ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3

 At the end of 2020's EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2, I wrote:

The same dynamic also applies to those serials that often or always focus upon “guest stars”who never again appear in the series. Early installments of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT are structured like almost every other adventure-hero feature, in which the Spirit helps good people and vanquishes bad people. However, even in the earliest years Eisner sometimes devoted stories to one-shot characters who seemed to take center stage, in that their triumphs or tragedies received the most attention. However, the Spirit was still the thread holding all of those one-shot characters together, and so he retained the greatest stature, even in stories like THE CURSE, in which the hero barely appears. As discussed in HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE, the only exception to this centricity formulation appears in certain anthology titles. When a continuing character merely appears as an interlocutor—Jorkens in Arthur C. Clarke’s TALES OF THE WHITE HART, or the many “horror hosts” in comic-book titles—then whatever focal presence inspires the most conviction in each story possesses the greatest stature-vector, though not necessarily the greater charisma-vector.

But, it's occurred to me from time to time, what if the interlocutor telling the stories is also a part of them, as the Spirit always has potential agency in the anthology-stories in his series? 

My conception of "agency" came up at the end of last year, with GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1, where I defined the term thusly:

..."agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

The relevance of such comparison to the current question goes like this: if the Spirit can have dominant agency even in all of his stories, even those where he does next to nothing, then why would the same NOT be true of icons who appear in all the stories within a self-contained anthology?

In the above essay, the reason I split agency into both "narrative" and "significant" values was because it's more than evident that central characters may have no agency at all within the diegesis of their stories, but may have it in an extra-diegetic sense. My example was Willy Loman of Miller's play DEATH OF A SALESMAN, who has no power within his story to change his circumstances, but has agency insofar as his fate manifests the primary concerns of the author's will. Similarly, though the serial character of The Spirit may not have much narrative agency in all of his stories, he has significant agency as the source of the authorial ethos that ties together all the characters in his world.

So, when an interlocutor-like character participates within the diegesis of a story, one must ask if the author's will is most fully expressed in this icon's actions and outcome. 

The 1981 HEAVY METAL presents viewers with a frame-story in which a glowing green sphere, billed in credits as "Loc-Nar," accosts a young girl, whose father he has just killed, and tells her stories about the many ways Loc-Nar has spread, or tried to spread, evil throughout the universe. 

In one of the narrated stories-- which the listening girl views, as if Loc-Nar were a crystal ball-- Loc-Nar has only a minor effect, encouraging a robot to go sex-mad in "So Beautiful, So Dangerous."

In two stories, "B-17" and "Captain Sternn," Loc-Nar wreaks capricious changes on human beings, reviving dead pilots as zombies in "B-17" and mutating a not-quite-innocent individual in "Sternn." 

In the story "Harry Canyon" Loc -Nar, pretending to be a priceless artifact, leads two subordinate characters to their doom. However, the centric character is never even aware of Loc-Nar's power, and fortune so favors him that he makes a pile of money off the weaknesses of those who seek to profit from the artifact.

In the other two stories, "Den" and "Taarna," Loc-Nar's influence takes different shapes. The entity does not directly seek to tempt the heroic Den, but other characters present Den with the possibility of using Loc-Nar to rule his new world, and Den nobly refuses.

 In "Taarna" Loc-Nar seeks to dominate an entire future-world. Some denizens of that world summon the heroine Taarna to oppose Loc-Nar's forces, and after several battles, Taarna makes a direct assault upon Loc-Nar. The entity makes its only direct attempt at temptation, offering Taarna rulership, but the warrior-woman destroys Loc-Nar-- which, through some unfathomable resonance, causes the interlocutor Loc-Nar in the frame-story to perish as well. The movie ends upon a triumphant note, even though of the six stories, Loc-Nar succeeding in promulgating evil in three narratives, but did not wholly succeed in the other three. 

In essence, the same paradigm applies to Loc-Nar that applied to Willy Loman. Loc-Nar has considerable narrative agency, but the point of the author(s) is to show that his agency can be defeated, and so in each story the centric icon is whatever entity the Loc-Nar impinges upon. Therefore he does not have significant agency across all six stories, as the Spirit does in all of his tales.

However, some of the characters appeared in other comics-stories before their adaptation in HEAVY METAL, and of course Loc-Nar, as conceived by the movie's authors, did not appear in the stories of "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." Therefore, since these are "familiarity icons" being "crossed over" with the "novelty-icon" of Loc-Nar, HEAVY METAL qualifies as a crossover-film.

(Note: the name Loc-Nar comes from one of the "Den" comics-stories but there's no connection between that name and the movie's icon. Additionally, though Wiki says that "Harry Canyon" and "Taarna" are derived from two separate Moebius stories, neither qualifies as an adaptation.)

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #14

 While scanning through issues of JUMBO COMICS to chart the progress of the character Sheena, I came across a "weird western" feature named "Wilton of the West," which lasted from issues #1-24 of the title. While the majority of early forties western comics are depressingly isophenomenal, "Wilton"-- allegedly drawn for three issues by Jack Kirby and then by Lou Fine-- had his first brush with the uncanny when he encountered a red-garbed masked crusader, the Crimson Rider in JUMBO #9 (1939). The Rider turns out to be female, making her one of the first masked heroines in comic books, though she's not in every story and is always a support character.

Wilton has a few other encounters with bizarre phenomena, such as a mutilating serial killer (no mutilations actually seen, though) and a town full of Lilliputians, liberally borrowed from the Travels of You Know Who. But the only story worth exhuming I've titled "The Ghost of Moose Ridge." While even in 1939 phony ghosts in the Old West were commonplace, in issue #15 Wilton and the Crimson Rider encounter a weird spook with some "Headless Horseman" similarities. For some reason Crimson Rider becomes an expert in the occult for this one story.

By comparison, for those first 24 issues Sheena's issues are fairly pedestrian, except for #20. Sheena, as a tiny number of fans know, was not the raised-by-animals type of jungle hero. Instead, she was a white child adopted by a tribe of Afro-Mongols, from whom she learns skills with knife and spear. The story, given the mostly irrelevant cover-title of "Spoilers of the Wild," has Sheena and Bob explore a hidden valley. They're taken prisoner by a bunch of gorillas under the control of a human female, Keela, who's as strong as a gorilla and was apparently raised among them. Keela tries to edge Sheena out with Bob, and Sheena uses superior skill to vanquish "Keela of the Apes." Since at least one gorilla is unusually hostile to Bob and Sheena, I find myself wondering if he was a rejected suitor, though the story does not say so. (Also, what's with a tribe of apes having a place where they "make wishes?")

Neither of these stories is articulated well enough even to count as a "near myth," but they do present some odd "raw material."

STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL

 In the first two parts of STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN, respectively here and here, I pursued a comparison between Samuel T. Coleridge's comment about "the suspension of disbelief" and Stephen King's response to that concept. I then followed up with a third essay based on my two categories of the metaphenomenal. I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." Naturally, since King only talked about the metaphenomenal in general terms, there were no explicit comparisons between what he wrote in DANCE MACABRE and my NUM theory.

However, when I reread BATMAN #400, reviewed here, I was reminded that this very special anniversary issue included an essay by King, entitled "Why I Chose Batman." In this essay, King explains that as a comic-reading kid he far preferred Batman to Superman, and the reason he gives for that preference seems to be rooted in his personal sense of disbelief-- even though the way he frames that disbelief would seem to contradict everything he wrote in his DANSE essay. In that essay, King seems to disparage those who can't allow themselves to roll with a good fantasy-yarn:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Now, in the following segment of the 1986 essay, King seems to be endorsing a lack of imaginative muscle.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

Now, King probably did not know anything about any theories about fantasy-fiction, least of all those of Tzvetan Todorov and his theory of the uncanny, which I've refuted here numerous times. But he-- or at least his younger self-- is validating his Batman preference over Superman (though he says he did like the Man of Steel somewhat) simply because he didn't think Batman violated Young King's sense of what was possible in the real world. And nowhere in "Chose" does Older King invalidate what Young King thought about these matters, even though five years earlier he'd turned a pitying eye on audiences who couldn't place credence in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One.

Of course, everyone has blind spots, and I'm reasonably sure that King, having been asked to celebrate the Caped Crusader for an anniversary special, just reeled off his kid-memories to serve that purpose. He certainly wasn't making an aesthetic statement. However, what he said is not unique, since a lot of comics-fans have expressed a similar preference for the Bat-dude over the Super-dude. And often the criteria of these fans is similar: Batman seems possible, Superman impossible. 

Of course, in fiction nothing is impossible; readers only make that judgment if they are of the belief that fiction MUST reflect the reality of everyday experience. Years ago I played around with the idea that I might define the marvelous and the uncanny in terms of probability. But as I recall, I abandoned this notion, because I don't think fiction must reflect everyday experience, and indeed, fiction is attractive specifically because it is not tied to external reality, the reality of "one cause=one effect." Some people don't want fiction to indulge in impossibilities, and that's their prerogative, but by King's own 1981 standards, their disengagement from overt fantasies might be deemed a sign of imaginative underdevelopment.

Lastly, just to pick at King's analysis on one more point, I don't know exactly what Batman comics he read. But I don't think that there was ever a time when Batman didn't have substantial encounters with marvelous, "impossible" phenomena. King cites examples of bizarre criminals that in themselves conform to the domain of the uncanny. Since he was born in 1947, he wouldn't have seen the hero's contentions with vampires or mad scientists who change people into destructive giants. But if he was reading comics in the 1950s, then he certainly would have seen Batman contending with super-crooks who used freeze-rays and force-fields, even if he King made it a point not to buy any of the "Batman vs. aliens" entries.

On a side-note, King's essay also mentions in passing the same-year success of Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In 1986, this only meant a new validation for Batman after years of being deemed the Number Two DC hero after the company's Kryptonian mascot. But neither King nor anyone else could have guessed how sweeping the influence of Miller, and after him Tim Burton, would prove, so that today, more often than not, the Gotham Guardian gets top billing over the Metropolis Marvel. And so King's essay seems slightly prescient, even if I don't think people prefer Batman for exactly the same reasons he specified. 

NEAR-MYTHS: "RESURRECTION NIGHT" (BATMAN #400, 1986)

I discussed the most ambitious arc in Doug Moench's BATMAN run here, but as it happened the writer continued to script Bat-tales until late 1986, and within that time-frame his last one seems to be this celebration of the Caped Crusader's four hundredth issue of his own title. Oddly, the long-term Bat-writer who had immediately preceded Moench, Gerry Conway, also departed by writing an "anniversary" issue of sorts, that of Batman's 500th appearance in DETECTIVE COMICS. That celebration, like Moench's, depended on pitting the crusader and his allies against a huge smorgasbord of  villains.

Neither story is anything special, since the trope of assembling of so many evildoers in one tale creates a "too many crooks spoil the broth" situation. But "Resurrection Night" has a better gimmick, in that Moench's story was illustrated by a round-robin group of established artists, as seen on the cover above. This was the main attraction of "Night," giving fans the chance to see Batman and his cosmos rendered by many artists who wouldn't ordinarily work on the regular titles. 

The plot is necessarily simple: on the actual anniversary of Batman's genesis (I think-- Moench is vague on the matter), the mastermind Ra's Al Ghul liberates twenty-something villains from prison and from Arkham Asylum, in order to make a massed attack on the crusader and his allies. Said allies include "Jason Todd Robin" and Batman's competing love-interests Talia and Catwoman, both of whom are wearing their good-girl hats this time. I did appreciate that Moench almost immediately rids his story of about a dozen malcontents who simply refuse to play along with the big scheme against Batman. This economizing kept Moench and his collaborators from making an error like the one Conway made in his opus. That 1983 villain-rally began by showing the Penguin meeting up the rest of his criminal cronies--after which Conway evidently forgot that the Birdman Bandit was part of the story, since the Penguin vanished from the tale thereafter. 

So the villains break up into separate units, which makes it all the easier for the round-robin artists to handle separate sections of the peripatetic plot. IMO the most enjoyable outing is that of independent artist Ken Steacy, who made only irregular contributions to either of the Big Two. 

But what if anything justifies my calling "Resurrection Night" a near-myth? The closest the story comes to a "master thread" appears in a segment penciled (in a strangely hyperactive style) by Bill Sienkiewicz. Ra's, after unleashing this gang of ghouls upon Gotham, appears in the Batcave and offers the hero his idea of a "temptation in the desert;" offering to kill off all of Batman's foes if Batman will put aside crimefighting and join the mastermind's League of Assassins. Most Bat-readers will not think this an  especially well-thought-out idea, and of course Batman utterly rejects trading one evil for another. The most one can say for the master villain's plan is that he also has his pawns kidnap four innocents, including Alfred the Butler, so on some level Ra's hopes to guilt the hero into forswearing heroism. After the defeat of the pawns, Batman finds Ra's holed up in a windmill and defeats him, 

The Brian Bolland art for the near-finale is also a standout, but the coda is a little more psychologically interesting, First, after the heroes and their friends meet in the Batcave for a cheery anniversary party, It's then that we're told that the windmill where Ra's was defeated (in the usual fiery explosion) created an aftershock that just happened to punctuate the celebration with a stalactite of death. Batman being Batman, he takes the occurrence as a justification to stalk away and brood. Does he reflect on how his destiny has tied him inextricably to a world of freaks and fiends? Well, Moench doesn't exactly say so, but that's what I got out of it. As usual, some of Moench's poetic tropes are labored. The stalactite that impales the cake is a "candle?" And being just one candle, that means it signifies the "resurrection" of Batman's crimefighting career (albeit in other hands than those of Moench)? Not his most inspired symbol-correlation. But "Night" is certainly a better wrap-up for Moench's tenure on BATMAN than the rather piddling stories that appeared in the post-Nocturna months.

THE READING RHEUM: THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA (serialization 1927, book 1929)

 

In  my review of DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU, I quoted Wikipedia's "Sax Rohmer" essay, which alleged that Rohmer's novel THE EMPEROR OF AMERICA-- first serialized in 1927-- was an abortive attempt to write a sequel to 1917's HAND OF FU MANCHU, in which EMPEROR's female villain would be revealed as Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee. However, based on the information I culled from the Rohmer biography MASTER OF VILLAINY, the Wiki article seems full of unsubstantiated speculation. The biography establishes a clearer line of circumstances. Collier's Magazine, which had serialized the previous Fu Manchu novels in America, approached Rohmer about a Fu sequel sometime in 1925, possibly in response to the appearance of two silent-movie adaptations of the devil-doctor in the preceding years. Sometime between 1925 and 1927, Rohmer completed one segment of DAUGHTER, but for some reason Collier's wouldn't pay him for individual segments, and Rohmer needed cash. So he offered the magazine a different serial, one for which the editors presumably did pay on a serialized basis, and only after that was finished did Rohmer return to DAUGHTER. It seems obvious to me that EMPEROR must have been a stand-alone concept from the first, and that Rohmer probably would have roughly plotted out part or all of DAUGHTER when he first thought he was going to serialize the whole novel in (say) 1926.

I also commented in my review that I'd read EMPEROR once before and that I didn't remember much about it. On occasion I've reread a work that didn't make  much impression on me initially, only to find in the second reading that I'd missed this or that interesting quality in the first read. Not this time, though. 

EMPEROR's problem is an exceeding thin premise, possibly not well worked-out because Rohmer devised it in haste. The novel takes place solely in New York, and posits, not unlike the much later teleseries BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, that a labyrinth of caverns exists beneath the city. A vast organization known as "The Zones" has its central HQ within these caverns, and though the organization has sanctuaries in other cities, none of the others are important to the story. The supreme ruler of the Zones is usually called "Great Head Centre," though in one defiant note to the police, the villain assumes the title "Emperor of America."

Though Rohmer tosses out about five potential protagonists, he spends the most time with a policeman, Drake Roscoe, and his everyman-buddy Dr. Stopford, who gets the novel's obligatory romantic arc. Aside from the occasional amusing line, the protagonists are boring, and the villains are made tedious by the fact, despite their immense tactical organization-- the sub-commanders all oversee different parts of New York-- Rohmer never explains what methods the Emperor means to use in conquering America. Thus EMPEROR is a novel that suggests high stakes but fails to make them seem credible.

Possibly because Fu Manchu was on Rohmer's mind at the time, he teases readers with a "Head Centre" who seems to be a yellow-skinned mummy. However, this is a fake-out, since the mummy is a dummy, a prop for the villain. The Emperor uses one Fu-like method to deal out death, that of a poisonous spider, but I don't remember anyone actually getting killed, partly because Rohmer spends so much bloody time with the intricacies of the evil spy network. 

The only good thing about EMPEROR OF AMERICA is that its existence allowed Rohmer to get this weak premise out of his system so that he didn't use it in any of the Fu Manchu books. He must have had some affection for his hero Drake Roscoe, for later he made this character an opponent in some if not all installments of a book-series devoted to yet another villainess: the Sumuru saga.

MYTHCOMICS: "LAND OF THE TOTEM POLES" (FOUR COLOR #263, 1950)

 

In my somewhat scattered re-reads of the two Disney titles wherein Carl Barks created his most distinctive work, UNCLE SCROOGE and DONALD DUCK, the latter series has usually seemed to show less potential for myth-mining. The Donald of the comics did become much more articulate than his animated forebear. But even when Donald went on wild adventures without his money-hungry uncle, those exploits didn't seem to spark Barks' imagination quite as much, as when the artist cooked up such bizarre entities as Magica DeSpell. The Larkies, and the inhabitants of Tralla La.

To be sure, with the selected story "Land of the Totem Poles," the main opponents faced by Donald and his resourceful trio of nephews aren't that distinctive. In fact, many modern readers would probably consider Barks' depiction of a primitive tribe of Indians in British Columbia to be condescending. But Barks' main theme in "Totem" revolves around his comic validation of American entrepreneurship, and so the Indians-- I'll name them after the punny river in their terrain, "the Kickmiquik"-- exist primarily to become his ambivalent customers.

Though in this story Donald Duck does show a great deal of determination in his pursuit of a hefty sales commission, though not that much common sense. Not only does he not research the area he's assigned to sell his goods in, he barely seems to have looked at the item he's supposed to sell. He tells his nephews that he thinks it's "some sort of pressure cooker," when the item he's supposed to sell to primitive tribes is a giant steam calliope. In contrast, the three kids bring along their own set of commission-goods, but those goods-- mostly makeup items-- are both sensible and easy to transport. After Donald fails to sell anything to his first prospect, while the kids succeed, he orders them to switch with him. Of course, the second customer, a remarkably hairy hermit, does buy what the kids are selling, so that Donald fails again. This trope, in which the kids frequently outpace their uncle in some way, was one Barks surely used to appeal to his kid-audience. 

However, just so the Ducks don't have an easier row to how, the kids take the hermit's order but don't leave him their "sample case," being just as motivated as Donald to make a big score even in unlikely circumstances. However, just as the river comes to an end, the Ducks see smoke signals. Donald in his blind chauvinism assumes that primitive Indians will go gaga over his sample case of makeup items. Barks takes a slight jab at this assumption, since the Kickmiquicks have heard that all palefaces are "bad medicine" and try to avoid the intrusive salesman. 

Donald does manage to rope in several tribe-persons with a demonstration of the makeup, but they start using the junk before he can make any explanations, and they turn on him. 

By good fortune, the nephews luck onto a method by which they can drive the calliope to the Kickmiquik village, all unaware of Donald's flight from dissatisfied customers. 

When the kids find out what's what, they try to rush to the rescue, but in so doing, they destroy the calliope. However, with typical Junior Woodchuck cleverness, they transfer some of the calliope's mechanisms to the natives' totem poles. And thus they again trump their uncle, for though at first the Kickmiquiks are terrified of their totems making horrendous sounds, they rapidly change their minds and become customers for a product that the salesmen never actually intended to market. You can't get a much better validation of entrepreneurship than that, even allowing for the many comic reversals in the story.

In closing I should add that Barks didn't just draw a bunch of stock Native Americans, as a lot of artists of the period would have in his shoes. Since Barks' story hinged upon the visual pun equating calliopes and totem poles, he clearly researched the attire and artwork of the Indians most associated with totem poles, those of the Pacific Northwest. So, even if the artist's treatment of the primitive tribe might not seem virtuous to many readers today, Barks certainly exerted himself to ground his story in the actual art seen in the real-life "lands of the totem poles."

LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR

In COSMIC ALIGNMENT I addressed the way certain real-life historical figures generated innominative characters based on them, but I didn't try to address what if any limits I might place on the simple appearance of historical figures of any kind within a fictional context. In the essay I spoke of four Old West figures in terms of the enduring "folk-legends" they had engendered in addition to their appearances in nominative fictional works.

... these [four characters] would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

I won't pause at this time for a rigorous definition of what I mean by "legends," but I think it important to stress that though there are hundreds of famous historical figures who have been committed to fiction, very few of them have taken on the quasi-unreal status of legends. Billy the Kid is such a legend. A later author can imagine him doing all sorts of unhistorical things-- becoming a vampire who fights Bloodrayne, or being taught gunmanship by the Two-Gun Kid, but each fictionalized Billy has that legendary quality. Thus even a story in which the Kid is a superordinate character, Billy sustains only a "crossover-charisma" when he appears alongside a stature-bearing character like Bloodrayne or Two-Gun.The vast majority of historical figures, even when they're shown doing unhistorical things, are still no greater than what the reader/audience knows of the originals. Winston Churchill is just Winston Churchill even if he's seen consulting with The Invaders. Adolf Hitler is just Hitler, even if he's depicted as the secret creator of The Red Skull.

This idea of "legendary stature/charisma" came to mind as I considered a pair of early seventies films by junk-auteur Jesus Franco. The first of the two, DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN, was indubitably a crossover of two nominative icons from particular fictional works.

However, the quasi-sequel THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN depends on mixing the nominative figures of Frankenstein and his Monster with a brand-new character given the name Cagliostro. The movie uses the same pair of actors who played Frankenstein and Dracula in the earlier film, and a version of a character from the Stoker novel DRACULA also appears in both films. Franco's Frankenstein has a qualitative level of stature, but Cagliostro-- who isn't even explicitly compared to the 18th-century occultist-- lacks either stature or charisma capable of sustaining a crossover. Even if there had been some explicit connection to the historical figure, though, I would say, "Cagliostro is no Billy the Kid." 

The occultist only gets a few popular-fiction incarnations. He appears in a 1970s DOCTOR STRANGE continuity, for example. Wikipedia mentions several usages of Cagliostro's historical personage in various works, but  the only book I'd heard of was Alexander Dumas's 1846 BALSAMO-- and this was used as a partial basis for the oddball Orson Welles swashbuckler BLACK MAGIC. The latter two works may be the closest the historical character came to having "stature" in particular nominative texts, but they aren't sufficient for me to think of him as a figure of "legendary" status. Ergo, in Franco's RITES the intersection of Doctor Frankenstein with a man who might be the 18th-century occultist is at best a mashup, not a crossover.

The same would apply to any number of interactions between stature-icons and whatever historical figures they cross paths with-- Doctor Strange and Ben Franklin, Superboy and George Washington, or any time-traveling icon meeting any number of famous historical people-- on which I may expound further later on.

ADDENDUM: Of course when Adolf Hitler becomes a super-villain, as when a version of Der Fuhrer got turned into Marvel's "Hate-Monger," then the real historical figure has become totally subsumed by a fictional character. This type of fictionalized character becomes nominative, not innominate, and said character can be a "charisma-crossover" with another repeat-villain, as he is in SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP. Also, if Hate-Fuhrer had been the star of his own villain-centric series, or part of an ensemble, for an impressive amount of time, he would obtain stature and would qualify as a stature-crossover with any other character with stature, much as Deadshot acquired stature and keeps it after his respectable run in the SUICIDE SQUAD ensemble.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MONGROL MAN" (UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY #4, 1942)

 When I went myth-hunting in the pages of Quality's publication UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY-- a short-lived attempt to give the ultra-patriotic hero his own title, lasting just eight issues-- I thought it likely that any mythcomics there would be authored by Sam's creator Will Eisner. But though Eisner's contributions in this series are amusing, the most mythic story here is by an unknown writer and stalwart artist George Tuska. Neither collaborator attempts any of Eisner's well-known tics with respect to lettering or panel composition, but "The Mongrol Man" does evince the sort of bloody-mindedness I associate with Eisner's sometime collaborator Jack Cole. However, so many fans have sought out Cole's work that "Mongrol" probably would have been identified by now if it was one of his works.

The title is an anomaly in two respects. First, there isn't just one "Mongrol Man," there's three of them. Second, the name seems to be punning on the two words "Mongol" and "mongrel," but only the second word actually has any significance in the story. This is surprising because during WWII a favorite trope of American superhero comics was that of a "20th-century Mongol invasion." Strangely, although "Mongolian" was informally used to describe, not just inhabitants of Mongolia, but all Asians roughly east of India, none of the comics I've read actually conflates any of these various recrudescent Mongols with the Japanese. Perhaps even comics-writers, far from concerned with fine points of cultural history, couldn't associate the Japanese opponents, usually pictured as small-statured, with Mongols, who were portrayed as tall hulking brutes.

Nazi eugenicists concerned themselves primarily with creating racial purity by excluding all supposedly inferior races from interbreeding with the Aryan stock of Germany. This story's villain, biologist Jeremiah Korntooth, goes to the other extreme: creating a "perfect brute race" by somehow combining aspects of humans of different climes and possibly animals as well, meaning that he was taking leaves from the books of both Frankenstein and Moreau. Hence, the brutes he invents are actually "mongrels," which sounds like the opposite of the Nazi ideology.

The common ground, however, seems to be that Korntooth has some roughly parallel beliefs about the fetishization of raw power, since he describes the three leaders of the Axis powers as those who "share my ideals." He views the advance of Western technology as a weakening influence upon humankind, and he decides to create a new breed of superhumans to offset human dependence on technology. Having bred just three Mongrol Men, he bestows one apiece on each of the Axis leaders and then vanishes from the story.

Now, Quality's Uncle Sam was supposed to be a heavy-hitter like Superman, able to fling around tanks and proving invulnerable to bullets. Two issue previous, the top-hatted hero had engaged in a grueling battle with a similarly powered opponent, and the cover for USQ #2 described the story as a "14-page powerhouse battle." Actually, the story was 14 pages, and the battle only lasted six, but for a Golden Age story, that was still pretty long. All this to say that a reader in 1942 could have reasonably expected Uncle Sam to take on the exemplars of the "brute race" and beat them in hand-to-hand conflict.

However, the "Mongrol" writer isn't concerned with matching Korntooth's mongrels against the strength of American willpower. Instead, by the way Sam and his ordinary-joe servicemen aides dispose of the creatures, the moral seems to be: use anything you have, technology or trickery, to overcome threats to freedom. So in the encounter with the Mongrol Man serving the Italian army, the sailor "Tex" lassoes the monster from his plane (don't try this at home) and successfully dashes the "invulnerable" Mongrol against a cliff-side.

The second one is defeated more by tricky use of the surrounding environment. When Sam and friends arrive to take on the monster serving the Germans on the Russian front, the second of the two aides, "Bayou Bill," tries to drug the Mongrol by pouring vodka in his drinking water. It's not certain that the Mongrol is weakened by the alcohol, for he comes after the serviceman. Uncle Sam comes to Bill's rescue and after a short battle knocks the creature into a handy quicksand pond, where he asphixiates.

The last of Korntooth's creations joins a couple of Japanese fighter-planes in trying to destroy an Allied vessel. This time Uncle Sam forms no particular strategy; he just dives down into the sea to duke it out with the Mongrol. But the last of the brutes is defeated by another manifestation of the technology hated by Korntooth: when one of the Japanese fighters is downed by Allied fire, the plane crashes on top of the Mongrol, whose invulnerability is something less than Superman-esque. The Axis' use of pure strength is invalidated, though Sam's useless sidekick Buddy sounds a little like Korntooth, complainnng about "sissy stuff." 

On a side-note, I have no idea why the writer named his villain Korntooth. The expression "corntooth" is an old putdown accusing a person of bad dental hygiene, in that he's so neglected brushing that one of his front teeth has turned corn-yellow. It doesn't seem to have any actual relevance to the villain's depiction, so probably the writer just thought "corntooth" would be an amusing name for a pretentious evildoer.

THE LONGING OF THE WEAK

One of these days I'd like to see a compilation of references to Sigmund Freud and his theories in popular culture. I don't imagine I'll attempt one myself, but here's a curious entry for such a list.

In preparation for a review on the NUM blog, I re-watched the 1952 musical SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE, in which star Virginia Mayo is a burlesque performer who only bumps and grinds so that she can earn the money to get her college degree. I remember that whenever I first saw COLLEGE, I happened to have seen the film adaptation of James Thurber's play THE MALE ANIMAL, and thought it interesting that this musical-ized version of Thurber's play more or less reversed Thurber's meaning. I assume that the movie version of the play fairly reflected Thurber's theme, since I've seen other Thurber works in which he was rather scathing toward the fetishization of visceral entertainments like sports and sex-games. COLLEGE is just the opposite, exulting in the world of the senses (with musical numbers that celebrate, among other things, Madame Du Barry, royal mistress of King Louis XV). It's an extremely lightweight film, though the Mayo character is interesting given that she's trying to escape her (rather high class) burlesque past by becoming a playwright, and she ends up writing a play about how great sex and love are.

All of the songs by the well-heralded Sammy Cahn are lightweight too, except for one section of a song entitled "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of." Here's a link to the full lyrics, but the only section that interests me here is Cahn's curious take on Freud:

I’m sure that Mister Freud
Would really be annoyed
If I presumed to contradict him
To him all dreams are explainable
As the longing of the weak for the unattainable
Admitting Mister Freud was very, very wise
My personal dreams I alone can analyze

I'm not sure if there are any big Freudian references in the original Thurber play, but it's a distinct possibility that Cahn was building on something Thurber wrote, given the statement from this site:

Thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary?, came out in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book presented Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comic talent. Thurber made fun of European psychoanalysis, including Freud's work, and theorists who had been attempting to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable level. In 'The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism' (1929) Thurber claimed that "in no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America." (Writings and Drawings by James Thurber, 1996, p. 3) According to Thurber, baseball, prize-fighting, horse-racing, bicycling, and bowling have acted as substitutes for sex. The female developed and perfected the "Diversion Subterfuge" to put Man in his place. "Its first manifestation was fudge-making."

Regardless of Thurber's reasons for dismissing Freud, I would certainly also dismiss the psychologist's tendency to view all dreaming-activity in terms of "the longing of the weak for the unattainable." At the very least, this attitude certainly appears in Freud's interpretations of his Oedipus complex, in which a child feels sexual possessiveness toward his/her opposite-sex parent, and takes refuge in fantasies that satisfy that repressed desire.

I've given multiple reasons on this blog for rejecting Freud's views of fantasy, so I won't repeat any of those. But curiously, before Mayo and Gene Nelson sing the "Dreams" duet, the professor character played by Ronald Reagan-- who is very close to the one in MALE ANIMAL-- listens to a stodgy authority figure complain about seeing a play that he thought was "dirty," and the professor objects that this philistine has just talked crap about the Greek classic "Oedipus Rex." This may be a line in the original Thurber play. But whether it is or not, this tip of the hat to Sophocles seems to be at odds with Sammy Cahn's determination to dispel Mister Freud's logic regarding fantasy's origins in "the longing of the weak."

And all this in a film which loosely addresses the conflict between sexuality and the intellect, yet really has no significant Oedipal conflict between its characters...

MIGHT AND MYTH

 In addition to the subjects of the previous essay, my cross-comparison of three influential intellectuals here stimulated an interesting return to a subject I've not addressed much lately: that of sublimity.

A quick recap: when I first began writing about the various literary and philosophical conceptions of sublimity, I was probably overly influenced by Kant's concept of the "dynamic-sublime" as expressed in THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I wrote quite a bit on the subject as to whether different forms of "might" were exclusively responsible for the fictional manifestations of sublimity, with this 2012 essay as a representative example.

In 2013, though, I reflected upon Kant's other manifestation of the sublime, which he termed "the mathematical-sublime." This conception had no great relevance to the fictional worlds with which I was concerned, but I realized that other scholars ranging from Burke to Tolkien had often spoken of perceiving the sublime through a combination of images and elements. From that insight, I formulated the notion that within a literary matrix there existed two forms of the sublime: the "dynamic-sublime" and "the combinatory-sublime," and I set this observation forth in the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series.

Now, my conception of the four potentialities were not specifically focused on any manifestation of the sublime. However, as a result of refining my definition of the potentialities in this essay, I realized that each of Jung's "perceiving functions" had a rough equivalence to the two forms of the sublime that I deduced from Kant.

In Jung's arrangement, the "perceiving functions" of sensation and intuition furnish a given subject with raw data about experience, and the two "judging functions" evolve in order to guide the subject's assessments of the data. I've specified in PARALLEL PATHS that Jung may made his "perceiving functions" a bit too passive in nature in contrast to the more active role that "prehensions" serve in the system of Whitehead. Rather than seeing the judging functions as having a superior role over the perceiving functions, I like better the idea that they are "co-definitional" as the term is used by Stuart Kaufman.

All that said, there's some justification for thinking of the mental products of the sensation and intuition functions as being a sort of prima materia from which a distinct secunda materia arises. My newest refinement of the conceptual quanta present in each of the four potentialities supports this reading. The sensation-responses of a subject to "energy," both his own and that of other entities, give rise to emotional evaluations of himself and those entities, while intuition-based responses that build mythic correlations regarding oneself and other entities are inevitably subjected to the rigor of ordered cogitation. 

Further, the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime." Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination.

The essay's title "Might and Myth" is also oriented upon seeing both of the prima materia functions as including a range of those fictional manifestations that do or do not possess a certain level of either "pre-epistemic" OR epistemological knowledge encoded into their discourses. I return to my example of this range from VERTICAL VIRTUES:

...I might say that from the POV of "tenor-excellence" alone, the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR excels the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, because I've detected more concrescent stories in the former than in the latter. But in terms of "vehicle-excellence," they are equals. for both generated an impressive array of icons fraught with mythopoeic POTENTIAL, even if the FF is somewhat ahead in terms of mythopoeic ACTUALITY.

So "might" would include even those elements meant to appeal to sensation, even if those elements are insufficiently organized, while "myth" would include all elements meant to appeal to intuition, even when not glossed by epistemological insights. And of course the respective "judging functions" would each be aligned with the categories of "might" and of "myth."

Possible meat for future meditations, as usual. 

KNOWING THE KNOWLEDGE FROM THE EPISTEMOLOGY

 As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.

The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions.-- AND THE HALF TRUTH WILL SET YOUR FREE, PT. 2.

This statement from my 2019 essay requires some modification thanks to my cross-comparison of three major thinkers here, though the modification depends on the accuracy of this online statement regarding Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy:

...the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

I don't discard the general applicability of the statement I made; it's true that the two "vertical/abstract" potentialities make greater use of epistemological patterns than the two "lateral/existential" potentialities. But the Encylopedia makes the interesting analysis that Whitehead does not present his "prehension" operations as being "exclusively knowledge based." This suggests to me that prehension is not foreign to the activities of cognitive activity, but rather is called "pre-epistemic" because it's capable of including all forms of knowledge, cognitive and affective. 

In fact, since I started applying my concept of Whiteheadian concrescence to fictional works, I've already functionally contradicted the HALF TRUTH statement without intending to do so.

Roughly two months before I wrote the two-part HALF-TRUTH essay, I posted CONCRESCENCE AND THE KINETIC PHENOMENALITY. In this, I examined two comics-works in terms of their "kinetic discourses," showing why the Jack Kirby work was superior to the Mike Zeck work in terms of illustrating how a diversely powered group of beings would battle one another. (To repeat an earlier qualification, it was widely rumored that artist Zeck may have been obliged to follow layouts set down by his editor Jim Shooter.) In this essay I concentrated on Kirby's superior ability to depict the interactions of "disparate elements," but much of this ability stemmed from a form of non-epistemological knowledge; the knowledge of how human beings of different capacities interact in a fight.

Similarly, I applied concrescence purely to the dramatic potentiality in 2022's SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH. Despite the sound of the title, I was taking the position that my subject, the rom-com manga NAGATORO, was concrescent within the dramatic potentiality even though the feature had few if any moments of "myth" in its more epistemological manifestations. I found that, upon surveying a particular trope in NAGATORO, the narrative also depended not on any elements with mythopoeic content, but was based in the reader's knowledge of Japanese customs about the use of personal names. This too might be termed a form of "non-epistemological knowledge," and that knowledge is also expressed through the interaction of two disparate elements in this particular story, though in the form of an "accomodation narrative" rather than a "confrontation narrative."

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

My recent meditations re: Jung's four functions and the four potentialities I deduced from them lead to another revision-- hopefully, the last, in which I attempt to define just what narrative quanta are evoked whenever an author employs one of the four potentialities. I wouldn't tread this ground again except I think it's necessary for a more extensive formulation.

The last major attempt to form terminology for the four quanta-types appeared in 2017's GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

Since then, however, I decided that in place of "ideas" and "symbols" I would use "cogitations" and "correlations" in this 2022 essay, and thus far I'm sticking with that revision. In another essay I experimented with substituting "potency" for "strength" under the kinetic umbrella. However, I've used both "power" and "potency" in an earlier terminological opposition. So, since the context of using "strength" was that of discrete forces impinging upon the various human senses, I'm going to substitute the new term "excitations," because I'm concerned with the excitation of neural perceptions by those forces. Whatever emotional context human beings then place upon their neural sensations then line up as "emotion-quanta," which takes the place of the vaguer "affect-quanta." So now my schema comes down to:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The new terminology of course essentially coheres with Jung's general formulation that the potentialities rooted in the sensation and intuition functions are what Jung called "perceiving functions," while those rooted in the feeling and thinking functions are what Jung called "judging functions." That said, I do have some departures from Jung's system on which I'll expound in a future essay, in line with remarks already made in PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT.