THE GOLDEN AMAZON RETURNS (1945), THE GOLDEN AMAZON'S TRIUMPH (1946)

 At the end of my review of John Russell Fearn's GOLDEN AMAZON, I said:

From this one adventure it's impossible to judge whether or not Fearn has much to say about Marston's favorite subject, female empowerment. But I have the next two books in the series and will make some effort to find out. 

Based on  my reading of the next two novels in the refurbished series-- which seem to be the only ones readily available through major commercial venues-- I would say that Fearn drops most of the tropes involved with female empowerment. In addition, because his new series had met with favor from readers, he ceases to emphasize what I called "the tycoon narrative" seen in the first book, and seems to be working his way back to the original template, in that the titular Amazon Violet Ray began as a space-opera crusader in the veins of both John Carter and Buck Rogers. I can only guess as to whether she becomes a full-time crusader in the later novels, though.

In my review I noted that the Golden Amazon's first character arc is that of a villain, and I wondered if Fearn had killed her off just in case this new template proved unpopular. But now it's quite evident that the author had at the very least sketched out a plausible way for Violet to return from the halls of the dead, arguably stronger than in her "first life." The first novel established that despite her "masculine" strength and intellectual drive, Violet is fated to burn herself out, and this information is communicated to the protagonist about halfway through the first book. 

The next two novels, while capable of being independently read, could be viewed as one long novel in two parts, given that they concern a new villain to take the place occupied by the Amazon in the first book. In RETURNS, Violet's adoptive sister Beatrice and her husband Chris have been married about five years and have a little girl. Former Third Reich scientist Carl Mueller organizes a gang of malcontents in order to mount missile attacks on Earth from the moon with the purpose of forcing all governments to capitulate to Mueller. It's at this point that Violet Ray comes back from the dead in dramatic fashion, using her super-strength to beat up four tough male agents of Mueller's. Violet explains to her former foes that she anticipated Beatrice's scheme against her in the first book and used that old standby, an android duplicate, to fake Violet's death so that she could escape and retrench, building a super-scientific enclave in a remote mountain-area. In addition, she used her super-genius to correct her metabolism problems, so that she could experience a normal life-span.

Fearn hand-waves Violet's list of past crimes by claiming that since the law declared her dead, she can't be prosecuted for anything. I don't think that would have worked if the law could have demonstrated how she had pulled off her fake death. Further, the author missed a bet by not stressing the way her correction of her faulty metabolism could have altered her outlook. In RETURNS the Amazon has lost her frenetic desire for control, and Fearn could have argued that her mind was affected by her faulty metabolism, which when corrected made it possible for her to take a more heroic attitude. In addition, she seems much stronger than before, now being able to snap a metal chain in two. The Amazon of the original book couldn't even defeat a single man who possessed a little judo skill.

I won't dwell on the specific events of either RETURNS or TRIUMPH, because they both involve Violet and her entourage journeying to other planets in Earth's solar system.  Both times, they seek to counter Mueller's evil schemes, both involving missile attacks on Earth. The moon adventure is OK, but the "swampy Venus" locale of TRIUMPH is a lot more fun, and allows for much more colorful pulp pseudo-science. Mueller is defeated in RETURNS but escapes to launch much the same kind of menace in TRIUMPH, only to be decisively conquered and slain. Mueller's only symbolic significance is that of being an "antitype" to the Amazon, essentially incarnating the evil she's renounced. Strangely, neither Mueller nor any of his allies from WWII Germany ever seem like ideological Nazis. Perhaps Fearn, who was moving the series in the direction of space opera (albeit set in the "far future" of the 1960s) thought that references to Hitler and the Final Solution would have worked against the futuristic milieu he was promoting. By the end of TRIUMPH, it's evident that the space-faring technology created by the Golden Amazon will make it possible for Earthpeople to extend their range into other galaxies. Thus, even though Fearn reworked the 1939 version of his heroine to be less of a standard space-opera champion by placing her origins on Earth, it appears that once the character proved popular he slowly began moving his Amazonian avenger back in the direction of The Final Frontier. 

I believe I've read that eventually Fearn allows Violet to conquer her antipathy to romance, so that she marries and raises a family. There are no hints of such a sea-change here, though Fearn devotes a subplot to a love-tale between two support-characters. But going on the first three books, the Golden Amazon stories seem most significant for focusing on a heroine with a penchant for pure superheroic action.

 

 

FIRESTARTERS

 Another response-post; context should be evident.

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You don't have the slightest concept of how much experimentation would have gone into something like the making of fire. First, fire has to occur naturally, from bolts of lightning and/or volcanic matter setting combustible objects on fire. Slowly early people, doubtless in separate tribes all over the globe, have to pick up on the idea that fire might be worth incorporating into tribal life for its warming properties, even though it's both intangible and harmful to the touch. That means Thoth knows how much trial and error those people had to go through to figure out what materials kept fire going-- not always a simple matter, since fire will burn dry wood but will not flourish on green wood. And who knows how the idea of nurturing coals even started, or the use of tree fungus as tinder, or your fatuous idea of just "rubbing two sticks together."

And the really funny thing is that all that experimentation took place among primitives who were, en masse, still religious. Their science did not require the massive arrogance of atheist materialists, who presume that knowing this or that datum about material forces meant that they knew everything about all of existence.

MYTHCOMICS: KLAUS AND THE CRISIS IN XMASVILLE (2017)

With CRISIS IN XMASVILLE-- a title designed to evoke fan-memories of Grant Morrison's associations with various DC "crises"-- the author, in tandem with artist Dan Mora, begins fleshing out the details of the "Klaus-verse" he began in the 2015 original.

A prologue sets things up with the depiction of an unfortunate family that accidentally drives into Xmasville, a town where it's always Christmas. Their misfortune grows greater when they're all taken prisoner by these Growly Old Elves, who also display a penchant for goosestepping. 

Before Klaus begins his investigation of this townful of Bad Santas, the reader meets the hero's enemies, the Partridge Family-- or, more specifically, two partridges without a pear tree: young Milhous Q. Partridge and his unnamed grandpa. The latter villain encountered Klaus in combat a generation ago, when he and his father engaged in a "trademark dispute" between Klaus's interests and the company "Pola-Cola," which sought to gain "complete ownership of Christmas as a concept." That gambit failed, but now Grandpa is directing Milhous to help him in a new game: "supplying children for space weapons."

These lesser foes' new ally is an unnamed "evil counterpart" of Klaus himself. While the Partridges want to control the imagery of Christmas to sell products, the Monster, as Klaus calls him, kidnaps Earth-kids (like the ones seen in the prologue) in order to drain off the imaginations and transfer them to his alien customers. He appears to kill Klaus's wolf-friend Lilli and hurls Klaus to his death.

Fortunately, both Klaus and Lilli receive succor from folklore-legend Grandfather Frost and his grand-daughter Snowmaiden. The heroes go toe to toe with the monstrous reflection while both the Monster's alien allies and the Partridges escape to fight another day. The Monster turns into a wolf-man who's vanquished by Snowmaiden's silver spear.

The real challenge, though, is that Klaus and Snowmaiden are forced to enter the Monster's domain, and this underworld is a kissing cousin to that of "the Underverse" from Morrison's earlier effort BEING BIZARRO. But Klaus can get himself, Snowmaiden and the captive kids free because he's the giver of gifts-- the greater of which is a rekindled imagination. In a wrapup coda, we see one of the kids grown to young womanhood, visited by Immortal Klaus in the same year, 2017, as this graphic novel is published. Whether Morrison returned to the insidious corporate schemes of the Pola-Cola Partridges may be fuel for a future Yuletide fire-- and I'm hoping Morrison and Mora continue to come up with new myth-takes on their Warrior Santa.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE CREEPING CREATURES OF STEEL" (HOUSE OF SECRETS #23, 1959)

What's great about myth-hunting is that how even the lesser near-myths show up in the most unexpected places. 

Though a lot of Silver Age DC serial characters have earned a measure of popularity-- sometimes more than they enjoyed in their original eras-- DC's anthology-stories usually don't generate even nostalgic memories. And for the most part, these one-shot tales don't deserve much respect. Marvel fans still celebrate many of the one-off stories from that company's Silver Age, if only because of stellar art-talents like Kirby and Ditko, But who in the ranks of DC fans care much about the output of the DC anthologies of the late fifties and early sixties? They're usually tepid gimmick-dominated narratives, crafted by a company that valued conformity to a subdued art-style (allegedly that of comic strip artist Dan Barry)-- a company that believed that its dominion of the market was etched in stone-- or steel.

I found a modest exception to this rule while glancing through HOUSE OF SECRETS #23, which was the first appearance of the serial character Mark Merlin. Merlin's debut was underwhelming to say the least. However, this issue also contained "The Creeping Creatures of Steel," penciled by George Roussos. Naturally no writer is credited, but since Jack Miller is credited with the "Merlin" tale, I'll call "Creeping's" author "Maybe-Miller."

"Creeping" opens with one of the many unlikely attractions that appeared in Silver Age DC comics: an amusement park called "Legend Land," wherein the three dominant rides are modeled after Greek mythological monsters: the three-headed dog Cerberus, the winged Harpy, and the hybrid monster Chimera. But suddenly the three monstrous structures come alive and start galumping around.

The park-owner calls in Larkin, the engineer who created the constructs, but he knows nothing about their curious capacity for perambulation. He suggests using magnets to restrain the monsters, and since there happens to be a magnet factory nearby, the humans try to restrain the Cerberus with a big one. Despite what the dialogue says ("Nothing can stop this thing"), the magnet apparently slows Cerberus down enough that an "acetylene torch crew" is able to dismantle the three-headed dog-scraper in jig time, despite the fact that the other two monsters are getting closer. But then the two creeping creatures and the disassembled beams go flying through the air.

The last two pages wrap things up in tidy fashion. The befuddled humans observe that the three "creatures" are homing in on the Ajax Iron Mine from which their raw materials were taken. All the humans can do is watch as the creatures, as well as a truck full of iron ore, return to the mine. They also provide a sci-fi rationale, since Larkin just happens to remember that a meteor struck the mine long ago, turning the metal there into "cosmic iron" that possesses the attribute of "self-magnetism."

On the face of things, "Creeping" is just another gimmick-tale with thoroughly dull talking-head characters. But of the many myth-figures from which Maybe-Miller could have chosen, he happened to pick monsters who all have ties to the Greek underworld. Two of the three were birthed by the serpentine deities Typhon and Echidna, while a third, the Harpy, was linked in some stories to Typhon and a different mother. However dimly, these constructs, made in the image of creatures aligned to death and darkness, defy the will of mortals by returning to the underworld that spawned them.

Of course there are no "self-magnetic" minerals; the only entities with "homing instincts" are animals. Of the animals referenced in the myth-creatures-- dog (Cerberus), goat, lion and serpent (Chimera), and bird (Harpy)-- only birds have a strong repute for said instincts. I don't claim that Maybe-Miller had any conscious intent beyond turning out another gimmick-tale. But there's more myth-potential here than in a couple hundred similar stories from Silver Age DC.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

 Another politics post...

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While I won't criticize the South for doing what the North had been doing for the previous hundred years, I will criticize them on another line: they allowed themselves to be gulled by the Northern politicians into taking an absolutist, hard-line view on the slavery question.

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Imagine what might have transpired if, a brilliant Southern statesman, of the capacity of John C Calhoun, had looked at the Tallmadge Amendment of 1819 (talk about an extra-legal, un-Constitutional stipulation) and realized, "Hey-- this is the wave of the future. These Northern dinks don't care anything about Black slaves, but they want to give the illusion that they do in order to gain Congressional superiority. And with all the new territories opening up-- there's no chance that we'll able to convert enough Western states to the slavery position to keep Congressional power."

The far-sighted solution to the Northern anti-slavery posture would have been to institute something similar to what the North was doing, in order to steal their thunder. Possibly there could have been an incentive plan for slaves to amass enough credit to buy their freedom, which also might have diverted a fair number of them from simply running away to the North and undercutting the bottom line of the planters. Instead, the planters dug in their heels, like many people who simply don't like being told what to do by those who aren't any more moral than they are. A far sighted person would have seen that the Missouri Compromise was just a bandaid, albeit one that lasted over thirty years, yet one that clearly did not prevent the North from continuing to inflict partisan tariffs on the South. For instance, the Nullification Crisis took place in the early 1830s, long before new states became a clear and present danger to Southern Congressional representation. Andrew Jackson backed down from his partisan tariff. Lincoln would not.

But we didn't get a far sighted politician. Calhoun, despite his brilliance, failed to see that his strategy, that of abiding by the letter of the Constitution regarding its protections of property, was going to be swept aside by the emotional appeal of liberation for an underclass. Legally, slaves were property, but emotionally, they were human beings capable of citizenship, and more often than not, emotion trumps legality. Northern soldiers didn't fight the South to free slaves, and most of them probably weren't even aware of the tariff issues. But they felt they'd been attacked, and they responded accordingly, even as the South did. But had the South liberalized its stance on slaves by 1860, those states would have been in a position to forge links with Western states on concerns other than slavery.

QUICK KULL CONTEMPLATION

I posted the following on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO but decided to duplicate the post here in case I thought of any follow-ups later.

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I've sometimes wondered if original Kull stories might be more successful if the hero found himself in what we now think of as GAME OF THRONES territory.

For instance, not in all the KULL comics I've ever read have a found an answer to the question, "Why does Kull even want to BE a king?" He complains about "poison in my wine cup, and daggers at my back" (a great line BTW), but he doesn't seem to derive any compensatory joys from rulership. Hell, does he ever even line up candidates to be his queen? Conan more or less stumbles across a commoner for his queen in HOUR OF THE DRAGON, but in "real life," a king is constantly being nagged to make a political marriage for the nation's benefit. Howard had his own reasons for wanting to keep Kull free of what some might call "the Jane Porter Syndrome," some of which had to do with the audience for whom he wrote. But WEIRD TALES is gone, and whereas Conan will always be celebrated as the lusty freebooter, Original Kull stories might take a more settled approach-- without, of course, neglecting sex, blood, and thunder.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #29: WESTERN ADVENTURES

Thanks to an excellent article on the history of Ace Comics by one Mark Carlton-Ghost in ALTER EGO #144, I went curiosity-hunting in the six-issue run of Ace's WESTERN ADVENTURES (1948-49). None of the stories therein bear close analysis, but as an overall phenomenon, they comprise an interesting variation on western themes.

The feature included a few cross-genre products, such as "western romances" and "western true crime stories," but most of the stories feature cover-starring hero "The Cross-Draw Kid," whose specialty was confusing his enemies with a cross-drawing technique, as well as inciting pitter-patter in the hearts of numerous fillies to whom he barely paid attention. His enemies included a couple of very minor masked villains, hardly a match for the more distinctive villains in Ace's superhero line, and one mundane owlhoot who shared the name of the villain in the 2011 cartoon film RANGO: the name of "Rattlesnake Jake." 

But the most amusing moment in Cross-Draw's short history was the one time he did seem interested in a girl, it was one who hadn't been a woman for very long. Early in the story he says he hasn't seen young Dorothea since "she was in pigtails," and that when he meets her as a mostly grown woman, he says he "always figgered you'd grow up cute." And if she's "frontier jailbait," at least the feeling goes both ways, since fawning Dorothea makes it clear she's had her eye on him as well. None of the fully adult women inspire such mutual affection in Cross-Draw's world-- though of course at the end of the story the cowboy once again rides off in the company of his horse.

The standout feature in WESTERN, though, was the story of an independent young western woman, Sally Starr, who accepted the job of sheriff of her town, and so became SHERIFF SAL for all six issues of WA. Now, there had been many female heroes in comics since 1938, and most of them were written by male authors. Not many of these heroines can be fairly called "feminist"-- "feminist-adjacent" might be more accurate, inasmuch as such features were meant to hold some appeal for female purchasers. But SHERIFF SAL really was feminist. Not only did Sal defeat all of her outlaw challengers, and resist the attempts of her boyfriend Flash to get her to quit her job and marry him, three times she called on help from other women in the town-- an idea that almost never comes up in any westerns in any medium. 

Barely any Ace Comics credit authors, but since the Carlton-Ghost article mentions that one prominent female writer he tracked down was one Isabel Mangum, she's a likely candidate for having scripted SHERIFF SAL. The above dialogue about "intuition" doesn't sound to me like just another male writer voicing sentiments for the sake of a paycheck.

As a western adventure, WESTERN ADVENTURES flopped, and its publisher rebranded it as a western romance comic, which died after three issues. Sheriff Sal had her last adventure in issue #7, in which she gave up her heroic independence for the married life. I didn't closely read any of the romance stories, but I did come across one that took the same egalitarian stance as SAL, and might've have come from the same writer. Rodeo girl Dallas loves manly man Tal, but can't help embarrassing him with her skills. He tries to make her jealous with another woman, but Tal ends up teaming up with Dallas to corral a loco steer, a feat which is clearly said to require both of them working in tandem. So even as romance killed off Sheriff Sal's stance of independence, at least one love-tale still put across a slight feminist touch or two.

NEAR MYTHS; KLAUS AND THE WITCH OF WINTER (2016)

The second KLAUS story, following the first less than a year later, thrusts the former 16th-century gift giver to the 21st century, where he seeks to free two abducted children from the evil Snow Qu-- er, the Witch of Winter.

It's a serviceable Xmas adventure, with an interesting take on another famed craftsman, the Gepetto of (public domain) PINOCCHIO.

The story's most mythic moment concerns Klaus reforming the Winter Witch into an avatar of Spring. I bet that other Santa wished he could do that in a Xmas tale I imagine Morrison never encountered: the 1942 SANTA CLAUS IN TROUBLE.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 7

 I was looking up something about the TV show MODERN FAMILY and stumbled across an academic article for Gale Research, which is only readable through one's library subscription service. In this article, "Modern Family: the Return of the Incest Aesthetic in Culture,"  author Stephen Marche argued that the primary use of incest in traditional societies has been for the purpose of describing the dissolution of stable cultures, and that modern cultural artifacts that utilize incest topics or incest humor (GAME OF THRONES and RICK AND MORTY are cited) represent an "incest aesthetic" oriented on societal dissolution as well.

I don't deny that the trope of incestuous relations can be used to signal societal downfall, but my own occasional examinations of the trope in popular fiction don't bear out Marche's conclusions. In short, like almost any subject matter, incest can be used to signal whatever any author pleases to reference.

Here's a section of Marche's article that gets the subject wrong.

Incest appears at the end of things because the fear of incest, the law against it, rises at the beginning of things, at the beginning of meaning for both individuals and societies. In the early twentieth century, anthropologists struggled with an odd fact about human society: the prohibition against incest was so universal and so ancient that it could hardly be described as cultural. "This rule [against incest] is at once social, in that it is a rule, and pre-social, in its universality and the type of relationships upon which it imposes a norm", Levi-Strauss wrote in The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Nature plays some role in the incest prohibition. We have evolved not to have sex with our family members. A study from 2002 found that same-sex siblings dislike their siblings' smell and that mothers dislike their children's smell--an aversion, the researchers speculated, expressly to prevent incest. For Freud, the repression of the incestuous urge was essential to the formation of the ego. The "family romance" demands prohibition. This prohibition lies at the moment of separation between nature and culture, both a bridge and a fracture.

The problem with this view of Freud, though, is that Freud doesn't just say "incest must be prohibited." Given that he thinks the Oedipus Complex is inevitable in everyone, different only in degree, the complex must not just be prohibited, but sublimated. This means that the mature Oedipal male must re-direct his affection for his maternal unit to some more plausible marriage-partner. However, Freud continued to maintain that even sublimation did not destroy the power of the complex. Instead, Freud had it both ways. If the mature male marries someone similar to his mother, he's still "marrying his mother." Yet if he marries someone markedly dissimilar, this is a form of "deflection," which just shows how much work the male goes through to dampen down his original affections.

Actually, most recent iterations of the incest-trope have, in my opinion, followed Freudian orthodoxy, and though I could cite other essays I've blogged here in support, the teleseries MODERN FAMILY actually does counter Marche's "Modern Family." I won't go into onerous detail here, since anyone can find assorted Youtube videos chronicling all the show's humorous jokes about sons subconsciously desiring mothers, brothers sisters, and so on. The point is that this was a well that the MF writers kept coming back to-- and yet they certainly weren't trying to sell their fictional family as a paradigm for "the end times." If anything, the showrunners represented their paradigm as the future of American families, inclusive of various ethnicities and sexual proclivities. Within that context, MODERN FAMILY got humor out of sublimation, not actual incestuous feeling. Thus, for just one quick example, the Dunphy daughters at one time or another date males reminiscent of their daffy dad, and one daughter, Haley, marries her goofy beau in the later seasons. The one Dunphy boy, raised by both a permissive dad and a bossy mom, is mainly seen gravitating toward older women as sex-partners, though the series concludes without giving him a permanent love interest.

What MODERN FAMILY celebrates with its take on incest-tropes is a tacit assumption that every family has these little hangups and that sublimating them is just part of the maturation journey, though the hangups remain funny because they're always incongruous to the audience's expectations about what family "ought to be." This has nothing to do with any "end times," and may be closer in spirit to "the carnivalesque" spirit promoted by the Russian critic Bakhtin. The disruptions to "normalcy" are like those of the carnival; they divert, but do not permanently overthrow, the boundaries of normal life. And that, I believe, is the real dominant "incest aesthetic" in the 21st century.

MYTHCOMICS: '["THE AMAZON QUEEN OF FEMALIA"] (SMASH COMICS #76, 1948)

 

Most Golden Age comics stories achieve high mythicity in an erratic fashion. All raconteurs, well or poorly educated, were required to turn out a high volume of material in order to make a living. Thus, even though the writer of WONDER WOMAN had attended Harvard, and though he'd constructed one of the more elaborate superhero concepts of the period, he didn't necessarily turn out more myth-stories than did raconteurs who never got past high school. All comics-creators had to generate ideas very quickly, and only on rare occasions did any of them bring all the symbolic elements together to create something like a discourse, intentionally or not.

Golden Age mythcomics about the topic of sexuality are even rarer, given the audience associations-- though it should be said that most media of the period weren't much more complex on that subject. There were plenty of narratives about "the war of the sexes," and a fair number dealt with fictional versions of the Greek Amazons. But often such Amazonian societies were conjured up just to banish the demonic forces they suggested. Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1924 novel TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN doesn't deal per se with an Amazon society, but does introduce a savage tribe in which the women are physically larger than the men. Tarzan influences the males to take control and return women to a subordinate position.

Various comics-creators used societies of strong women for analogous reasons, as did Jack Cole in a couple of PLASTIC MAN stories. Cole also created the character under discussion here, though by 1948 his only contribution to the feature was that raconteurs like Alex Kotzky-- the creator to whom I assign this story-- sometimes sought to draw like Cole.

The character Midnight was essentially what Will Eisner's SPIRIT would have been, had Eisner concentrated only on adventure with lots of goofy comedic content. Midnight is a guy in street clothes who dons a domino mask and uses a few gimmicks to fight crime. However, his support-cast is designed to be dominantly humorous. First, Midnight gained a sidekick, name of Gabby, who was a literal "monkey-boy:" a simian endowed with the ability to talk (not, as some references have claimed, a little Black kid). Then an aptly named mad scientist, Doc Wackey, joined the entourage. Later additions included a baby polar bear (apparently just a pet) and a bumbling detective, Sniffer. All of them are on display in the splash page above, decked out in feminine harem garments and dancing before the titular "amazon queen."

The story unwinds quickly, with a lot of use of coincidence. (I tend to think no comics-people loved overheard conversations more than did the Quality Comics crew.) Midnight, in his regular ID as a radio host, lets "the illustrious Professor Zogar" lecture Middle America about the archaic custom of matriarchal rule. The three sidekicks and their pet go for a walk, during which Doc is particularly voluble, claiming that "the dame doesn't live who can push me around." Quick as a bunny, two Amazonian females in archaic bikinis seize him, clobber his friends, and drag Doc off to their land of Femalia, under the belief that Doc is their long absent king.

Heroic Midnight then interviews Zogar about the society of Amazons in Femalia, and drags the reluctant scientist along for the ride when he and his crew mount a rescue mission. However, if any juvenile readers were expecting these brave males to put the matriarchy back in its place, those expectations get dashed when a single woman floors Midnight with an uppercut.

The captives are dragged through a city full of huge women and shrimpy men, not a little reminiscent of one of Al Capp's "Sadie Hawkins" celebrations. Queen Menna (seen in the splash with a big stogie in her mouth) sits her throne besides her crowned king Doc Wackey. Menna is just as convinced as her servants that Doc is her long lost husband, and she takes no backtalk from uppity males.

Midnight does manage to escape the palace with Doc, and as the group rushes back to the plane the hero makes a half-hearted effort to inspire the local males to rebellion. Then comes the "big reveal" that probably didn't fool all that many kid-readers in the day. Menna calls out to the man she thinks is her consort Ragoz, and Zogar (spell it backwards) responds with a beaten-down "Yes, dear." This prompts Midnight to make the amazing correlation that the expert on matriarchal societies is actually the guy who escaped Femalia, and this in turn causes Menna to admit that yes, this other shrimpy guy is her real hubby. She lets the Americans leave-- and heroic Midnight is only too glad to leave Zogar in the lurch so that he and his friends can return to the land where women aren't quite so dominant.

It would be silly to think that Kotzky sought to say anything profound here by leaving a gynocracy in charge of their own domain, as was *sometimes* the case when Marston wrote analogous stories. Kotzky's main purpose was probably the same as in any other MIDNIGHT story: to come up with a wild tale diverting enough to get kids to part with their coins. Nor can one place any deeper complexion on the kinky sounding dialogue in the next to last panel:

MENNA: Go easy on him, indeed! Well, perhaps I will, AFTER I've given him a daily beating for about three months!

ZOGAR: You are very kind to let me off so lightly, your majesty!

Actually, it might be a light sentence, if Zogar was away from Femalia for the years it would require for him to become an "illustrious professor." And he would've gotten away from the modern Amazons, if he'd just kept his mouth shut about them! Not that I'm claiming this fictional character had anything like an actual psychology, but his creator might have appreciated the irony that Zogar's big mouth led him back to the subservient fate he'd escaped-- and it's by no means certain that he's not okay with it.

I also don't want to make too much of the final exchange between the heroes as they run back to the U.S., tails between their legs, but I'll note it to wrap up.

GABBY: Poor Zogar! What a life he must lead!

DOC: Are you TELLING me or ASKING me?

It's an interesting exchange only because Doc has been in the custody of the Femaliens for what one must assume is only a few hours. Certainly he doesn't have the chance to get initiated into Femalian society, whatever that might entail. So why was he wondering if Gabby was "asking" him about the "life" Zogar now leads, the "life" Doc would've been forced to lead had his buddies abandoned him like they abandoned Zogar? Doc only had time to learn the same lesson the others did: that when men lose the advantage of sexual dimorphism, they can be easily changed from "men" into "mice."

ADDENDUM: The only element that moves "Queen" into the domain of the marvelous is Gabby the Talking Monkey.

THE READING RHEUM: STARDUST (1999)

 

The short review: STARDUST is more like "moonshine," in the sense of its lack of substance.

I don't think I have a problem with a creator of genius simply tackling less ambitious projects. That's the nature of creativity: one is drawn to this or that endeavor by some internal muse, and there's no gainsaying that imperative.

That said, even in 1999 STARDUST feels like a very minor effort, particularly when it's compared to the section of BOOKS OF MAGIC that Gaiman completed. partly in collaboration with STARDUST-illustrator Charles Vess, about eight years previous. Though the subtitle styles STARDUST a "romance," the novel is centered on its male protagonist, around whom various female presences revolve.

A prologue describes how the novel's hero Tristran Thorn is conceived by a unison between his mortal father Dunstan and his faerie mother Una. This is possible because Wall, the English village Dunstan occupies, is separated by a literal brick wall from the dominions of Faerieland, which are represented by a loose association of entities. Some of these beings are almost indistinguishable from mortal people, like the royal family of Stormhold, while others include more overt fantasy-figures like witches and unicorns.

Tristran grows up in Wall, having no knowledge of his Faerie parentage, and falls in love with Victoria, a mortal girl. He pledges to undertake all manner of tasks to please his lady love, and when the two of them witness the falling of a star from the heavens, Victoria playfully suggests that he bring her the star. But to do that, Tristran must venture into the lands of Faerieland. And among the many magical entities he meets is "the star" herself in human form, eventually given the name Yvain. Additionally, there's a witch who wants to eat Yvain's heart to gain immortality, while the sons of the Stormhold kingdom are set a task that will end with one of them gaining their late father's throne, and this task too loosely coheres with finding the star.

All of these are perfectly respectable fantasy-tropes-- a cannibal witch, rival brothers seeking to complete a task, a love affair between a mortal male and a supernatural female. But STARDUST never escapes a mannered quality that may be Gaiman's worst creative failing. 

Some complaints are minor. Gaiman burns up a lot of space describing how Yvain, once she became a living yet immortal woman, broke her leg falling from the sky. Okay, but if you're going to go with that idea, why just her leg? Why didn't she break her neck or back? Because Gaiman had to keep Tristran's destined real romantic partner alive, of course, but the constant reminder of the broken leg serves no actual purpose in the narrative.

The major problem is that the romantic byplay between Tristran and Yvaine seems tepid rather than intriguing. Though Tristran had nothing to do with Yvaine's fall, she constantly rags on him, just for having come to capture her, when he didn't even have any way of knowing she would be a sentient creature. The literary woods are full of acrimonious romances that turn out okay, but the acrimony needs to be rooted in some natural male-female conflict. 

Moreover, Tristran only has one or two moments where he distinguishes himself with some act of wit in order to escape trouble. Most of the time, various magical donors show up to solve problems for Tristran and his stellar companion-- so many that Tristran never assumes any stature of his own. Further, the subplot with the royal brothers never ties into the main plot in any meaningful way, and the threat of the cannibal witch simply peters out at the end.

Despite an adult level of sexuality and violence in a few scenes, STARDUST feels like it should have been written more like a modern upbeat fairy tale, in which the good people suffer a little at first but end up having an uncomplicated happy ending. As for Vess, his art is technically proficient but he's illustrating a fantasy without much depth, and that undermines the potential mythopoesis.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #28: BILLY BOSTON

While "thumbing" at random through ARCHIE comics online, I came across a Black support-character, Billy Boston, in BETTY AND ME #30 (1970). I don't know if he made any appearances before or after this one but in this one story I like him better than the bland "Chuck."

STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS

 In contrast to some of my revisions, these two should be relatively painless.

I've only used the term "postulate" three times. In the essay THE INFORMAL POSTULATE, I tossed out the titular term in response to a critic's use of the phrase "formal postulate." Then I wrote two linked essays, Part 1 and Part 2 of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE. The only limitation I see in the use of the word "postulate" is that I don't think it has as much broad applicability as my previously used term "proposition," even though the two words mean approximately the same thing. So from now on, I will only speak of formal and informal propositions.

I have used the linked terms "master thread" and "bachelor thread" more often, both beginning in 2020. Here's my rationale for the metaphor from the first part of MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD:

I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

About two months later, I formulated the complementary term "bachelor thread" as a pun on "masters' degrees" and "bachelors' degrees." In the essay DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM, I was particularly focused upon the fact that what I called "open serials" usually did not manifest master-threads.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

Of course, this formulation was not exclusive only to serials, open or otherwise. It's possible for any narrative, whether a serial, part of a serial or a monad, to sustain only a master thread and nothing more, which is the way I used that term in MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3, even though I specified that the master threads in my first two examples were relatively simple in symbolic development next to my third example. In monad-narratives, bachelor threads usually manifest when the author chooses to develop other concerns peripheral to the master thread. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, I spoke of "meaning-threads" in MOBY DICK being subordinate to the book's master thread, and this conception was simply later borne out in the formulation of the complementary "bachelor thread" term.

However, though I still like the "thread" metaphor, henceforth I'll speak only of "master tropes" and "bachelor tropes," in order to make my take on literary thematics hew closer to my analysis of what literature is made of, as per my statement in 2021'S QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM.

just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Indeed, all of the statements I've made about both types of "threads" are symbolic scenarios that take the same form as "tropes," and thus I don't see any difficulty in making the change, except that now all the categories that used to read "thread" will now read "thread/trope" to reflect this altered priority.

 

 

 

ANOTHER EINSTEIN INTERSECTION

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.-- Albert Einstein.

I encountered these two quotations in Graham Joyce's excellent novel SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE. Both quotations appear on the Net, which does not necessarily mean that Einstein said those precise words, given the many ways in which celebrity figures are frequently misquoted.

But if one could prove definitively that Albert Einstein, a genius in the realm of the physical sciences expressed these unbounded sentiments in favor of unrestrained fantasy-- what would that mean?

My guess is that Einstein felt that fantasy enlarged the scope of his ability to imagine new patterns, and then to test them as to whether or not those "shadows of imagination" represented anything in the perceived patterns of consensual reality. If this was the case, then one might accuse Einstein of advocating fantasy for utilitarian purposes, as Peter Washington said of Calvino in this quote:

By presenting possible worlds, [the writer] 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.

But of course Einstein didn't make any definitive statement as to the utility of fantasy. All he says is that fairy tales are good for intelligence, and that the gift for fantasy has meant more to him than his lauded capacity for "abstract, positive thinking," which I compare to Cassirer's concept of "discursive thinking." 

Purely for motives of self-flattery, I'd like to think that he had some intuition along the lines of my own: that the capacity for fantasy, for representing what may not be real, goes hand in hand with the capacity for testing reality, for representing what seems to be real. 

But as I said-- no one really knows.

MYTHCOMICS: "I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH" (STRANGE WORLDS #1, 1958)

I went into a lot of detail in this essay about the importance "philosophical SF" had on both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1950s, prior to their contributions to "The Marvel Superhero Universe." Thus it behooves me to provide at least one example of such a story from the period following Kirby's return to the company.

Since the title STRANGE WORLDS only lasted five issues, from 1958 to 1959, it was relatively easy to read all five in quest of mythcomics with a philosophical slant. Now, I never claimed that every story at Atlas/Marvel was in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke (any more than was true of the celebrated EC SF-line). Of the fifteen or so comics stories in STRANGE WORLDS, most of them are "gotcha" stories in which some fool or criminal gets his destined comeuppance, or the opposite, in which some steadfast character's travails are validated, if only in the viewpoint of the reader. But LAST not only has a philosophical bent, it also manages to breathe new life into what's often considered one of prose science fiction's hoariest cliches.

After the first two panels, most of the story is related by the "last man" in flashback, though by his own testimony he will continue alongside what is implicitly "the last woman." The flashback establishes that this Future-Earth has banished the majority of human ills, but has remained hemmed in by biological constraints, since humans still only live eighty years or so. But then a report from a space-mission brings back biological data on the planet Xernes. On Xernes, the atmosphere  will allow humans to endure for five hundred years. This immediately fills almost all human beings with a passion to emigrate, to leave a qualified paradise for a garden where the grass seems much greener.

I'll mention in advance that the emigrants never suffer, to the reader's knowledge, any dire "gotcha" fate. As far as the reader knows, all of the emigrants are wildly successful in reaching Xernes, settling the planet and living extended lives, with absolutely no consequences. Such a gotcha, in my opinion, would have diluted the author's philosophical question: is it right for people to desert the "cultures that were born out of the pain and suffering of countless millions of people?" The Last Man doesn't go into detail about why he considers the emigrants "ungrateful, greedy fools." But he avers to the Last Woman that the two of them will manage to build an "even better world" even without all those greedy souls; a world that implicitly will be marked by the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors.

As noted above, there are a number of science fiction stories which end with a man and woman of some futuristic civilization traversing space and becoming stranded on some Edenic alien world, with the big revelation that the man's name is Adam and the woman's Eve, with the clear implication that the "alien" world is really "our" Earth. Usually this trope is simply a bland attempt to recast an archaic myth into science-fiction terms, and some iterations, like the 1966 WOMEN OF THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, are content to use the situation with characters not named Adam and Eve. At most the point is to present the reader with a conclusion that suggests the continuity of the human species in a paradisical environment, wherein Adam and Eve will be fecund and multiply.

Fecundity, however, is not the point in LAST, but rather, continuity between the labors of the past and the labors of the future. Whatever the original intent of those who first told the story of Genesis, the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden has usually carried a tragic note. Because the first two human beings disobeyed God, they were cast out of Paradise and forced to labor for their bread, and Eve, who may or may not have been able to bear children in Eden, became the first woman to know the pains of childbirth. The broad implication of Judeo-Christian myth is that through future obedience to God, mortals have a chance at some "Paradise Regained," if only in some afterlife.

LAST, however, anticipates a contrarian reading of the Story of the Fall along roughly the same lines as the 1967 STAR TREK episode "The Apple." This story also validates the virtues of hard work and the necessity to bear children in response to limited lifespans (though to be sure the STRANGE WORLDS author does not bring up the question of restoring the population except in the most general sense). But since the TREK narrative deals with a genuinely alien race, that tale cannot address the question of a continuity with earlier, hardier cultures. 

LAST interestingly takes both God and The Serpent out of the picture. All that exists is the temptation of Planet Xernes, which takes the place of the Tree of Life in Genesis. Clearly the world of The Last Man is one in which humankind has never been in Eden at all, but has from the start pulled itself up by its bootstraps, and after centuries of suffering, has finally rejected violence and endorsed reason. But whereas all the children of Adam and Eve in the Bible have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the human beings in LAST *are* given a comparable choice-- not in terms of being free from labor, but in terms of being able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor for five times the normal human span. The story's author does not quite say that shorter lifespans force humans to take more risks and to live life more fully. But I think that's implied, and it was certainly a familiar enough theme in 1950s prose SF.

While the penciller of LAST is unquestionably Don Heck, I've been circumspect about the writer because the story bears no writer's credit. Stan Lee usually signed any story he fully wrote, so it's possible that either (a) he had nothing to do with this tale, or (b) that he supplied a basic idea to a writer who completed the actual plot and dialogue. GCD also notes that LAST was used as a template for two other "Adam and Eve" anthology-stories with altered plots, and of those two, Lee DID write and sign one. It's my opinion that writers usually find it easiest to swipe from themselves rather than others because their own earlier works always encode the writers' own story-priorities. In any case, there are also a handful of other Lee works that stress the necessity for risk and conflict, most notably THE ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER. So in my mind, I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a prime example of Lee himself using, or at least signing off on, the use of science fiction for philosophical reflection.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to note that the title contains a mythic irony not present in all similar Adam-Eve SF-tales, since this version of Adam is at once "the last man" and "the first man" on Earth. "The last shall be first," indeed.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 4

 A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.-- CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there...-- ICONIC BONDING PT. 3.

 

In the second quote, I mentioned first two types of bonded ensembles in which villains who had been "familiarity-icons" since their introduction did not incarnate a crossover-value. My first example was a duo of villains, the Enchantress and the Executioner, who had been introduced as a team in their first appearance and who remained in that configuration in most though not all of their appearances (at least up to the point where the latter character dies). The second type, as specified, was that of a coterie of evildoers more or less permanently bonded into the service of a leader. But now I've become aware of what may a third, even more rare type, thanks to beginning a re-watch of the Fox teleseries GOTHAM.

Prior to GOTHAM, I believe every adaptation of the BATMAN franchise has utilized only Batman himself as the sole superordinate icon, or else has combined Batman with various other partners, whether bonded, semi-bonded or unbonded. Most of these iterations also include a sampling of characters from the franchise to serve the same subordinate-icon purpose that they serve in the comics, such as Alfred the Butler and Commissioner Gordon.

GOTHAM formulated a relatively new approach. It's set in the years that most iterations pass over: the period immediately after twelve-year old Bruce Wayne is orphaned. But in this universe, Young Bruce receives succor not only from faithful Alfred but also from a young James Gordon. During the five years of the series, Young Bruce grows older but does not don his caped costume until the show's last episode. Nevertheless, the youth, slowly maturing toward crimefighter status, enters into a superordinate, semi-bonded ensemble with crusading cop Gordon. I say that they're semi-bonded because though both are central characters involved in investigating crimes in Gotham City, they don't "team up" as such but rather pursue parallel courses that sometimes dovetail. 

Most BATMAN iterations also maintain a subordinate ensemble, and that ensemble usually consists of icons who are allies to the hero or heroes. GOTHAM has a wealth of such characters, but the show seems unique in that some of its villains who also belong to the subordinate ensemble, in that they're present in most episodes and are woven into major story-lines. This is NOT the case with the ongoing serial comics, even when they utilize long arcs focusing on various criminal figures. 

Some of GOTHAM's ensemble-icons are relatively mundane characters, either derived from the comics (mob boss Carmine Falcone) or created for the teleseries (ambitious lady gangster Fish Mooney). And some villains from the comics are introduced in long arcs that eventually terminate, just as they do in the comics. But from the show's first episode GOTHAM set up its analogues of three comics-villains so that they would enjoy story-arcs that lasted the length of the entire series. These three were Catwoman (a fourteen-year-old street thief who befriends Bruce), Riddler (an eccentric medical examiner who eventually blossoms into a psychopath), and Penguin (a junior mobster who eventually becomes one of the crime bosses of Gotham).

Now, I've usually said that any time a given episode of a serial crosses over two distinct icons, either unbonded or semi-bonded, that counts as a crossover, even when both are regular members of the main hero's "rogue's gallery." However, much of that logic was based on the idea of the crossover being what I've called "dynamic," something that the regular reader does not expect to see on a regular basis. 

A "static" crossover generates a different aesthetic. That's why I went into laborious detail about this type of crossover in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. In AVENGERS #16, three characters who had only been subordinate icons in other features-- Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch-- were transformed into superordinate icons, possessed of stature rather than charisma. But after that first change of status, the membership of the three new inductees becomes something that the reader does expect to see on a regular basis. So as far as those three icons are concerned, only the one issue in which their status changes is a crossover-story.

A loosely similar change in status takes place in the transition of Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman from the comics-pages to GOTHAM. Within the sphere of Batman serial comics, not counting any narratives focused upon the villains as main characters, the trio are all subordinate icons. However, upon transitioning to the GOTHAM serial, they all become members of that show's cast of regular subordinate icons. None of them have stature, but they do have greater charisma than any of the shorter-term villain-adapations, like Hugo Strange and Firefly. But-- to pursue the same aesthetic I put forth with respect to the Avengers, only the first episode of GOTHAM sustains a crossover between those three characters, simply because they all have agency within the story, though none of them literally meet one another in that first episode.

Now, other episodes can be crossovers when they bring any of these characters into proximate contact with other adapted villains from the comics. A second-season arc introduces GOTHAM's version of The Firefly. The TV character has almost nothing to do with the template provided by the comics, not least in that the TV version is female. I would tend to say that Firefly just being in the same story as Penguin and Riddler is not much of a crossover, if it is one at all, specifically because the latter two have been "regularized." 

Yet in the same arc Female Firefly is befriended by Young Catwoman, and the two pull off a robbery together. And at least the specific episodes showing that interaction carry the "dynamic crossover" vibe. 

All this to say that at least the three premiere villains of GOTHAM don't automatically cross over with one another, or with other villains, unless there's a narrative effort to transition past the bond tying the three of them into high-charisma members of the subordinate ensemble.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to add "The Court of Owls," whose presence is only implied in the first episode, but who are later identified as the killers of the Waynes. They, like Penguin, Catwoman, and Riddler, are also "crossovers" only for the first episode, albeit by implication only.