two outstanding works centered upon her spiritual growth out of darkness, the RESURRECTION arc and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN. However, the story goes that someone at Marvel promised Miller that they wouldn't use the character without his permission, and that, when they reneged on that promise, Miller ceased to work for the company. And for a time it seemed like Marvel had reaped the consequences of this disagreement. None of Marvel's post-Miller features starring Elektra seems to have sold particularly well, despite her high level of recognizability, and neither of the live-action movies in which she appeared earned much approbation. But though the 2014 ELEKTRA was no more successful than other iterations, the BLOODLINES arc from the first five issues is at least in line with some of the symbolic discourse used in the Miller mythcomics.

To be sure, while writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Michael Del Mundo agree that Elektra came back from the dead as she did in the RESURRECTION arc, they ignore Miller's idea that Daredevil purged her of the spiritual pollution she'd suffered since the death of her father, and the activation of her eternally unsatisfied "Electra complex." This Elektra begins her story by focusing on her utter lack of identity, ticking off all the things she is not-- not dancer, nor artist, nor hero, but only "somebody's assassin." The dominant suggestion is that her lack of identity has allowed her to be molded into whatever shapes others wished her to take.

So for this arc, Blackman and Del Mundo gave Elektra two new adversaries-- and when I read their names on the back cover, I thought, "These guys have no talent for naming super-villains. 'Bloody Lips?' 'Cape Crow?' Even Bill Mantlo came up with better names, and he made up a character called Razorback." Well, Bloody Lips grew on me, but Cape Crow is still a lame name and not much better as a character. In fact, the part of the story involving Cape Crow and his son Kento is meant to play on Elektra's anomie about not having had a proper familial upbringing, and so bears a resemblance to the 2005 ELEKTRA film. Blackman's BLOODLINES script is not as stickily sentimental as the movie, but the resemblance does the writer no credit. Lest you wonder, he doesn't even try to come up with some justification for the guy to use the weird cognomen "Cape Crow."

Like Elektra, CC-- which abbreviation I'm adopting to avoid that awful name-- is a bounty hunter, but he's pissed off a whole guild devoted to the profession, and they've sent a passel of other hired guns after him. He kills or half-kills all of them, including Elektra's onetime murderer Bullseye. Elektra accepts the commission to seek out CC, but so does a metahuman assassin, "Bloody Lips."

Bloody Lips is not given a straight origin as such, but it's implied that he's an Australian aborigine who can absorb the memories and skills of adversaries after eating their flesh. Blackman and Del Mundo work in a lot of references and imagery suggestive of aboriginal religion (these are the "metaphysical myths" of the narrative), but Bloody Lips' main attraction is that he revels in the lack of identity that distresses Elektra. He doesn't care that his identity is compromised by absorbing the strengths and skills of other beings, just so long as he can kill people. 

In a long sequence, both Bloody Lips and Elektra are plunged into mental psychodramas in which shadows of their pasts seek to task them with their foul deeds. Elektra feels but rejects her guilt. Bloody Lips, who slaughtered his family for whatever reasons, realizes that even if he hadn't done the deed in that way, he would have committed some other version of the crime. He's practically the incarnation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

Elektra, however, remains haunted by the possibility that things might have been different, If Only. But her ninja training leads her to a conclusion similar to that of Bloody Lips, but without any false self-aggrandizement. When a psychic image of her mother tries to guilt her for the scores of deaths she's caused, Elektra rejects the notion of feeling guilt for her carnage. "You want me to see victims," she tells the false mother-image, "when all I see are murderers, terrorists, sadists, despots." She slays the image of the mother she never knew in life.

Later, Elektra later learns that all the psychic specters experienced by her and by Bloody Lips were conjured up by the mental powers of Kento, who wanted to protect his father against both bounty hunters. She doesn't know this when she saves Kento's life or when she battles CC, though her lust for battle is sufficient that it overrides any "rational" attempt to reason with the rival bounty hunter. She spares CC, only to figure out what Kento did to her. Yet because he did it for his father, she essentially forgives him that trespass.

But the CC battle is just a prelude to the heroic assassin's duel with her opposite number. All through the story, Bloody Lips has gone on and on about how much he likes incorporating the experiences of his victims as well as their skills, and he hungers to take in "everything you've felt, everything you've seen," to which Elektra responds, "See if you can survive being me."

There's nothing blazingly original about the villain who realizes he just can't measure up to the hero he wants to overwhelm, but it's an appropriate punishment, however temporary, for the omophagic evildoer. But once again, Elektra is tempted by the "If Only" lure of becoming someone other than who she is-- and again she rejects it, accepting eternal recurrence with far more self-awareness than her erstwhile opponent.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

MARCH TO WOMANHOOD

 I was revving up to do a mythcomics post this week when I realized, "Shit! March is Woman's History Month; I have to devote all my mythcomics posts to Female Characters in Comics."

I jest, of course. Only on occasion have I been moved to do something similar in Black History Month, and even then, I frequently posted anything relevant to racial myths of any kind. I would never follow the pack just because that's what agenda-driven politicians seek to do. But for whatever reason I simply didn't think of doing anything like that for WHM. However, not to do it at least once in a while, as the spirit moves me, would run counter to my advocacy of pluralism.

Since I haven't yet decided which two I will examine in March, I throw open the gates to any reader who may care to suggest a possible source of Feminine Myth in Comics. 

I have of course devoted dozens of posts to such myths over the years, and in all likelihood various versions of Wonder Woman have received the most attention, so I'd like not to focus on her this time out.

The 2001-2014 manga-series CLAYMORE is a fair candidate. I've sampled the feature here and there, and as it happens I reviewed the collected anime disc on the NUM blog without finishing the manga. Since the manga went on for many years, I'm going to guess that the collected anime may have condensed the manga's main arcs into one overarcing narrative, much as did the single-season anime show CHRONO CRUSADE. I found that the original manga for that show did not prove concrescent, since it didn't manage to keep its master thread coherent, and I'm kind of anticipating the same for the CLAYMORE manga.

VAMPIRELLA is another possibility. My impression is that the original Warren series is just okay formula, and most of the Harris follow-ups are not any more ambitious. But as I said in my February review of an early Vampi story, there's a lot of good potential in the concept, not least because Vampirella was one of the earliest "bad girls" to get her own featured series. There have been several reboots of the character over the years, so there's at least the possibility of some good myths.

I've also sampled bits and pieces of HARLEY QUINN features, but so far, nothing that has proved mythic, despite the immense popularity of the character. I read BATMAN: THEIR DARK DESIGNS, wherein Harley meets the new Joker-henchwoman PUNCHLINE, who seems to be garnering her own following, but DESIGNS was not quite complex enough to fit my myth-list, though my jury's still out on this "anti-Harley-Quinn."