FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I'm a big fan of one of Leslie Fiedler's quotes from his 1982 book WHAT WAS LITERATURE?: "Mythopoeic excellence is independent of formal excellence." I've never invoked the quote in any of my various analyses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either singly or in collaboration. Yet the quote came to mind while I was mulling over some recent friendly arguments between fellow comics-bloggers Kid of CRIVENS and Rip Jagger of RIP JAGGER'S DOJO, if only because both of them made some allusions to "myth."

Now the thing called "myth" is a many-splintered thing, and no one entirely agrees on how to define it. My overall concept of myth is probably not the same as that of Kid, Rip, or Leslie Fiedler. However, one possible common element may be the idea that mythic elements in fiction are those we commonly call "larger than life," and possibly all of us would agree that these two titans of comic-book storytelling predominantly told stories that were "larger than life." (I include Fiedler because he did make a couple of positive remarks on the Fourth World, though I believe he credited the opus to Stan Lee.)

I'll get to quotes by Kid and Rip soon, but first I want to clarify that I'm not entirely sure what specific targets Fiedler was reacting against when he coined his quote. In the book he generalizes a lot about the literary elitism of his time, without naming specific opponents. The way his quote is worded, one assumes that there were critics who believed that "formal excellence" in literary works was everything. If a writer like Virginia Woolf (my example, not Fiedler's) could turn out highly finessed prose that one could admire for its own sake, it would seem that Woolf's lack of any "larger than life" story did not matter to such critics. Fiedler represented himself as someone who could appreciate what he called "myth" in popular as well as elite culture; could appreciate a bestseller-type like Margaret Mitchell as much as he appreciated a literary light like William Faulkner, if not in the exact same way.

OK, so here are the relevant quotes from Kid and Rip from this comments-section of this Dojo post. First Rip mentions two of the more "mythic tales" of Jack Kirby's Fourth World  cosmology, and Kid responds:

I think it likely that many of the themes that people saw in Kirby's work, weren't actually there (or were exaggerated) and had probably never even occurred to him. The Fourth World is laid against a superficial backdrop of 'myth', purely for the purpose of telling stories about good guys versus bad guys.

And Rip responds:

I disagree with you adamantly that Kirby's tapping of mythic themes was by chance. He was intentionally evoking those themes. The "Anti-Life Equation" is a core idea that permeates the stories and is all about the individual freedoms we aspire to.

Now at this point one may be thinking, "okay, all three quoted persons said something about myth, but where does all the fuss about 'formal excellence' come in? Neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee was any sort of 'literary light' with a reputation for fine wordsmithing." Quite true. But Kid makes clear that he didn't find Jack Kirby's solo works, Fourth World and otherwise, to be as "readable" as the collaborative works between Kirby and Stan Lee, and this has been a frequent complaint from many other fans over the years in assessing the virtues of the Lee-Kirby collaborations as against the "Solo Kirby" stories, including but not limited to the Fourth World.

It's true that the sort of critics Fiedler was responding to would have deemed both comics-makers to be melodramatic trash. However, I believe that Fiedler was arguing that certain authors did tap into a special type of creativity, one that didn't require a well-turned literary phrase at all. But "readability" was another aspect of story-crafting, and it's as good a word as any for what fans liked in the Lee-Kirby collaborations that they didn't find in the Solo Kirby stories.

Since I'm not trying to make any new enemies, the only reason I quote Kid and Rip is to ground my own responses to their estimations, not to attribute to either blogger something he did not say. And my response is as follows. I agree with Rip that there's a lot of intentional myth-making in the Fourth World, though not so much in the rest of Kirby's solo oeuvre. But I also think Kid is correct that many contemporary comics-readers found the Fourth World hard to follow, and I believe that the hardcore comics-fans didn't invest themselves in Kirby's myths because by 1970 many of them had come to expect a certain level of "formal excellence" even in funnybooks. 

What does "formal excllence" look like on the low level of comic-book melodrama? I see one crucial element that Lee brought to the collaborations that Kirby was not able to master despite his best efforts-- and I'm going to capitalize this element to indicate its importance--

THE APPEARANCE OF CONSISTENT TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS (defined as characters who seem to have two or more dominant characteristics that give the impression of consistency)

Now, I say "appearance" because of course there were dozens of Marvel characters, either by Stan and Jack or by other creators entirely, who were only one-dimensional (defined by just one trait) or no-dimensional (defined by the function the character performs in the story). Both Lee and Kirby grew up with comics in which one-dimensional and no-dimensional characters practically defined the medium, and the main exceptions were in the works of particular raconteurs like Will Eisner and Carl Barks. Lee and Kirby separately experimented a little bit with two-dimensional characters, mostly in one-shot anthology stories, where they didn't have to worry about a serial status quo. 

I might argue that both authors had made minor inroads toward two-dimensional characterizations, Kirby in the comic strip SKY MASTERS, and Lee in his collaboration with Joe Maneely on the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT. But they weren't moved by any lofty literary aims in either case. By the late 1950s the comics-business was in chaos, and no one was sure what would sell. DC, long the home to the reigning super-dude, had started pushing superheroes in the last years of the decade. But even these were at best one-dimensional. Barry Allen was a dogged police scientist, Hal Jordan was a slightly more venturesome test pilot. 

Then Lee and Kirby, who had both been doing a lot of stand-alone SF/horror stories for the Company That Would Be Marvel, came together for FANTASTIC FOUR. In those anthology stories both men had sometimes emulated the two-dimensional characters in 1950s SF-films, and they brought a similar dynamic to this new group of superheroes. The feature's success was a blend of Kirby's great talent for character design and Lee's sensitivity to the different "voices" each character might possess. I would never credit all the "myth-elements" to Kirby alone, or all the "characterization-elements" to Lee alone. But each of them had their primary strengths, and together they were able to present a variety of larger-than-life fantasy-situations that seemed more "relatable" because the characters had an apparent consistency of voice and attitude.

I may build on some of these considerations elsewhere, since Fiedler's use of the word "formal" reminds me of my distinction here between "formal and informal postulates." But none of those hypothetical essays are likely to involve the eternal "Stan and Jack" question.

QUICK ADDENDUM: Here's an example of what I would deem a two-dimensional character by Stan Lee, which story he completed with John Romita long before Kirby returned to Martin Goodman's company.

NEAR MYTHS: "WHY ME? WHY NOT?" (HAGAR THE HORRIBLE, 1973)

 In THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PART 3, I wrote:

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

Most of the time, there probably still won't be any good reason to explore the simple vignette-type of gag strip. But here's one that garnered a certain amount of political fame. According to this online essay, Presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that he'd kept the following HAGAR THE HORRIBLE strip on his desk since the 1972 loss of his son Beau.

Now, a lot of people keep comic strips that have a special, snapshot-like personal association for them. But the HAGAR strip relates well to what Jung called "transpersonal" associations, because it's patently using Hagar's particular situation-- the wreck of his Viking ship in a storm-- to put forth a condensed version of Job's argument with God. Admittedly any reader of the strip will know that Hagar's troubles are transitory; that by the next strip he'll back in his little Viking hut with his family, no worse for wear, because he's that type of cartoon character. But the answer of the unnamed sky-deity is one that many people can apply well to their real troubles. Why, in a world full of travails, should anyone expect not to be plagued by ill fortune?

All that said, there's nothing more than can be said about this two-panel strip, so "Why" does not present, as a concrescent work would, a "dialogue between a variety of symbolic representations."

MYTHCOMICS: THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH (2013)

 

As much as I enjoy finding mythic tropes in all of the modern genre-narratives, it's particularly bracing to encounter a modern artist who seeks to craft a narrative set in the never-never land of archaic myth. And even then, the number of works that succeed in entering the realm of myth are rare. For every genuine evocation of myth, like Tanith Lee's "Flat Earth" book series, there are probably a dozen superficial concepts, like Disney's relentlessly stupid ONCE UPON A TIME TV-franchise.

One quality of mythic stories often ignored by meretricious authors is that of loneliness. Real myths can include victorious gods and triumphant heroes, but even happy endings require the characters to pass through fiery baptisms. No matter what powers a knight or a wizard may have, their lives are often compromised by the need for human contact.

Thus Isobel Greenberg begins her first graphic novel-- a winner of two Eisner Awards, no less-- with a new iteration of the classic Asian story of the Separated Lovers, one version of which is described here. However, Greenberg places the action of her "early Earth" in the frozen North, and the only two cultures we see for most of the story are those of the Inuit-like "Nord" people and the Viking-like "Dag." The main character, known only as The Storyteller, is one of the Nords of the North Pole, and he's first seen falling in love with a woman of the South Pole whom, for reasons not immediately revealed, he cannot even touch due to a magnetic force that keeps them apart. Their tale of doomed love provides a frame for all the stories that follow, which The Storyteller relates to his wife.

The Storyteller himself is something of a myth since as an infant he floats into the lives of his three mothers after the fashion of Moses, but unlike the Hebrew leader the reader never knows where Baby Storyteller came from. The three mothers, however, each one their own private kid to raise, so they seek out a Medicine Man who outdoes King Solomon and really does split a single kid into three separate boys. Of course this doesn't work out, and the three boys eventually re-unite into one. This reunion makes for some psychic chaos but the varied experiences make him a great Storyteller. 

Unfortunately, the Medicine Man who split up the Storyteller lost a little piece of the latter's soul, so the Storyteller has to go looking for it. After a couple of maritime adventures strongly reminiscent of the trials of Odysseus, the Storyteller meets the Viking-like Dag, who eventually honor the traveler and relate to him their own stories, such as the creation of the world by the indifferent deity Birdman and his offspring The Ravens, a son named "Kid" and a daughter named "Kiddo." (Apparently Greenberg wanted to keep things light to avoid portentousness.) The Dag also relate stories about the origin of their tribe and that of the enemies the Hal, who both descend from two brothers with a Cain-and-Abel theme. They also relate the story of how Birdman cursed the Giants for committing hubris. However, the Storyteller relates a popular story from the history of the Nord people, about how the Nords kicked out a gang of hostile invaders. When the Dags figure out that their ancestors were the ones who got their butts kicked, the Storyteller has to flee for his life.

The traveler makes it to the city of the Bavelians. Among other things he learns another version of creation. Not only does the world of humans come into being merely because of a pointless contest between the Ravens, the daughter Kiddo falls in love with a human named Noah. Birdman takes a dim view of such fraternization, and he sends a flood to devastate the human world. Kiddo saves Noah and other humans by instructing him how to make an ark, but she's just as divinely wrathful when she discovers that Noah has taken a human wife. Thus, while humanity lives on, the flood carries away much of the richness of the world, so that life is harder afterward, which more or less cross-breeds the stories of the Deluge and of the Expulsion from the Garden.

The Storyteller also learns from the Bavelians of a story in which Birdman cast down his world's equivalent of the Tower of Babel, but the traveler wants to be free to find his missig soul-fragment. Despite the harsh indifference of Birdman, though, his offspring resolve to help the mortal. While this world is too harsh to harbor deities kind enough to mark every sparrow's fall, Kid and Kiddo are at least good stand-ins for the beginnings of beneficent divinities.

With the help of the Ravens, the Storyteller reaches the South Pole and regains his soul-fragment, as well as meeting the woman to whom he will bond himself for the remainder of his mortal life. However, Birdman finds out about the twins' interference, and he waxes wroth. His anger inadvertently creates the force that eternally separates the lovers from one another. But for all the lovers' travails, the story ends on a triumphant note, since even love separated is still love. This brings the myth-tale full circle, though Greenberg adds in a few other tales in her appendices.

It's fascinating that Greenberg chose to call her work an "encyclopedia." It's not an assemblage of cognitive knowledge after the fashion of standard encyclopedias. But it does assemble all the knowledge about "Early Earth" into discrete categories, and archaic myths were also, in their way, "encyclopedia entries." Ancient myths organized human knowledge about the physical world as well as their knowledge of the world within their own souls, melding these forms of knowledge as only a few philosophers have been able to accomplish in modern times. 

MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY

As I look over my various posts on both the topic of "epistemological patterns" and that of the "master thread," I don't think I ever managed to show how the former plays into the latter. 

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

In 2020, I proposed "master thread" as a substitute for the familiar "theme statement" formulation, given that the image of a "master thread" could better account for all the "lesser threads" that might be tied into the dominant one. The essay was also the beginning of the end for the terms "overthought" and "underthought," both of which appear therein. Now, having claimed that master threads are either dominantly didactic or dominantly mythopoeic, I won't bother with those outmoded terms in future. But I didn't really set down how the process of concrescence depended on translating ideas and intuitions about the four epistemological patterns so that they become such a master thread.

Following the same pattern I'd used to argue THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I offered three types of "master thread" as they occurred particular stories on the same theme in the 2020 essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3. This essay requires updating in line with the formulation of the necessity for epistemological patterns in the process of concrescence.

All three cited stories depend on the same type of master thread, which I stated to be "hero must defeat evil counterpart." The purpose of such confrontations are always to better define the hero's virtues as against the vices of the counterpart, and so the reigning epistemological pattern is psychological.

The first example, which had a *poor* level of mythicity, was "The Haunted Island" from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43. I noted the various ad hoc elements of the story, but at heart its greatest weakness is that the "evil counterparts" aren't given any psychological grounding. The mutants, having survived weird transformations but continuing to live on, draw an irrational comparison between themselves and the heroic Challengers, simply because they think that the latter are also living on "borrowed time." The author can only explain this association by falling back on the makeshift rationale that the mutants have gone mad, which in theory frees the author from coming up with a plausible psychology for his villains.

The next cited story, with a *fair* level of mythicity, was "And So My World Ends," from JLA #71. This story actually had an editorial agenda behind it, as much as did "Haunted Island," in that the story eliminated all civilization on J'onn J'onzz's version of Mars and also provided an exit scene for the Martian Manhunter, who had lost his regular berth and was no longer a good fit in the JLA. But this time the writer gave the villain, Commander Blanx, a reason for his decimation of his homeworld: his utter contempt for the way his people have become "weaklings." This heightens the tragedy felt by J'onn as he mourns his world's fate at the hands of "one individual, sick with the need for violence."

And in the example of *good* mythicity, I claimed that "The Injustice Society of the World" was one in which the titular Society succeeded in showing their devotion to crime and evil just as intransigently as the Justice Society defend justice and goodness. None of the individual villains are any more "psychologized" any more than the heroes are. But I argued that the story was a landmark because the villains as a group were atypically portrayed as being just as super-competent as the heroic team, and they display their warped psychology by putting the good guys on trial for their opposition to criminal activity. 

All of these takes on the "evil counterpart" master thread are mythopoeic rather than didactic. But the level of concrescence rises according to the density of correlations that the author brings to all the respective evil counterparts, with the result that the first is not symbolically compelling at all, the second is only compelling in a limited way, and the third has been compelling enough that the Injustice Society remains a myth-presence to be reckoned with in current comics, while the other villains are either wholly or nearly forgotten.

MYTHCOMICS: BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN (1996-97)

In contrast to the many admirers of the Loeb-Sale LONG HALLOWEEN, I didn't get much out of the collected issues after two separate readings, aside from appreciating Sale's art. I'm not sure that I realized that it was supposed to be a direct sequel to Frank Miller's celebrated BATMAN: YEAR ONE, though obviously HALLOWEEN had to occur early in Batman's career due to the absence of any members of his Bat-family. 

In this iteration Batman has just barely started to make inroads against the entrenched "Roman Empire," the reigning crime family in Gotham, represented by local godfather Carmine Falcone, aka "the Roman." The Caped Crusader has already won the confidence of police captain James Gordon, and much of the action in HALLOWEEN centers around the way Batman and Gordon also bond with D.A. Harvey Dent in their attempt to bring down criminals. Organized crime is the true foe of these do-gooders, while the notorious super-villains of Batman's mythos are regarded as "freaks," particularly by the career criminals. Batman has met most of his big-name foes at this time-- Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy-- though Loeb and Sale also make use of two lesser lights in the Bat-mythos, Calendar Man and Solomon Grundy. At this point in time, Harvey Dent has not yet undergone his transformation into Two-Face, and indeed that transformation is the culmination of HALLOWEEN's main plotline.

Still, I wasn't deeply impressed with the Loeb-Sale treatment of either the ordinary crooks or the super-crooks, nor with the retelling of Dent's transformation, or with the "serial killer" mystery that extended across all 13 issues of HALLOWEEN. Each issue represented a month in the Bat-universe, during which Batman proved unable to keep the mysterious assassin Holiday from executing at least one victim a month, always on a popular holiday. Most of Holiday's victims are also members of the Falcone crime family, and so a major part of the mystery is the attempt to determine whether the killer belongs to a competing family-- or someone who hates crime but has decided to go outside the law-- someone like Harvey Dent.

I confess that even though I'm not a great admirer of Christopher Nolan or his collaborator David Goyer, their prologue to a 2011 collection of HALLOWEEN gave me a new insight. Both filmmakers stated that the Loeb-Sale work had been a seminal influence on their first two Bat-films. Remembering how much THE DARK KNIGHT plays off of HALLOWEEN's leitmotif about "belief"-- particularly with the phrase "I believe in Harvey Dent"-- I realized that whatever I thought about the films, HALLOWEEN was about how even among good men, belief is always vulnerable to corruption.

In most Batman stories, the hero can track down any serial killer, because the murderer always conveniently leaves clues that enable the crime-fighter to track down the miscreant. HALLOWEEN goes to the other extreme. Even though Holiday leaves behind some holiday-themed token every time he (or she) kills, Batman learns nothing from the tokens, and he almost nver manages to anticipate where Holiday might strike next, despite knowing what day the assassination will take place. Holiday remains "off-camera" for most of the story, since Loeb and Sale were creating a genuine mystery, even if their denouement is somewhat ambivalent. Oddly, one of the few super-villains who has some mythic presence here is the lower-tier felon The Calendar Man. Though Julian Day is not directed involved in the Holiday killings, his obsession with seasonal occurrences gives him in HALLOWEEN a function like unto that of Hannibal Lecter in RED DRAGON. Batman consults with Calendar Man as Clarice consulted with Lecter to learn the nature of the Red Dragon-- with the main difference being that Calendar Man only provides one useful yet highly ambivalent clue, as if he were a Greek oracle dispensing problematic advice.

The other super-villains almost function as date-markers during Holiday's year-long campaign of targeted killings, and all of them are pretty routine. The Joker is crazy. Catwoman is unpredictable. Poison Ivy uses her hypnotic plants to suborn Bruce Wayne's will. Arguably none of them shine, because the focus is on Harvey Dent, whom the reader knows is destined to become Two-Face. 

None of the "ordinary crooks" in HALLOWEEN get any better treatment, despite Sale's borrowing from visual elements in THE GODFATHER. All of the hoods knocked off by Holiday are ciphers, while Loeb doesn't bring any interesting dynamics to Carmine Falcone and the various literal members of his family: wife, sons, daughter. There's a minor subplot revealing how, many years ago, Thomas Wayne saved Falcone's life, but not much comes of it.

Though no one cares about the bickering of the criminals, freakish or normal, Loeb and Sale spotlight the trials of the just at every opportunity. Dent's busy schedule as prosecutor causes him to neglect his wife Gilda, and on one occasion she's injured by a bomb intended to kill both of them. Because of Thomas Wayne's past action, Dent tries unsuccessfully to prove that Bruce Wayne has some collusion with Falcone, though of course the fighting D.A. does not know that Wayne's other identity. The troika of Batman-Gordon-Dent is strained as the first two suspect Dent of having adopted the identity of Holiday in order to murder the ganglords of Gotham. 

But before Batman and Gordon have the chance to accuse Dent, one of the crime-lords strikes a decisive blow: assailing Dent's face with acid. Crazed by pain, Dent flees to the underworld of Gotham's sewer system, where he forms an odd bond with the undead monster Solomon Grundy, simply because Dent knows the "Solomon Grundy" rhyme. And although Harvey Dent is not guilty of the Holiday murders, his ambivalence about the law's effectiveness transforms him into Two-Face. Only with the passage of a full year do Batman and Gordon finally figure out how to trap the real Holiday, and that's only with Calendar Man's help. But the damage is done. Two-Face uses Grundy to liberate the other fiends from Arkham Asylum, and though Batman manages to corral them all, he can't prevent the formerly righteous D.A. from going over the line and killing Carmine Falcone.  

Two-Face is arrested as well, but he's beyond the pale to his former friends, and they can only ask themselves if their actions were just. Loeb and Sale then throw in a last "teaser" to suggest that there's an angle to the Holiday killings that the two crime-fighters will never learn.

One podcast professed the opinion that HALLOWEEN was all about how the ordinary crooks were displaced in the Bat-mythos by the super-crooks. On the contrary, I think the diminished importance of the super-crooks' deeds in the story indicates their transitory effects on the crime scene. Yes, by the end of the story "the Roman Empire" has fallen, but every Bat-reader knows that other crime families simply filled the void in present-day Gotham. Sale's deliberately cartoon-like art frequently exaggerates the super-fiends to the point of absurdity. When Batman punches the Joker in one scene, the villain's neck stretches like the body of a jack-in-the-box. In the Penguin's brief appearance, he sports a monocle so big that no human eye-muscles could hold it, and Poison Ivy has "leaf-hair" that's longer than her entire body. Compared to the scourge of ordinary criminals and the poisonous effect they have even on righteous people, the super-fiends themselves are like the calendar's holidays: attempts to punctuate the dull round of human existence with the celebration of non-rational customs. And that is the "master thread" by which BATMAN THE LONG HALLOWEEN can be accurately read as a mythcomic.

THE EXCLUDED THIRD

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

My use of the term "excluded third" is an idiosyncratic one, for it has nothing to do with the term's use in formal logic, where it's better known as "the excluded middle." But it amused me to use a high-flown philosophical term for a "third" that I simply neglected to include in one of my classification endeavors.

In 2020's DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, I applied the established art-terms "grotesques" and "arabesques" to two dominant trends in the mythos of the BATMAN comics. First I applied the term "grotesque" to Batman, due to the forbidding nature of his costume and his origins in a traumatic experience. Then I applied "arabesque" to Robin, to characterize his bright, colorful costume and the dominant playful attitude he took to fighting crime alongside his mentor. Then I extended the same metaphors to the duo's rogues' gallery, according to whether the rogues were dominantly "fearful" or "fanciful."

In my second essay on the topic,THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD, I attempted to distinguish between the dominant motives of grotesque villains and arabesque villains:

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall development of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

I don't retract any of these classifications, which I think apply across the board to all of the "super-villains." However, there is a third category of Bat-foe who is not "super" in any way: the category of the "ordinary crook." Extraordinary crooks and ordinary crooks align respectively with what I have called "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects" in the essay EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS:

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has... One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term. "Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

The majority of ordinary crooks in Batman's world have no interest in playing "games of expenditure" with the Dynamic Duo. Pure acquisition is their modus operandi: either they want to acquire the goods of others or to keep tight hold of the riches they've plundered. They don't challenge Batman with jokes or riddles, and even though some of them may come up with imaginative schemes to promote their larceny, particularly during the gimmicky tales of Batman's Golden Age, making money is their concrete goal, and so they carry the association of acquisition. 

The principal exception is that of revenge, as when a malefactor seeks to seek vengeance on a law-abiding person, or a law enforcement figure, for having caused harm to the malefactor or some ally. At first glance this might seem related to Hobbes' notion of "reputation," as when Crook A wants to show the law-dogs that Policeman B cannot get away with causing him injury. But this sketch fails the expenditure test, for at the roots of Crook A's desire for vengeance is the desire not to be challenged in his criminal activities, not the will to challenge a superior opponent, as we get whenever the Riddler attempts to out-riddle Batman.

Though most Bat-fans have enjoyed the hero's jousts with extraordinary criminals far more than the opposite, it's a mark of the franchise's groundedness that the hero has always had a substantial number of encounters with ordinary, acquisitive felons. This is certainly logic given that both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson lost their parents to ordinary crooks, and this coheres with the fact that although children enjoyed Golden Age Batman comics in an escapist fashion, those same children knew the consequences of real crime. If they had no real-world experience of crime in their mundane lives, they would still know how thoroughly organized crime had infested American life, would have heard of scandals like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. And, at least in fantasy, they could imagine a hero capable of tearing out such festering sores.

All of the Batman mythcomics I've reviewed on this blog concentrate upon "extraordinary crooks," who inevitably have a stronger tendency to inspire symbolic discourse than their ordinary compeers. The sole exception is the two-page ORIGIN OF BATMAN, and even this concentrates not on the nameless criminal who kills the Waynes, but on the hero's singular response to this trauma. There may well be examples of "mythic ordinary crooks" somewhere amid the Bat-mythos, possibly obscured by the larger-than-life array of grotesques and arabesques. Additionally, the problem of crime itself may be conceived of as mythic in nature. In a previous post I noted that although ordinary crooks cannot harm the Spectre thanks to his almost unlimited powers, collectively the world of crime has the power to prevent the Ghostly Guardian from giving up his crusade and passing on to his heavenly reward. Crime as a whole has a similar hold on The Batman. Ordinary crooks cannot challenge him, but their ubiquity remains a constant thorn in his side-- and this is the role ordinary, acquisition-based crooks play in the next mythcomic I review, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN. 

NEAR-MYTHS: "VALHALLA CAN WAIT" (DEFENDERS #66-68, 1978)

 

An online review of DEFENDERS #66 reminded me that it's been a very long time since I first surveyed the early iterations of Marvel Comics' first female powerhouse, The Valkyrie. 

When I began THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE in December 2007, I didn't do many reviews. The first two I later included in my list of mythcomics when I finally committed to that ongoing project, LINUS THE RAIN KING and TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE. Following that, I devoted a series of posts to the evolution of Marvel's Valkyrie, and, somewhat tangentially, her alleged "creator" The Enchantress. Those posts were:

DAUGHTER OF LOVE AND DEATH-- devoted to the first appearance of the Enchantress and her paramour the Executioner, this analysis also counted as a mythcomic.

FEMALE TROUBLE-- This was about the AVENGERS story in which Valkyrie was supposedly "created" by Enchantress. Not a mythcomic.

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY-- This talked about the provenance of the two mortal women who became the vessels of the Valkyrie's spirit, Barbara Norris and Samantha Parrington. By my current criteria, none of the Barbara stories are mythcomics, but the HULK story with Samantha, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?," does count as such.

KNIGHT MOVES-- And here I discoursed again on both the Enchantress and her involved history with the Black Knight character, and then concludes at last with the events of DEFENDERS #4, in which the persona and power of the Valkyrie was imposed upon the mortal body of Barbara Norris. No mythcomics here.

I noted in the last essay that Valkyrie became "the glue" that held the Defenders group together from then on, for she was a tabula rasa who was not grounded in being anything but a "Scandinavian superhero." I expressed some intention to examine her "gender-kinship with other women," but I never did, and I think it's because this aspect of her character never signified anything but a particular form of "valkyrie-kryptonite." And, having recounted all of my analyses of Early Valkyrie, I can at least comment on the significance of DEFENDERS #66--

--which, perhaps fortunately for me, isn't all that much. The three-part story whose third part has the sporty title "Valhalla Can Wait" receives the cover-copy, "At Last! Valkyrie Enters Asgard!" I'll take the Marvel raconteurs at their word. When I read the story back in the day, I certainly had the impression that this was the first time she'd been in Thor-country. I believe it's also the first time any writer suggested that Valkyrie had an Asgardian body to match the Asgardian spirit that Enchantress had manipulated. However, David Kraft's script for "Valhalla" is extremely rushed. Kraft tells us that somehow the villain Ollerus not only gets hold of Valkyrie's comatose Asgardian form, he manages to transfer the spirit of Barbara-- which has apparently been slumbering in the body controlled by the Valkyrie-persona-- and put Barbara in Val's ACTUAL form.

This could have been a fun bit of body-switching, both in terms of drama, comedy, or both, but Kraft rushes past this potential. He doesn't even do a good job of establishing that Barbara is still something of a madwoman due to her experiences with the Nameless One. Instead, Ollerus focuses on using his phony Val to persuade the Defenders to fight Ollerus' rival Hela for possession of the Asgardian death-realm. 

Ollerus is of course defeated, and the whole "lords-dueling-over-the-death-realm" thing never acquires any mythic significance. If there is a myth here, it might be a myth of exorcism. By story's end Kraft tells us (though we do not see it) that Valkyrie's immortal body with its mortal spirit will join her master in the crappy afterlife of Niffelheim, while Valkyrie will return to Earth with her immortal spirit in Barbara's transformed mortal body. 

And there I believe Kraft leaves things for the remainder of his tenure. Eventually another writer tackles the already complicated Valkyrie-Enchantress narrative and makes it even more complicated, and if time permits I suppose I may eventually delve into this story-line as well. So "Valhalla," despite being very confusing on many points, still earns some status as a near-myth that started a major retcon of the Valkyrie character.

NEAR MYTHS: BLACK ADAM/JSA BLACK REIGN (2004)

Though I'd already seen the 2022 movie BLACK ADAM without having read this JSA compilation, I decided I would give the TPB a read in order to determine whether or not the film's writers for the movie had borrowed any important plot or character points. The short answer is that, if one subtracts all the over-complicated subplots provided in the Geoff Jones-Rags Morales graphic novel, there is a rough similarity of the main plotlines. 

In REIGN, Black Adam somehow assembles a small coterie of super-powered aides with which he overthrows the local dictatorship of his native land. (Note: in the comics-character's original appearance in 1945, he was an Egyptian of an archaic era, but at some point in his DC revival he was reworked as an archaic native from a fictional DC country named Kandahq.) Though the character had been reworked in other ways when DC took over the Fawcett library of characters, I imagine that in 2004 Johns probably was not bound by any previous iterations, and so Adam's conquest of Kandahq here may be the "first" time he ever did so in Johns' version. Adam's ruthless conquest of the country suggests that he may planning the conquest of other neighboring nations. To prevent that contingency, about a dozen well-known Justice Society heroes descend upon Kandahq and have an involved battle with Adam's forces. In the end, enough chaos erupts that Adam pledges to the JSA that he will remain within his own borders unless attacked.

In the film, Adam is newly revived by a band of Kandahq freedom fighters seeking to oust a vaguely defined occupying force. Logically enough, Adam does not attempt to collect any allies, given that as a possessor of the "Shazam lightning" he's almost unstoppable. Adam doesn't take any immediate action to take over the country of his descendants, but four members of the JSA descend upon Kandahq on the theory that Adam's very existence is a threat to cosmic order. In contrast to the graphic novel, the JSA heroes and Black Adam are forced to work together against a common menace. 

I won't expatiate on the film further here, since I'll review it separately. BLACK REIGN is a very ordinary superhero punch-em-up, and I say that as a critic who believes that fight scenes can have a lot of extra-ordinary significance. For my taste at least there are far too many subplots, with the result that no single plot stands out, though since some of the issues appeared in the HAWKMAN title, there's a strong emphasis on the contentions between Adam and the Winged Wonder, just as one sees in the movie. The closest thing to a myth captured in REIGN is not sociological, as it is in the film. Johns' script emphasizes psychological trauma about the loss of loved ones and roads not taken, but the only scene that has any resonance takes place when Adam demonstrates to his uncertain ally "Atom Smasher" the fruits of their violence: the preservation of innocents.

STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT

In STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL, I summed up some previous arguments thusly:

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." 

Having made that fine point, though, I didn't follow through on the question of whether Stephen King's extrapolations from Coleridge re: the "muscular" nature of disbelief might apply equally to disengagement. Once more, just to keep track of what Coleridge originally said:

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 

Again I note that Coleridge does not define what he means by "suspension," though he certainly doesn't use any of King's muscular metaphors. If anything, when he speaks of "transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" in order to overcome some state of "disbelief," it sounds more like he's saying that he the author has to "charm" the disbeliever into putting aside his disbelief in favor of "poetic faith." It's not impossible that, since he's comparing his "endeavors" to those of his partner-in-poesy Wordsworth in a general way, Samuel T. may be covertly implying that Wordsworth's more grounded ruminations aren't capable of delving into "our inward nature," that they are only capable of giving "the charm of novelty to the things of every day."

Though both Coleridge and Stephen King were somewhat at odds with literary trends toward naturalism in their respective times, the kind of literature that Coleridge above calls "romantic" had made a modest comeback, and this is at least part of the reason that later critics lumped Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others into the category called "Romantic poets." In contrast, both during King's youth and his writing career, the general consensus in American literary culture was that Naturalism had essentially won the battle against Romanticism. This culture might admit to the existence of a handful of post-Renaissance literary works worthy of being called "good literature." But most "romantic" works, particularly those that involved metaphenomenal fantasy-content, were considered trash, and they generally appeared in such trashy media as pulp magazines, comic books, and kiddie television. (Fantasy-films arguably gained a greater stature than fantasy-works in other media during Stephen King's youth, but the possible reasons for this would comprise a separate essay.)

King's statements in DANSE MACABRE and the essay "Why I Chose Batman" show that he was fully invested in fantasy-fandom, though he, like many fans, formed his own non-academic criteria for what was good and what was bad. Yet I suggest that he was always conscious of the scorn of majority culture for many if not all of the fantasy-stories he favored. I also suggest that King didn't really have much of a rebuttal to naturalism except the idea that one's imagination might possess something like "muscles" that fantasy-fans regularly exercised while realism-fans did not. It's a stimulating idea but does not really speak to a deeper issue. It's true that realism-fans may dislike metaphenomenal fiction because they think it important that all fiction should emulate "the things of every day." But I've pointed out that most fantasy-fans don't literally "believe" that the fantastic content in their favored stories is real. Rather, they choose to engage with such content for reasons of aesthetic taste, not cognitive assessment. 

I think that when Coleridge speaks of how "suspension of disbelief" can foster "poetic faith" by way of the aforementioned "inward truth," he's a lot closer to stating that the human psyche draws equally upon both "inward truth" and what might as well be called "outward truth." In the second part of 2022's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS, I related these categories to the Greek ideas of "the limitless and the limited."

I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation.

Since both categories have relevance to the human condition as a whole, it is not so much that "realism-fans" disbelieve in fantasy-content as they do not engage with it as strongly as they do with realism-content, and the reverse formula would apply to "fantasy-fans." And of course there are those who can engage strongly with works in either category. Though I have a fascination with the complicated dynamics of how fantasy-content is expressed, I appreciate the rigor of a well-conceived "realism-work."

My theory of aesthetic engagement also speaks to reader-preference in terms of the two major categories of the uncanny and the marvelous. Possibly for the last time, here's King's statement as to why he "chose" Batman over Superman.

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.

I don't really credit that Young Stephen King liked these uncanny Bat-feats simply because they were more believable, and in part I dismiss this recollection because King had almost certainly allowed himself to "believe" in marvelous phenomena no more extraordinary than Superman in many other fantasy-works mentioned in DANSE MACABRE. I think the dynamic of the uncanny engaged him more than that did the dynamic of the marvelous, possibly because the former seemed to have a greater supply of what I've called "rigor." And given that King also WROTE quite a few stories with marvelous content-- some of which, rather improbably, tried to compete with the secondary-world mastery of J.R.R. Tolkien-- I think he could engage with the marvelous whenever he pleased, irrespective of his "belief" systems.

ADDENDUM: I may as well note that the reason I've gone so long about the use of the word "disbelief" is that I don't think anyone who knows what fiction is comes to it with the idea of "believing" in it, since the essence of fiction is that it is not factually true. One can accept a lot of fictional propositions and reject others, but always in the context of what I once called "relative meta-beliefs." Engagement or its lack, however, is crucial for anyone's appreciation of fictional narrative-- and it's anyone's guess whether I'll leave things at that pass for the near future.

 

AGNOSTICISM ASIDES

 Below are some assorted thoughts from Thomas Huxley on the agnostic movement for which he became famous, though he insisted that he merely followed earlier examples set in archaic cultures. The essay "Agnosticism" was written in 1889 and replied to what Huxley considered a certain churchman's inaccurate definition of agnosticism.

________

So I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist; nor can I deny that, not merely the whole Roman Church, but many Wiccan “infidels” of no mean repute, do honestly and firmly believe that the activity of such like demonic beings is in full swing in this year of grace 1889.

Nevertheless, as good Bishop Butler says, “probability is the guide of life;” and it seems to me that this is just one of the cases in which the canon of credibility and testimony, which I have 7  ventured to lay down, has full force. So that, with the most entire respect for many (by no means for all) of our witnesses for the truth of demonology, ancient and modern, I conceive their evidence on this particular matter to be ridiculously insufficient to warrant their conclusion. 

####

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis,”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion.

####

This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were “ists” of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the 11  appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took; and when the Spectator had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people, that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, completely lulled. 

#####

If anyone had preferred this request to me, I should have replied that, if he referred to agnostics, they have no creed; and, by the nature of the case, cannot have any. Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, “Try all things, hold fast by that which is good”; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him. 

QUICK CROSSOVER CORRECTION

 In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I wrote:

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

At the time I wrote these words in 2021, I hadn't yet formulated the linked terms of "novelty and familiarity," first seen in slightly different form in 2022's THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Once I had made this formulation, the description of Qualitative Escalation became strained. Yes, Ivanhoe became a "cultural touchstone" despite the fact that in his original medium he enjoyed only one story, and possibly would have become just as "escalated" had Scott not included the subplot of Ivanhoe's crossover with Robin Hood. But if I truly restricted Qualitative Escalation only to famous works, then it would be impossible for me to term the minor Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS in the ranks of crossovers, because its hero only enjoys one appearance but never becomes a touchstone of any kind.

So I will revise the exclusionary terms of my criteria for Qualitative Escalation. I was seeking in that criteria to come up with a form of "durability" to parallel that of the Quantitative type. But an icon's assumption of the stature of superordination, whether that icon appears just once or not, is de facto a Qualitative Escalation in comparison to all the subordinate icons within the text. So Tan Hadron, though never able to match Ivanhoe in any other way, does possess the same superordinate status.

This does not apply, however, to "back-door pilots," episodes of regular serials (usually but not always television shows) which attempt to launch new serials. A few such pilots may take over almost the whole run-time of a given episode, so that the pilot-characters can amass more time onscreen than the regular serial-icons. Nevertheless, such pilot episodes are still under the aegis of the ongoing serial's main characters, and if said episodes do not generate even one independent monad, and are not adapted from previous narratives, then the characters have no crossover-mana whatever. One comic-book example of this practice are the three issues of Marvel's INVADERS, in which Roy Thomas created the "Kid Commandos" team in order to hustle the sidekick characters out of the title. In this essay I expressed the notion that I might regard that team as an "adjunct" to the regular superordinate icons, but I now reject that line of thought to be consistent with my statements on other forms of "pilots" that go nowhere.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SPIDER VS THE EMPIRE STATE (1938)

 

I preface this review by stating that I'm far from an expert on the pulp character The Spider. Over the ten years in which the character appeared in his own magazine, a little over fifty novel-length stories appeared, of which I may have read a dozen or so in reprinted forms. Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of these novels, and it's probable that most of the works I've read, with their grotesquerie and blood-curdling ultraviolence, were stories by Page. What I value most in SPIDER stories is their apocalyptic delirium, in which the hero's domain of New York City is often razed to the ground in one narrative, only to appear in the next totally back to normal. So when I heard that Page had written a big story, "The Black Police Trilogy," which extended over three consecutive issues of the magazine, I ordered it.

The short verdict: delirium is hard to sustain over a long haul.

An excellent foreword by scholar Thomas Krabacher explains that Popular Publications, the house that issued the SPIDER adventures, also came out with a magazine with a similar apocalyptic feel. OPERATOR FIVE began in 1934, the year after the SPIDER began. Whereas the arachnid protagonist confined himself to menaces to New York, in OPERATOR FIVE hero Jimmy Christopher always dealt with huge invasions of the United States by predacious foreign armies. While many modern readers might deem this focus on foreign threats to have fascist overtones, Krabacher demonstrates that publisher Harry Steeger was a thoroughgoing liberal. His publications conjured up larger-than-life menaces so that heroes, whether empowered by the government or operating on their own, could vanquish them and return a devastated populace to normalcy. Krabacher asserts that Steeger may have been trying to cross-pollinate the approaches of the two magazines by having the Spider battle a more long-range threat. 

In EMPIRE-- a title apparently imposed on the trilogy by some modern editor-- a criminal schemer called "The Master" duplicates Hitler's 1933 feat: that of getting a repressive political party legally elected to supreme power, if only in the state of New York. (Very little is said in EMPIRE about how the other 48 states react to this state of affairs, much less the Federal government.) The Master immediately enacts through his proxies draconian laws, and liberates from the state's prisons a horde of ruthless criminals. These hardened crooks become the Black Police, who devote all their time to collecting illegal taxes and torturing citizens who don't pay. The Spider, a,k.a. millionaire Richard Wentworth, cannot counteract this peril with no more than his usual small band of helpers. Instead, the Spider must become a revolutionary figure, inspiring countless brave citizens to take up arms against the tyrants and their servitors.

Though Page's trilogy is never completely dull, its many scenes of inspiring derring-do and sacrifice become repetitive after a while. My overall impression is that, since Page could not concentrate his imaginative talents in a compact story of apocalyptic action, he resorted to repeating his revolution-themed scenarios as a strategy to simply extend the story artificially. A handful of new characters appear to assist the Spider's band, but none of the newbies are memorable. Nita Van Sloan, Wentworth's inamorata and the pulps' epitome of the courageous woman, gets some strong scenes but these too fall into something of a rut, while familiar aides like Ram Singh are often sidelined. The Black Police are one-note villains and the Master is just a standard mystery-fiend. (Given the evildoer's name, Page foregoes to use the hero's usual epithet, "the Master of Men.") The Master has a few gimmicks, like a virulent plague he uses to quell rebellion. But he has no personality and the Big Reveal of his identity carries no weight.

So THE SPIDER VS. THE EMPIRE STATE adds up to little more than a so-so pulp adventure with no real political connotations and excessively padded. It's surely one of the few times I found the foreword more entertaining than the novel proper.

GENETIC FREAK-OUTS

I was barely reading any Marvel Comics in the 2010s, but I followed in a loose sense the consequences of the company's bizarre decision to play down the successful X-Men franchise and promote that of the never-successful Inhumans. I'm not sure I knew that plans for an Inhumans film were initiated in 2014, but I certainly saw the result that same year in the AGENTS OF SHIELD teleseries. The first season of that ill-conceived cockup had already been lousy, but the show reached new Heights of Stupid with an attempt to shoehorn the Inhumans concept (though not the familiar comics characters) into a secret agent format. After plans for a movie stalled, in 2017 the principal Inhumans of the so-called "Royal Family" appeared in an eight-episode ABC teleseries. The series proved a huge bomb, critically and commercially. I found in it but one virtue-- a strong performance by actor Anson Mount as the silent king Black Bolt. In my book that put the INHUMANS show on the same quality-level as AGENTS OF SHIELD, whose only strength was the casting of Ming-na Wen as agent Mathilda May.

All these idiotic machinations almost certainly came about because some genius in Disney Marketing decided that the company wasn't getting enough bang for its buck by playing up the X-Men franchise, since that property's movie and TV rights were then owned by Fox. I can imagine the conversation going like, "Hey, Marvel still totally owns the Inhumans, right? The fans will just accept anything we push at them as long as it has a bunch of weird, colorful people in costumes to help them (the fans) compensate for their drab lives." And once this blockhead came up with this genius idea, no one else could point out its fatuity, lest that person seem like he wasn't in favor of the company making more money. One hopes the genius got kicked to the curb for whatever monetary losses Disney suffered for the failure of the INHUMANS teleseries.

As I said, none of these Marvel machinations affected me back in the day, since I wasn't reading the X-books, or for that matter the FANTASTIC FOUR features that also got downplayed for an analogous reason. But when I recently caught sight of a TPB collection of a 2016-17 Marvel series, INHUMANS VS. X-MEN, I wondered if the story, written by Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire,  might signal some of the company's priorities during that historical moment. 

I also dipped into a handful of Inhumans stories published around the same time as IVXM, but I'm sure I've missed a lot of fine points about the execution of the Inhumans franchise. That means that any conclusions I make here are partial at best. But IVXM by itself sets up a situation that COULD have been used to shunt the Unwanted X-Franchise off Planet Earth and to play up the Inhumans, though this possibility does not actually come to pass by the end of the story. Overall the Soule-Lemire story conforms to the "Marvel heroes fight over a misunderstanding" trope, though I will say that, unlike a lot of multi-character crossovers, the writers manage to give most of the characters therein a "spotlight moment" or two. 

Perhaps more tellingly, IVXM attempted to "democratize" the process of genetic-diversity-with-superpower-benefits. The 1970s X-MEN capitalized on this trope far more than its 1960s iteration by disseminating that diversity over countless human cultures and ethnicities. By contrast, the concept of Marvel's Inhumans, as initiated in 1965, was that of an insular culture that had a thing for inducing mutations in its populace, even though the people came from the same stock as common humanity. Following the 1960s, most of the attempts at giving the Inhumans ongoing serials were hampered by the difficulties of endowing such exotic characters with any relatability. Some of the Inhumans stories produced in the middle 2010s, though, sought to modernize the franchise by introducing an assortment of younger Inhumans, sometimes termed "Nuhumans," who in my opinion were designed to compete with the more numerous and successful X-spawn.

I don't have enough information to render any aesthetic judgment on the various INHUMANS comics of this period. There may be some very good works in the actual books, whatever the motives of the marketing people who were responsible for the X-Men X-cision. Still, history will record that Marvel customers still wanted the X-Men, no matter how much the company pushed its favored franchise. Perhaps the fact that the comic-book version of Kamala Khan, originally retconned into an Inhuman as part of the "Inhumans First" project, is now being touted as being "both an Inhuman AND a mutant."

In 2019 Disney bought out Fox and now has the right to monetize any X-adaptations the company might want to do. I suspect, though, that the failure of the Great Inhumans Push will not teach Disney anything about the folly of trying to manipulate their customers' desires for entertainment purely to help the company's bottom line.