THE LAST TIMELY-ATLAS CROSSOVERS?

My earlier essay THE FIRST MARVEL CROSSOVER remains accurate, given that it describes the first encounter of starring icons since the publisher variously known as "Timely Comics" and "Atlas Comics" began using the name "Marvel Comics" for the entire line. However, there were developments in the late 1950s that can be seen as precursors of that 1961-62 event-- or at least, just as a barometer of how bored Stan Lee was with his job.

First, in WYATT EARP #5 in 1956, the Atlas version of the famed marshall met the second of two Atlas versions of the celebrated Annie Oakley, after the latter character lost her short-lived title. (The first Atlas-Annie was just one of the company's standard "pretty-girl humor" features.)

Then in SHERRY THE SHOWGIRL #5 (April 1957), the titular Sherry (introduced I believe in issue #1 of the series) had a minor encounter with the long-running Millie the Model.

Then came the oddest mutation of the pretty-girl humor genre; a two-issue wonder called SHOWGIRLS. I'm reasonably sure that I saw this cover for issue #1 (June 1957) at one time or another, but I probably thought that it was just one of the many "phony-meeting" covers often seen on comics-covers since the early 1940s.

But no, the first issue has a single-page gag in which Millie and her support-character Chili-- despite the fact that they're models, not showgirls-- are hanging out with Sherry Storm and Pearl Dimly, the latter the star of the "My Girl Pearl" feature initiated in 1954. (As yet I have no idea if Pearl was ever a showgirl and I'm not sure I want to know.) Everything else in the issue, though, just focuses on separate pretty-girl stars.

Then, issue #2 offers a full four-page story in which the aforesaid four girls, along with Hazel Haze (catty rival to Sherry Storm in that series), go on the road and have some forgettable things happen to them.

The same five girls also get a one-page gag in the same issue.

For some reason, the title then jumps to #4, possibly the result of re-numbering some other title, and though there are no literal crossovers therein, there is a cutesy reference to another company icon, Patsy Walker.

Like the Marvel crossovers described earlier, all of these were piddling stories that could not possibly have been intended to impel readers to check out other established titles. They just show Stan Lee futzing around, trying to keep himself entertained while he churned out gags. He may not have initiated the 1956 Earp-Oakley crossover (GCD credits that script to Hank Chapman), but it took place under Lee's editorial aegis, just like all the cute-girl strips Lee did write. In addition, about two years had gone by since Atlas had attempted its revival of its "Big Three" superheroes. These strips also did not have more than minor crossovers, one of which was the recycling of a failed 1948 superheroine, Sun Girl into the Human Torch's partner. Still, possibly those failed books caused Lee to think back to the glory days of early Timely, when the Human Torch-Sub-Mariner battles were big money-makers. Lee wasn't ready to undertake anything ambitious in the late 1950s, and the journey to "Marvel Continuity" was a slow one even in the early 1960s. But sometimes the seeds that seem not to grow at first are merely slumbering for a later rebirth. 

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #25: SUN GIRL #2-3 (1948)

 From 1948 here are two separate Sun Girl stories in which she faces off against colossal monsters. The first one is seen here ripping up a train-track like Kong in the 1933 film, though he's immune to cannon-fire like the later Godzilla. Sun Girl eventually figures out he's a deep-sea critter and drives him into the ocean.

The other, name of Bokk, is a more conscious King Kong copy, though he has an analogous "Godzilla moment" in that he gets "riddled with bullets" but does not succumb to them. Sun Girl beats Bokk by tricking the goliath into eating poisoned food, but in the last panel she slightly regrets doing so, noting that the people who brought Bokk to civilization were truly at fault.

Both of these Kong-copies predate the giant-size gargantua who is the star of the 1949 MARVEL TALES story, "The Gool Strikes."

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE DEMON DOORWAY"] (DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE #2, 1978)

In the comment-section for my 2021 analysis of Gerry Conway's SUB-MARINER story "A House Named Death," I said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that "if I can find mythcomics for writers like Len Wein and Cary Bates. surely I can find something for Conway." I wasn't thinking of Conway at all when I decided to do an overview of the early MADAME XANADU stories, since I didn't associate him or any other raconteur with the short-lived series. Only during re-reading all the issues and their editorial pages did I learn that editor Joe Orlando made the conscious decision that DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE would not be executed by any steady writer-artist team, but would instead continually change up the combinations of raconteurs. The only constant elements would be the Michael Kaluta covers and the general setup of fortune-teller Madame Xanadu, who would help tormented young lovers out of supernatural trouble, after which she would often capture malignant entities in mystical glass jars.

As noted in the overview all of the other DOORWAY stories are not much more ambitious than an average story from one of DC's horror-anthologies. Possibly Conway, who scripted stories for many DC and Marvel titles, managed to cut loose somewhat with the story I've titled "The Demon Doorway," though the art by Vicente Alcazar is largely pedestrian. Since the nature of Madame Xanadu's participation in the narratives remained static, here Conway could give more mythic emphasis to the one-shot pair of young lovers menaced by the psychological flaws in the mind of Melissa Mann.

When Douglas Holt escorts Melissa to the fortune-telling shop of Xanadu, Conway shows them moving through a festival in Greenwich Village. (The season is later said to be winter, though no one in the story dresses like it's a New York winter.) The festival's only purpose in the story is to illustrate that Melissa finds herself uncomfortable around all the celebratory rituals, and Douglas underscores her antipathy by stating that he wants her to visit Xanadu's shop so that she can forget her role as a physicist at New York University. Douglas also mentions here and two other times that he's an artist, but his profession plays no role in the story, unless it's to contrast "art" with "science."

Xanadu welcomes the lovers and does a Tarot reading, though she's apparently already learned their names from her cards. While most of the Tarot readings in the Xanadu stories eschew specifics, Conway does mention that Melissa's significator is "the Queen of Rods," but does not enlarge upon the symbolism. Xanadu tells Melissa to "leave your pursuit of science" and "find renewal in life," though without further explanation. Melissa assumes that Douglas set up the reading to scare her out of her association with a university-sponsored "Doorway Project." 

As Douglas unburdens himself to Xanadu, it turns out his opposition to Melissa's scientific obsession isn't concerned purely with her psychological balance. The Doorway Project is the creation of a senior scientist, Hampton Hill, and Douglas suspects that Hill is seducing Melissa, "not emotionally, but intellectually." Douglas even goes so far as to claim that his older competition is not just a "father-figure," but the embodiment of Melissa's desire that life should "logical, orderly, sane-- and Hampton Hill was sanity personified." Douglas worries that Melissa's blowup means that she'll fall fully under Hill's control, but Xanadu assures the young fellow that the cards indicate he still has a role to play. 

That very evening, Melissa meets Hill at the university as they plan to initiate Project Doorway, an attempt to use a computer-matrix to open a doorway into another dimension. No practical purpose is cited for this endeavor; Hill merely hopes to "unlock ancient mysteries," though he mentions that the university doesn't fully approve of the experiment, believing that he is "tampering with forces beyond our knowledge." It may not be coincidence that the man professing this Frankensteinian ambition apparently was born in or lived in Geneva, which is the Swiss locale with which Mary Shelley's mad scientist was most associated. Anyway, for a moment Hill lets a bit of animal passion steal past his facade of utter sanity as he tries to kiss Melissa before they activate the doorway. Melissa avoids the intimacy, which may suggest that though she's found a father-figure in Hill, she's not obsessed enough to desire symbolic incest. Yet the Doorway Project is the symbolic child of their joined intellects, for as they activate the machine Conway states that the device "hums into life, struggling to awareness like some dark, mythological giant."

If the giant metaphor means anything, it aligns best with the idea of the Greek Titans who sought to overthrow heaven. This aligns in turn with the nature of the dimension opened up by the Mann-Hill brain-child, for Conway calls the otherworld "the depths of Hell," i.e., the domain of rebellious angels. Douglas's jealousy saves Hill and Melissa from their folly, for he hears them screaming at the sights they behold, breaks into the lab and wrecks the machine. The dimension-door closes, but something has changed. Melissa refuses to discuss what happened with the device, and demands that Douglas take her out to eat at an expensive restaurant, where Melissa discards her normal abstemious diet and chows down. 

As Douglas later tells Xanadu, at first he liked the change in her attitude, because Melissa became more affectionate. However, when the two attended a party, Melissa left with a complete stranger. Unable to reach her, Douglas checked the university lab, and tells Xanadu (without going into detail) that Melissa was there, but wearing "the same outfit she'd worn the night before." Melissa then  underscored the previous night's infidelity (sort of a "walk-of-no-shame") by kissing Hill-- only to shove him away and start bashing the Doorway computer. Hill then had the raving woman institutionalized at Bellevue, after which Douglas ended up at Xanadu's door. Madame Xanadu tells Douglas that Melissa's problems are now metaphysical rather than psychological: that she's possessed by a demon that has unleashed her emotions not for love, as Douglas wanted, but for pure self-indulgence. (Poor Hampton Hill: he gets rejected both by the real young woman and by the demon in her flesh.)

At Bellevue Douglas and Xanadu convince the attending physician to let them attempt an exorcism, which of course the super-rational Hill opposes. Xanadu requires Douglas to read the exorcism, apparently so that he can lure out the demon the way Father Karras did in that other possession-story, by offering up his own soul. However, when the demon does emerge, Xanadu traps it in one of her jars. Melissa is freed of the possession but ironically, Mister "Sanity Personified" suffers a nervous breakdown from beholding the demon he unleashed-- implicitly his punishment for poaching on a younger dude's territory.

Conway's story is not especially religious, for all that it clearly trades on the trope of "seeking forbidden knowledge trespasses against the natural order of God." Unlike many such stories, this one is stage-managed by a woman who implicitly knows more about "ancient mysteries" than Hampton Hill could even imagine, so one might state that profane science is incapable of plumbing such mysteries. Melissa and Hill are both too "sane" to imagine that their endeavor can invoke the demons of Hell, and these demons can be seen as being just as much the spawn of irresponsible science as the Frankenstein Monster or the atom bomb. Hill, who desires Melissa, tries to make her his "mind-mate" through their collaboration, and Melissa, for whatever reasons, wants an older man in her life that doesn't disturb her reason with the allure of youth and life, as Douglas does. Both are guilty of over-reaching the limits of what reason can accomplish, but only Hill pays the price, while Melissa gets some measure of integration, which *may* be the meaning that Conway had in mind with his mention of the Queen of Rods card.

I don't normally think of Conway as being a good coiner of names, but he does pretty well with "Melissa Mann." The young woman wants to put aside the chaos of life for pure reason, the sort of reason that is often thought the masculine domain. In Greek "melissa" means "honeybee," and while honeybees normally follow the egg-laying queen of the hive, this Melissa follows a type of "man" she considers neutered from the threat of sexuality. The other two names suggest some less concentrated symbolism. One definition of "holt" is an animal's den, while "Douglas" in Gaelic means "dark stream," so these connotations of natural phenomena may cohere with Douglas' attempts to persuade Melissa to be more spontaneous and natural. A "hill" is also a natural feature, but the name "Hampton" connotes the inhabitant of a settled community, such as one built upon a hill. So together these two names could signify human rather than animal habitation, and the faculty of reason humans use to separate themselves from the beasts. In any case Douglas doesn't have to sacrifice his life and goes on to enjoy a "natural" existence with Melissa, but his rival's power of reason is forfeit. As for Melissa, the implication is that she's reached a balance, neither too emotionally reserved nor too emotionally indulgent. 

So, in conclusion, Conway wasn't immune to the allure of myth after all.

But-- sigh-- now I have to find something for Tony Isabella...

ICONIC BONDING PT. 2

My entire formulation of bonded ensembles is oriented upon trying to discern which subordinate icons are, or are not, bonded to which superordinate icons in terms of alignment.

Here's my first statement on the ways in which a given subordinate icon, in particular a famous villain, is aligned with a given superordinate icon:

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe.

Now, I said "often" because there have been times that a subordinate icon (I may as well say "villain" for the rest of the essay, since that's the only icon I'll address here) is introduced under the mantle of a given "hero," but the latter has not yet been aligned with a strong superordinate icon, Thus Thanos first appears in an issue of Iron Man, alongside a heroic subordinate icon (Drax the Destroyer), but Thanos is in a "floating alignment" until he's aligned with Captain Mar-Vell.

I've established so far that if the Joker had appeared in a Batman story before Batman teamed with Dick Grayson Robin, Joker would still be aligned with Grayson-Robin, but that no Bat-foe who meets Batman after the dissolution of the bonded ensemble is aligned with Grayson-Robin. But how does this theory apply to the next strongest form of ensemble, the "semi-bonded" ensemble?

Here, I will draw, as specified, upon the AVENGERS title as an example of a semi-bonded ensemble. 

In the earliest AVENGERS stories, all members of the team had their own features. In AVENGERS #6, Baron Zemo, making his first appearance, brings together three villains from each of three heroes' features: the Black Knight from GIANT-MAN, the Melter from IRON MAN, and the Radioactive Man from THOR. As soon as these established villains appeared fighting heroes with whom they were not aligned, this resulted in a charisma-crossover.

However, the reverse is true when a villain introduced as a foe to the Avengers-team fights one Avenger, because by fighting one Avenger, he has in essence declared war upon them all.

So when the Living Laser debuts, he's obviously aligned with all of the Avengers he fights.

But say for argument's sake the Laser never fights the Avenger Iron Man within the sphere of the AVENGERS feature, but that his first one-on-one encounter with the Armored Avenger takes place in the first of two Iron Man stories I analyzed here. This would not be a charisma-crossover, because of the ensemble-bond between Iron Man and the other Avengers. I will leave open the question of whether this bond extends to Avengers who have very limited stints as Avengers, though. Spider-Man was an Avenger for a time, but his time in the group was so short that this membership did not become a major part of his mythos. Thus in his case the Laser fighting Spider-Man in the latter's solo feature probably would qualify as a charisma-crossover, because the bond between Spider-Man and the Avengers is so transitory.

Short-lived team memberships characterize the last form of ensemble discussed, the unbonded ensemble. In addition to the example of a short-lived membership in a greater group, this applies also to such phenomena as "rotating teamups" (such as THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD) and to short-lived partnerships. For instance, for about two years the CAPTAIN AMERICA feature was transformed into CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON, but the escalation factor was not sufficient to create a bonded ensemble. Therefore the Falcon is in alignment only with those Cap-villains he encounters, but not any villains before or after the limited partnership.

Rotating teamups have a similar impermanence, but they incorporate a different alignment-dynamic. I've stated earlier that when the Second Molecule Man debuted in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, wherein he fights the temporary team of The Thing and The Man-Thing, the villain became equally aligned with both icons, despite his father's association with the Fantastic Four. But if one of the temp-team's villains has fought one of the two hero-icons, that villain remains in alignment with the hero with whom he (or she) has been previously acquainted. The above seen villain Blackstarr first appeared as a Supergirl villain. Then said villain appears later in a DC COMICS PRESENTS teaming up Supergirl and her cousin Superman, and thus there is a charisma-crossover there between Blackstarr and Superman. This crossover-over vibe would not exist, hwoever, if Superman were simply guest-starring in a Supergirl story wherein he and his cousin fought Blackstarr as the menace of the day, and both Blackstarr and Superman were subordinate icons within Supergirl's story.

DOORWAY TO XANADU

I don't remember what drew my attention to DC's seventies spiritualist Madame Xanadu, but I found myself wondering how much, if at all, her introductory stories qualified her for (1) centric status, and (2) combative status. My verdict is that she satisfies my criteria for both, but oddly, the original five issues of her debut comic, DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE, also reflect a strong influence from the Gothic subgenre that DC Comics toyed with during that decade. The Gothic, in my definition, tends to include a strong element of sexual transgression, while the more overarching category of horror fiction does not utilize sexual transgression as prominently.

I'll exclude two of these early "Madame X" stories from this summary, because I want to review them in more detail elsewhere. 

DOORWAY #1-- This issue, like the one following it, uses the title of the book in place of a separate story-title, so I'll use as a title a phrase from the first page of David Micheline's script: "The Emporium of Truth." The mysterious Madame Xanadu runs a fortune telling shop in New York's East Village, and like all the later DOORWAY stories, she seems to draw to her people with romantic conflicts. Actress Cindy Barnes has been dating playwright Brad Jacobs, but she finds herself sidelined by another actress, name of Erika. Xanadu intuits through her reading of her Tarot cards that Erika is more than she seems, and the quasi-heroine displays her ambiguous powers by defeating an apparent demonic attacker.

This scene also establishes a constant motif, that upon defeating a foe, Xanadu seemingly imprisons her former foe's essence in a glass jar. Cindy then learns that Erika is actually an ancient Egyptian sorceress in modern garb, and that she plans to drain Brad of his spirit-energies. Xanadu, rather than directly combating the sorceress, encourages Cindy to break the witch's soul-pyramid, after which the sorceress perishes.

Vaulting over issue #2 for later consideration, issue #3 is the first Xanadu story to merit a title, "Blood Red Tear." Scribe Bill Kunkel and artist Ric Estrada issue a serviceable vampire story, in which an unaging bloodsucker, Victor Christianson, falls for mortal woman Margot. Xanadu does not actively oppose the vampire, but uses her Tarot skills to make Victor sacrifice himself to keep from making Margot one of the undead. Xanadu does apparently collect his soul or whatever for one of her little jars. Given the theme of sacrifice, the last name "Christianson" is probably no coincidence.

DOORWAY #4 contains the risibly titled "Six Claws of the Dragon," written by Andrews and Hopen and penciled by EC legend Johnny Craig. Two mummies from ancient Manchuria go missing from a New York museum, and for some reason police detective Abrahms finds himself seeking the shop of Madame Xanadu for information. He also meets two Asian women, and he falls in love with the younger one, Sue Lie Hau. An undead Chinese swordsman appears to take Abrahms' life, but Xanadu apparently does some  hocus pocus so that, though she Xanadu appears to get knocked out a window by the assassin, somehow the swordsman ends up on the pavement. The older Asian woman is behind it all, seeking to transfer the soul of a mummy-princess into the body of Sue. At Xanadu's urging, Abrahms is able to reach Sue by the power of love, so that the evil spirit is exorcised. Xanadu adds another jar to her collection.

"Day of the Devils" in DOORWAY #5 is by Scott Edelman and Romeo Tanghal, and alone boasts no sexual transgression elements, though it's still a supernatural romance story, Handsome youth Johnny joins a vicious gang to gain acceptance, but cute girl Anne tries to talk him into leaving the gang. They both end up at Xanadu's shop, but for once, the seeress becomes pro-active. At the shop Johnny has a dream in which he becomes a literal devil and Anne wields mystic powers to stop him. When the dream ends, Johnny decides to tread the straight and narrow from then on. This time Xanadu appears to use a mystic jar to create the dream but she doesn't make any new acquisitions.

Once DOORWAY was cancelled, four inventory stories then appeared in DC's anthology magazine, THE UNEXPECTED.

UNEXPECTED #190 presents "Tapestry of Dreams" by Cary Burkett and Juan Ortiz. Young Stephen comes to Xanadu because his girl Lauren has become besotted with an older man, the mysterious Mister Hazel. Prior to Stephen's advent, though, the reader has seen Hazel visit Xanadu's emporium, making clear that he's no mystery to Xanadu. She reveals to Stephen he's truly an incubus named Azazel, and that the only way to free Lauren from his control is by entering the girl's dream-world and defeating the incubus in combat. Xanadu performs no combat herself but does lend Stephen some undefined power, and after the lovers are liberated, Mister Hazel ends up in a jelly jar.

UNEXPECTED #192 offers "Wheel of Fortune" by Bill Kelley and Romeo Tanghal. A girl named Joyce witnesses a "disco inferno" at a New York club, seeing female friend Erica disappear while dancing with the handsome but enigmatic club-owner Damon (whose band-members look like demons). After consulting with Xanadu, Joyce-- who is herself attracted to Damon-- returns to the club and sees Erica again, but the formerly young girl seems aged. Xanadu tells Joyce that a devil-cult has taken over the disco, and Joyce herself learns that the band of demons has suborned Damon. Though there's one incident in which Xanadu seems to protect Joyce from a mundane attack, she allows Joyce to have the triumph of banishing the club's evil, and this time one of the seeress' jars is comparatively crowded. I believe this is the first story in which the script calls Xanadu a "gypsy."

UNEXPECTED #194-- Andrews and Hopen return to write "Moonlight and Laughter" with art by Jess Jodloman. The story starts out with more action than usual, as a werewolf tries to exhort from Xanadu, only to be slain by the rifle of werewolf hunter Lyle Morgan. Xanadu makes a few dire predictions to Lyle, and then he goes to visit his girlfriend Mina, who's working at a comedy club (?) Mina knows all about how Lyle became a hunter after a werewolf slew his first love, and the two of them end up at Xanadu's emporium. Lyle desires vengeance on the particular shapechanger who killed his ex, and after that, a new wolf-thing shows up, almost killing Lyle until Xanadu repels the creature. Later Lyle and Mina learn of a whole cult of werewolves, and this leads to Lyle finding his quarry, though not with the usual upbeat romantic conclusion.

UNEXPECTED #195-- Finally, Denny O'Neil and Johnny Craig execute "Deadly Homecoming," in which an embittered soldier, Johnny Dallas, returns home from Vietnam, meeting his fiancee Vanessa. Johnny expresses rage at both his commanding officer and at Vanessa's father, and both of them die soon after. Vanessa visits the emporium, and Xanadu gives her a protective amulet. It turns that Johnny and his soldier-buddy Frank fell afoul of a Vietnamese war-god, who imbued Frank with mental powers, which he used to make Johnny the catspaw for his murders. Xanadu appears, shows Frank a soul jar, and that's enough for the soldier to commit suicide, so that the war-god somehow ends up in the jar.

In conclusion, like the majority of DC horror stories, most of these are mediocre at best. Though much is made of Xanadu's Tarot skills, none of the writers or artists do much with Tarot symbolism or imagery. The last inventory story happened to be executed by fan-favorites Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, so DC Comics decided to publish this story as a one-shot comic, MADAME XANADU, in 1981. I want to eventually giving this story more detailed attention, so aside from that story and the one in DOORWAY #2, Xanadu's debut is marked by a few scattered myth-nuggets in stories that feel a bit like a romance comic crossed with The Phantom Stranger.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 1

 So in GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN, I sketched out three types of "bonded ensembles" in which fictional icons could take part. Here I'll expand on those categories.

For all three, I used Robin the Boy Wonder as an exemplar of each ensemble-type, stating that:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

All of these bonds depend upon the principle of escalation, as described in the February 2023 essay INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2. Most of the time the categories of bonded ensembles are determined by quantitative escalation, that is, how often the characters in the ensemble have appeared together. It's not impossible that a bonded ensemble could result from qualitative escalation, which is what determines the crossover-status of Walter Scott's IVANHOE At present no examples of bonded ensembles stemming from qualitative escalation occur to me. 

In addition, I asserted that the Barbara Gordon Batgirl participated in two separate configurations. 

In the comics, Batgirl was independent of the Batman-Robin team, so that her peripatetic guest-star appearances, both before and after she graduated to her own stature-series, so she was not in any ensemble at all, except for the brief unbonded ensemble she formed with Robin in the BATMAN FAMILY magazine. (This ensemble was not even constant for the run of the title, since some issues featured the two heroes enjoying separate adventures.)

However, when the television version of her character was created for the third season of BATMAN, she formed a fully bonded ensemble with both Batman and Robin for the duration of that season. 

Roughly thirty years from her debut, though, Barbara Gordon, in her new incarnation as Oracle, formed an ongoing "semi-inclusive ensemble" with Black Canary in the first BIRDS OF PREY tryout. As Batgirl she had enjoyed her own series, and the Canary had received her first headliner series in 1992, if one chooses to ignore the Golden Age incarnation, with which the post-Crisis heroine was no longer coterminous. So theirs was a inclusive ensemble at first, as defined previously:

The Inclusive Ensemble is one in which the members of the team all originate in other features, and thus all of the starring characters have some degree of stature when they appear in the team feature, a stature independent of the ensemble feature.

However, over time the Birds team became more of a semi-inclusive team on the loose model of The Avengers, including some temporary members who no longer had their own features (The Dove from HAWK AND DOVE) or who debuted in the BOP feature, such as Misfit. Both versions of the team would still be "semi-bonded" given that there was some degree of stature-independence due to the continued presence of Barbara Gordon and Dinah Lance. 

And it's propitious that I mentioned The Avengers, because that will be one of my subjects in Part Two.

Incidentally, the essay-title ICONIC BONDING riffs on a scientific term for a form of quantum entanglement:

Ionic bonding is the complete transfer of valence electron(s) between atoms. It is a type of chemical bond that generates two oppositely charged ions.

NEAR MYTHS: "BUS FUSS" (ARCHIE AND ME #50, 1972)

In this essay I spoke of the ARCHIE franchise as "damn close to being anti-epistemological." I don't believe it's impossible that somewhere, someone did a story that meets my criteria for epistemological myth. But if there's even one, it's buried under thousands upon thousands of average stuff.

And then I came across this near-myth, probably both written and drawn by Al Hartley, whimsically titled "Bus Fuss." I gasped at the first page, in which Principal Weatherbee is seen having the seats of a bus taken out, and Jughead quips that the old fellow has "flipped his lid over the school busing thing." Gasp, thought I. Is an ARCHIE comic going to say something about desegregation?

Instead, Weatherbee has a different sort of bee in his bonnet, not political in the least. He's taking everyone on a trip into the Great Outdoors, not only the most prominent teen regulars but also three teachers, the janitor and the lunch-lady. In other words, the lesson to be imparted is not for kids only, and it begins with a prayer. "Can we do that in school?" asks Jughead in his atypical Confederate cap. "We're not in school now," responds Betty. Weatherbee's prayer contains no specific religious allusions, only invoking the protection of the creator as they journey to see "the beauty of your creation."

For the next six pages, Weatherbee gives his captive audience a Cook's tour of natural wonders, with no other religious context, beginning with the importance of trees and their wood by-products to the early American settlers. I like the fact that Hartley isn't so evangelical that he misses a chance for a covert reference to the canine love of trees. He also throws in a tiny bit of conflict at the end of page six.

The bear's advent forces everyone back into the bus while the ursine intruder eats all their food. Jughead rages about the loss of the victuals, which prompts Weatherbee to take a shot at the lunch-lady: "[the bear] will pay for it. Miss Beazley prepared that food." Nothing daunted, the next day the improvised camper travels to a local range of mountains. Though Weatherbee reductively assumes that ancient peoples revered mountains because of volcanic activity, he nevertheless draws upon the archaic sense of the numinous by mentioning their connection to deities (which of course they also have in Judeo-Christian belief).

And to top off the rambling quasi-lecture, "the Bee" then shows his charges their insignificant place in the universe by pushing them to look up at the stars, untrammeled by the interference of civilization. And with that simple but non-denominational revelation, the story ends and they descend to "find our place in the scheme of things."

I had read two or three of Al Hartley's "Archie gets religion" stories and found them heavy on Christian proselytizing. But here, even though all of the other stories in this issue are just routine teen hijinks, with Weatherbee playing the fool, this lead tale was refreshingly subtle. I'm not sure I even know why Hartley even gave this gently spiritual story a goofy title like "Bus Fuss," unless he just anticipated that his editors would expect such a title. "Fuss" is not elaborate enough to be a fully epistemological myth, but at least it has some of the right ingredients.

IT'S STRONGER THAN DIRT

 (The title is taken from a jingle in an old old commercial for Ajax laundry detergent, and the following is a quick commentary from a political forum in which one poster had linked to an article on Asian "whitewashing," i.e, artificial skin-bleaching, and its putative connection to "whiteness.")

____________

Yes, it's not always clear how much some of these "lightness fetishes" really stem from "whiteness as such."

For instance, I remember a tidbit from Burton's ARABIAN NIGHTS translation, where translator Burton claimed that the high-caste Brahmins of India did not consider the British colonials "white" in comparison to themselves. He claimed that they called the Brits "red men" because they had so little resistance to the Indian sun that they were frequently sunburned. If this nugget is veracious, those Brahmins weren't fetishizing "lightness" because of any hidden envy of the British overlords; it was their strategy of differentiating themselves from the more numerous darker skins of India, somewhat along the lines of Doctor Seuss's "Sneetches." 

It's also a little hard for me to believe that a huge swathe of Asians still seek lightness of skin because they remember the decades-old dominance of colonial Europe. I guess it's a little more possible that they harbor some subconscious envy of the economic juggernaut of the United States and its worldwide promotion of capitalism. But of course Asians had their own version of capitalism long before Marco Polo, as we see with feudal China's colonial attitude toward neighboring Asians. So the argument of "whiteness as such" still seems forced at best.

THE READING RHEUM: HERBERT WEST, REANIMATOR (1922)

 My review of this six-part tale, so notable for spawning the cinematic RE-ANIMATOR franchise, will be succinct. I'd long heard that this might be HPL's worst story, and despite trying to keep an open mind, I concur with that verdict. I found none of HPL's stellar use of language or his esoteric concepts. 

In fact, WEST isn't a standard story at all. All six parts are vignettes, and all save the last concern this innocent-looking mad scientist repeatedly bringing corpses to life with his special fluid. The narrator is the usual "I couldn't help just following along" type, who tells us of West's pointless enormities, none of which are given even slight self-justification, as one can find in the diatribes of Moreau and Frankenstein. West likes to bring life to dead bodies because he can, and that's about it, until the last story, in which it appears that the risen dead carry West away to his doom.

The only incident that showed a little psychological promise appears when HPL describes the aged mentor of West and his companion as an almost saintly man. West shows his indifference to affection by bringing his former mentor back to life as a raving hulk. Mary Shelley used Frankenstein's mania as a means of displaying his buried hostilities toward everyone close to him. But HPL has no such aims, and frankly, I don't know why this notion held any appeal for him. He does, however, come up with a much more substantive "living dead man" story in the 1928 story COOL AIR.

THE READING RHEUM: THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE (1920)

 Quick personal note: my first experience with Lovecraft came about when I picked up this 1967 Lancer paperback. 

It printed five of HPL's best stories-- the titular "Colour Out of Space," "Cool Air," "Call of Cthulhu,' "The Whisperer in Darkness," and "The Shadow Out of Time," and this lesser effort, "The Picture in the House." These six stories made me an HPL fan for life, even though I must admit that the main thing I liked about "Picture" was its opening paragraph.

SEARCHERS after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.

I would say that this paragraph by itself is the first time HPL really found his distinctive voice, his unchallenged ability to suggest indescribable horrors through a combination of poetry and pedantry. The whole story, though, is mostly a curiosity, and back in the day I didn't quite understand why it didn't have the same impact as the others. Part of the reason lies in the fact that it is a very early horror-story, though its inclusion as an "Arkham Cycle" tale depends entirely upon being the first tale to mention the city of Arkham itself, as well as the river of the Miskatonic Valley. 

A nameless genealogist, while bicycling through New England for purposes of research, gets caught in a downpour, so he takes refuge in one of those "ancient, lonely farmhouses." Before he can even tell if the house is occupied, he sees numerous antique books. On opening one, he finds that it's written in Latin but features very explicit engravings of the cannibal butcheries committed by primitive African tribesmen. Then he meets a weird old man whose speech resembles that of Yankee settlers long extinct, and the unnamed fellow begins regaling his visitor with his enthusiasm for the weird pictures in the book, even though he cannot read Latin. He draws a strange comparison to the Bible: "When I read in Scripture about slayin'-- like them Midianites was slew-- I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it." Slowly the narrator begins to deduct from the old guy's ramblings that he became unnaturally fascinated with the practice of cannibalism. Then, just as he sees possible evidence that the man has acted on his fantasies by killing some poor soul, the story abruptly ends when a lighting bolt hits the house. (The editor of the ANNOTATED edition thought the narrator survived; I think the story implies that the lightning kills everyone in the benighted house.)

The other reason this story doesn't work well is that HPL probably modeled it on some of Poe's less successful vignettes; those in which the author tried to evoke some transitory mood of gloom and then just brought the tale to a quick close, like THE OVAL PORTRAIT. Later HPL stories show a better "beginning, middle, and end" structure. On a related note, HPL is so cagey with his big reveal that I didn't clue until now that he meant to suggest that the old man might have been extending his life for decades via his cannibal-ritual, so that he actually hailed from the Puritan era. (Since this is only a suggestion, I would still categorize the story as "uncanny.")

The main reason I class the mythicity of PICTURE as "high" is that, as in BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP, the debased subject of the story is a white New Englander. Although HPL maunders a bit about the negative aspects of Puritan culture, at base he's still depicting a scion of the Anglo-Saxon race, of which HPL deemed himself a member, to be capable of descending to the subhuman depths of Black Africans. Thus for me, the nameless New Englander is, like Joe Slater, a projection of HPL's fears of degeneration. Against such powers, nothing, not even an individual with the right racial credentials, can survive--and in this, HPL ran counter to the majority of other writers who portrayed Caucasians in a more flattering light.

MYTHCOMICS: "LAND OF GOLDEN GIANTS" (FLASH #120, 1961)

 

The two Silver Flash stories I've previously analyzed, MASTER OF THE ELEMENTS and PLIGHT OF THE PUPPET-FLASH, showed writer John Broome intentionally articulating mythic aspects of each story's respective villain. In LAND OF GOLDEN GIANTS, however, I believe that his conscious intent was only to craft a boy's adventure involving time-travel to prehistoric times. Yet he subconsciously structured it to reflect myth-images with which he might've only had a nodding acquaintance-- particularly, images relating to the Deluge Myth.

As the story opens, a "scientist explorer," Bill Manners, mounts an expedition to gather evidence of the separation of the continents from one another during prehistory. Manners invites Barry Allen and Iris West, who are his "young friends." Barry and Iris for their part invite along their young friend, Iris' nephew Wally West, who became Kid Flash ten issues previous. In fact, GIANTS is noteworthy in the relationship of the older superhero and his mentee, since Barry reveals his true identity to Wally prior to the trip.

No sooner does the party-- consisting of the three adults, Wally and Manners' granddaughter Gail-- arrive at some location in South America than a nearby volcano, located in the Valley of the Sleeping Giant, erupts. The whole expedition is swept up in a landslide, apparently so unexpectedly that even the two super-speedsters are caught off guard. When they regain their bearings, though, the country around them appears radically altered for all five travelers.

Barry and Wally leave the others behind, don their costumes and scout around. This works out well, since they almost immediately must save a primitive tribesman from an outlandish monster. Eventually it will dawn on the duo that they haven't traveled geographically, but temporally; that the volcano explosion cast them back to an earlier era. The cavemen of the tribe try to tell the heroes about another local menace, a horde of Golden Giants, but Flash and Kid Flash find out the hard way.

Fortunately, the crusaders not only to escape their colossal foe, they manage to obtain cables from the expedition-camp, enabling them to pull a Lilliputian act against the golden "Gulliver." 

But they're still faced with the dilemma of how to get back to their own time. The two Flashes don't immediately come up with an answer, so they make a super-fast exploration around the whole world. They learn that, propitiously enough, the time-warp hurled them back to the very era Manners sought to learn about: the moment in time when the continents of Africa and South America began to separate. This cataclysm unleashes mighty flood-waves, so the heroes rush back to the cavemen and talk the prehumans into running to higher ground. Just as propitiously, the implied foes of the cavemen, the Golden Giants, show up just in time to get engulfed and exterminated by massive waves. Barry, though a scientist first and foremost, remembers Genesis 6:4 well enough to quote the familiar phrase about "giants in the earth," which foregrounds God's decision to send the flood to wipe out most of humankind, except for a select few.

At any rate, the heroes must return their friends to their own time, and they do so by duplicating the temporal vibration from the volcano. Amusingly, Flash concerns himself with the adults, while Kid Flash saves the age-appropriate Gail. However, once the whole expedition is back in modern times, Iris, Gail and Manners never know that they time-traveled at all, nor do they catch sight of the two Flashes, which keeps the heroes' identities from being compromised. Manners finds some of the contemporary evidence he wanted and never knows that he actually visited the era he's researching.

By virtue of the Genesis quote, Broome demonstrably knew the most basic association between giants and the Deluge, even though the King James Bible does not explicitly link the giants with the sinning humans whom God destroys. And he might have been utterly ignorant of the considerable elaboration of Jewish lore about the giants, originally called "Nephilim" in the Old Testament text:

In apocryphal writings of the Second Temple period this fragmentary narrative was elaborated and reinterpreted. The angels were then depicted as rebels against God: lured by the charms of women, they "fell" (Heb, nfl. נפל), defiled their heavenly purity, and introduced all manner of sinfulness to earth. Their giant offspring were wicked and violent; the Flood was occasioned by their sinfulness. (None of these ideas is in the biblical text.) Because of their evil nature, God decreed that the Nephilim should massacre one another, although according to another view most of them perished in the Flood. One version asserts that the evil spirits originally issued from the bodies of the slain giants. These giants, or their offspring, are identified as Nephilim (See I En. 6–10, 15–16; Jub. 7:21ff.)-- Jewish Virtual Library.

Yet Broome was clearly reworking the most basic trope of the Deluge Myth, in which some are saved and others are destroyed. The function of the Flashes is slightly similar to the role played by the "time-travelers" of Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD novel, where the intrepid explorers intervene to make sure that a race of primitive humans is not enslaved by brutal ape-men. There seems to be no particular reason for Broome to have made the giants "golden," although the color is sometimes associated with a formative period. And the period of the continents' separation is clearly one such period, in which a Deluge sorts out the good tribe from the bad one, and makes possible the stable configurations of modern reality.