A COUPLE OF EXCEPTIONAL MONSTERS

 In 2020's OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD PT. 3, I formulated an assortment of tropes that described ways in which the four persona-types diverged from their dominant configurations: that "heroes" and "demiheroes" are usually good (that is, beneficial to the society) while "villains" and "monsters" are usually evil (detrimental to the society). Here are a couple more examples of exceptions to the dominant rule.             

   Most of the characters in Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and its film adaptation are easily aligned: all of the denizens of Green Town are demiheroes, while all of the creatures from Mister Dark's carnival are monsters. The one character who's a little difficult to place is that of Tom Fury, the lightning-rod salesman. In the early chapters of WICKED, Bradbury's early chapters don't make Fury seem as mundane as the Green Town citizens; if anything, he talks like some sort of mad prophet when he first addresses Will and Jim. Mad prophets, who represent some order outside the bubble of the society, often if not always align with the tonality of the monster, albeit one that expouses some ideal higher or more unique than the society's dominant moral order. In the book Bradbury disperses Fury's supernatural aura and has him neutralized. Fury succumbs to the carnival's temptations and becomes a dwarf, sort of a lesser monster, and plays no further role in the narrative. But the movie makes Fury the representative of some uncanny power that's never defined, as shown by Dark's attempt to torture him into compliance. The film concludes Fury's arc by having him break free of his bondage and destroy Dark's chief henchwoman the Dust Witch. Even in this arc, Fury is too erratic to register as a hero and too unusual to register as a demihero, and so I list him among my "beneficent monsters."                                             

    Melville's Captain Ahab proves even more difficult to categorize. Like Tom Fury, Ahab's certainly set apart from ordinary whalers who are simply pursuing profit. He's given an "evil" aura merely by sharing the name of a Biblical king who's supposedly one of the foes of God, but his action of hunting the particular whale who maimed Ahab is not "villainous" as such. Melville sometimes confers a certain heroic aura upon Ahab, but if Ahab's quest doesn't have an evil influence upon society, it doesn't have any good impact either. Thus I find that Ahab has become a monster as a result of questing after a monster. Moby Dick's godlike indifference to the suffering he inflicts upon Ahab is mirrored by the whale's hunter (and co-star in the novel). Ahab brings about the deaths of almost everyone on board the Pequod, not least the cabin-boy Pip, with whom Ahab almost regains some of his natural human feeling. He isn't therefore a "good monster" like Tom Fury, though Ahab's aura of tragic waste ennobles him somewhat. At the very least, that aura keeps Ahab from being consigned to the same circle of Hell that contains Doctor Moreau, the Invisible Man and the Baron Frankenstein of the Hammer "Frankenstein" series.                             

NEAR-MYTHS: BATGIRL YEAR ONE (2003)

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl, despite being one of the more iconically recognizable superheroines since her creation in 1966, has not fostered any concrescent myths, at least in her own assorted features. I wouldn't even have re-examined her 2003 opus, BATMAN YEAR ONE (penciled by Marcos Martin and co-written by Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty) if I didn't intend to cross-compare the comics story with a motion-comics video production.                                                           

Naturally, Beatty and Dixon rewrite a lot of things from the original sixties iteration. This Barbara still ventures into her costumed identity without intending to become a costumed crusader full-time, but she's also made previous attempts to become a law enforcer both in the FBI and the Gotham PD, only to be frustrated by height requirements. This Barbara is extremely petite, which may have come about as a rationalization of her hero-name, since it's still politically problematic to call a twenty-something woman a "girl."         

   

She still has her first bout of crimefighting when she encountered the Bat-villain Killer Moth, though the writers can't resist the Alan Moore impulse: to make the naive creations of kid-focused comics look ironic from a "mature" viewpoint. Further, this time the current Batman and Robin (still Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson) don't immediately welcome the newly christened "Batgirl" to their ranks. To the extent that YEAR ONE has a master trope to tie together the serial's episodic structure, it would be the trope of "new hero must pass baptism of fire to win respect."                                                                                                

                                                                                                                     

   

                                                                            
Naturally, the revised origin of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl must also incorporate aspects of her development in the 1970s, when she and Dick Grayson Robin begin a tentative romantic arc. These scenes are cute and certainly better written than the heroine's running battles with Killer Moth, the Moth's new partner Firefly, and various hoods. There are also a handful of heroic guest-stars who just serve to eat up space. The only time YEAR ONE generates sparks occurs at the story, when Batgirl comes up with a novel way to take down the villains' helicopter.                                                                                         

At the story's opening Dixon and Beatty make a reference to the Greek myth of Cassandra, but this myth-tidbit isn't developed into anything. The authors whip the reference out again at the very end, but it's less effective than just the general "prediction" of Barbara's fate as a costumed crusader by itself.                                                                                                          

MYTHCOMICS: "SANTA'S LITTLE HELLION" (JINGLE BELLE #1-2, 1999)

I didn't find but one concrescent Christmas-myth this year. (Grant Morrison, the last two issues of your KLAUS project let me down.) For several years, I had been familiar with the comical character of Jingle Belle, impish daughter of Santa Claus, but I hadn't read her earliest appearances from Oni Press. The two-part story I feature here, whose second part sported the title I'm using for both, was only the second time Paul Dini's character had appeared in a story, though an artist named Lynne Naylor is credited on Wikipedia for having made early concept drawings. Stephen DeStefano penciled the first story as well as this second outing.

One interesting aspect of this tale is that it draws upon a motif I've identified once or twice before: the trope of Santa Claus being "the master of the frozen North."  In the backstory to the main heroine's birth, a frost-creature, the Blizzard Wizard, controls the North Pole and uses his icy foot-soldiers (made of rancid ice-cream) to enslave the Northern elves. When the elves' queen Mirabelle seeks to free her people, the evil Wizard threatens to imprison her.

Enter Kris Kringle, which here is another name Dini uses for Santa, and one I'll use here just for variety's sake. Kris has mastered many of the animals of the arctic or has at least made common cause with them against the Wizard's tyranny, and with their help he invades the frosty fiend's sanctuary and defeats him. The liberated elves swear fealty to Kris by vowing to help him make toys for children, while Queen Mirabelle marries the hulking old fellow.

A century or so later, the only offspring of Kris and Mirabelle has reached her teenaged years, and she's a daddy's girl in reverse, alternately seeking to impress him and to put him down. In the story's first part, Jingle (whose technical full name would be Jingle Kringle) makes a combat-toy to impress her sire, but she fills it with live ammunition-- suggesting at very least a lack of ability to think critically. Then, knowing that Kris is supposed to make an appearance at a department store, she reroutes him to a Hanukah celebration and tries to fill in for him-- though again, in a half-hearted, distracted-teenager manner. However, before she reaches her goal, the Blizzard Wizard makes his move. He creates an ice-storm to sidetrack Jingle, feeding her a line that the bad weather proves that Santa's weather-subduing snow-globe must be malfunctioning. The villain rather easily talks Jingle into bringing him the globe, and while she's on her little jaunt, he uses the device to initiate his re-conquest of the North Pole.

Dini doesn't mean for the reader to think that Jingle is dumb, even though she does dumb things. Rather, a flashback at the start of issue #2 establishes that as a small child (presumably only a few decades old) she has considerable ambivalence about sharing her father with thousands of other children, so she always remains similarly ambivalent about Kris Kringle's mission in life-- meaning that she screws things up because she secretly wants her father to devote all of his attention to her. Conversely, when Kris and Mirabelle discuss their wild child, they conclude that they were too indulgent with her when she was young, so that now, when they attempt to instill discipline in Jingle, she merely resents it and keeps yearning for the happy days when she alone was the center of her parents' world.

And that ends the psychological myth, which I imagine Dini will never alter because it's the source of his comical conflict. But after her father and mother are captured by the Wizard, Jingle gets the chance to emulate her father's feat of defeating the tyrant. This means enlisting the arctic animals as Kris did, although, since Jingle is not as powerful, she ends using more scatterbrained methods...               

 Like dueling with the mammoth king of the narwhals, and winning the duel only because she comes up with the improbable strategy of plugging up the creature's blowhole...

And sending an incompetent assistant to enlist the polar bears, only to gripe when the elf comes back with a bevy of lemmings-- which manage to save the day anyway (not unlike Jingle herself).

The Wizard is defeated, but not surprisingly, she's still in the doghouse for her carelessness. So her "imitatio Santa" fails, but it's questionable as to whether she really wanted to make herself over into her father's image. Indeed, in all the subsequent JINGLE BELLE stories I've read, she just keeps rebelling against Kris's authority in one way or another-- which seems to be the perfect way to keep drawing his attention away from all those other kids. I don't think Dini had any desire to "solve" Jingle's psychological problems, since she's not meant to mature any more than Dennis the Menace. But "Hellion" is one of the few times Dini brought her psychological quirks into line with a metaphysical myth about Santa of the North Pole.    

Since Santa Claus is a legendary figure who possesses charisma rather than stature, the attempt to "spin off" Jingle from his "cosmos" only constitutes a charisma-crossover. However, when a later story featured the bratty elf-girl meeting with the characters of BLUE MONDAY, that tale stands as a stature-crossover. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SCARLET GOSPELS (2015)

I'm glad I got some of my takes on author Clive Barker set down in an earlier essay, so that here I can focus more on the specific problems I had with SCARLET GOSPELS, one of Barker's rare crossovers between two of his icons.

First I'll say that even though GOSPELS isn't well-plotted and its characters are under-realized, Barker succeeds in creating enough of a linear sense of menace that the novel is a decent read, though I don't envision ever wanting to reread it. The criticism I voiced in the earlier essay-- that often Barker's works are just catalogues of sex-and-sadism scenes, without much narrative "glue" to hold them together-- particularly applies here. Because Barker doesn't care about delving into individual characters, he often tosses in new ones without any attention to context. For instance, one of Harry D'Amour's allies is a female body builder, name of Lana. This makes it possible for Barker to throw in a little femme-formidable action. But who is Lana? Is there a story about why her character devoted herself to muscle-building? Not at all, and so even though Barker might have included her as a change from his studiously swishy characters, she comes off as just another "freak flag" getting flown.

This is even more evident with one of Barker's starring icons, Harry D'Amour. D'Amour isn't exactly a well-known figure outside Barker fandom, for the author has only placed the detective in a handful of short stories, one major role in an unfinished novel-series (THE BOOK OF THE ART), and an unsuccessful stand-alone movie, LORD OF ILLUSIONS. Yet Barker wants to play up D'Amour as if he's a fascinating "everyman" (his word) type of character, who becomes enmeshed in occult situations far beyond his means. Barker doesn't arm his detective-hero with any special weapons or skills, so he clearly wanted him to be the sort of protagonist who just muddles through situations far beyond his compass. I for one just found D'Amour terminally dull, and his relationships with his various allies didn't improve his character. D'Amour doesn't really have the mojo to be dealing with the more famous icon of the story, and so he usually comes off as a glorified viewpoint character rather than an icon with his own stature.

There's actually zero reason for D'Amour to be involved in the story of the Cenobite mastermind Pinhead (whose movie-name I'll use for convenience, since Barker's name for him, "The Hell Priest," is cumbersome). Pinhead has a master plan to take control of Hell, and to that end, he spends a lot of time invading the sanctums of mortal magicians to plunder their secrets. One of these forays brings Pinhead into contact with D'Amour, and Pinhead hatches some contrived idea that D'Amour should be the witness of the Cenobite's grand scheme. Thus Pinhead lures D'Amour and a handful of helpers into Hell to witness his grand scheme in action. Said scheme involves the revelation that Satan, after centuries of ruling Hell, committed suicide due to his estrangement from Heaven. Pinhead uses this opportunity to steal Satan's armor, with which he can channel even greater mystical powers and thus take control of the infernal realm. However, for some obscure reason Satan comes back to life when his armor's removed, and the two demons fight. Without giving away too much, Barker seals the fate of his best-known icon here-- and I wouldn't mind that, except that Barker's Hell Priest isn't much more interesting than Harry D'Amour.

I may finally take time to read the original novella on which Barker based his HELLRAISER movie concept, but without question, Pinhead of the movies is far more famous than his prose predecessor, much less this 2015 version. The first HELLRAISER is indubitably Barker's best venture into cinema, just on the strength of his interbreeding between Hell's standard association with suffering and the new idea of demons informed by sadomasochistic obsessions. But I also admired how HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II-- an original story not derived from a Barker story-- created a Hell with a much more impressive visual appearance. Barker may not have wanted to emulate that approach for either legal reasons, aesthetic reasons, or a little of both. But his Hell is utterly routine and visually unimpressive. 

On my movie-blog I've reviewed all eight of the HELLRAISER movies starring Doug Bradley as Pinhead. While only the first two films are better than average, all of them contribute to a fairly consistent cosmos in which Pinhead only intrudes on reality under special conditions and depends on tempting mortals in approved Satanic style. Barker doesn't abide by any particular rules in his book, much less having any deeper appreciation of the deeper myths informing Hell and, by extension, the rest of the Judeo-Christian cosmos. So his idea of a new Gospel is more like a heresy against the superior iconicity of the cinematic HELLRAISER. 

THE READING RHEUM: LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932)

So they looked at the fire with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before.

LIGHT IN AUGUST is definitely the most singular "Christmas" story I've reviewed on this blog, being that it's a highly ironic parody of the story of Jesus Christ set in the rural American South of the 1930s. Despite the fact that the novel is entirely isophenomenal, Faulkner constantly refers to interior states of mind that, like the quote above, suggest some primeval ethos that predates not only the racial matrices of the South but of organized religion as such. LIGHT is also a mystery loosely in the vein of the detective fiction that was becoming a major American genre in the 1930s, but the "mystery" Faulkner aspires to solve relates to the nature of human identity, more in keeping with the "mystery plays" of medieval European Christianity.    

The narratives of three principal characters intertwine to give LIGHT its mythopoeic structure, though many of the supporting characters are no less mythic. One is defrocked Christian minister Gail Hightower, who resides in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi and who lives a lonely existence isolated from the other citizens, aside from one confidante. The other two main figures are relative newcomers to Jefferson. One is the very pregnant hillbilly girl Lena Grove, who has hitchhiked from her home in Alabama, looking for Lucas Burch, the man who knocked her up. The other is the main target of Faulkner's Christological parody, petty criminal Joe Christmas (note the initials), who is also the vehicle of the author's views on the simmering racial matrix of American culture, mostly that of the South though not without some trenchant commentary on the Northern states as well.     

In a use of coincidence that most genre-mysteries would scorn, Lena finds her way to Jefferson by asking passersby if anyone has encountered her not-yet-husband Lucas Burch. Someone tells her to seek a "Burch" working in Jefferson, but the speaker is thinking of a man with a similar last name, Byron Bunch (the minister's one Jefferson confidante), who in most ways is the ethical opposite of Lucas Burch. The coincidental part is that Lucas Burch truly is working in Jefferson as well, but under the assumed name of Joe Brown, possibly to avoid Lena or anyone tracking him down. Burch/Brown has been in Jefferson to enter into a partnership with Joe Christmas, who runs a covert bootlegging operation there.  

Whereas the Jesus Christ of scripture was always sure of his divine parentage no matter what any mortal thought, Joe Christmas was raised an orphan and accused of being half-Black. The reasons behind this accusation constitute a secondary mystery, but the main mystery concerns the apparent murder of a Jefferson citizen, rich Joanna Burden, the spinster daughter of a Yankee abolitionist family. Burden allows Christmas and Brown to dwell on her land because she's carrying on a secret affair with Christmas. When she's killed and her house burned, Brown makes public the rumors of Christmas's racial heritage, the better to enflame the public against the fugitive-- less for his having killed a rich abolitionist than for having slept with a white woman. Further, in the last third of the novel supporting character Epheus Hines reveals his part in the evolution of Christmas' situation, in a development so entangled as to make GREAT EXPECTATIONS seem straightforward.

There are far too many symbolic complexities in LIGHT to explore in a blogpost, far more than one would ever find in a simple novel about racial justice. Faulkner compares Southern Whites' constant persecution of the Negro race with the sufferings of the Christian savior, even though the likeness is ironic given that Joe Christmas is anything but saintly. For Faulkner it's only a small step between societal scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, and Christmas-- whose mixed heritage is never definitively proven-- suffers a martrydom that deeply impresses those who lynch him, as Christmas "seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever." And yet, as noted earlier Faulkner sees the same scapegoating process in the Christianity of the allegedly more liberal North. One of Joanna Burden's ancestors speaks the following convoluted rant about the intertwined destiny of Whites and Blacks in the New World:

The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen because He once cursed Him.

Faulkner leaves this skein tangled, probably because he believes that it represented the confusion of sentiments in American religion. Is the speaker comparing American Blacks to the Bible's "chosen people," the eternally persecuted Jews? Or is "the black man" of the passage comparable to the name Puritan settlers used for Satan, also "The Black Man"-- and if so, is the curse of God (the first "He") the curse that hurled "Him" (Satan/Lucifer) into perdition? Or does the speaker have in mind some muddled notion of the Biblical Curse of Ham by God's prophet Noah, a curse which originally had nothing to do with African Blacks but which was used to justify the subjugation of Black slaves?

And this fraction of Faulknerian analysis doesn't even touch on the author's view of the multitudinous conflicts of male and female natures, which could engender a separate post or two by itself. I'm also skipping most of the details on Gail Hightower and Lena Groves, though as one might expect, nativity myths are implicitly invoked with respect to Lena, with naive Byron Bunch standing in for "cuckolded" Joseph.      

Of the many mythopoeic prose novels out there, literary or otherwise, LIGHT IN AUGUST is one of the densest and most rewarding. It doesn't beat out the champion, Melville's MOBY DICK, but even Herman's own BILLY BUDD looks rather simple next to this Faulkner masterpiece.

                 

MY THOUGHTS ON CLIVE BARKER

 I could write overall evaluations of a lot of writers given that I've read all or most of their repertoires. But I can't do more than make general comments about English horror-writer Clive Barker. I'm currently about to finish SCARLET GOSPELS, which I'll review separately, but what I have finished didn't impress me much-- the 1985 DAMNATION GAME and the 1988 CABAL (reviewed here) and one of his short story collections. I certainly didn't feel that he was "the future of horror" as Stephen King fulsomely claimed decades ago.        

At first, I thought the only thing I didn't like about Barker was that I found most of his characters superficial. Yet I've enjoyed a lot of authors who aren't particularly good at characterization and who depend mostly on "types." But reading GOSPELS makes me realize that a lot of my problems with Barker depend on his heavy dependence on projecting his oft declared S&M fetish into his fiction. This would not be a problem if he was able to make his characters come alive, to sound as if each of them has specific motivations. But without a sense of individual character, Barker's constant barrage of hyperviolence and (usually gay) sexuality becomes wearying and takes me out of his stories. True, I sometimes have the same reaction to the works of Sade, the author whose name begat the term "sadism." But whenever I enter Sade's world, I know in advance that sex-and-violence scenarios are pretty much all he offers.                 

In my review of the last firm that Barker both wrote and directed, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, I remarked that the Barker stories I've read don't "hold together" because of his lack of ability to empathize with the world of ordinary people, in contrast to the occult demimonde in which his characters move. I have not read the story Barker used as the source of his movie HELLRAISER, but I note that in the movie Barker did an admirable job of showing how the ordinary folks Kirsty and her father get trapped in the bizarre domain of the Cenobites and their votaries. Yet Barker also scores fairly low in the realm of imaginative play when he's not depicting his sadism scenes, as the version of Hell he depicts in GOSPELS is not nearly as interesting as the one in the HELLRAISER sequel that was given to two other raconteurs, Tony Randel and Peter Atkins.                        

In conclusion, there's some irony that Barker is just as hemmed-in by his dependence on his demimonde tropes as a more conservative creator-- say, Frank Capra-- might be by his concentration on tropes of middle-class life. The moral of the story might then be, as Captain Kirk sagely said, that "too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing."                                           

COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

CURIOSITIES #40: WONDER WOMAN'S "NEW GOLDEN AGE"

 

In WONDER WOMAN #156 (1965), editor/writer Robert Kanigher endeavored to goose sales by announcing a "New Golden Age" for the heroine. This brief reboot of the low-rated WW series only lasted about eight more issues, in which the words "Golden Age" would often be used on covers or splash pages. Kanigher revived a smattering of villains introduced by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s, and he even had his regular artists, Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, emulate the drawing-style of the feature's original artist H.G. Peter. Once sales came in, probably indicating little if any improvement, Kanigher and the artists largely went back to what they'd been doing on the title in years previous.

One might think that Kanigher, who was himself a graduate of the Golden Age hard-knocks school, might have been able to capture something of the resonance of the Marston series. Indeed, for some years after Marston's passing, Kanigher even wrote scripts for Peter before DC gave the older artist his walking-papers. Since I haven't read every Kanigher WW script from his run of twenty-plus years, I can't make a decisive statement about why the feature began to lose readers over time, and I can't even say when the decline began. But my considered opinion is that Kanigher generally imitated the daffier aspects of Marston's scripts-- things like having Amazons riding kangaroos-- but he couldn't deliver on the heartfelt meaning that Moulton conveyed in his scripts. I'm not saying that any of Moulton's 1940s readers were necessarily converted to his unique feminist philosophy, or even that those readers understood what Moulton was talking about. But young readers are often attracted by the sense of an author's conviction in his principles, as long as he makes those principles into good stories. That's something Moulton was often able to do, in contrast to the modern generation of Progressive political comics-writers.

In summation, I think Kanigher looked around at the sales success of other DC revivals of Golden Age characters-- one of whom, THE FLASH, Kanigher had written at the dawn of the Silver Age, circa 1956. But the FLASH stories produced by dominant writer John Broome did possess a strong conviction in the types of science fiction and fantasy appropriate to juvenile audiences. In contrast, Kanigher writing a WW script in 1965 wasn't much different than a WW script in 1956: almost non-stop wackiness with a small moral sop tossed in. Kanigher looked at the success of some (though not all) of the Julius Schwartz line of DC magazines, and he thought all one had to do was mindlessly emulate the outward form of Golden Age stories-- which was exactly what the Schwartz line did NOT do. It's at least of passing interest that 1965 was the same year as the first full comic-book convention in New York, which is probably why Kanigher worked in a lot of references to the comic-collecting hobby in #156.

BTW, the fact that I have no comments on the featured "novel," "Brain Pirate of the Inner World," should be enough to signify my opinion of it.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE TALE OF THE CLAWS OF ATHENS" (UNICO, 1978?)

I copied these scans from a 2013 edition of the eight stories Osamu Tezuka completed for his series UNICO, about a hapless little unicorn consigned to travel from era to era, where he solves the problems of innocents like himself. Without further information, I assume that the translated stories are unaltered from the 1976-79 originals, aside from translation choices and the addition of color. 

While I've reviewed some of Tezuka's more ambitious works here, UNICO is a serial devoted to one overarching plotline that loosely unites eight done-in-one stories. Of those stories, only one satisfies my criteria for a mythcomic, so I'll devote most of my critique to the tale with the odd title CLAWS OF ATHENS.

The structure of the series slightly resembles the American show THE TIME TUNNEL, in which the protagonists were thrust into a new environment in every episode. Venus, the Greek goddess of love, resents the way the locals value the younger deity Psyche over her, and Psyche thinks that Psyche's power stems from having a pet unicorn, Unico. Venus calls upon the West Wind, telling the spirit to transport the young unicorn to another era, where Psyche can never find her pet. In whatever era Unico appears, he loses his memory of all past events, recollecting only his name and the fact that his magical powers are enhanced whenever someone shows Unico kindness and/or love. And every time Unico finishes helping some marginalized person-- or trying to, at least-- the West Wind shows up and transports the unicorn to his next adventure. Only in the last one is suggested that Unico may be able to be reunited with Psyche.

CLAWS is interesting in that though it invokes the story of the Sphinx and her riddle, almost nothing about the associated Oedipus narrative proves important. Unico gets deposited in a desert where the Sphinx dwells. (Possibly Tezuka was thinking more about the Thebes in Egypt than the one where the Sophocles play transpires.) The monstrous female tries to subject the amnesia-stricken child to questions, but the exhausted Unico simply collapses. The Sphinx interprets this failure as her victory and takes the unicorn to her lair to feed to her only offspring, Piro. 

Piro doesn't care for meat and lets Unico go. However, Unico gets turned around in the desert and ends up back at the lair. The unicorn learns that in his absence, the sage Oedipus accepted the Sphinx's challenge. He correctly guessed the answer to the riddle and used the wish he won to slay the Sphinx. (In some Greek stories the monster kills itself, but apparently there are variants wherein Oedipus does the dirty deed.) On the verge of death, the Sphinx asks Unico to help Piro become a healthy, powerful Sphinx.

Oedipus is mentioned in passing once more, but CLAWS is all about Piro's pedagogical journey, the "claws" symbolizing the young monster's ability to be aggressive. Unico, despite his own youth, is a pretty severe taskmaster, but Piro is dilatory and self-indulgent. 

Then we finally learn why Tezuka worked in a reference to Athens, because the bulk of the story from then on is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. We never see Athens itself, only "Athens Forest," where the elf queen Titania reigns with her husband Oberon. Titania wants to make Piro her pet, and when Unico puts his spade in, the queen gets her henchman Puck to trap the busybody unicorn. With Unico out of the way, Piro gives in to his worst instincts, inflated with self-importance.

Even while Unico is out of the picture, though, Oberon meets Piro and gives the Sphinx the same message Unico, telling him to "make yourself stronger." Humiliated, Piro tells Titania that he wants to leave, and she places on him the curse of Bottom in the Bard's play: making an ass of him. Oberon, tired of his wife's high-handed ways, gets into a fight with her. Meanwhile, ass-Piro seeks out Unico. Unico tells him to fetch an axe from a nearby mortal's cabin, but not to touch anything else. Once again Piro's self-indulgence gets the better of him; he filches some of the mortal's food gets captured and sold to a donkey-skinner.

Unico makes a deal with Puck, and the elf frees the unicorn. However, before they can find Piro, the West Wind obeys one of Venus' chimerical orders and comes to transport Unico to another realm. To the unicorn's good fortune, night is about to fall, and the Night Wind's power trumps that of the West Wind.

Puck gets the ides to run an impersonation scam on Oberon, so that he'll cancel out Titania's spell. Much Midsummer's tomfoolery ensues, but Titania finally removes the spell. Restored to Sphinx-hood, Piro finally stands up for himself against a pack of savage dogs. Having at last honored the wishes of his mother, Piro also plans to build a great statue to her-- but then the West Wind returns and spirits Unico away to his next exploit.

The rest of the stories in the collection are all good melodrama, but CLAWS is the only one where Tezuka manages to work a good epistemological pattern into his very eclectic approach to three unrelated narratives.

NEAR-MYTHS: "EUSTACE THE TURKEY" (THE SPIRIT, 1943)

I'm aware of no fully mythic Thanksgiving stories. But Will Eisner managed a cute near-myth with a tale of a turkey who is seemingly spared his grisly holiday fate, but who ends up sacrificing his life to save his fellow birds (sort of). Strangely, Eisner does not make the predictable comparison to the Nazarene, but to-- that gloomy Dane, Hamlet?

Just for good measure, here's a bit from GIGGLE COMICS in which an endangered turkey pleads for the main cat-hero to become his "Lincoln."

CURIOSITES #39: RADIATION REVELS

I've been a little curious lately as to when comic books began making sustained use of the fantasy-trope that radiation can cause either (1) modifications in infants at conception or in the womb, or (2) spontaneous changes in fully grown entities. In prose science fiction, the trope has been traced back to the late twenties and early thirties.

So far the earliest examples I've found appear in 1944. One is in a YOUNG ALLIES story, wherein a Nazi agent is mutated by radium exposure and changes into an atomic powerhouse who's variously referred to as both "The Green Death" and "The Radium Man."

By an interesting coincidence, 1944 also gave us the short-lived jungle girl strip, JUN-GAL, whose star gains super-strength from exposure to natural radium. There's no mention as to why the Black natives in her tribe fail to get similarly empowered.

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

INTERRUPTED MEDLEY

I'm putting a short hold on the next EVIL post, to respond to a comment by AT-AT Pilot in the comments to Part 2. One of his two references included a link to a post on the EDUCATED IMAGINATION blog, excepting a section from one of Northrop Frye's essays, albeit one devoted entirely to the Christian religion he practiced, and not to the literary works he more often analyzed. 

In an argument against the social tendencies toward literal readings of Biblical passages, Frye says in part:

In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only itself to itself. How do we know the Gospel is true? Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the prophecies of the Old Testament are true? Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel. Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament? None really, and the writers of the New Testament obviously preferred it that way. As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase “word of God,” as applied both to the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. In proportion as the presence behind disappears, it becomes identified with the book, and the phrase begins to make sense. As we continue to study the significance of the fact that the Bible is a book, the sense of presence shifts from what is behind the book to what is in front of it. (CW 4, 82-6)

I like to think I fully understand Frye's point in stressing the circular nature of the Bible-- and possibly, by extension, of most or all other religions. However, Christianity in particular has encouraged some degree of literalism in its discourse, not least as a result of grounding many events of Scripture in the perspective of a linear history. True, the Bible does not offer the sort of close chronicling of minutiae that readers today expect of "history." Further, many narratives in the Bible that purport to relate historical events are disputed by the evidence assembled by modern historiography. Yet it's unquestionable that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, centered all narratives within a *simulacrum* of linear history. 

Thus, certain key events happen in a straight line; the Jewish captivity in Egypt always precedes Rome's dominance of Judaea, for example. The Biblical writers tie all these events together with the repetition of religious images or tropes, as Frye says-- but the use of history is meant to convince the unconverted of the vastness of God's scheme for humankind. All three "religions of the Book" profited enormously from grounding their religious narratives within the sphere of "real" history. 

Reading the Frye excerpt coincides with my having read another chapter of Bataille's LITERATURE AND EVIL-- and, as in Part 2 of my essay-series, I find myself again endorsing Bataille's view over Frye's. In a chapter devoted to William Blake, Bataille agrees with Blake's idea that "Poetic Genius is the true Man," Bataille extended that statement, contending that "there is nothing in religion that cannot be found in poetry." The chapter's main point concerns Bataille taking issue with a particular Jungian scholar who, in Bataille's opinion, sought to reduce Blake's narratives to Jungian paradigms. Blake, who disputed any philosophy that smacked of idealism, concocted an interesting take on how Poetry "destroys immediate reality" yet "admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego."

Though poetry does not accept sense-data in their naked state, it is by no means always contemptuous of the outer world. Rather, it challenges the precise limitations of objects between themselves, while admitting their external nature. It denies and it destroys immediate reality because it sees in it the screen which conceals the true face of the world from us. Nevertheless poetry admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego. Blake’s lesson is founded on the value in itself, extrinsic to the ego, of poetry. -- LITERATURE AND EVIL.

For Bataille, then, Poetry subordinates but does not negate all "real-world referentiality." I would say that, even though I don't concur with Bataille that Poetry and Religion are consubstantial, Religion follows the same dynamic, in which even linear history is subsumed by the vision of godhood continually interacting with mortals confined within, but not limited to, that history. If I wanted this essay to go on forever, I'd bring in the ways "real-world referentiality" also takes in the endorsement of specific, work-oriented goals, found in both religion and literature.

Next, back to considerations about taste, sadism, and perceptions of evil.

 

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 2

In Part 1, I stated that Northrop Frye wasn't an influence on my own literary theories of "work and play," but George Bataille certainly was, even though most of what he wrote on that pair of concepts concerned his view of anthropology and religion, not literature. Yet he certainly transferred his concept of "religious transgression" to the world of literature. In 1957 that he wrote in EROTISM that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it," and an analogous idea appears in LITERATURE AND EVIL, published the same year:

Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good. Death is the punishment, sought and accepted for this mad dream, but nothing can prevent the dream from having been dreamt." -- p. 21.

Though I don't consider LITERATURE AND EVIL one of the better books on literature-- it compiles eight essays on particular authors Bataille admired for incarnating his ideas on "literary evil"-- EVIL did greatly influence me to consider that every conflict in a fictional story involved a transgression against someone or something, and that's as good a reason to use Bataille to approach the question posed to me, "Is it possible for literature to be 'evil?'" (And by the bye, Bataille's sense of an interpenetration between Good and Evil is what conjured forth my Miltonian essay-title.)

I don't believe that anyone ever has, or ever will, formulate a definition of evil as such, which any tenable theory of "literary evil" would require. But Bataille's definition is at least a good starting-point. In his very short preface, he states:

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'

Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

His idea of "hypermorality" probably explains why he's not overly concerned with many of the lesser forms of evil that ordinary morality inveighs against: specifically, those centered in self-interest. In his initial essay, whose main subject is Emily Bronte (and her sublime evildoer Heathcliff), Bataille privileges Evil as the deliberate enjoyment of suffering beyond the considerations of personal advantage.

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Obviously, a lot of literature engages in moralistic polemic against the evils of self-interest in all its forms-- though polemicists like Frederic Wertham are well-versed in dismissing any such moralizing as being no more than a protective cover, the better for those pundits to attack literature they deem "morally noxious." So Bataille is in the end not offering a general definition of evil, but of a specifically form of Evil that he associated with the sovereign values of literature as a whole. 

Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature, and therefore it serves as a counterbalance to the views of the pundits. For them, all evil is defined by self-interest, and sadistic thrills are just part of that package-- which is why Wertham constantly conflated readers wanting sadistic thrills and publishers wanting to make money off those customers. For Wertham, the taboo exists only to prevent the transgression, and Good never dreams of Evil in any fashion. Yet Wertham's own altruism is compromised and implicated in self-interest when he's caught cooking his casebooks, or even just making insubstantial arguments.

Bataille's idea that "Sadism is Evil" requires separate consideration from his overall definition of Evil in Literature, and Part 3 will touch on that topic, as well as the age-old question, "When an artist shows a thing, is he endorsing it?"