NOTES ON NUGATORY FICTION

 I'm not heading these observations under "The Reading Rheum" because the novel in question-- THE DARK FOFEST, second part of a trilogy by Chinese writer Cixin Liu-- was so terrible that I couldn't do more than spot-read it. Based on the reputation of the trilogy-- which begat a current streaming series, THE THREE BODY PROBLEM-- I probably would never have even attempted a read. But I'm in a book group, and other members wanted to read it, so I wanted to become at least moderately conversant with the content. So this is less an analysis than a rant.

I had a similar experience trying to plow through the first book, THREE BODY PROBLEM, which sets up the main conflict. An alien civilization, named "The Trisolarans" by Earthpeople, plots to exterminate the Earth's population. They have sent a fleet to destroy the world, but they also seek to "soften the Earthlings up" with "sophon-particles." With these particles, the aliens can monitor every possible defense the planet can muster. Fortunately for the humans, a brilliant Chinese scientist detects broadcasts by the aliens and begins mounting theoretical strategies. But they have to be careful not to do anything that the Trisolarans can monitor.

So PROBLEM is an empty exercise in which the main conflict doesn't come close to resolution in that novel but is put off for the next two, which take place over ensuing decades. THE DARK FOREST is the second of these overhyped potboilers, and some reviews thought it the best of the trilogy. For me it was just more of the same.

Since the days of science fiction's early development in the early 20th century, the genre has been tasked, not unfairly, for producing narratives in which some scientific concept is explicated at length by an expert in biology, cosmology or whatever to some fascinated audience, in theory the stand-ins for the readers. The century was characterized by a pushback against that image, as writers sought various ways to use either poetic or naturalistic language to overcome the specter of the dreaded "information download."

Yet something changed about a lot of the science fiction of the 21st century, at least from my point of view. Many of the most celebrated SF writers began to use their novels as political podiums. There had been considerable political content in a lot of 20th-century works, but most of them tried to tie the ideology to stories with some genre-content: espionage, war, romance. This ensured that readers could enjoy the stories as genre-exercises even if they disagreed with the ideological content.

FOREST is a book with nothing but ideological content, expoused by characters more paper-thin than anything in Ray Cummings (a 1920s writer, who wasn't good but was still more readable than Cixin Liu). Liu throws in various phony-baloney impostures of character interplay, but he hasn't the slightest ability to create organic fictional figures. Ironically, in an early chapter, two writers discuss how to create good characters like those of "Shakespeare and Balzac and Tolstoy." One writer tells the other that the way they did so was to imagine the characters so strongly that they seemed to be real. This is stupid beyond all words, even if Liu covers his drivel by claiming that this approach runs converse to the movements of "postmodernism" and "deconstruction"-- movements which have their own problems but may not be nearly as dull as Liu.

Since I didn't read the book cover to cover, I can't speak to Liu's ideology, though I don't believe he really renounces Marxism or the Chinese Communist Party. But the true ideological appeal of Liu is probably not Communism per se, but the culture of China in all its historical manifestations. I speculate that this is the main appeal of the trilogy. Most readers of the 21st century have never read Chinese authors, not even the more recent celebrated literary works like Mo Yan's 1987 RED SORGHUM. (I have, and by virtue of brevity alone it's better than anything Liu has written.) So Liu wrote a big long science fiction story in which nothing is resolved in the first two books, and to me it appears the trilogy has no virtue but allowing audiences to see what science fiction would look like from the POV of a Chinese writer.

One minor benefit of the trilogy is that once or twice Liu clownishly works in a few pop-fiction references which are just as superficial as his characters. In one such reference, a character states that next to the Trisolarans, humans are like "the Flintstones." In the same chapter there's a confused dialogue that brings up the movie-version of Superman, and one character thinks it hilarious to think that "Superman" broke his back in a horse-riding incident, even though another person of course makes the correction that it was just the actor who had played the superhero. There may some ideological content here, since three or four times, characters disavow any claim to being "supermen" of any kind. But then there's a weird moment where another character changes himself into a "human bomb"-- that is, securing an explosive to his body so that no one can touch him-- and even references, in his dialogue, the episode of the 1950s SUPERMAN teleseries, "The Human Bomb," for God only knows what reason.  

MYTHCOMICS: DELIRIUS (1972)

Phillippe Druillet's best known character, "Lone Sloane," debuted in 1972 and soon became one of French comics' leading misanthropic protagonists. I've not read the character's very first adventure but recently read the half-dozen stories collected in "Les Six Voyages de Lone Sloane." That title may have been meant to invoke the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and in fact the last story in this series briefly references the forthcoming events of DELIRIUS, so in that context one could view the longer story as Sloane's seventh voyage.

The six stories are erratically plotted, usually dropping the hero into this or that dire situation, which is usually resolved in some elliptical fashion. Sloane is established as some sort of "rebel" opposed to his own people, the descendants of Earthmen who have colonized the usual endless galaxies. The hero is entirely self-interested, ruthless about dealing with anyone who gives him crap, and looks like an ordinary man, except for having red eyes. The stories are largely just excuses for Druillet to exercise his fabulous design sense, filling pages with titanic spaceships and robots, towering buildings with weird baroque architecture, and a variety of grotesque aliens. I assume that Druillet wrote all the short tales himself, but for the longer DELIRIUS, he teamed up with one Jacques Lob, which gave the resulting story more of a conventional plot.

Sloane and the crew of his ship, the "O Sidharta," have long been in the disfavor of the reigning Galactic Emperor Shaan, but lately they've also been dogged by other ships. Sloane and his second-in-command, a Martian named Yearl, figure out that the newcomers belong to a priesthood named the Red Redemption that dwells on Delirius, the pleasure planet. Delirius began as a barren world that was useless for colonization. (The above panorama shows a large replica of an astronaut's suit on display, and any high ideals that it might have signified have been undercut by the bird poop covering the helmet.) Shaan therefore structured Delirius into a casino-world, whose only purpose is to separate jaded citizens from their money, thus swelling the emperor's coffers. 

The Red Priests confer with Sloane. They want him to help them steal the treasure-trove of Delirius from the clutches of Governor Kadenborg. The priests claim that they want to overthrow both Kadenborg and Sloane's enemy Shaan, but Sloane has heard that they work a protection racket on the businesses of Delirius, so their word isn't worth much. Nevertheless, the payoff tempts Sloane, and he agrees. He and Yearl begin a reconnaissance on the pleasure planet, but they're almost immediately betrayed by the priests and imprisoned.

Almost as quickly, the two thieves are also liberated by an unknown benefactor.  They escape prison in a ship and take refuge in "The Gluon," a dry ocean-bed where Delirius deposits all of its garbage. (I assume the name is an ironic reference to a quantum physics term, coined in 1962, for a type of subatomic particle.) This visit is a brief one, probably just an excuse for Druillet to draw a big trash-heap. Agents of the mysterious benefactor show up to give the duo clothes, but no information on their boss's motives. 

Sloane and Yearl wander around rather aimlessly, which gives Druillet the chance to draw more exotic stuff, like various combatants in arena-games and "mystical masochists," though neither has anything to do with the main story. Another of their peregrinations takes them into a building designed to homage M.C. Escher, where they meet a prostitute named Saarah. 

But this meeting is not coincidental; Saarah works for the Red Redemption. The reader finally gets an explanation for the reason the priests betrayed Sloane and Yearl to the cops: that they knew the duo would be tagged by "the intuitives" (whoever they are) and so the priests stage-managed both the capture and liberation of their partner-pawns. By having the Earthman and the Martian become fugitives, the priests made it possible for them to penetrate Delirius.

Sloane, however, figures out that the Red Priests want to use him and his crew as fall guys, so that they can topple Kadenborg and take his place under the Emperor's aegis, rather than seeking to end the corruption of Delirius. Sloane therefore cooperates with them on heisting the treasure, but chooses his own game plan, bearding the governor in his den. (Kadenborg, incidentally, is drawn to look like a sort of "blob-man," making him a E.T. version of a "fat cat.") 

In the end, though Sloane secures for himself and his crew a large portion of the haul, he also contributes to the downfall of a world devoted only to filthy lucre: by allowing some of the "credos" to fall to the planet's surface, everyone on Delirius starts to fight over "literal free money." (Writer Lob might have mentioned that this is the implicit promise of all of the world's gambling-dens, but maybe he considered it implicit.) As Sloane and his crew escape with the Emperor's money, Sloane distances his pecuniary mission from that of the priests' alleged desire for revolution.

This pseudo-revolution is no benefit to anyone, except those who want to take advantage of the chaos and snatch a bigger piece of the pie.

Lob and Druillet may have patterned DELIRIUS after the still popular spaghetti westerns of the period. In most of these movies, the hero is a badass who similarly resorts to stealing huge sums of money from corrupt regimes, often with the help of cohorts who plan to betray him, thus justifying his cutting them out of the bounty. If he helps the downtrodden, it's usually by dumb luck, since the spaghetti-hero is out for himself alone. Many of these flicks might be deemed "indirect revolutionary propaganda," since they justify striking back at entrenched interests, even if the protagonist's motive is making money. Sloane's final lines suggest that he's more of a disillusioned idealist, since he gained his fame for having rebelled against the emperor, though I doubt he ever caught the idealism-bug in earlier or later adventures.

As a minor point of literary history, it might not be coincidence that the name of Sloane's Martian buddy "Yearl" resembles that of "Yarol," the Venusian accomplice of C.L. Moore's "space western" hero Northwest Smith. The Moore stories were written in the 1930s but reprinted in the early 1950s. Thus it's not impossible that Lob or Druillet read some or all of the Smith stories and, consciously or not, paid homage to an earlier space-badass. 

   

THE FIRST TIME I SAW ALFRED (DIE)

 

I don't remember where I recently heard someone bring up DC's possible reasons for letting editor Julie Schwartz kill off the faithful butler Alfred in 1964, but it was probably in a podcast like this one. The cited podcast reports, but does not credence, the idea that Schwartz was in any way worried about the alleged problems of having three men live alone in Wayne Manor, which had been raised by Wertham in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT ten years before. Allegedly, the story goes, Schwartz immediately brought in Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet to occupy the mansion, so that her feminine presence would allay suspicions about any hanky-panky between Bruce and Dick.

This unfounded theory intrigued me enough to blow an hour or so scanning an online pirate site for all the Schwartz issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS after the introduction of Aunt Harriet and up until the revival of Alfred, and guess what?

Auntie's hardly in most of the stories. If anything, she was usually just seen serving dinner for a few panels, if that, and she had far less interaction with Bruce and Dick than the character in the BATMAN teleseries did. The comic-book Aunt Harriet didn't know the secret identities of the millionaire and his ward, but if Schwartz had any idea of having Harriet, through intention or accident, endanger the heroes' clandestine activities, he didn't follow through. There's exactly one story wherein Harriet suspects that her charges might be the Dynamic Duo. But when she's proven wrong through the usual shenanigans, the matter is never raised again. After Alfred's brought back to life and returns to Wayne Manor, there's a moment in which Harriet plans to leave, but Bruce and Dick talk her into staying. They needn't have bothered, for though Schwartz remained editor for about fifteen more years, even he didn't bother insisting on her presence, and she just faded into the woodwork.

In addition, Schwartz barely took advantage of an easy way to counter homosexual suspicions: by giving the two heroes heterosexual relationships. Fans will never know if this was the reason for the introduction of various female presences during the Batman-run of editor Jack Schiff-- pesky photographer Vicky Vale in 1948, Batwoman in 1956, and Bat-Girl in 1961. Yet the way Batwoman and Bat-Girl were paired off with Batman and Robin respectively gave some credence to the "Placate Wertham Theory," as did the long exile of Catwoman from DC comics due to Wertham's complaints about her. When Schwartz took over both Bat-books in 1964, he dumped all the rotating Schiff characters-- but that didn't mean he couldn't have come up with one or two token girlfriends to take the place of the Schiff Sirens. 

Schwartz's intention to focus on the "detective" angle of Batman's persona resulted in a lot of stories with almost zero female presence. Occasionally Batman and Robin would help out some poor pitiful damsel whose boyfriend was in peril somewhere, but really-- if there had been homosexual readers who wanted to fantasize a "wish dream" of Batman and Robin together, it would have been easy to ignore Aunt Harriet's nearly nugatory presence to facilitate such fantasies.

There was one early, almost half-hearted attempt to make a romance possible, but for Bruce Wayne rather than Batman. In BATMAN #165 (1964), Batman meets a serious young policewoman, Patricia Powell, who discloses to the masked hero that she has a thing for Bruce Wayne, even though she's only seen the handsome millionaire from afar. This short tale, and a follow-up in the next issue, tease the reader with what may happen when Patricia finally gets the chance to meet her idol face to face. But Schwartz evidently lost interest in the idea, for the second story doesn't even resolve its "what happens when they meet" cliffhanger. 

Not until after 1966, when Alfred was back and Harriet was slowly on her way out, did the two Bat-features begin re-emphasizing female characters. Some became established members of the mythos, like Poison Ivy, the second Batgirl, and a revived Catwoman. Others only appeared only once or twice, like Alfred's niece Daphne Pennyworth, for whom Robin briefly had a thing, but were still more memorable than the Schwartz "damsels" from the first couple of years. (Incidentally, the backstory of Niece Daphne was possibly recycled into that of the Batgirl in the 1997 BATMAN AND ROBIN.) The slow increase in memorable Bat-females after 1966 was probably the reaction of Schwartz, or one of his superiors, to the success of the teleseries that year, that it was a good idea to include a few more charismatic females, as the TV show did. 

So my laborious answer to the "Aunt Harriet" question is that if Schwartz had some hope that her presence would inspire good detective stories, that hope was dashed, because most of the scripts just shunted the old lady off to the side. Schwartz may not have had any strong reason for getting rid of Alfred, who in the past had proved quite useful to Bat-writers seeking to craft detective-stories. But rather than having some arcane fear about "three men living together," Schwartz probably just wanted another means of divorcing his regime from that of his predecessor. The fact that Alfred didn't just get written out like Vicky, Batwoman and Bat-Girl was probably a sop to those fans who would have complained had the faithful butler simply vanished.  

THE READING RHEUM: THE GIRL IN THE TOWER (2017)

 

I was stoked enough by Katherine Arden's THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE to invest time in the second part of the trilogy. Though I've been a member of a couple of book groups for years, giving me exposure to various authors of the current century, it's been extremely rare that I've liked the first novel in any trilogy enough to follow up on its next chapters.

THE GIRL IN THE TOWER follows immediately on the events of NIGHTINGALE, focusing upon the exploits of protagonist Vasya Petrovna, a young woman seeking to chart her own destiny. Vasya is forced to depart from the township she's occupied with her family for her entire life, and to strike out on her own, in part because her talent for seeing the spirits of households and woodlands have caused her people to label her a witch. Of course, having consorted with Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, also puts Vasya somewhat beyond the pale of ordinary experience. Her adventures implicitly have a modern feminist subtext, in that Vasya does not wish to be confined to the only two dispositions of young women in medieval Russia: lawful marriage or the convent. Yet, in marked contrast to the majority of feminist writers, Arden causes the reader to identify with Vasya's plight on a personal level, rather than using the heroine as a chess-piece to illustrate an ideology.

Unfortunately, other characters in TOWER have less organic substance than Vasya, and many of them exist largely to play limited roles in the "game" of the novel. Possibly I had this reaction because in NIGHTINGALE, Arden conjured forth a rich tapestry of Vasya's home life and her relations with all of her family members, even with the history of the mother who died birthing her. In addition, the woodlands around the township seemed alive with strange spirits, and dominated by an ongoing conflict between the demonic "Bear" of the title and his brother-deity Morozhko. 

In TOWER, though, Arden places her heroine in a position where her supernatural gifts are at a disadvantage. Because medieval Russia exercises Muslim-like restrictions on the freedoms of women-- which is what the metaphor of "the girl in the tower" references, rather than any particular event in the narrative-- Vasya can only seek her destiny by masquerading as a boy. In this guise, circumstances force her to visit Moscow, where she encounters two of her family members, a brother and sister, who have become highly placed in the court of the current Tsar. Though in NIGHTINGALE the brother was strongly sketched even though he only appeared in a few early chapters, this time he has no character-arc beyond reacting to Vasya's predicaments. Additionally, Konstantin, a secondary villain of the first novel, appears in TOWER as well, but his development is also superficial.

I complained in my first review that the principal opponent was not well defined, and this is even more so of TOWER's main villain, who unlike the Bear is fairly well-known in major Russian folktales: the sorcerer Koschei the Deathless. Arden accurately reproduces the primary story-tropes associated with the character, but he never comes alive, least when the author tries to tie him into the mysterious maternal side of Vasya's family. Yet once Arden finally gets all of her chess-pieces in the positions needed for the big climax, she does deliver a killer conclusion, with a "eucatastrophe" perfectly in line with Tolkien's theory about the purpose of fantasy.

At some point I will probably read the third book in the trilogy. I speculate that its strongest myth-trope will be the same as that of the first two books: that of the relationship between involving the impossible relationship of Vasya and the Spirit of Death, inhuman, and yet given a patina of humanity by his contact with the young woman. 

CROSSING GODS PT. 3

 Following directly upon my comment at the end of Part 2--

In formulating my definition of an "internal alignment" crossover, I'm again only concerned with the interrelationship between nominative and innominate icons in modern fiction, but I'm not discussing the interaction of different icon-cosmoses, but with substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos.

I've already touched on two examples of such alterations in the essay PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4. In the 1952 movie THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, King Solomon is "deposed" from his Prime position in the Old Testament in favor of a romance between the titular queen and Solomon's handsome young son. In the 2004 NOAH, because the patriarch didn't have a "villain" to drive a film-narrative, the writers imported an icon from another section of the Old Testament, Tubal Cain, to serve in that capacity.

Two other interesting examples are both cinematic versions of CLASH OF THE TITANS. Both movies attempt to emulate a number of familiar tropes from the Perseus legend, but they import figures from other Greek narratives having nothing to do with Perseus. As I discussed in my review of the 1981 movie, that script edged out the character of Hera and built up the character of Thetis, Mother of Achiles. More memorably, since this was a Harryhausen production, Perseus does not fly with the aid of Hermes' magic shoes, but on the back of Pegasus, freely borrowed from the narrative of Bellerophon. 

The 2010 CLASH, reviewed here, arguably delves into even more "cosmic" waters, situating Perseus within a war of gods between Perseus' negligent father Zeus and the malefic Hades, God of the Dead. So both of these films mingle the alignments of differing innominate myth-tales within the widespread cosmos of Greek myth.

Parenthetically, both films used the name "Kraken" for the giant monster Cetus from the original Perseus narrative. But there's no attempt to make the creature homologous with the Norse beastie, so the use of that name does not constitute any sort of "cross-alignment."

CROSSING GODS PT. 2

 Like the earlier CROSSING GODS, this essay will focus mostly upon how different forms of literary works, whether nominative or innominate (as explained here), utilize deific icons.

As noted in the cited essay, innominate texts are those whose "history is hard to determine." So even the earliest texts available to us testifying as to the history of Zeus or Enki or Thor are not necessarily the first appearances of those deities, in the way that we can be totally certain that the first appearance of Marvel Comics' Thor was JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83. So the Thor of the Prose Edda is an innominate figure, even if the author tries to claim that he was just a human being descended from Priam of Troy, while Marvel's Thor is nominative, "able to accurately named."

Now, a nominative icon may emulate many of the tropes associated with an innominate original. In archaic texts, Thor isn't always the star of every story in which he appears, but he is for all of the Thor stories appearing in the MIGHTY THOR feature. And just as Thor is a nominative character based upon an innominate one, the same holds true for all the support-cast icons who derive from archaic stories. Further, these Subs are aligned with Prime icon Thor as much as his rogues' gallery of villains.

However, icons who do not derive from the Norse mythos of the archaic Thor cannot be fully subsumed by his cosmos. I've already referenced some of the differing ways the character of Hercules was brought into the Marvel Universe-- first as a one-off character in an AVENGERS issue, and then as a more long-lived iteration that was probably planned to be launched as a Prime at some future time. 

But Thor crossing over with another deific "cosmos" stands as a crossover even if the new icon never appears again. For instance, in THOR #301 Marvel premiered its version of the Hindu god Shiva, who naturally was given some reason to go toe-to-toe with the Thunder God. I think it's safe to speculate that none of the people associated with that story planned to use Shiva again. Had there been any such intention, that plan would have been squelched by reader-protests to the effect that it was inappropriate to feature a fictional version of a still-worshipped deity alongside a fictionalized Norse god. FWIW, Marvel editors did a retcon claiming that the entity who had fought Thor in that issue was actually "Indra," a Vedic divinity whose worship seems well and truly dead.

I touched on this type of crossover at the end of CROSSING GODS PART 1, discussing a paperback fantasy-series, "The Iron Druid Chronicles." The Prime icon of this series was a modern-day druid who was still in contact with all the ancient religious entities of Celtic myth and legend, and so I judged that all of those Celtic entities were Subs to that hero's Prime, just as Odin and Heimdall and Loki are all Subs to Thor. But just as Shiva was a "crossover god" the first time he appeared in Thor, because of his innominate history, the same would be the case for every time the druid-guy encountered a myth-figure from outside the Celtic cosmos.

This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.

And where there's an "external alignment," can there fail to be an "internal" one? Stay tuned.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5

 For this term-centered post, I'll revise some of the terms I introduced in the COSMIC ALIGNMENT series, starting here, for greater specificity. I'll also limit this post to examples of the cosmoses of nominative serials.

In Part 1, I said:

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future.

This tendency I will now call "default alignment," since serials that maintain a variety of protagonist/antagonist oppositions tend to favor this default. It's a default that exists as soon as a given icon comes into being, though it's only relevant to "crossover-dynamics" when said icon has appeared more than once. 

When, as a result of quantitative or qualitative escalation, the default becomes an entrenched expectation on the part of audiences, I'll term this a "static alignment." The Joker was my example in the cited essay. He may cross swords with Superman or with Batgirl or with Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth, but he will always be thought of as a Batman villain first.

In the same essay, I mentioned two characters who appeared independently as enemies of The Mighty Thor, and then teamed up against the thunder-god: Mister Hyde and The Cobra. I suspect that since that first team-up, editor Stan Lee conceived the notion that even both villains together weren't really a match for the increasingly powerful Thor, so Lee shuttled the felonious duo over to the Daredevil feature. As I discussed in the essay, eventually both characters tended to wander around the Marvel Universe, so that it's debatable if they ended up being aligned with any single icon, or group of icons. In one essay my term for this state of affairs was "floating alignment," but I've abandoned that phrase for "dynamic alignment."

Part 1 also discussed a slightly different situation: that of Jim Starlin's character Thanos. This villain-icon first appeared in an IRON MAN story, and if he had never appeared anywhere else, then the default alignment would have made Thanos an Iron Man antagonist. But from a historical POV, it's evident that Starlin had some plans-- how definite, I do not know-- to use Thanos in some feature he would be able to write and draw continuously. Thus, Thanos became one of the major villains of both Starlin's CAPTAIN MARVEL and WARLOCK serials. This is a somewhat more constricted form of a dynamic alignment, according to my statement that I myself deem Thanos dominantly a Warlock foe these days. Thanos can still float from feature to feature, the same way as does the Hyde-Cobra team, but there's a stronger association with Warlock than with any other feature-- though not strong enough that readers automatically think of Thanos as a "Warlock villain."

Having completed this exercise, I move on to a more complicated rumination on both nominative and innominate icons.

THE READING RHEUM: HYPERBOREA (1971)

In the same decades that Clark Ashton Smith wrote several stories about a magical-fantasy realm of the far future in ZOTHIQUE, he also wrote other tales about a realm ostensibly in some ahistorical version of Earth's past, HYPERBOREA. Both collections were set in an approximate historical order by editor Lin Carter and published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

Though I didn't see much point to establishing a continuity in the ZOTHIQUE tales, Smith did work one historical event into a few of the HYPERBOREA stories. To wit, in the best of the stories, a spectral entity called The White Sibyl prophecies that a particular kingdom will be overwhelmed by an ice-floe-- and some stories post-date the fulfillment of that prophecy. That said, on the whole the Hyperborea stories don't manage to tap into the same mythopoeic depths as the Zothique stories. However, in the Hyperborean tales Smith concocted a deity named Tsathoggua, and H.P. Lovecraft paid Smith a literary compliment by incorporating the creature into the Lovecraft bestiary of unearthly beings. As before, I'll rate each story in terms of mythicity, with G for good, F for fair, and P for poor.

THE SEVEN GEASES (G) -- This is an ironic fable akin to "The Voyage of King Euvoran" in the ZOTHIQUE collection, in that both deal with ignorant noblemen who get caught up in magical matters beyond their ken. While hunting in the mountains, the lordling Ralibar Vooz trespasses on a magician's ritual. The magician, instead of just killing Ralibar, sends him to another mage to see if the latter can make any use of the nobleman. But the second mage can't use Ralibar either, so he sends him on the toad-god Tsathoggua-- and this is repeated over and over, driving home the point that Ralibar is utterly useless to any of these cosmic entities. But in the end, even being useless doesn't save the lord from his doom.

THE WEIRD OF AVOOSL WUTHOQUAN (P) -- The fellow with the unpronouceable name is a treasure-hoarder whose fanatical greed leads him into the belly of a beast.

THE WHITE SYBIL (G) -- The poet Tortha beholds a mysterious woman in his native city, and becomes aware that she's the legendary White Sibyl, who will prophecy the city's doom by ice. Besotted with the phantom, he follows her to her chilly mountain home. For once the foolish hero manages to survive his brush with the supernatural, though at the cost of some of his faculties.

THE TESTAMENT OF ATHAMMAUS (F) -- The character in the title is the head executioner of his city, but he encounters a vexing mystery when one murderous criminal keeps coming back to life after his executions.

THE COMING OF THE WHITE WORM (F) -- Hyperborea's Ice Age results not from inert ice-floes, but from an iceberg under the command of the worm-monster Rlim Shaikorth. A wizard survives the destruction of his city only by agreeing to serve the monster, but he has to reconsider his plans when the "service" involves being the creature's food supply.

UBBO-SATHLA (P) -- This is the only story in the collection which is not a magical fantasy tale, because its main character is a denizen of the 20th century. Paul Tregardis encounters a relic from Hyperborean times, and the relic causes his personality to fuse with that of the relic's original wizard-owner. Neither entity wins the struggle as both are absorbed into the "formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla."

THE DOOR TO SATURN (F)-- The odd inclusion of a real-world place-reference does not break with the dominant magical fantasy continuum. Two Hyperborean priests quarrel over whose god is better, but Eibon-- no doubt the author of Smith's arcane sorcery-tome, the Book of Eibon-- decides to step through a door that takes him into another world. Eibon's enemy Morghi goes through the door as well, but as a result both men are cut off from returning to Hyperborea and must work together to survive in a wholly alien world. Interestingly, Smith gives Eibon's deity the name of "Zothaqquah," suggesting that this may be a later corruption of "Tsathoggua." And though Smith may or may not have realized it, the distorted god-name also sounds a lot like-- "Zothique," which name Smith borrowed from the old Greek term "Sothic."

THE ICE-DEMON (P)-- It's another treasure-hunt story where the seekers pay the ultimate price for their greed, but it's depressingly overlong once one realizes where it's going.

THE TALE OF SATAMPTRA ZEROS (F)-- The titular character, a master thief, commits to his diary the story of what happened when he and his only rival in thievery sought to plunder the temple of Tsathoggua.

THE THEFT OF THIRTY-NINE GIRDLES (F)-- In the second and last story from master burglar Satamptra Zeros-- one of a very small number of repeating Smith characters-- the aging thief relates another one of his adventures, this time with a female accomplice-- one of the few females-with-agency in the Smith cosmos. Not bad, but it's a decided disappointment that none of the girdles are being stolen off the bodies of their feminine owners.

Carter also adds four very short non-Hyperborea tales, which are close to being "prose poems" more than short stories. Though THE ABOMINATIONS OF YONDO has the best title, it doesn't manage to conjure forth any distinct myths, nor do two of the others. But THE PASSING OF APHRODITE-- the only tale in this volume that places a historically known deity within some sketchy fantasy-world called "Illarion"-- succeeds in putting across a good, if brief, myth-vibe, as a poet mourns for the passing of the Goddess of Love and Life. 

RAVISHMENT OVER RAPE

 In the third part of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I wrote the following:

Commercial films-- which were, it should be said, aimed equally at both male and female adult audiences-- are replete with such forceful displays of passion, in which the male protagonist forces his attentions-- usually not to the extent Rhett Butler does-- upon a female. It's generally understood that the female protagonist is a stand-in for the female audience that is presumed to want to see sex happen between the lead characters. Ergo, the protagonist's show of reluctance is meant to be broken down in the face of passion; i.e., it is a "no" that really does not mean "no." I do not think that female audiences would have partaken of such scenes in novels and films unless they could relate to them as fantasies. This gives the audiences credit for realizing that such scenarios did not represent real experience, and that they did not represent rape as such.

Were all members of the male audiences aware of "forced attentions" as being in the domain of fantasy, and hence, not justifications of real rape? Here too I think that we must assume that the majority of males knew that they were watching a staged fantasy, though I would admit that there is more potential for misunderstanding from the male point of view.  Still, the male protagonists of novels and films usually were not represented as literally overpowering the female as Rhett Butler did. The more standard scenario was that the reluctant female would finally respond and the curtains would close upon what was then consensual, if only implied, sex.

I just finished reviewing one of the more interesting Golden Age films, Henry King's 1942 THE BLACK SWAN, which features a hero who implies that he takes feminine resistance as a signal to ravish-- but not specifically to rape-- the heroine. Here's the roguish Jamie Waring's response to getting slapped by the irritable Lady Margaret:

 In Tortuga when a woman slaps a man's face, it means she wants him to grab her, overpower her, and smother her with kisses. I understand in Jamaica a gentleman must refuse such overtures.

As I mentioned in my review, at no time in SWAN does Margaret convey the sense of coming on to Waring, nor does she ever admit that she appreciates his attractiveness or forcefulness. Only when he's shown that he's willing to fight against other pirates, and therefore on the side of civilization, does she become interested in Waring as a potential mate. So, even though Waring subdues Margaret twice-- first knocking her out and then wrapping her in a sheet and kidnapping her-- she keeps a certain amount of power in their negotiation of status. Of course, this is only possible because the film shows that the hero has fallen in love only with Margaret, in contrast to his buddy's claim that there are lots of other fish in the sea.

The cinematic situation reflects the opinion in a 2014 PSYCHOLOGY TODAY essay by one Leon Seltzer:

The multiple ironies that emerge from such a depiction can hardly be missed. To Meana, “What women want is a real dilemma.” For, relationally, the female’s paramount need (and this is consonant with evolutionary biology) may be to have a strong, dominant male care for and protect her. So we end up with the eroticized image of her being thrown up against a wall yet, as imagined, not in any real danger. In short, on a very deep level that women might well wish to take exception to—though research strongly supports the idea— it may be a kind of biological imperative that, deep within their psyche, they can’t help but crave a “caring caveman” to whom they must submit.

And the SWAN scenario also parallels that of GONE WITH THE WIND, as I explicated here. The example is complicated in that when the crucial "spousal rape" takes place by that novel's "caring caveman," the male and female protagonist have already had consensual sex. This may not have been all that exciting for Scarlett, since at the time of the caveman-assault, she has banished Rhett from her bed to keep from her bearing any more children.

I like Seltzer's emphasis of the term "ravishment" over the inexact term "rape," and the former term takes in what I've loosely termed "fake-rape." But I will probably keep using the term as one of my subject-tags, since at times the term does take in the real-life, non-fantasy crime.

   

THE READING RHEUM: STAR OF DOOM (1983)

In the early 1980s Ace Books brought out new editions of REH's Conan books, while also publishing two serials of new novels based on REH characters. Andrew J Offut wrote six paperbacks about the adventures of the Gaelic warrior Cormac MacArt, while the team of David C Smith and Richard L Tierney wrote six for Red Sonja. Technically, the Sonja here is not the version Howard created, but the one Marvel reworked into a denizen of Conan's Hyborian world, complete with brief references to the comics-character's origin. I would imagine Ace made some sort of arrangement with Marvel, though that would depend upon the nature of Marvel's contract with the Howard estate.

I recall having read two other books in the SONJA series, and found neither memorable in terms of being very good or very bad. I'd never read STAR OF DOOM, the last in the series. But it may be that Smith and Tierney were on their last legs when they reached their DOOM, for it's an appalling waste of time, even for quickie junk fiction.

It's hard to believe anyone would craft a sword-and-sorcery story with so little action. DOOM is a talkfest that spends most of its time with Sonja discussing strategies with her small cast of characters. The menace is a pale retread of the old "meteor that crashes to Earth holds alien visitor" trope but altered to accord with the magical matrix of Sonja's world. An unnamed entity within a fallen "star" is captured by a mad magician, who finds that he can leech magical power from the visitor, enough to possibly conquer the world. However, it takes the magician over ten years to gain mastery of the ET's power, during which time his sanctum is under siege by enemy soldiers. Sonja and her male comrade-in-arms Daron come up with a possible way to enlist a powerful sorcerer to root out the world-conqueror before he takes whatever fiendish plan he has in mind.

Not surprisingly, since Daron was the creation of the authors, he gets the lion's share of the drama, while Sonja is bland and unmemorable. In their world, Daron is the first man Sonja ever loves, but he's never especially appealing, so DOOM is far from a grand romance, in addition to being light on blood-curdling action. Smith and Tierney suggest that the magical figure that Sonja saw before she became a warrior-woman may have been a manifestation of her own ego, but their execution of this idea-- slightly suggested in the Marvel origin-- is mediocre. The only real point of interest in DOOM is this odd line spoken by Sonja about the futility of making war for a "noble cause."

Self-survival or greed; that's all most noble causes turn out to be.

This relates to my interpretation of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but since I've already done a similar meditation on that subject here, there's no need to repeat my observations here.

MYTHCOMICS: BATMAN: THE JOKER WAR (BATMAN 95-100, 2020)

... Joker considers both Batman and himself to be above the common breed of "civilized men," telling him, "Don't talk like you're one of them. You're not, even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak." I guess I'm fortunate Nolan didn't work in any mentions of Ubermenschen, possibly counting on audiences to interpolate the (false) idea that Nietzsche's supermen were simply strong men who ignored society's rules. -- my review of DARK KNIGHT.

 This five-issue arc appeared on the heels of two other arcs in the regular BATMAN comic, both scribed by James Tynion IV. In the first one, CITY OF BANE, Bane kills faithful butler Alfred. In the next, THEIR DARK DESIGNS, several of Batman's familiar rogues -- including the Joker, resurrected from the usual villain-death-- set up the theft of Bruce Wayne's billions, which is the main story-trope of THE JOKER WAR. In addition, during DESIGNS Tynion, in concert with artist Jorge Jimenez, introduced Punchline, the Joker's replacement for his former partner, which debut includes an inevitable "first fight" between Punchline and Harley Quinn. I passed on reading CITY OF BANE, but to put JOKER WAR in perspective I did reread DESIGNS. As on my first reading, I found that it was just a basic Bat-adventure, with the intro of Punchline being that arc's only distinguishing aspect.

WAR is more complex than DESIGNS, for this third Bat-arc partly builds upon, and partly rejects, Christopher Nolan's quasi-Marxist interpretation of Joker. Some might aver that Nolan's above line about Batman and Joker being members of some elect group had already been suggested by assorted comics-writers, not least Frank Miller, but Nolan certainly popularized the concept. On the third page of WAR's first section, Tynion takes Nolan-Joker's sentiments and takes them in a similar direction, as Batman relates to an imaginary Alfred in his head:

I'm the only other person in this world he thinks is alive...

 

At the same time, Nolan-Joker shows utter contempt for money, while Tynion-Joker enjoys having access to the Wayne fortune, even if his main purpose is to use filthy lucre to defeat his destined enemy. That plan revolves around using money to prove Joker's view that Gotham City, the cynosure Batman has devoted his life to protecting, is really more in line with Joker's philosophy than Batman's.

 

One of Joker's opening gambits is to exacerbate the hero's already de-stabilized state of mind by having Punchline expose Batman to a toxin that makes him hallucinate in far more gross ways. Harley Quinn, anxious to keep Joker from turning Gotham into his own crazy town, seeks to aid the crusader, though her ultimate goal is to bring the Clown Prince's reign to a permanent end.

Harley manages to take Batman to a hideout, giving him a counter-agent to the toxin. Under this chemical bombardment, the hero begins to "trip balls" as Harley calls it, which includes another vivid dialogue with Alfred. (Actually, it sounds about the same as the toxin-less hallucination Batman has at the opening of the story.) Imaginary Alfred adds an element that obviously couldn't appear in the Nolanverse, having Alfred claim that Joker "mocks love and family by pulling his acolytes close to him. Making a joke of your family, your relationships. But he'd just as soon put a bullet in their heads if that gave him the upper hand against you." Alfred's subsequent statement about how the number of Joker's victims matters far more to the hero than to Joker, however, sounds largely like a restatement of a similar point in Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

While the crusader trips out, Joker and Punchline enjoy the high life, with Joker commenting on his supposed early life (which of course could be a total fantasy on his part). Punchline mentions that some of their men have been slain by a new vigilante, Clownhunter. Though Joker gives the order to have Clownhunter "crucified" as an example, the villain is pleased to see the rise of an avenger who doesn't obey Batman's no-killing principles, because that confirms Joker's view of Gotham as a "kill or be killed" cesspool.

A little later, Punchline invades Harley's hideout and tries to kill both Harley and Batman. In terms of gender politics, Tynion must tread carefully here. Since the original Harley-Joker relationship of the nineties Bat-cartoon was denounced as toxic, Harley can't be seen as merely jealous of Joker's new female partner/girlfriend. For that matter, Punchline makes clear that she's not into Joker for reasons of passion, but because she admires his unswerving devotion to chaos. And Tynion largely succeeds in making the catfight about how each female projects, or has projected, her desires under the empty vessel of the Clown Prince. Tynion even throws in the irony that "there's nothing in the world that [Joker's] ever going to care about more than that stupid bat."

Back in Batman's seething brain, Alfred adds a fairly original wrinkle, stating that "Batman is a child's dream, that you can travel the world and learn every possible way to save everyone"-- but also adding that the dream is important for that very reason. Earlier Punchline has already claimed that Batman, not his kid-associates, is the one who gives his tools their childish names, and a recovering Batman indirectly confirms Punchline's hunch in a funny scene with Harley. 

Not too surprisingly, Joker too echoes the insight about a "child's fantasy," though he calls it "selfish and strange" because Batman has sought to alter Gotham from its true corrupt nature. But Batman has one advantage: a whole Bat-family invested in his dream, and with the help of that family Batman turns the tide against Joker's army and recovers the Wayne fortune. Bat and Clown meet at Ace Chemical, the place where most versions of Joker were clown-ified, and though the result of this never-ending battle is inevitable, Tynion concocts a reasonably original climax. 

Harley shows up while both combatants are on their last legs. She attaches one bomb to the tied-up Joker and another to herself, then runs away, forcing Batman to choose to save her life or Joker's. Batman makes the right choice, though naturally the villain escapes via his own resources, though not without a little humiliation. An epilogue shows Batman perform an "intervention" for the vigilante Clownhunter, trying to persuade him to give up his unholy fixation on killing.

JOKER WAR, though it's a better than average Bat-myth, is certainly no classic. There are too many segues in which Batman encounters zombies of some sort, both imaginary and brought about through some obscure Joker-science, and the Alfred-delusions would have made more sense if all of them had been triggered by the toxins. (There's a loose excuse that even before getting dosed, Batman was injured in the previous arc, but it's not a convincing reason for his fantasies.) There's a nothing subplot about Gotham's other villains trying to profit from the chaos, but it just takes up space. To my eye Jimenez resembles a more rough-hewn version of Jim Lee's work in the celebrated HUSH storyline, giving maximum moxie to even minor villains and to briefly seen members of the Bat-family. 

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE (2017)

THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE is the first part in a trilogy by Katherine Arden, based upon Russian folklore and set in medieval times. In contrast to the majority of 21st-century fantasy and SF novels I've read in recent years, this one is distinguished by a strong interaction of both plot and characterization.

Most of the action takes place in a compound near a rural village, where the local boyar ("lord") Pyotr Vladimirovich ministers to the people under his beneficent rule. Arden devotes almost as much time to describing the members of Pytor's family as one would see in one of the classic Russian novels of the 19th century, but the one family member crucial to the story is Pyotr's daughter Vasya (loosely based on a character from Russian folklore, one Vasilisa). 

Though the village, like the rest of Russia, subscribed to the Orthodox Christian faith, old pagan ways are covertly observed by the peasants, and Vasya herself finds that she has a talent for seeing the miniscule sprites that inhabit the house and stable. She grows to womanhood while her sisters and brothers are maneuvered into marriages that are good for the family's betterment. In addition, circumstances force her widowed father to make a second marriage to a high-placed royal named Anna, who becomes something of an "evil stepmother" to Vasya. However, Vasya's main opponent is the "Bear" of the title, a malignant entity that feeds on fear and seeks to fill human hearts with terror. The Bear subverts an overly gullible Christian monk, thereby using Christian ethics to reduce the power of the house-spirits-- thus placing mortals within the Bear's control.

Though the Bear is Vasya's principal opponent-- she even summons the various spirits of house and forest against the evil force near the climax-- the Bear himself is not that well defined. Arden does much better in depicting the chancy relationship between the young proto-witch and Morozhko, the spirit of winter and death, and brother to the Bear-spirit. Arden certainly patterned the bulk of NIGHTINGALE after various Russian tales of "Father Frost," and some of her other conceptions seem more derivative of modern fantasy-tropes. Incidentally, the "nightingale" of the title is a bird whom Morozhko transforms into a horse that he gives to Vasya, though said bird-horse doesn't really play a big part in the novel. In all likelihood Arden wanted to foreground the horse for future stories, just like some of the details about Vasya's family aren't important here but may become important to the other two parts.

Vasya ends the novel in a non-fairy-tale manner, for she remains an independent woman at novel's end, rather than completing some romantic arc. In fact, though Arden probably did not intend to draw parallels with popular fiction about "girls and horses," it may be no coincidence that though Vasya can talk to many types of spirits, she communes only with one type of animal: horses. Maybe a better title for the novel would have been THE WILD GIRL AND HER STABLE OF STALLIONS.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 4

 The second appearance of Yuriko Oyama also does not bring her into direct alignment with the X-MEN cosmos, though in contrast to her DAREDEVIL appearance, this time she at least meets Wolverine face-to-face. But her dramatic arc is secondary to Wolverine's interaction with the character of Heather Hudson.

Once again, I don't choose to reread every story involving Heather or her husband James since Chris Claremont and John Byrne introduced them in the pages of X-MEN in the early 1980s, or the characters of the Canadian supergroup Alpha Flight, who were in essence a project brought into being by James Hudson. Byrne both wrote and drew the first 29 issues of ALPHA FLIGHT when they got their own title, and during that period James, who took up superheroing under the name Vindicator, was killed off. Heather took over theoretical command of the supergroup after James's death, but the next writer on the title, Bill Mantlo, determined that she should become the new Vindicator in order to join her fellow heroes in the field. But because she had no combat training, she sought out the man whom she and James had essentially fostered in his identity as Wolverine: the mystery man Logan. (And I'm sure Mantlo chose this story-path for much the same reason Wolverine was included in DAREDEVIL #196: to stoke a title's sales with the appearance of a popular character.)

I assume, without checking, that Mantlo mainly followed the broad outlines of what Claremont and Byrne had established in the backstory about James and Heather taking in the feral-seeming Logan, but it's my loose impression that Mantlo probably expanded on some details. For instance, Mantlo specifies that James and Heather were on their honeymoon at the time they found Logan, and that James actually leaves his blushing bride alone with the feral man to seek out help. Mantlo's not usually a very mythic writer, but I rather liked him having Heather think that her "Cinderella" story got turned into "Beauty and the Beast." This may also be the first time Wolverine himself witnesses how he was transformed by the Weapon X project, though the uniqueness of that experience was later overwritten by the events of WOLVERINE: ORIGIN.

As for Lady Deathstrike, she's brought in just to give Wolverine and the New Vindicator someone to fight. To this end, Mantlo quickly undoes O'Neil's happy ending for Yuriko Oyama, claiming that her lover Kira, shamed by the slaying of Dark Wind, committed suicide. This essentially caused Yuriko to do a 180-degree turn, so that in effect she became a copy of the father she had resented all her life. She considered that because Wolverine's adamantium skeleton had been created by Dark Wind's research-- even though it was the scientists of the Weapon X project who transformed the hero-- her dead father had a proprietary interest in said skeleton. This lousy motivation is matched by a rather desultory fight between the heroes and the villain's forces, after which the story kind of drops the training idea.

Lady Deathstrike quickly becomes fully aligned with the X-MEN cosmos in UNCANNY X-MEN #205, dated May 1986, which happens to be the same date allotted to the second part of the Mantlo ALPHA FLIGHT story. Given the quickness of the villainess's transformation, the editors may have flown Mantlo's idea of Lady Deathstrike before regular writer Chris Claremont, after which he, or other parties, arranged to remold the character. Thus, with the help of regular X-foe Spiral, Yuriko becomes a killer cyborg who now emulates Wolverine with her own claw-appendages. From then on, I would say that Deathstrike remains in the X-MEN cosmos no matter where else she may have appeared.

And just to bring things back to the cinematic tales, Deathstrike first makes her movie debut in X2, where she's said to be the creation of scientist William Stryker, who also assumes the role of transforming Logan into Wolverine in place of the head of the Weapon X project, one Doctor Thorton. Regrettably, Deathstrike isn't given even as much character in the movie as Mantlo gives her in the ALPHA FLIGHT tale, even though X2 remains the best of the X-films. But all this establishes in my mind that Lady Deathstrike is not in an iconic bond with Stryker or anyone else in the comics, and thus the film's use of Deathstrike and Stryker together makes that movie a charisma-crossover, even disregarding the presence of the script's other villains, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.