Friday, September 1, 2023

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.




The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.



I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cbwboy."



Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.



Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.



In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.



The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.

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