NULL-MYTHS: "VENGEANCE! CRIES THE VALKYRIE" (DEFENDERS #108-109, 1982)

The "cry" of the title is more like a whimper, given the long history of Marvel's Valkyrie character. When I analyzed Dave Kraft's DEFENDERS story "Valhalla Can Wait," I noted that I'd started off this blog by surveying most of the early stories that established the history of the heroine. One of the things that intrigued me about the character is that, being produced at seventies Marvel, she wasn't created in the same manner as the Hulk or Spider-Man, who began in stand-alone serials devoted to their exploits. Instead, Valkyrie started as a tabula rasa character, an Asgardian powerhouse who, at first, seemed to be no more than a fantasy-creation of the evil Enchantress. Further, both she and her mortal "identity" were loosely intertwined with various prominent Marvel heroes (like the Black Knight and Doctor Strange) to menaces (the Nameless One and the Celestials) in a way that was not characteristic of heroes invented for the sixties, when there existed no overriding Marvel continuity-mythos. 

In DEFENDERS #4 Steve Englehart grafted the persona of the Valkyrie upon the madwoman Barbara Norris (who had been introduced in an unrelated HULK story). But though Englehart  established that the mortal Barbara still shared the body with the Asgardian being, he did nothing more with the history of Barbara. Steve Gerber began exploring Barbara's past in order to give more human context to the heroine, particularly by having the warrior-woman interact with Barbara's mortal husband Jack-- though Barbara's spirit during this time remained quiescent, effectively out of the picture. Once Gerber left, subsequent DEFENDERS writers largely wrote Jack out of the series. 

"Valhalla" suggests that Kraft toyed with the idea of writing Barbara Norris out of the Valkyrie mythos. His was the first tale to suggest that Valkyrie had never been a creation of her sorcerous mistress; that she had an identity in Asgard: Brunhilde, leader of the Valkyrior who gathered slain souls for Valhalla. Brunhilde's original body still existed in Asgard, and a scheming Asgardian deity caused the current Valkurie to come in contact with the comatose Brunhilde form, causing the soul of Barbara Norris to exit what had technically been her own body and entering that of Brunhild. By the adventure's end Mad Barbara in Brunhilde's body ended up going to the Asgardian hell, and Brunhilde's consciousness totally controlled the transformed Barbara-body.

I commented that Kraft's story possessed mythic potential but was very rushed, But at least it was a story, and not a farrago stuffed with continuity points, like Marc de Matteis' 'Vengeance." 

DeMatteis passes lightly over the Kraft story and begins his story by having Valkyrie's mortal body slain. Though the Enchantress had nothing to do with the murder, she conveniently shows up and issues a demand to Brunhilde's colleagues the Defenders. The original Brunhilde-body is now in the witch's possession, and she wants the Valkyrie's fellow Defenders to find an item with which to ransom said body, since it is now the only receptacle that can house Brunhilde's liberated spirit. There's some paltry debate amongst the heroes about the morality of the transference, since it will possibly doom Barbara Norris' spirit, but some of the Defenders attempt to do the Enchantress' bidding. 

I'll pass over the specific treasure they seek, because it's irrelevant to the story as a whole. Slightly more interesting is Enchantress' motivation for wanting the treasure. Out of the blue, she decided one day to conjure up The Spirit of Love and incarnate the being (not seen in Marvel comics prior to this story) so that Enchantress, the consummate loose woman, can bond with the Spirit. Somehow, the aforementioned treasure will restore the villainess's "purity," which is a point De Matteis does not explore overmuch. 

The heroes assigned to get the magical thingie end up choosing not to deliver the goods. Thus Enchantress tries to slay Brunhilde's body, but the Defenders forestall her. Love, who hasn't said much about all these goings-on, suddenly announces that he doesn't love Enchantress's manipulations, and he not only deserts her, he takes the spirit of Barbara Norris with him for some sort of heavenly union. This makes it possible for Brunhilde's spirit to become incarnated in her rightful body, and then issue #109 is taken up with Valkyrie taking her vengeance on the sorceress.

I don't envy DeMatteis trying to make a story out of all the body-switching complications he inherited, and I get that it's tough to focus on the main conflict, the one between Valkyrie and Enchantress, given that DEFENDERS was a team book and the writer was expected to give the other members of the super-team some activities to keep them busy. But De Matteis seems to go out of his way to make the matter MORE complicated than necessary, as with shoehorning non-members Spider-Man and the Beast into the mix. I should note that Mark Gruenwald was credited with a "plot assist," probably because that writer finished (but did not start) the "Celestials Saga" in the pages of THOR a few years previous. In fact, the latter part of "Vengeance" is a complicated sorting-out of Valkyrie's interaction with her lord the All-Father Odin, and maybe Gruenwald's role was mainly filling DeMatteis in on all the continuity complications from the aforesaid saga. Speaking as a fan of Marvel continuity, I *did* want to see the relationship of Valkyrie and Enchantress defined, just as I wanted to see the one between Valkyrie and Odin sorted out. But I didn't want to see a bunch of sterile plot-points trotted out in a desultory manner.

Artist Don Perlin was totally out of his depth with this sort of multi-character epic. I'm not familiar with much of his Golden or Silver Age work, but he was competent with simple, single-character titles like Marvel's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. It's astonishing that so limited an artist remained in place on DEFENDERS from 1980 to 1986, and I tend to assume that he kept the position because the title was perceived to be a dog, even though the book must have made enough money to avoid cancellation during those years. To be sure, Perlin's visuals got better with the DEFENDERS scripts of Peter Gillis, since those scripts were clearer and more straightforward than De Matteis's labored gobbledygook, and I even favorably reviewed one of the Gillis-Perlin collaborations here.

MYTHCOMICS: "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS" (THE THING #17, 1954)

Even hardcore fans of old horror comics probably don't think much about Charlton's 17-issue title THE THING except insofar as Steve Ditko contributed both stories and cover art, such as the one seen above. And I'd have to say that most of the offerings were ordinary creep-tales without the gore that aroused the ire of parents and eradicated almost everything in the genre, aside from even blander work like DC's HOUSE OF MYSTERY. 

One of the gimmicks the editors used in THE THING were spoofs of famous fairy tales, which may have been an imitation of a similar concept seen in some of EC's horror comics. And in the last issue one such story, "Through the Looking Glass," managed a stronger symbolic discourse based on Lewis Carroll's ALICE books. The art was signed "Kirk," while GCD speculates that the writer may have been long-time Charlton workhorse Joe Gill. Comics fans know him best for collaborating on such sixties superheroes as Captain Atom and Peacemaker, though IMO his best credited work was on a tough detective, Sarge Steel.

In my review of the two, I pointed out that Carroll's Alice showed a certain amount of egotism and illogicality not always seen in film adaptations. "Glass" goes further, making the little blonde cherub (apparently a 1950s version) a holy terror. Whatever ambivalence Original Alice had as to her seven-year-old status, Cruel Alice hates children's books with a passion.

I'm not sure why Gill chose to have this Alice read THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, since like almost everyone else, he doesn't stick to adapting that book, or to ALICE IN WONDERLAND, but just jumbles together elements from both novels. She falls into a dream, and then falls literally, as down a rabbit-hole, and ends up in a "pool of tears," which has no context since this Alice never grows giant-size and sheds giant-sized tears.Instead of meeting a bunch of woodland creatures, Cruel Alice beholds a group of grisly ghouls who immediately announce their intention to eat her, which is a simplified version of the Carroll-theme I termed "omniphagia." Cruel Alice doesn't seem fazed by the threat. If anything, she decides right away that all these weird things mean that she's dreaming (which never occurs to Original Alice) and that now "I can be as cruel as I want."

Compared to what she does to the ghouls, Cruel Alice is almost merciful to the Cheshire Were-Cat. She meets the Mad Hatter and March Hare at their Mad Tea Party (as well as a background character who looks a bit like The Carpenter). The partygoers show Alice that they have no mercy to their Wonderland kind, offering her to snack on the dead body of the Dormouse before they dine on her. A handy beehive full of "killer bees" solves that problem, and then she meets the King and Queen of Hearts playing croquet (though not with flamingos). They claim to be civilized cards and they even show her their lovely dam.

The dam (not in Carroll) is just a setup for another drowning-death, as Cruel Alice shows the cards how to play poker, introducing them to a "royal flush." Her next two encounters are with the scions of the Looking-Glass World rather than Wonderland, the talking flowers and Humpty Dumpty, both of whom she happily expunges, albeit only after they provoke her.

Whereas Original Alice finds her occasional egotism dwarfed by the selfish and quarrelsome nature of the natives of her dream-lands, Cruel Alice absolutely outdoes her perpetually hungry dream-folk in unrelenting cruelty. In fact, when the remaining "citizens of Wonderland" beseige her, she apparently dreams up growth pills, ducks into a rat-hole (substitute for a rabbit-hole?) and makes herself a colossus so she can stomp everyone else to death. But whereas Original Alice escapes Wonderland in part by Getting Tall, for Cruel Alice getting too big for her britches proves a crushing experience-- because, for some damn reason the author can't trouble to explain, the homicidal child isn't dreaming.

"Glass" may not be a great story, even for Golden Age comics. But it's closer to the mythic meaning of Lewis Carroll than the majority of film adaptations, much less ungodly messes like THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR. 

Though I've reprinted the whole story here, it's probably easier to read here.

NULL-MYTHS: "SPIDERMAN AND HIS WEB OF DOOM" (THE THING #7, 1953)

I probably wouldn't bother mentioning this minor story from Charlton's generally pedestrian horror-comic THE THING if it didn't happen to use the name "Spiderman" for its ghoul star, and if Steve Ditko didn't happen to be an occasional contributor to the title. But I'm not implying any influence, given that there's a very well-documented narrative as to how Jack Kirby brought the name "Spider-Man" to the attention of Stan Lee, who in turn teamed with Ditko on the resulting superhero. So this time the coincidence between "a title Steve Ditko worked on" and the name "Spiderman" seems to be nugatory, particularly because Ditko did not contribute to this issue and probably never read the comic except to check his own works.

An additional odd detail is that GCD attributes the story to Walter "The Shadow" Gibson, but if his other scare-stories are this lame, that explains why no one regards him as a horror-tale writer. An ordinary couple rents an old house from a creepy old fellow with the name of "Nemo" (though the name-use doesn't resonate with either Homer or Jules Verne). But Nemo tells the couple that no one should venture into the attic. He later tells the reader he knows no woman can resist opening a forbidden room, and sure enough, the wife does so. After a few false starts, Nemo, transformed into "Spiderman," attacks her, but only sucks her blood and lets her walk around the house like a zombie. The husband twigs to the plans of the arachnid menace and sets the house on fire, consigning Spiderman to burn up with his "web of doom."

EINSTEIN INTERSECTIONALITY, UNIVERSALIZED

My meditation on Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS got me thinking about apocalyptic scenarios generally, most of which are generated by post-nuclear holocausts. And this reminded me of a book I liked somewhat back in the day, and which I loosely plan to re-read in future, Samuel R Delany's 1967 EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. I don't know if I will be as impressed the second time around, but I couldn't resist the temptation to see how a few modern online reviewers regard this Nebula-winning novel. 

Here's a summation from a review reasonably sympathetic to Delany's goals, though not without criticism.

Plot: In the far future humans have moved on and an alien race have come to inhabit our abandoned shells. Unfortunately, they are devolving into mutants. One of them, Lobey, gifted with music, sets out to find his love Friza, the latest to die by a mysterious hand. He leaves his village, battles a minotaur, travels with dragon herders haunted by the spectre of a supernatural Billy the Kid and arrives in a city where the myths of Orpheus and Christ are about to go down.

And here's one which is a little more disparaging:

The other key theme is mutation as a metaphor for being “different,” and when we consider that Delany himself was a gay black poet growing up in Harlem, that makes sense. He married high-school classmate poet Marilyn Hacker after high school, but they experimented with polygamy and had affairs with both men and women, and Marilyn later declared herself lesbian after their divorce. So it’s fair to say Delany would consider himself different. The underlying theme of the story also strongly identifies with the mutants, and at the end of the story Lo-Lobey realizes that instead of imitating the traditions of the extinct human race, the aliens (for that is what they are) need to embrace their differences and live on their own terms. This may make sense thematically, but to shoehorn such a complex idea into the fragile vessel of this story is really over-reaching in my opinion.

What makes these reviews significant to me is that back in the day, Delany did not make his message so limited (unlike, say, a modern like N.K. Jemisin) that I, a White reader, felt hit over the head with the author's status as a gay Black male. In those pre-Internet days I'm sure I had no way of knowing that. Will it effect my future re-read? Possibly.

But even merely in the act of remembering the novel's broad plot, I found myself thinking of matters that transcend intersectionality. I've been meditating off and on about what sort of intellectual legacy I would leave if I popped off tomorrow, and I found myself attracted by Delany's image (not totally original to him, I'm sure) of a depopulated Earth, where metamorphic aliens settle and begin "appropriating" the myths of mankind.

Regardless of ethnicity or religion, every mortal being's "cosmos" ends this way, leaving behind a detritus of personal effects, family connections, and sometimes intellectual/artistic accomplishments. But all of those things will be "inhabited" by the living, and they in turn will forge their own re-interpretations, world without end.

So even if Delany had some sort of sixties intersectionality in mind when he wrote EINSTEIN, I think he may have "universalized" his project more than he intended. Food for future thought (assuming I don't pop off tomorrow, that is.)

ADDENDUM: One of the reviews mentions in passing a later work by Delany, and though I only read that one once as well, it DID strike me as a cesspool of pretentious intersectionality-- so I'll almost certainly never give it a second chance.

CHAOS OVER ORDER PT. 2

 This essay won't discuss any of the authors mentioned in Part 1, and in fact it deals less with "impossible things" than "unlikely things." The stimulus for this essay was a blogpost dealing with a vaguely "evolutionary psychology"  approach to what I called in 2019 "the pervasiveness of the Amazon archetype."  Said blogpost, however, did not in my opinion make any valuable observations, so I'm not troubling to cite it.

The image of amazon-like women in world cultures are not all subsumed by the specific Greek myth of the Amazon tribes. Some figures evolve from purely polytheistic concepts of war-goddesses like Athena and Anath. Others may evolve either from figures believed to be real, but actually purely legendary (the Chinese Ha Mulan), to those clearly rooted in history, like the pirate Anne Bonny. The element most of these would have in common would seem to be females who in some way challenge males on the field of battle, and so would not include other archetypes like sorceresses (Morgan Le Fay) or women who kill men with deception (the Biblical Jael, who lulls an enemy general into sleep and then kills him).

That said, one may fairly question the provenance of the Amazon archetype. I've stated that I can engage philosophically with the archetype, whether it's rooted in any historical reality or not, simply because the archetype reverses the expectations of normal life. The norm, even in prehistorical eras, would have been the division of labor arising from sexual dimorphism. Even in tribes where the men might not have been much taller than their women, the men always had greater body mass thanks to testosterone, and this hormone usually, though not universally, encouraged males to be the foremost protectors of their respective tribes against marauding males from other tribes, or from predacious animals.

By and large, it seems likely that most females in all eras accepted the division of labor, not least in the belief that offspring were best nurtured by the female of the species. If there were individual women of this or that tribe-- what moderns sometimes call "tomboys"-- who pushed back against the division of labor, seeking to compete with men in various ways, no feminism existed to champion their outlying nature. Archaic women are as likely to have been just as conservative as archaic men, condemning any females who deviated from the norm.

Given this likely tendency toward conservatism from both genders, then, why would any archaic tribespeople come to imagine goddesses of war, which is at least part of the makeup of the Greek Athena and the Ugaritic Anath? 

Though the pure appeal of "unlikely things" could be the reason for the appeal of the archetype, there's one "evo psych" influence that might have provoked the development of the archetype, and that is the influence of the Ha Mulan/Anne Bonny type, the woman who joins male ranks to fight alongside them for whatever reason. 

To the extent that tribes all across the face of the Earth have always been fighting with one another for supremacy, it's not impossible that "women warriors" fighting alongside men, possibly in disguise more often than not, could be a cross-cultural phenomenon that spurred the equally cross-cultural archetypes of "warrior goddess" and "Amazon society." A few societies may have normalized the participation of worthy females alongside males, such as the Brazilian woman-warriors whose storied existence led to the naming of South America's Amazon River. The roving tribes of the Scythians, which allegedly included both horsewomen and horsemen, is often nominated as a real-world source for the Greek myth of a society ruled by dominant female warriors.

I'm familiar with only one resource that went into great detail regarding the widespread phenomenon of women fighting in the battlefield with men: Jessica Salmonson's 1991 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMAZONS. I read the book long ago, and primarily remember some interesting narratives regarding women who fought in male guise during the American Civil War. I have not found any detailed reviews of the Salmonson book online, only this indirect disparaging comment in the course of reviewing a separate book about "women in war." It's quite possible that Salmonson's book is not well sourced. However, since I'm concerned more with the archetype than with real history, even stories with no basis in real history, like that of Mulan, are relevant to my line of thought.

It's not demonstrable that "women warriors" were a continuous presence in any historical society. For all we know, even the horsewomen of the Scythians might have been a temporary aberration from the norm of whatever "nurturing vs. protection" division of labor existed in Scythian society over the centuries. However, as I said primitive societies were liable to being attacked more often than not, and that could have eventuated in the irregular but consistent appearance of "tomboy heroines." Greeks and Romans sometimes explained individual warrior-women like Camilla and Atalanta as virgin huntresses devoted to Artemis/Diana. But there need not be a specific allusion to religion. In some versions of the Brunhilde story, she seems to be a mortal woman despite being termed a "valkyrie." Her strength is such that she can easily repulse the advances of the weakling warlord Gunnar, though not those of the hero Sigurd, who in one iteration masquerades as Gunnar, overpowers Brunhilde in the marriage bed, and so deceives her as to Gunnar's masculine prowess, causing her to marry an unworthy man.

In the fantasy-novel THE LADIES OF MANDRIGYN, a group of women have to train themselves to fight men to achieve a particular goal. In the course of that training, author Barbara Hambly has the trainer impress the women with a crucial difference between the sexes, to wit: "Women fight because they have to; men fight because they want to." But even if one takes that as an absolute, there could have been countless instances where women, even those who were not disposed to be tomboys, took the field purely to defend their homes and children. And that is the one factor of "evolutionary psychology" that I can imagine as pertinent to the evolution of the Amazon archetype.

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ALICE BOOKS (1865/1871)

 

What do you suppose is the use of a child without meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning-- and a child's more important than a joke, I hope.-- The Red Queen, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.

Though both the Red and White Queens talk a great deal of nonsense, there's actually a good deal of sense in what this royal chess-piece says to Alice, even if the response is disproportionate to Alice's line, "I sure I didn't mean--" (the thing the Queen attributed to her).

Now, since Lewis Carroll was a self-appointed apostle of nonsense, "making sense" is not necessarily a good thing. The author had already expressed a dim opinion of a similar outlook in WONDERLAND, when the Duchess self-importantly informs Alice that "everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." 

Clearly Carroll means for readers to laugh at the presumption of both the Duchess and the Red Queen and to embrace the lunacy of the author's mad, mad worlds. The two ALICE books are meant to delight children (and adults) with every sort of word-play imaginable-- which is to say, telling jokes whose appeal is that they don't apparently mean anything. Though Carroll avoids taking a philosophical position in the books, since that would be too much like "sense," it seems obvious to me that he rejected the utilitarianism of his time that would say a child only has "meaning" if he or she is "moral." The ALICE books are in every way a "vacation from morals."

That does not necessarily mean, though, that Carroll's works are a "vacation from meaning." And by "meaning," I'm not talking about allusions, like the allusions to familiar nursery-rhymes or well known political figures. I'm talking about Carroll using his unique logical system to mirror mad dreams with their own internal logic, a logic drawn from common human fears and anxieties. The primary tropes I find in both books are:

(1) Frequent references to injury and death, starting in WONDERLAND with Alice speculating on what would happen after she falls off the roof of a house-- though I like better the second one, where she wonders what it would be like to he a candle-flame once it was snuffed out. LOOKING GLASS begins much the same, in that before Alice goes through the mirror, she remembers having playfully told her nurse to pretend she's a bone while Alice is a hyena eating the bone.

(2) A trope I call "omniphagia" is related to the death-and-injury trope but not identical. All children are obliged to grapple with the fact that they, as living things, must devour other living things to survive. Carroll's worlds are defined by the sense that "everybody eats everybody," and this trope extends from the cake and drink labeled "EAT ME" to the foodstuffs that come alive on the Queens' table before one can devour them. 

(3) Egotism and quarrelsomeness. Only rarely does any character tender useful advice to Alice (the Caterpillar is one exception), and that's usually because they're busy pontificating on whatever's important to them. When any of these butt-headed characters butt heads, they get into ridiculous fights, though LOOKING GLASS emphasizes such conflicts more than WONDERLAND. I tend to class all the size-changing episodes under the "egotism" trope, for when she's small, Alice has to worry about being eaten by crows or puppies, and when she's tall, she has to contend with getting her long neck stuck in the trees.

(4) Inconstant motion. In both books Alice experiences long falls that seem to take a great deal of time, and LOOKING GLASS stresses that the Red Queen must constantly keep running to stay in the same place. Though WONDERLAND includes many examples of sudden transitions, like the door in the tree that leads Alice back to the long hall, LOOKING GLASS provided a sort-of rationale for said transitions in the chessboard pattern of the domain. Not that Alice always needs to move between squares: she undergoes at least three transitions in the shop run by The Goat, a character I've yet to see appear in any adaptation.

(5) Finally, the meanings of both words and one's sense of identity are just as inconstant. Alice can't say a word without one of the Carrollian creatures inverting her words or interrogating her intent to looney effects. And when Alice can't remember the correct words to familiar poems like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or "Father William," she immediately begins to doubt her identity. Throughout both books, various characters forget who they are and what they intend doing. Arguably WONDERLAND emphasizes this trope more than the other book, culminating in a group of jurors who can't recall their names unless they write them down. The arbitrariness of legal systems is also one that takes refuge in the meaninglessness of jargon, as with "sentence first, evidence afterwards." Most of Carroll's logic games in both books depend on the many-sided nature of words and expressions.

Because the ALICE books depict two nonsense-realms where all the denizens are mad and no form of logic applies, I deem them both to fit Northrup Frye's category of "the irony." With respect to focal presences, I've stated before that I consider Alice to be largely a viewpoint-character, even though her own egotism and sometimes erratic grasp of logic makes her a stronger character than most similar ones. But it's the denizens of the two weird realms who form the superordinate ensemble. In WONDERLAND, the narratively important characters are the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat (none of whom were in the 1864 draft), the Caterpillar, the Queen and King of Hearts, the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, and the Duchess. Others, such as the Gryphon and the various minor animals Alice encounters, form a subordinate ensemble. LOOKING GLASS is not nearly as rich in original characters, which is probably why many adaptations fold some or all of LOOKING GLASS's superordinate icons into the WONDERLAND universe-- usually Humpty Dumpty (whom Carroll did not invent), Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Red and White Queens, and (more rarely) the White Knight. The aforementioned Goat and the Gnat seem more like undistinguished spear-carrier types. However, Carroll allotted two subordinate "guest appearances" in LOOKING GLASS to the Hare and the Hatter, though both appear under pseudonyms.

All and all, though LOOKING GLASS hasn't been mined nearly as much as WONDERLAND, both deserve their status as literary classics for all ages. One documentary claimed that the ALICE books are the works most quoted after the Bible and Shakespeare, and that speaks to the author's incredible facility with the mysteries of language and logic.

COUPLE MORE QUICKIE REVIEWS

Like this group of quickie reviews I did in May, there's nothing about these items that firmly aligns them, in terms of symbolic discourse, as either near-myths or null-myths, which distinction of course matters only to me.

The Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. KICK ASS is, to my surprise, a decent read, compared to the awfulness of works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN. It had a few decent jokes and it presented its ultraviolence competently, even though the choreography pales next to the collaboration of Romita Jr and that other guy named Miller on DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR.

I suspect that even though a lot of Millar's concepts are paper-thin BS like WANTED, he took a little more care when he sought to represent the supposed fantasy of all superhero geeks. The geeks will accept some parody, but how much? Yet how can Millar do parody and still keep using the tropes that make his story work? How can the author put across the notion that amateur superhero Kick Ass, rescued from a burning building by firemen, doesn't just get his mask pulled off by the first fireman to lay hands on him? And will the geeks accept the parody of an ordinary guy who almost gets massacred playing superhero, as long as he's counterpointed by a "real-life" superhero who's a total badass, i.e. Hit-Girl.

Again, I'm not recounting the pretty simple story here. But the biggest laugh I got was the ad slug on the back of the THB for KICK ASS: "the greatest superhero comic of all time." Maybe somewhere in the low nine-hundreds out of a thousand.

Finally, while it's true that there are a lot of superhero stories that are as basic, simple and unadorned as KICK ASS-- which I think Millar truly believes to be representative of the real genre in comics if not in all media-- it's the more complex versions of the genre that have kept me invested for more than fifty years.

I've even less to say about the 2004 TPB JSA: THE LIBERTY FILES. It's another "realistic" Elseworlds effort, and the gimmick by writer Dan Jolley and writer-artist Tony Harris is that back in WWII the various heroes of the Justice Society-- including a non-canonical Batman-- operate primarily as covert government agents in mufti, unveiling their superheroic long underwear only when fighting super-powered Axis agents. Because FILES is two separate stories jammed together, they don't play off one another very well. Harris does pretty but static photorealistic art and Jolley produces wordy Alan Moore naturalistic dialogue, but with less eccentricity. No better or worse than most Elseworlds stories.

AND WHY NOT THE IRON AGE?

In the addendum to 2019's VERTIGO REVISIONS, I listed my determinations for "The Ages of Comics" from 1938 to the present. In the section of the "current age," I remarked that one could call it "the Iron Age." if one could escape the traditional negative connotations.

Then it occurred to me today: why should "iron" be negative in this context? Iron's not a "precious metal," but iron is a far more durable metal than gold, silver, or bronze, and durability is exactly what the medium needs at a point when most of the old distribution venues have collapsed.

My screed on the current age also focused on the change in "Big Two" priorities that made it possible for other companies, like Image, to take advantage of creator-owned properties. However, the Iron Age may actually be durable because of creators publishing their own properties, partly or wholly dependent on direct funding, which has become more viable in the Internet Era. Obviously not everyone succeeds, but this may be the main way that American comics prosper, especially at a time when the Big Two have become so creatively restrictive that they're being easily overtaken by translated manga. And so in this case, "iron" may stand not just for the durability of the industry, but of the resilience of the fans who support what they love.

MYTHCOMICS: "LEGEND OF THE LONG THIRD FINGER," (THE BEYOND #3, 1951)

I doubt that over the years, since starting the mythcomics project, I've done many celebrations of "Halloween Month." Nevertheless, at least for this October I'll shoot for doing more mythcomics, or near-myths, on a horror theme.

I've devoted a lot more mythcomics posts on the Archive to heroic adventure than to horror. This could be the result of my simply having read more of the former than the latter. However, on my film/TV review-blog, I doubt that there's as much of a disparity, though I'm not likely to do a statistical calculation any time soon. 

Anyway, my first October surprise comes from the horror-anthology THE BEYOND, published by Ace Magazines. A few of Ace's publications were trashed in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, but otherwise, the company's most notable publications from a modern POV are probably the superhero features "Magno" and "Lash Lightning" and the teen humor series "Hap Hazard." The company, which closed its doors in 1956, also published pulp magazines about such heroes as "The Moon Man" and "Secret Agent X." The story I've chosen bears no writer-credit, so as I've done in past, I'll treat GCD's attributed artist, Louis Zansky, as the sole creator, purely for narrative convenience.

One of the most interesting things about "Finger" is that it's a werewolf story in which the werewolf doesn't eventuate from a bite, a witch's curse, or a Satanic conjuration-- but from a moral imbalance in a "family romance."

In a story that appears to take place in early 20th-century France (going by the fashions and automobiles), the action opens on a deathbed curse. The caption tells us that the harridan in the bed is Marie, who was divorced years ago from the well-dressed, forty-something man, Aristide Chauvet. (The name sounds a bit like "aristocratic cavalier," even though the caption tells us he's a self-made man.) After Aristide cut himself loose from drunken shrew Marie, his fortunes improved as he built a successful business, married a second wife, and sired other children. However, on the occasion of her death Marie has invited her ex to her room just to place a curse on him before she passes, claiming that Aristide's first born should be his heir, and any other heir will die horribly.

The next two panels clarify the other figures in the room. The guy in the sailor-outfit is Jean, an aide to Aristide. The sinister-looking boy, whose real name is never spoken, is Aristide's first born, and on the next page Jean claims that the the kid's extra-long ring finger means that he's a born werewolf.

The kid's apparently been filled with resentment of his absent father by his late mother, as he hurls a dart at Aristide's face and rants about wanting to kill him. Aristide, though presented as a generally good guy, doesn't exactly win any good parenting awards with his next move: he won't take the boy into his own home, to imperil his new family, but he makes clear that he will pay Jean to be the child's guardian. Zansky implies that this state of affairs takes place over the next twenty years, for we never see Jean again or hear anything about the raising of the first-born Chauvet.

A panel or two later, Zansky relates with admirable celerity that by the time Aristide's two children have grown to adulthood, the rich man's fortunes have become more mixed. Though his daughter Denise is a generous, refined soul, his wife and grown son Jules exist merely to waste the money Aristide worked to accumulate. (It's almost as if Aristide is "destined" to have one bad wife and one bad son.) While Aristide and Denise discuss their family problems, the reader sees a werewolf break into Aristide's barn and ravage his livestock.

While Aristide and his servants organize a hunt for the strange intruder, possibly a madman rather than an animal, Zansky introduces the reader to Eduardo Valin, who's been engaged to live at the estate while teaching music to Denise. However, once all the men have left the house, the werewolf invades the house and kills Madame Chauvet. The surprisingly talkative beast-man explains his intent to knock off anyone in line for the Chauvet fortune, and even indulges in a little irony, observing that the older woman's cries will be "smothered in these garments you admired so much." (To be sure, she isn't smothered, as the next page testified that Madame's throat was torn out.)

By page 5 Zansky is all but stating outright the true identity of Valin (whose name comes from a Germanic word for "stranger.") Aristide keeps thinking he recognizes Valin somewhere, and Valin even gives him a photograph to jog his memory. Spendthrift Jules has returned for his mother's funeral but is anxious to be off again on his wastrel endeavors, and Valin even taunts Jules with the possibility of werewolves. Later, as they ride together in a car, Valin transforms "on-camera" and slaughters his second rival for Aristide's money.

Page 7 then delivers the quick wrapup. The clue of the overlong finger finally bears fruit, for that's one of the ways Aristide figures out Valin's true ID (though technically, he first realizes that Valin bears the same features as Marie). But the long finger has one more role to play. Valin has driven Denise off to a lonely area and transforms again. He apparently stalks his half-sister a while to "prolong the agony, " but this allows the local constables to overtake the malefactor with their "vicious hounds." No silver-bullet rule here; the hounds treat the wolf-man as he treated his victims, and a French cop observes that Denise "missed death by a finger-- a third finger!" (I've heard of missing something by a hair, or a whisker, but-- a finger? I think Zansky made up the expression for the sake of his ending.) And so Aristide's good relative lives and all his bad ones die-- though it's interesting that even though the rich man refused to let his first-born be part of his family, evidently Valin and Denise share a genetic patrimony. The one thing that links them is musical talent, though in this world, music has no power to soothe the savage breast-- or beast, for that matter.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 3

Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity.-- G.K. Chesterton, IN DEFENSE OF PENNY DREADFULS, 1901.

In Part 2 I responded to Martin Scorsese's praise of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST by noting that Hitchcock used much the same "innocent accused" trope for THE 39 STEPS, which lacked any of the "painful emotions" Scorsese extolled in NORTHWEST. In that essay, I said I didn't know what if anything Scorsese had written about STEPS, but I was informed that the movie did make at least one of the director's best-films lists.

Another famous film on the list, at #942, is 1971's DIRTY HARRY-- and it just so happens that in Pauline Kael's contemporary review of that film, she touched on some of the same issues mentioned by Scorsese in his 2019 remarks. Kael wrote:

There's an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they're so cleverly done-- even if, as in the case of Siegel's DIRTY HARRY, you're disgusted by the picture.

I don't know what aspects of the Siegel film Scorsese liked well enough to elevate it into his personal pantheon, but those favorable aspects must have weighed more in his personal scales than any elements he might've found problematic. 

The Kael excerpt, even though it doesn't specify the reasons why HARRY is disgusting, is a flawed analysis. I don't believe for a moment that Kael was "exhilarated" by this or that action sequence because she thought they were cleverly done. I think she had a visceral response FIRST to a thrilling scene, because it conveyed the illusion that she was experiencing the events. Then, after the fact, she rationalized that she'd been captivated by the technique behind it.

This general idea of "good technique in the service of a bad story" bears a strong resemblance to the way Scorsese dismisses superhero movies in his remarks to EMPIRE magazine re: theme parks.

The only time his ardour dims is when the subject of Marvel comes up. “I don’t see them,” he says of the MCU. “I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

In his follow-up remarks Scorsese admits filmgoers also went to Hitchcock movies to experience "thrills and shocks" like those offered by amusement parks. (I assume he's associating such parks primarily with things like carousels and roller coasters, though he doesn't explicitly say that.) But after admitting that the Hitchcock films offer thrills and shocks, he stated that they offer other elements that keep viewers coming back to them.

I don't disagree that a lot of Hitchcock films offer other interesting elements, just as I believe that Siegel's DIRTY HARRY offers more than, say, an appeal to fascist sentiment (which was one of Kael's condemnations of the movie). But I also would say that some superhero films offer these other elements as well, and that they're not all homogenized thrill-rides as Scorsese contended.

Ir's at this point I finally work my way back to my Chesterton quote. In his defense of the despised medium of penny dreadfuls-- which defense is an almost precognitive rebuttal of Frederic Wertham  -- Chesterton admits that what he calls "fiction," as opposed to "literature," is a "dehumanized and naked narrative." Yet he calls it a necessity because these naked stories are akin to the ones people tell themselves as they live their daily lives in society.

Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

The "ordinary" men and women who watch the films of both Siegel and Hitchcock may be responding equally to the movies' "heroic truisms," to the convention of watching the good guy overthrow the bad guy. Some may also respond, as Scorsese says, to other elements of  the famed directors' stories, but others in the audience may not get anything out of PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY but the visceral thrills. If the best superhero movies could compete with Siegel and Hitchcock in terms of both the visceral and what I call the mythopoeic, then that accomplishment would be a little more impressive in my book than the comparatively simple excitements of a roller coaster ride.

And as it happens, I do think at least some superhero films have more to offer than "technique" alone. 

The 2008 IRON MAN is a case in point. There's little doubt that the filmmakers capture much of the appeal of the comic-book character, depicting the wonder of a man's rebirth: of compensating for a near-fatal wound by building himself into a super-knight-in-armor. The flawless way in which the filmmakers explore every step of Tony Stark's evolution into Iron Man-- including the humorous ones-- provides enough "thrills and shocks" to satisfy even the most undemanding of Chesterton's "gutter boys." But of course there are other elements that made the Marvel Universe seem credible, ranging from Tony Stark's silver-spoon political naivete to his "daddy issues," which didn't exist in the early IRON MAN comics and only developed, very erratically, over the course of two decades. I noted in my review that in the comics the Obadiah Stane arc is clumsy and superficial, but the movie takes all of those weak "father's evil colleague" motifs and works them into a more cohesive myth of the superhero as partly damaged in spirit as well as in body.

Is the 2008 IRON MAN as great a film as PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY? I wouldn't go that far. But IMO it does show a mastery of elements that go beyond "thrills and shocks," and other costumed-crusader films have done much the same, though there's perhaps not enough of them yet to form a "canon." I don't question that the very same filmmakers turned around and made a lot of mediocre superhero films-- not least the two IRON MAN sequels. But those sequels no more downgrade the accomplishment of the 2008 film than PSYCHO is compromised by the vastly inferior FRENZY.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."