MYTHCOMICS: "BLACK MAGIC IN A SLINKY GOWN" (BAFFLING MYSTERIES #6, 1952)

I didn't remember to dedicate this month, the month of Halloween, to mythcomics in a horrific vein. However, in one sense Halloween is as much celebrated for all forms of fantasy, not just horror, and I've already suggested how the two super-genres are intrinsically tied together in this essay.  So my choice of a Mary Marvel story about "sky spirits" makes a good contrast to a tale centered on the specter of fear-- even though I've chosen another obscure story that even most Golden Age fans have forgotten. As I've done with many such stories with no definite credits, I'll assign total credit for the script to the artist whom fan-artists have tentatively identified as Mike Sekowsky.

Despite the title, neither anything magical nor any slinky gowns play a special role here, and GOWN isn't even explicitly about sexual enticement. However, I feel sure that when Sekowsky conceived the story in 1952, he would have been riffing on one of the most popular tropes seen during the horror-comics boom of 1948-1954. That trope is that of the conniving "black widow" murderess. No matter what form of phenomenality each story utilizes, the basic setup is always one in which a scheming woman marries a man, often older than she is, and then plots to murder him, usually with the help of a male lover, often younger than the intended murder victim. 

The story proper introduces the reader to slinky Leonore Black (complete with a telltale hourglass on her dress in the splash panel). Leonore has just married an older, richer man named Richard, but before so doing, she broke off an engagement with a more age-appropriate young man, Dan. Dan is not however Leonore's co-conspirator, and so his only function in the opening scene is to inform the reader that Richard happens to have a huge collection of dead spiders. Leonore coyly references her intention to knock off her new husband, but Dan doesn't pick up on the allusion.

Richard doesn't have long to enjoy his marriage to Leonore. He shows her his dead spider-collection-- the provenance of which is never explained-- and remarks that he fell in love with Leonore's arachnid-like allure. But Leonore is not swayed by flattery, for she carries out her next part of her plan by changing into a giant black widow spider, wrapping Richard in webbing, and giving him with a presumably poisonous bite. Leonore certainly wins no prizes for subtlety in her method of murder, but the police are duly stumped by a victim covered in webs, and no blame attaches to the newly-made widow. Her new status, though, gives her a cultural excuse to wear black all the time.

Leonore also isn't worried about social proprieties, for in a matter of days she's chatted up Dan and talked him into proposing to her. Apparently, even though she's soliloquized about using Richard's money to go after spider-killers everywhere, she harbors some idea of attempting a normal life with Handsome Dan. He takes her to visit a friend who runs a local aviary, and to Leonore's horror, the aviary guy likes to feed some of his birds with -- spiders. Leonore doesn't expose herself right away, but she does tell Dan an abridged "origin story." Young Leonore had an early fascination with spiders. Her paternal unit passed away, and her new stepfather tended to beat both Leonore and her mother. A black widow spider seemingly intervened, killing the stepfather. And after that, with no explanations related to either magic or super-science, Leonore simply manifests her "inner spider," and this gives her the power to change into a giant black widow.

Leonore of course has no intention of letting Dan's aviary friend off the hook, and he's her next target. The second murder makes even a dullard like Dan suspicious, so he invites his fiancee to his laboratory for a chat. Once there, Leonore, who perhaps is not the most attentive listener, learns that her intended is a zoologist, and that his lab is full of boxes conveniently labeled as containing toads, lizards, and wasps. Though Dan has not killed any spiders so far as the reader knows, Leonore picks up on his suspicions and decides that it's time for another extermination. Providentially, Dan has "giant wasps" in one of those boxes, and as soon as the insects are released, they attack the giant spider and sting it to death. Dead Leonore conveniently reverts to her original human form and Dan decides not to divulge her secret to the world.

 While male authors don't have a monopoly on the creation of female monsters, real or figurative, I can't avoid noting that nearly all the authors writing and drawing horror comics during this boom-period were men. That probably had some effect on the sheer quantity of "black widow murderess" stories. However, in GOWN, the monstrous female is barely motivated by killing for profit, given that her primary focus is the defense of the tiny arthropods with whom she's obsessed. The influence of her brutal stepfather makes Leonore more sympathetic than most cold-hearted vixens, even though her insanity is no less obvious. Real black widow spiders certainly are known for slaying the males who mate, or try to mate, with them, though at least one online source says that the lady arachnids are usually motivated purely by hunger. Leonore clearly doesn't eat her victims, though a few horror-publishers of the period might have been willing to go there. But the script does play around with one other spider-trait. In the course of the origin-story, Leonore mentions, seemingly to no point, that "I spend hours at the spinning wheel." The only symbolic reason to mention this, since it has no relevance to the plot, would be because Leonore wants to "spin" in some way analogous to the way (some) spiders spin webs. It's at least of passing interest that spinning wheels are dominantly associated with females, because in most tribal cultures, women weave and sew clothing for everyone. 

The monster-woman's last name of course references "black widow spider." Her first name, derived from "Eleanor," doesn't have any spidery connotations, but it does have a general horror-association, in that it sounds like the name of the deceased heroine from Poe's "The Raven."    

THE UNIQUENESS OF '66 BATMAN

Just a forum-post to clarify some of the unique factors of the TV show, responding in part to a claim that the program went downhill because of the number of episodes required in the second season.

______________

I guess we are at loggerheads on the episode thing. In terms of sheer quantity, going from a half-season for a show with about thirty half-hour episodes to a full season of 60 should not have been any bigger deal than an hour-long show with a half-season of, say, 15 episodes suddenly getting a full season order of, say, 30 episodes. 

HOWEVER, I do concede that with BATMAN, even the producers were to an extent making things up as they went along. Doing two episodes of BATMAN a week was in my outsider's opinion far more difficult than doing a weekly hour of even a good western like, say, RAWHIDE. The rules on how to do westerns had been well established long before RAWHIDE. Everyone involved in making the series would have grown with westerns, both juvenile and adult, and everyone would have known what a good western needed.

BATMAN was almost sui generis for television. ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN followed various tropes of comic book stories, but I don't think that show consistently represented the comic book of the early fifties. Some episodes roughly captured the feel of some comic stories, but the low budget meant that overall SUPERMAN couldn't really be that much like SUPERMAN the comic. Similar factors also limited other low budget adaptations like SHEENA and cheap original cartoons like COURAGEOUS CAT.

But BATMAN actually had a high budget (though some accounts claim that the showrunners acted like they had to pinch every penny). The makers could actually make the Caped Crusader as way out as the source material. But most adults had at best a friendly contempt for comic books of all genres. Hence Dozier came up with his two-pronged approach: render the comics tropes as accurately as possible to please the kids but seek to please the adults with ironic humor. Yet that balance was hard to sustain, and as we've discussed, in the end a lot of raconteurs defaulted to zaniness rather than distanced camp. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1951)

Though I read assorted novels and short stories by British author John Wyndham in my formative sci-fi years, I never got around to what many would consider his most famous work, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS.

I saw the 1962 movie adaptation at an early age, in which the Triffids were alien invaders. But one of the big surprises for me was that in the original book, the walking plant-monsters are the bioengineered creations of an unidentified Earth-nation, implicitly Russia. In addition, similar causes bring about the plague of blindness that leaves all of humanity vulnerable to the Triffids, though Wyndham doesn't devote much space to the plague's origins.

The second big surprise is that the Triffids are not the stars of the novel. Since H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS, the template for nearly all alien-invasion stories that followed, the majority of these stories emphasize some bland (sometimes nameless) viewpoint character who describes the powers and proclivities of the invaders. Some alien-invasion stories have chosen a course opposed to that of Wells by emphasizing a larger-than-life hero who seeks to defeat the invaders, but obviously such narratives put aside Wells' attempt to emphasize a common-man narrator.

Wyndham's viewpoint character, biologist Bill Masen, has much in common with the nameless protagonist of the Wells novel. However, during the apocalypse that causes British society to fall into chaos, Masen only occasionally discourses on the Triffids. Masen's concern, like that of Wyndham, and unlike that of Wells, is to provide numerous camera-eye views of how the society falls apart, and what can be done to build it back again. The ambulatory plant-creatures are more of a secondary menace, not least because the social chaos brought about by the blindness-plague would have come about had the Triffids never existed. I theorize that Wyndham chose to use the Triffids as proxies for foreign invaders, given that human agents weren't a possibility in a world where all countries had been equally devastated by the twin menaces.

TRIFFIDS is a good read, but Masen is nothing more than an authorial insert, providing bland takes on the various factions that arise in the absence of the social contract. Somewhat better in terms of characterization is the hero's girlfriend. She was a minor celebrity in the vanished social order thanks to having written a racy book (though author Wyndham never really tells readers what was racy about it). However, she's absent for a large portion of the story, so Bill Masen is the functional focal icon of TRIFFIDS. My memory is that the 1962 movie abandons the structure of the book and pursues the Wells template unabashedly. I plan to confirm that soon with a re-watch of the film that gained a measure of immortality through inspiring the following lyrics from ROCKY HORROR:

And I really got hot
When I saw Janette Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills

 

QUICK POST ON ROOT CAUSES

 My response to a political post regarding the "root causes" solution of illegal immigrant incursions.

___________

Now, we've heard for a long time about "root causes," which in this case consist of the U.S. taking steps (which will almost certainly cost the country money in some manner) to "build up" the chaotic countries so that in theory their citizens won't want to travel to the U.S. I have no faith in this solution. I understand why Liberals of all stripes would like this latest manifestation of dollar diplomacy, since it allows them to think of themselves as generous sponsors of our "little brown brothers." (The Taft quote applies here since the Left has repeatedly characterized border security as racist.) One major problem with this solution is that a lot of immigrants-- even the ones who intend to work an honest day's work if they get in by hook or crook-- are coming here not just for free stuff (though that doesn't hurt) but because the U.S. already has the advantages of a fully articulated system of social benefits. Underdeveloped countries may or may not develop such systems if we give them lots of patronage, but they won't develop them any time soon. And the cartels that have battened onto the Liberal permissiveness toward illegal immigration-- what do they care about preying on penny ante operations in Honduras, when they've already got a foothold in the richest country in the world?

Even if this "root cause" approach could have *some* limited good effects, the plan also fails overall in that its main motivation is to allow Liberals to virtue signal in order to gain political advantage. Building up other countries is not, in the final analysis, America's responsibility.

MYTHCOMICS: "MARY MARVEL GOES OVER THE RAINBOW" (WOW COMICS #14, 1943)

This 1943 tale, written by Otto Binder and probably drawn by his brother Jack, is "metaphysical" in the sense of taking discriminate phenomena and attributing abstract aspects to them. I analyzed a story with a similar trope-- that of "light versus darkness"-- in THE PERIL OF PAINGLOSS. Here Mary Marvel encounters a war between "color" and "blackness," the latter to be understand in the visual sense, as the absence of all color perceptions.

In her civilian ID of Mary Batson, the heroine reads a newspaper story in which a reputable scientist claims that the legend of the "Pot of Gold at the Rainbow's End" is real. Mary, being patriotic, wonders if this treasure could be used for America's war effort. At the same time, a crook named Porky Snork talks his gang into seeking out the same golden horde. Meanwhile, Mary finds out that the person claiming to have seen the pot of gold is not reputable science-guy Tinkerman but his self-important son Creighton.

When Porky and his thugs show up, Mary changes into her heroic identity, but can't manage to stop the malcontents from stealing the balloon Creighton meant to use to track down the rainbow's end. Mary flies after the balloon, towing Creighton behind her, perhaps less for his guidance than for his potential for comedy relief. When both protagonists and antagonists arrive at rainbow's end, they learn that the rainbow actually creates the pot of gold, as all the colors of the spectrum "drip" off the rainbow and coalesce into the fabled treasure.

Mary contends with the petty thieves, and the balloon drifts to the top of the rainbow, where all see a colorful city dwelling. Mary rather rashly punctures the balloon, and the crooks fall from the basket. However, the greedy men are rescued by a "Batplane" piloted by Mister Night, a mysterious figure in black. Mary clouts the new villain, but he escapes with Porky's gang, so Mary and Creighton decide to investigate the city. It turns out to be inhabited by "sky spirits" whose purpose is to dispense color to the mortal world.

King Color informs Mary that Mister Night was exiled from Rainbow City, and that he's probably planning some fell scheme against his former brethren. Sure enough, Night has apparently been waiting around for some plug-uglies to fall into his lap, since his first gambit is to send the thugs after Jack Frost.

(Jack Frost, incidentally, comes into the matter because there was a tradition in which the frosty fellow was portrayed as being the entity who "painted" plants with autumnal colors.)

Mary thwarts the thugs but Mister Night rescues them, while revealing that his real purpose was to kidnap "Aurora, Spirit of Dawn." The dark villain's true plot is to eliminate all colors from the mortal world, so that he can become Earth's ruler. Mary flies to "Night Land" to rescue Aurora, without whom dawn can't transpire on Earth. However, for all her myriad powers, Mary can't see in absolute darkness. She changes to her human self so that the magic lightning will illuminate the landscape. The same light allows Night to see and capture the intruder. However, because the story's running out of space, the fiend doesn't take the time to either clobber or gag Mortal Mary. She easily "shazams" her way back to her super-powered ID and slugs Night, though he escapes into the darkness of his domain. 

With Aurora returned to her celestial duties, all that's left is the wrapup, as Porky's gang once again tries to acquire the pot of gold (with the use of a toboggan, yet), only to be captured by Mary. She also returns Creighton Tinkerman to his home, though one can wonder how much approbation he received for the discovery of Rainbow City, whether Mary donated the pot of gold to the war effort or not. I haven't found evidence that Mister Night ever returned, though Binder helpfully equates the shadowy evildoer with real-life world-beaters like "Hitler and his henchmen."

The inventiveness of Otto Binder's story is underscored by the writer's clear avoidance of the standard association of "pots of gold" with "leprechauns." How this association came to pass has received some online speculation, and I rather like (without necessarily advocating) the idea that rainbows became associated with wealth because at times heavy rainfall might uncover buried gold. Of course that's probably too reductive by half, and the real correlation is probably all sorts of supernatural spirits have been tied to underground stores of wealth, whether of natural or man-made provenance. Binder makes a strong association between "wealth" and the pleasures humans feel at the variety of natural colors, and extrapolates those pleasures into a race of color-bestowing spirits. Of course, the title suggests that Binder was aware of the use of the phrase "Over the Rainbow" in a famous song for the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ. There aren't any strong similarities between this story and the OZ film, though of course the latter also foregrounds the experience of prismatic beauty. It's interesting, though, that he includes Jack Frost as one of these dispensers of color-beauty, because when Frost paints plants with autumnal hues, that presages the "temporary death" of such plants worldwide, when Winter, the time of darkness, holds sway. I suppose Binder could have had Mary capture Mister Night like she would any common troublemaker. But it's fitting that he did not do so, since the darkness symbolizing Death is inextricably intertwined with the forces that bring forth light and Life.   

EVERY REVELATION, STILL A SECRET

All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.-- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Here we run into a dilemma, for what is truth and what is illusion? John Briggs, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger, has described truth as "the freedom of letting things reveal themselves as they are-- but... when anything is revealed, other things are concealed."-- DREAMS OF ISIS (1995), Normandi Ellis, p. 266.

These two quotes both appeared in separate sections of the Ellis book, which is that author's personal account of her experiences with examining Egyptian concepts of spirituality and/or occultism. It's an interesting book, and I've read a considerable number of similar accounts from dubious biographies like the Don Juan chronicles and theoretical studies like those of Colin Wilson. While I've had occasion to believe in the reality of certain so-called "psychic" events, I hold no firm opinion one way or the other on subjects like soul transmigration or the existence of archaic gods, even on something akin to the "astral plane." I suspect that much of my interest in the occult stems from my desire to know, as much as any individual can, the outward limits of the imagination. I have a dim memory of a Percy Shelley reminiscence, in which he claimed that in his youthful years he read a lot of mystical literature because he was seeking "metaphors for poetry." However, I haven't troubled to look for that particular quote.

As for the quotes above, I knew Bachelard by reputation but have not yet read POETICS OF SPACE or any other work by him. I have read a little Heidegger, though not enough to have any notion as to what he may've said that author John Briggs paraphrased, or the context Briggs had in mind when he made the comment in his book FIRE IN THE CRUCIBLE. Still, Briggs' purported ideas on aesthetics might prove interesting to my ongoing project. Bachelard's evaluations of science might draw some intriguing comparisons with the works of Whitehead on that subject.

Though about thirty years separate the quotes of Bachelard and Briggs, they seem to complement each other not a little in speaking of the difficulties of communication. Reading both quotes out of context naturally means that I don't know what general argument either writer was making, but I can respond to what the quotes suggest in themselves.

Starting with Bachelard, it's fascinating that he asserts that all one can communicate is something subjective, something that is explicitly not objective in nature, and that, even that "subjective something" is not the actual secret of the person transmitting it, but an "orientation" toward that secret. The opposition bears a structural similarity with Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal. I would guess that when Bachelard says that the implied "we" cannot "tell the secret objectively," he's at least partly agreeing with the materialist idea that subjectively speaking every man is an island, and that every such island harbors secrets that cannot be communicated as such to any others. Yet Bachelard is perhaps more hopeful than the materialists in saying that though subjective secrets of a private mind cannot be communicated-- possibly because they stem from so many intertwined, personal factors-- "we" can communicate orientations, as one presumes, for example, Socrates did to Plato. Last month I touched on similar limitations with regard to literary experience, under the heading of "intersubjectivity:"

But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities. -- THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1.

Of course, I don't know if Bachelard is using the word "secret" with any special connotation in mind, but for the present I view it as general subjectivity. "Orientation" would be the part of an individual's secret subjectivity that can be transmitted to others, though always with the likelihood of misprision of some kind, like, say, Plato recording those aspects of Socrates' philosophy that resonated best with Plato himself.

Now Briggs' quote sounds a little more pessimistic, a little more "one step forward, two steps back." Briggs doesn't confine himself to communications between human beings; for him, even "things" can reveal themselves-- and conceal themselves, too. I assume that "things" would include all phenomena, from human beings to all aspects of the environment in which humans live. Shamanistic accounts, such as those on which Carlos Castaneda probably based his books, would allow for human beings to receive communications from birds or insects or even stones. 

However, in the folklore we have on such subjects, such communicates reveal, but they don't also conceal. So I tend to think Briggs is, in the final analysis, still talking about human communication, just like Bachelard. 

How does one reveal and conceal at the same time? In OEDIPUS TYRANNUS the Delphic Oracle reveals what is destined to happen to Oedipus. But the Oracle conceals the relevant info that he is not related to the two people Oedipus thinks are his natural parents. Revealing that, of course, would spoil the story, which depends upon a reaction to limited knowledge.

 In the world of intersubjectivity, too, Reader A can feel that this or that work by Author B feels revelatory. But of course, Author B is only revealing what is important to him, and in communicating one thing he may conceal a hundred others, both from himself and from others. Percy Shelley's incantatory poetry reveals his superabundant talent for versification. But nothing in the poetry will reveal many other aspects of Shelley, aspects that might distract from his poetry. In a somewhat more intentional concealment, Karl Marx enthralled countless believers into a sincere belief in his myth of the proletariat, but he omitted anything that might hinder that revelation.  And often there's no intent to conceal. If one chooses to follow one philosophy, it will always remain concealed as to what another path might have revealed.

And possibly the greatest concealment is that I have found both quotes to have revelatory content, though since I haven't read them in context, I might be "concealing" some or all of their "real" meanings.

FINE-TUNING DURABILITY AND DURATION

 ...not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative icons within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture. -- A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1.

Since typing the first part of this five-part essay series, I said very little about my use of the offhand term "durability." The other essays, however, generally imply that I judged the highness or lowness of icons' stature or charisma on the basis of quantitative escalation-- though I would only adapt that earlier term a few weeks later in December of 2021. For instance, in Part 2, I noted that the Golden Age character of Miss Victory had transferred her stature from a solo feature to that of the ensemble of the Bronze Age title FEMFORCE:

Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

In contrast, in Part 3 I noted that The Blue Diamond was an example of a character who didn't accrue much stature, having had only two starring appearances. Also, the character of Magik, prior to joining the New Mutants ensemble, didn't get much stature by virtue of appearing in one four-issue mini-series.

In Part 4, I noted that I might not assign High Charisma to a villain-interaction between Joker and Catwoman, who'd only just been created, but that I definitely would in the first crossover of Joker and Penguin, who by the time of their meeting in 1944 had already logged in several appearances as Bat-foes.

And in Part 5, I gave examples of two narratives-- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC-- in which numerous Primes function as little more than background-characters to the featured Primes.

Now, all of the above examples depend on an idea of "duration," of how much narrative time a given icon has enjoyed as either a Prime or a Sub, either within a single narrative or in a series of linked narratives. 

Then, a week or two later, I wrote ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, in which I formulated a term for the type of escalation depending on an icon's duration: Quantitative Escalation. But I also specified that another type of escalation could also take place with respect to a narrative assuming the nature of a cultural touchstone, as per the example of Walter Scott's IVANHOE, which was a single work with no additional installments. About a year and a half later, I would show in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PART 3 that qualitative vectors could also influence serial narratives: specifically, as to whether the characters of "Giant Man and the Wasp" were qualitatively more important in their AVENGERS appearances than in their solo feature.

So, though I did not see the distinction in 2021, the "durability" I was describing took two distinct forms:

Narrative Durability relates to how much time an icon occupies within a story, or series of stories.

Significant Durability relates to how much time an icon accrues in literary history, thanks to whatever the icon does or doesn't do that some sizable audience finds to have significance.

A further elaboration is that in some narratives, though a crossover between stature-icons may be relatively short within a story, that crossover can accrues greater significance because of its impact upon the audience. The crossover between Ivanhoe and the pre-existing icon of Robin Hood lasts only a few chapters in Scott's narrative. Yet even if the icons' time together has little Narrative Durability, their crossover possesses Significant Durability because Scott managed to relate his newly created hero to the ideals of the Lord of Sherwood, in such a way that many readers found that part of the story significant. 

The same significance applies to works outside the sphere of canonical literature. In the 1918 book THE GOLDEN SCORPION, Sax Rohmer pits his established detective Gaston Max against a new villain, The Scorpion. Only on a few pages does Rohmer establish that the new villain belongs to Fu Manchu's Si-Fan, and on one of those pages a witness describes an encounter between The Scorpion and his master, though the latter is not explicitly named. Since the Scorpion never appears again, there is no crossover between villains, but the established figures of Gaston Max and Fu Manchu sustain the crossover-vibe between their universes, even though the two of them never meet. And Significant Durability applies solely because SCORPION was an important development in the history of the Fu Manchu character-- but not so in the case of Gaston Max, given that he faded from prominence and never, like Fu, became a cultural touchstone.

 

NEAR-MYTHS: DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL (2021-2022)

I've not reviewed many of DC's "Elseworlds" projects-- which is what DARK KNIGHTS OF STEEL is, even though it does not use that tag-- because they tend to be no more than gaming-scenarios, where the creators move various characters into new positions for nothing but novelty's sake. An example of such an aesthetically nugatory work is 2015's DOOM THAT CAME TO GOTHAM. An awful lot of STEEL consists of just the usual aimless moving of franchise chess-pieces around for little effect, so in one sense there's not much that's special about this effort by writer Tom Taylor and artist Yasmine Putri (assisted by various artists drawing in her style).

The basic concept: Krypton still explodes, but this time Jor-El and his still pregnant wife Lara escape their doomed world and migrate to a "high-fantasy" version of DC-Earth. By "high fantasy" in this context, I mean that there's no necessary connection with anything in real-world history or with anything in regular DC-Earth, which theoretically is "our" Earth with superheroes and magical critters. The STEEL world is made up of assorted faux-medieval kingdoms inhabited by rough facsimiles of DC characters, and although magic is a regular presence, science is just barely getting started. 

Through assorted contrivances Jor-El and Lara ascend to the monarchy of one land after the deaths of the previous rulers, Thomas and Martha Wayne. In addition to Lara birthing Kal-El, she also births "Zala Jor-El," a.k.a. Supergirl, who seems to have been partly named for her "real" DC-Universe father "Zor-El." And then there's Bruce, who goes around in a Bat-helmet and is one of the few double-identity characters called by his superhero name. He's called a "bastard" in the genealogical sense, for reasons not revealed until halfway through the story, and the relationship of teenaged Bruce and teenaged Kal-El was the one or two elements that kept me curious about how the story would turn out.

The other thirty and forty characters are all spawned on the high-fantasy Earth and range from close approximations to the originals (John Constantine, "court jester" Harley Quinn, Princess Diana, Jefferson Pierce) to '"in-name only" congeners (The Metal Men, a bunch of knights who use the names of metals). We get two lesbian relationships, one more or less canonical (Harley and Poison Ivy) and one out of the blue (Diana and Zala), but they don't consume a lot of space. John Constantine gets the second longest arc, as he's responsible for a doomsday prophecy that seems to condemn the El Family. The prophecy appears to come true in such a way that three major kingdoms go to war, but Constantine eventually discovers that the menace behind the conflict is tied to a different flavor of DC-alien. I confess Taylor surprised me with his subterfuge here.

I said that the witty, lively relationship between Kal-El and Bruce was one of the things I esteemed about STEEL. The other is Putri's art. In a period when an awful lot of comic-book art is banal and ugly, Putri's designs possess a grandiose quality that reminds me of the strong fantasy-work of stellar figures like Richard Corben and Craig Russell, just to name two. Even when Taylor's just giving readers a jejune rehash of "How Oliver Met Dinah," Putri's art has an elevating quality foreign to most 21st-century comics art. I can see myself coming back to enjoy STEEL years from now, just to see how Putri gave the various DC heroes a "Brothers Hildebrandt" treatment.

CURIOSITIES #38: ["JON THE MAD SCIENTIST"] (1941)

 I was looking up the second appearance of the original Clayface in DETECTIVE COMICS #49 and happened across this Crimson Avenger story. The low quality of the story may indicate why the Crimson Avenger (who for some reason is only called "The Crimson" in the main story) was largely ignored by readers in favor of Batman, even though the red-clad hero had appeared seven issues before the Cowled Crusader.

One thing I can't resist about this wonky story is that only once is the stereotypical mad scientist given a name-- that of "Jon." Really, Jack Lehti (or whoever wrote this)? If you wanted to save lettering-time-- which might be the reason for repeatedly calling the hero "The Crimson"-- why not use a stereotypically ghoulish name, like "Ool" or "Gor?"

Anyway, Jon shows his classical knowledge by naming his gargantuan killer robot "Echo," I guess meaning that the Frankensteinian automaton is the "echo" of his genius. I'll note that although the monster of Mary Shelley's book and of the Universal films is merely human-sized, some films intimate that the creature might be some sort of world-conquering menace-- a threat which is at least a little more credible with a robot about 20 stories tall. Robert Florey's unused script for the '31 FRANKENSTEIN ostensibly made the monster into a mindless killing machine.

By this time in the main character's history, the Avenger has shed most of his original "Green Hornet" attributes, taking on the general look of "union-suit" crimefighters. There's no mention of the hero's Asian sidekick here but he also donned a union-suit at some point. It's of minor interest that in this period the cops didn't automatically trust anyone in a superhero costume, and so this band of blue boys improbably blame "The Crimson" for the big robot.

The Avenger does still use his gas-gun, immobilizing Jon just after the latter calls his murder machine to kill the intruder. The hero deliberately leaves the scientist in the robot's path and then makes sure both entities are destroyed. A moderately cool moment of vigilante justice.