MYTHCOMICS: ["TOUGH LOVE"], BATGIRL #45-50 (2004-05)

 As I noted here I belatedly remembered that May was AAPI Heritage Month, so I thought it would be something of a self-challenge to find at least one mythcomics story starring either an Asian American or Pacific Islander character. Well, I succeeded, but I certainly am glad I didn't set myself to find two. I encountered a number of reasonably entertaining stories featuring such characters as Jubilee, Karma, Kamala Khan and even Jimmy Woo, but none were imbued with the symbolic complexity of myth.

I mentioned that I thought the 2000 BATGIRL series featuring the half-Chinese character Cassandra Cain might bear some fruit, and I admired the way the character's creators Kelly Puckett and Damion Scott (with collaborative help from Scott Peterson) laid out the basics of Cassandra's complex backstory-- though these early stories, too, did not meet my criteria.

Cassandra, the daughter of professional assassin David Cain and martial arts mistress Lady Shiva, is raised entirely by her father. Cain becomes intrigued with the idea of training a child to become a perfect assassin by having her read "body language" rather than communicating through the spoken word, and giving her tons of martial tutelage but no affection. When Cassandra turns eight, Cain takes her to meet an assassination-target, and instructs Cassandra to use a certain martial move on the man, but without telling the child that the move will kill its victim. The target dies, and despite her hard upbringing, Cassandra is appalled at having killed anyone. She flees her father and spends roughly the next ten years "off the grid." At eighteen she arrives in Gotham City and through involved circumstances takes over the role of Batgirl from Barbara Gordon, "benched" by virtue of her becoming a paraplegic. 

For whatever reason, in issue #39 a new writer, Dylan Horrocks, was assigned to BATGIRL, as well as other artists, principally Rick Leonardi. In the feature's earliest issues, the series had explored some of the emotional issues of Cassandra finding a "new dad" in the stern and demanding figure of Gotham's guardian. Horrocks ratcheted up the tension by having Cassandra courted by not one but two young swains. This dramatic turn caused the heroine to become more active in her quest for self-definition, even as Batman-- who'd never been responsible for a teenaged girl-- found his authority increasingly challenged.

The six-issue arc I've entitled "Tough Love" (after the arc's concluding episode) follows up on earlier stories in which Batman and the New Batgirl encounter a sinister chemist, Doctor Death. The villain has created a new designer drug, "Soul," which is causing manic behavior in those who take it. Cassandra restrains a couple of users, but one of them sparks in the heroine a deep uncertainty by telling her that she Batgirl has "no soul." This causes Cassandra to question her role as the new Batgirl, as well as her relationship to her father-figure, and she seeks counsel from her new "mother-figure" Barbara Gordon.

 This leads Cassandra to temporarily don the costume of the former Batgirl, in part as a means of coming to terms with her own sexuality, and she gets an enthusiastic reaction from current Robin Tim Drake.

Meanwhile, at the end of that adventure, Barbara responds to an earlier question, "What is soul," and gives a philosophical answer that Cassandra didn't necessarily ask for, though it's clearly something she needs.

In the following story, Cassandra gets an inkling of sexual discontents when she learns that Barbara and her former paramour Dick "Nightwing" Grayson have permanently broken up. Nothing daunted, Cassandra continues seeking the purveyors of Soul, and her path takes her to a gang, "The Lost Girls" (sort of a feminist take on Peter Pan's "Lost Boys"). Cassandra attacks the gang-girls, but during the altercation she's exposed to the psychotropic influence of Soul. She imagines herself assailed by all of her allies talking mean about her, but she still manages to beat down the Lost Girls. As a comical capper to this tale, Barbara sends Nightwing to render assistance, but when Cassandra sees him, she sees him only as the guy who hurt her "mom" and renders him a kick in the face.

The third section of "Tough Love" pits Batgirl against a serial killer, The Doll Man, but she also encounters a linguistics professo, who turns out to have been David Cain's influence for his ruthless tutelage of Cassandra. The professor even met young Cassandra earlier, though he had no idea of Cain's plans to use her as the perfect assassin. This encounter gives Cassandra new insights into notions of non-verbal communication, which enables her to track down and capture the Doll Man. But this causes a greater rift with Batman, who expressly told her to stay out of the matter.

In the fourth part, penciled by Jean-Jacques Dzialowski, Batgirl again defies one of Batman's orders by tracking down a child-stealing ring. Yet, rather than being angry, he confesses to Barbara that he may be doing her harm by using her in his anti-crime crusade; that he may be doing her as much psychological damage as David Cain caused. Cassandra overcomes her foes, but Batman claims that her defiant actions make her too erratic to continue as Batgirl, and he revokes her right to be a costumed hero in Gotham.

The reader of course knows that Batman isn't laying down the law to be a hardass. He's become at least partly convinced by Barbara's argument that she needs a real life rather than a crimefighting crusade. However, Cassandra can view the ban as nothing more than a fatherly rejection, and she responds with daughterly defiance. She dons a revised costume (which, significantly, exposes the eyes in a way the old one did not, hearkening back to the Soul-user's complaint that Cassandra's eyes were "cold and empty"). She finds Soul's creator Doctor Death in one of his lairs, but at the climax, Batman finds her.

What follows is something a combination superhero battle and therapy session, as Barbara herself more or less observes. Batman tries once more to assert his authority. Cassandra-- whom her father forced to express herself through peerless battle-skills rather than affection-- attacks the crusader.

To further complicate matters, Doctor Death puts his two cents in. Just as Cassandra gets atop Batman-- Barbara observes from afar that she looks more ready to kiss him than kill him-- the villain exposes both heroes to Soul, hoping to make them even more irrational. And indeed, it seems to work, as the crusaders take their quarrel into the city, exchanging biffs and bams in the tradition of balletic superheroes everywhere. This doesn't help Death, though, since Robin captures him. On a side-note, Death is shown making Soul by extracting chemicals from fresh corpses, which means that the drug has certain cannibalistic/necrophiliac associations.

Though "father" and "daughter" exorcise a lot of their hostilities in this fight, Batman possesses enough control to maneuver things so that Cassandra finally gives the reins of her "soul" to the better angels of her nature. She faults him for rejecting her, but even after being re-inducted into the Bat-family, she makes clear that she will follow her own independent path, guided by Daddy's influence but not bound to it. Batman gets the last word here, though. Barbara figures out that the Gotham Guardian was only partly affected by exposure to Soul, and that he let Batgirl fight him in the hope that she would be able to work through her conflicts that way. This suggests that Batman made a 180 degree turn away from the notion that Cassandra ought to seek an ordinary life, but maybe he just wanted to test her determination to remain in the Bat-family.

On a side-note, BATGIRL #50 was one of many DC titles that carried an obituary for Julie Schwartz. The editor made many contributions to the saga of Batman, but one of the biggest was his role in charting the course of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl. "Father" Batman and "Son" Robin had been the main focus of the feature for almost twenty years, but the character of Commissioner Gordon's daughter was the first real intimation of an "extended family." Over the years, said family would become far more dynamic in its growth than one can imagine having happened with Barbara Gordon's 1950s predecessors Kathy and Bette Kane.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #17: ADVENTURES OF THE RED MASK (1936)

 According to a page on "Pacific Islander" characters on PUBLIC DOMAIN SUPER HEROES, the earliest contender for "Polynesian superhero" may be The Red Mask, native to a fictional island, Kaukura. He originated in a newspaper strip, "Adventures of the Red Mask" which first ran in 1936 (same year as the Phantom's debut). This site has a breakdown of available info here.

It would be interesting to know if any episodes of the short-lived strip intimated possible romance between the Red Mask and the blonde heroine Nina. It's true, as Allan Holtz says in his article, that the hero is inconsistently colored. I don't see his "wavy" hair being an objection, though. Pacific Islanders did not all have "woolly" hair, since some of the islands were close to the Asian mainland, which meant more potential intermarriage with Asians who had predominantly straight hair.

 Nedor Publishing reprinted some sequences of the strip in four issues of BEST COMICS, but only one online reprint site has even a single issue of this title. I think Red Mask does have some claim to "first POC masked hero in comics."

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #16: "DRUMS OF DOOM" (VOODOO #4, 1952)

 I'd already done one of my two mythcomics posts for this month when I realized that May was "Asian American and Pacific Islander" month. Thus, even though I despise the banal concept of representation as it's constructed by ultraliberals, I wondered, "what could I come up with in these categories?"

I've done three or four posts on Marvel's MASTER OF KUNG FU, and dozens of posts on Japanese manga, but none of these characters are "Asian American." I glanced at a list of Asian superheroes, and it included Damian Wayne, who got some "representation" in my review of DEMON STAR. However, that one seems a stretch. Damian is a quarter-Arab, and does anyone deem any denizens of North Africa to be "Asian" any more? Seems like the furthest west one could start might be Turkey. Mantis got a "near myth" review, but her father was German and her mother Vietnamese. I've read a substantial number of the Cassandra Cain BATGIRL stories but not with a mind to seeking out mythicity. Some potential there, maybe.

Pacific Islanders, particularly those who are either born as or sworn in to be Americans, are not going to be very populous, much less myth-friendly. In the Golden Age Ajax-Farrell published a half dozen issues of SOUTH SEA GIRL, about a Polynesian princess, Alani, who defended her hidden island from intruders, but I read these and didn't get much out of them. A Silver Age back-up feature from Gold Key, JET DREAM AND HER STUNT-GIRL COUNTERSPIES, included a native Polynesian beauty named Ting-a-Ling, but these are all very simple action-tales with no conceptual depth. The "Conner Kent" version of Superboy had a Hawaiian girlfriend, and Marvel has a couple of Polynesian heroes I know nothing about, but I'd probably do better looking for anthology horror-tales like this one.

"Drums of Doom," drawn by that titan of jungle-girl comics Matt Baker, almost certainly started as an inventory story for SOUTH SEA GIRL, only to be rewritten, and maybe partly re-penciled, as a horror story. The first page introduces the reader to two Polynesian principals: Moltane, a drum-maker possessed of arcane knowledge, and "that she-devil Adana," who covets Moltane's power. Given the similarity of name and general appearance, "Adana" almost certainly started out as "Alani" but got reworked into a secondary villainess here. Don't ask me why all the Polynesian characters are colored charcoal-grey. 

A white interloper named Pierre has heard that Moltane's drums can confer eternal life, so he suborns Adana's help to take on the sorcerer. Note, in the page above, that an old native woman warns that death can travel on wings just like Pierre's plane.

In the next few pages Adana and Pierre are captured very easily by Moltane's forces. The sorcerer condemns the trespassers to death, but Pierre turns the tables, killing both his enemy and his ally. This page is almost certainly original to the story, since Alani was a continuing character and would not have been knocked off as she is here. Pierre does get hold of a magical drum, but in the badly constructed, hurry-up-and-get-it-done conclusion, the drum just spells his doom. It's a pretty bad story, distinguished only by the Baker art, the curious linkage to SOUTH SEA GIRL, and the fact that Moltane (who doesn't really do anything evil, given that he's defending himself against invaders) stands as the real star of the story, managing to curse Pierre even from the grave.

CENTRICITY AND RESONANCE

On this blog I've devoted thousands of words attempting to imagine the diffuse operations of literary endeavor into more specified categories, but I don't feel I've managed to do so with the concept of centricity. A little while back, I played around with the idea that centricity might subsumed by the agency of a given narrative's superordinate icon or icons. But the word "agency" is too easy to confound with other principles, so I'll probably confine its use to all matters related to interordination comparisons, as laid out in GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1.

It sometimes helps, though, to imagine what abstract principles would act like if they were incarnate entities, and one day I was trying to imagine "centricity" as if the icon in it were "doing something" in order to express, as mentioned earlier, the author's priorities. And the image that came to me was that of the icon as a human singer, projecting his/her voice outward so that it enveloped all the subordinate icons within his/her span.

Since I've also specified that icons don't have to be human or even humanoid beings, another possible metaphor would be that of the tuning fork, that, when struck, sets up a resonance that affects its surroundings. 

By extension, an ensemble of superordinate icons would be like a set of tuning forks, some of which might be struck at different times in order to produce their effects.

One reason I like the resonance metaphor is that it's a means of describing how authorial will spreads out from different types of icons in similar forms of narrative.

For instance, in the 2012 essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 2, I compared two television shows in the "occult crusader" subgenre, the 1974 KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and the 1987 FRIDAY THE 13TH--THE SERIES. I can express the opinion that the former is centered on Kolchak, the endotheric identification-figure, or that the latter is centered on the Curious Goods shop, the exothelic source of evils for the continuing characters to thwart. But the argument, as I've previously framed it, is perhaps easier to picture (though it may not compel any greater agreement) with one's experience of the way everything in the KOLCHAK series is permeated by the resonance of the hero, while everything in the FRIDAY series is permeated by the resonance of the malefic shop of evil wonders.

A similar example can be made with respect to a type of icon that would seem to have the least possible "agency:" the dead-person-who-tells-a-story." In the 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD, the story is related by murder victim Joe Gillis, but the audience is barely made to care about the provenance of this character. The character with the greatest resonance is clearly Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star who pulls Gillis into her world and ends up killing him.

So Desmond has both the greatest agency and resonance. However, in 1947's SCARED TO DEATH, I think it's arguable that Laura, the murdered narrator of the movie, has greater resonance than any of the usual "old dark house" support-characters, or even than the green-masked villain who kills said narrator. Like most of the victims in the old PERRY MASON TV show, it's the murdered person who's the center of the mystery, but what little authorial will exists in SCARED stems from Laura, whose malevolence makes the plot go. 

It's interesting that Northrop Frye made use of the term "resonance" in his book THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION, where he said that resonance was the process by which "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye was not talking about centricity as such, more about the general function of narrative. But since I've defined narrative here in terms that focus upon the interaction of what I now call superordinate and subordinate icons, the coincidence seems felicitous.

FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

 In this 2015 essay I wrote:

A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

Therefore in my schema:

A stereotype is defined by bare functionality.

An archetype is defined by some degree of "super-functionality."

I haven't invoked either type of functionality since 2018's CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE, and in that essay, I cited "super-functionality" as one of various terms I'd used to denote certain literary works that displayed complexity. However, in my earliest writings I was concerned primarily with "symbolic complexity," with complexity within the domain of the mythopoeic potentiality. By contrast CONVERGING explicitly asserts that the process of concrescence leads to the product of complexity in all four potentiality-domains. 

These days I also tend to avoid the term "archetype" in favor of trope, since my process of review here and on other blogs shows that tropes can take archetypal or stereotypical forms, meaning that "trope" serves to subsume both terms. But what makes an archetypal trope "super-functional?"

The answer is "knowledge," albeit the knowledge of fictional "half-truths," truths that dwell half within the domain of verisimilitude and half within the domain of artifice. I believe that over the years I probably implied this in various ways, but I wanted to state outright that the "extra functions" that boost an archetypal trope above the level of a stereotypical trope relate to the author's ability to make his trope reflect these *quanta* of knowledge. 

In the world of non-fiction, many individuals don't agree on what constitutes real knowledge, be it the knowledge of political rectitude or of evolutionary patterns. But in the world of fiction, there is no verifiable knowledge, only what Coleridge called "shadows of imagination," some of which come with knowledge-quanta attached to them. Knowledge exists to unite the world of the objective with the world of the subjective, in such a way that audiences can gain what Whitehead would call a "prehension" of feeling that incorporates knowledge. This insight becomes more fruitful with respect to all four potentialities thanks to Whitehead's insights into "non-epistemological knowledge."

QUICKIE REVIEWS OF (FAIRLY) NEW STUFF

Probably because of my current fascination with crossovers, I've been seeking out whatever related items I could find in public libraries. None of my readings have been impressive enough for a full review, but I might as well set down a few impressions of 21st-century treatments of crossovers.

First, though, I'll note that prior to these investigations I reread all the WEST COAST AVENGERS issues written by Steve Englehart in the 1980s. I enjoyed these stories much more than the current offerings, for all that I don't have a ton of remarks on this mini-oeuvre. My main takeaway is that in the eighties, the ideal of Marvel continuity was still rigorous enough that a hardcore fan-writer like Englehart could bring together dozens of stories by himself and other raconteurs in order to forge the identity of the WCA super-group. Characters like Tigra, who had flourished neither in solo outings nor in the original, New York-based Avengers acquired much more substance as a result of Englehart's efforts. Not all his decisions were without flaw-- Moon Knight as Avenger was never a good fit-- but it's a solid series, regrettably torpedoed when fan-favorite John Byrne took over the title.

I can't pin down a particular diegetic event that made Marvel less unitary in its approach to continuity, though I imagine the two main factors in the twenty-first century were (a) the emphasis on "celebrity" arists and writers, who would often just do their take on a given character or series and not worry about being "in continuity," and (b) the fact that by the 2000s there was just too much continuity to keep track of. Thus in all of the books I explored, continuity is something of a "catch as catch can" game.

DOCTOR STRANGE DAMNATION-- One of the co-authors of this outing was Nick Spenser, who gained fame (or infamy) for the fake-out story in which Captain America was revealed to be a Hydra agent and thus a kissing cousin to Nazism. DAMNATION spins off a development in some other story, wherein all of Las Vegas is destroyed. The Master of the Mystic Arts arrives and brings the city and all its slain people back into existence (sort of a lesser version of the reveral of "the Thanos snap.") But before being destroyed the Nevada "sin city" went to hell, and now Mephisto controls the strings of the reborn metropolis. Strange then forms a team of mostly oddball choices to beat the devil. Biggest plus is that the concentration on the fate of one city proves more appealing than the usual universe-threat. Biggest minus is that none of Strange's allies play off one another in any interesting ways, so the crossover aspect is wasted.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Volumes 1-3-- These were all Brian Michael Bendis stories, and as such they're very freeform, with minimal plotting. There are a few good fight-scenes, particularly the one between Gamora and Angela. (I'd never heard that Marvel bought the character off Neil Gaiman. Way to get rid of some dead weight, Gaiman.) But Bendis most reminds me of the dozens of TV writers who tried to write like Joss "BUFFY" Whedon. Those writers missed that each of Whedon's characters had individual voices, and so just gave everyone funny-sardonic lines. Bendis is like these writers, except he's never funny.

FEARLESS DEFENDERS-- Don't think I ever read Cullen Bunn before, though I'd heard his name. This six-issue tale, titled DOOM MAIDENS, teams up one actual Defender, The Valkyie, with a motley crew of unattached Marvel femmes: Misty Knight, the New Mutant once called Mirage, and "Warrior Woman," which is a new name for the Amazon Hippolyta. Oh, and there's a lesbian scientist who tries to get it on with Valkyrie, so that helped Bunn get a GLAAD nomination, but she's pretty forgettable. The "doom maidens" of the story are a bunch of dead Valkyries brought back to life to menace the world, but Bunn can't get the vibe of Norse mythology to save his life. After being routed by the undead warriors, these dim Defenders debate bringing in other superheroes, even some male ones. But for fuzzy reasons, the Bad Valkyries can only be repelled by female heroes, which allows Bunn to work in eleven other heroines. Though this sounds like a potential Great Moment in Comics Pulchritude, the fights in FEARLESS are poorly choreographed and all the heroines sound like one another.

DEADMAN-- This was one of Neal Adams's swan songs, as he returned to the DC character that brought him to fans' attention, This godawful series might prove that a lot of old-school artists lost their discipline in the 21st century, except that I think Adams' early successes were largely contingent on his collaborators. DEADMAN makes all the other offerings look coherent by comparison, as the Ghoulish Guardian once more tries to figure who really, really killed him way back in the sixties. At least Bendis made some efforts, however limited, to distinguish his characters from one another, but here you've got characters as different as Deadman, the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger all speaking in one voice: The Last Angry Spook. In the sixties Adams' heavy melodrama was a breath of fresh air compared to the overemphasis on exposition, Now it's a stone drag, man.

SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN-- Another revisionist retelling of Superman's origins, emphasizing his identity as Clark Kent of Kansas. I don't know writer Max Landry, but he has better control of melodrama than anyone else being reviewed here. His Kryptonian hero does seem to get drunk on Earth-booze pretty damn easily, though. ALIEN contains yet another contentious first meeting between Batman and the hero who's not yet Superman, and I don't care for Superman getting the idea of his costume from the Gotham Guardian. Nice fight with Lobo at the end. Not likely to become a dominant paradigm for Superman's early years.

HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD-- I'd seen reference to this "SHIELD Monster Squad" in some SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so I had to check this out. Apparently most of the monster-themed characters had appeared in other Marvel titles, though I was only familiar with Man-Thing, Orrgo (one of those giant Kirby Kreatures from the early sixties), the short-lived Manphibian (whom I actually don't remember, though I think I have his first appearance), and SHIELD agents Jasper Sitwell and Dum Dum Dugan. Or rather, simulacra of the two agents, since Sitwell is a nearly brain-dead zombie and Dugan is an artificial version of the deceased original "Howler." The oldies and the relative "newbies" don't play off one another's powers very well, and some, like Man-Thing, just don't belong in the "spy game." However, artist Brent Schoonover provides some appealing action and emotional scenes, and writer Frank Barbiere does the best job of any writer here at giving each character a particular voice. I don't think these "Creature Commandos" went on to further adventures in the comics, but at least their one series was diverting.

TOMORROW ALWAYS DIES (AS HUMOR)

 Here's a post from one of the forums I visit, which I argued that when corporations and public schools endorse ultra-liberal causes, they're seeking to immunize themselves from frivolous lawsuits. To place things in context, my opponent argued that Florida's Parental Rights Act could encourage frivolous lawsuits. A separate opponent reprinted the following editorial cartoon from the odious ultraliberal Tom Tomorrow, to which I also made reference. All of Tomorrow's allegations are full of crap, but the SONG OF THE SOUTH lie is in the fifth panel.

_________

I may surprise you with a minimal agreement. Will the Parental Rights Act open up the possibility that some parents file frivolous lawsuits over minor kerfuffles? Yes, that is a distinct possibility.

But what you fail to mention is that American corporations, including the schools, are already constantly under the threat of frivolous lawsuits from grifters who want to use inclusivity to make money in court. Remember the winner who called himself Jessica Yaniv? No, that didn't have anything to do with public school, but you think schools don't worry, as much as any corporations, about getting so targeted?

In fact, Disney's apparent championing of LGBTQ representation may have a lot more to do with immunizing their corporation from such activist targeting than any high ideals. A few days back a poster printed a broadside from that stellar comics genius (sarcasm emoji) Tom Tomorrow. Tomorrow should remind everyone here that Libs frequently used to attack Disney for being too conservative (though in the forties through the nineties, they were generally more centrist). To that end Tomorrow brought up SONG OF THE SOUTH, claiming that the movie was constructed to portray Southern plantation life as happy for Black people. This was a lie that's doubly insulting because it can be so easily refuted, but Tomorrow, if he was ever a Classic Lib, has gone full Progressive. And yeah, I'm sure schools would like to get parents off their backs so that they can immunize themselves from frivolous suits by tossing out a few drag queen performances to please the activists.

P.S. Tomorrow also lies like a dog about Scott Adams, who has categorically stated that he made his "race remarks" as a hyperbolic method of provoking conversation. But guys like Tomorrow are not interested in conversation, only in dogma.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #15

This house ad from an issue of BETTY AND ME is only interesting for coining a word I'd like to see used again, somehow and somewhere: "psychedelicious." 

MYTHCOMICS: '"THE GURU OF OURS" (MAD #128, 1969)

 Some critics sneer at everything MAD Magazine printed after the departure of Harvey Kurtzman. I'll admit that there were some features that were essentially "get off my lawn" rants from aging artists like Dave Berg, but some writers and artists turned a sharp satirical lens upon the shibboleths of the "now generation." One of the best sendups of the counterculture was the Frank Jacobs-Mort Drucker spoof of 1939's classic WIZARD OF OZ, described in a header as "the story of a teenage girl who loses touch with reality and meets a lot of way-out characters."

So here the heroine-- played by Liza Minelli, daughter of the late WIZARD star Judy Garland-- doesn't seek to escape the dullness of Kansas by visiting foreign lands with her little dog Toto. She wants to escape the "real world" by getting her freak on:

Someday.. with an insane glow...

I'll get high...

And I'll freak out until my 

Brain starts to petrify...

Drucker's caricature skills are excellent here as elsewhere, but for this story his choice of imagery is a lot more free-form than in most of his MAD movie/TV spoofs. At far left we see the entirely predictable figures of Dorothy's Oz-crew, although to one side of Minelli-Dorothy, Drucker crammed in the side-wise head of mature Judy Garland, who passed away the same year this satire appeared on newsstands. As if the artist is seeking to duplicate drug-induced fantasies, Minelli-Dorothy's body has morphed into the head and body of a minatory-looking owl, and a flower-wreathed skull appears next to her, with the legend "Love Me" just beneath. The other images all reflect standard hippie-images of the era, possibly with some Peter Max influence here and there. (The Jimi Hendrix analogue has the name of MAD contributor Al Jaffee on his shirt.)

Minelli-Dorothy sings this, BTW, to an "Auntie Em" that might as well have been called "Auntie Tim," since he's played by novelty singer Tiny Tim. A handy tornado-- the only marvelous phenomenon in the spoof-- whisks up the farmhouse and drops it down in an unspecified city. (Given all the freaks and actors she meets, San Francisco seems like a good nominee.) Incidentally, while the heroine has a dog with her on page one, on page two she addresses a pig by the name "toto." Said porker follows Minelli-Dorothy for the rest of the story without anyone commenting on the discrepancy.

So the house gets dropped on the stereotypical enemy of hippies, the college dean, and the Munchkin-hippies, led by Dustin Hoffman, celebrate the functionary's passing. Minelli-Dorothy expresses her desire to "groove in on that Cosmic High and rap with the Universal Ooom," so the Munchkin-students send her to meet "the Biggest Head of Them All," the Guru of Ours. (The pun, an attempt to associate the Big Head of Oz in the Garland movie with the slang for a doper, as in "hophead," doesn't come off that well.)

In the space of a couple of pages Minelli-Dorothy meets her Three Musketeers: (Pat) Boone-Scarecrow, (George) Hamilton-Tin Man, and (Michael J.) Pollard-Cowardly Lion. They all sing their "I want" songs, and unlike Dorothy they all want some sort of societal satisfaction, not to groove on any Universal Oooms. Nevertheless, the foursome (and Toto the Pig) continue following the Dirty Dark Street in search of the Guru of Ours.

The spoofs of Boone, Hamilton and Pollard for their acting-personas have nothing to do with the Oz spoof. However, the celebrity-identity of the Guru is insightful, for he's played by none other than Ed Sullivan, the presenter who introduced Middle America to such counterculture figures as Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. The Guru  immediately gives the three schmoes "solutions" to their deficiencies that are as empty as the flapdoodle tossed out by the 1939 Wizard, but the Guru makes a lot of money off these phony cures.

"But what about Dorothy?" Well, she makes a weak request for Nirvana, and the Guru suggests "sensual mysteries" in his bedroom. Called a crook and a fake, he posits that the only "Nirvana" is money and that his fakery extends to both hippie-fantasies and all of avant-garde sixties culture.

With the greed of a vulture, 

I keep cashing in on culture, 

'Cause I'm nothing but a fraud...

And in the final panels, Minelli-Dorothy, her musketeers and Toto the Pig all get with the commercialization program and sing about how "merrily off to the bank we'll go."

The full spoof is here.