THE READING RHEUM: THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931)

 

"...everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin."-- Zadok Allen. 

"Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent."-- the narrator of SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (given the name "Robert Olmstead" in HPL's notes).

During my early enthusiasm for Lovecraft's works, I didn't tend to reread SHADOW, in marked contrast to the more imaginative "cosmic horror" stories. For that reason, to the extent that I thought about SHADOW in terms of the author's avowed racism, I might have even accepted the reigning critical opinion of the tale, apparently shared even by annotator Leslie Klinger. That opinion, drawn from HPL's own political writings, asserts that the horror of SHADOW-- of a repulsive race of fish-people, the Deep Ones, who intermarry with humans to produce hybrids-- was a one-on-one recapitulations of HPL's unequivocal distaste for almost anyone who was not of purebred English stock (including several dominantly Caucasian nationalities, like Italians and Poles). The two quotes above, however, suggest to me that HPL was aware that such a complexion could be placed upon his story, and that he took pains to tell readers, albeit indirectly, "no, my fish-people are not just allegories for ethnicities I don't like."      

Like CALL OF CTHULHU, SHADOW starts with an ordinary man who encounters strange phenomena that initially seem merely curious, but which eventually reveal the existence of alien conspiracies of which average society knows nothing. Unlike CTHULHU, SHADOW's opening posits that narrator Olmstead is able to alert the government to the existence of the conspiracy, resulting in a wholesale pogrom against the conspirators in the Massachusetts sea-town Innsmouth. Then, as in CTHULHU, the narrator tells us all the backstory of his horrific experience, in which he discovered that most of the inhabitants of Innsmouth were hybrid descendants of intermarriages of human beings and sea-dwelling fish-people (who are said at one point to worship Cthulhu). 

I won't dwell on the many ways HPL sells this concept via his excellent attention to detail regarding the history and physical layout of Innsmouth, since that would be impractical for a blogpost. Most of what Olmstead learns about Innsmouth comes from a 97-year-old Innsmouth resident named Zadok Allen, whose tongue Olmstead loosens by giving him liquor. Old Zadok was around as a child when Obed Marsh, one of the town's leading citizens, began trafficking with certain islands in the West Indies, and so essentially "colonized the colonizers," to play upon a current political buzzword. But because other residents of the polluted town see Olmstead talking to Zadok, they come after Olmstead. One doesn't normally think of HPL as an exciting author, but Olmstead's daring flight from Innsmouth, first by leaping out of his upper-floor apartment and then pretending to be one of the hybrids as he makes his way out of town on foot, is viscerally memorable. 

For an HPL-contemporary like Seabury Quinn, the violent suppression of a conspiracy would have been the end of the story. But the kicker to HPL's story involves Olmstead-- whose mother was of "Arkham stock"-- being much more intimately involved with the spawn of Cthulhu. And this is the great conundrum alluded to in the first quote: that as much as humans may want to believe themselves the lords of creation, they come from the dark abysses of the primal waters, where everything flows into everything else.

Now, in CALL OF CTHULHU, HPL implies that people not from Anglo-Saxon ethnicities may be degraded enough to traffic with unholy cults. Yet in SHADOW, the ones who surrender Innsmouth to the Deep Ones are the members of the town's "gently-bred" (HPL's word) families. Zadok tells Olmstead that although the spawn of the Deep Ones inhabited one particular island in the West Indies, he also mentions that the "Kanakys" of other islands despise the hybrids and eventually wipe them out, the same way the government in 1927 tries (but fails) to wipe out Innsmouth. Lastly, in one of Olmstead's most close-up descriptions of a fish-man resident, he observes that the man seems alien even though he does not look "Asian, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid." While SHADOW certainly is not "anti-racist" in the modern meaning of that term, it also indicates a different mindset from 1928's CTHULHU-- for reasons that will probably never be known.     

       

THE READING RHEUM: THE WHITE HART (1979)

 

I must have read Nancy Springer's fantasy-"pentalogy" THE BOOKS OF THE ISLE over twenty years ago, but I may not have read them in order. However, some or all of the books don't take place in the same eras, as is the more usual case with multi-book fantasy-epics. At present I don't know if I'll re-read the other four in the near future, but Springer has at least moved to the front of the line.

Springer's magic world of Isle takes place on a large island of that name, and in WHITE HART there are no indications of other contiguous lands. Celtic and Arthurian myths inform the background of this world, though Isle has no direct connection to the "real world" in any era. Many of Springer's recapitulations of mythic material is easy enough to trace: a cauldron that can bring the dead back to life comes from Welsh myth, and a stone that predicts the next ruler of Isle hearkens back to British myths behind the still-venerated "Stone of Scone."

HART's master trope, however, evolves from a romance between a mortal princess, name of Ellid, and a half-mortal, half-faery hero named Bevan. But I use the word "evolves" because Ellid, as necessary as she is to the plot, is not one of the central characters. Prior to her being rescued from captivity by Bevan, the princess is informally betrothed to her cousin Cuin, a noble warrior. He initially hates Bevan for winning Ellid's heart, but when Bevan saves Cuin from torture and probable death, Cuin feels bonded to the faery-prince. The honorable friendship between the rivals thus becomes more important to Springer's story than the romance per se, and their mutual battle to protect Isle from the death-god Pel Blagden provides the main physical conflict. However, the prophecy that Bevan, scion of an ancient fairy-race, will become Isle's High King takes some very hard-to-predict turns, as does Bevan's romance with Ellid.         

Given the cast of characters in this short novel, HART might fall into the category I've termed the "journey opera." However, based on my recollections of the other books in the series, the entire corpus of the Books of the Isle would probably constitute a "quest opera" overall.            

MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

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The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won. 

THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life, but in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention this just to spotlight one of many aspects of commercial comics that changed once they were directed not at children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

_______________

 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.

 

          

 

NEAR-MYTHS: "SEALED IN BLOOD" (SGT. ROCK ANNUAL #2, 1982)

For the last Memorial Day, I decided to read some random war comics from DC, few of which I ever sampled previously. I was aware that in the late 1950s, DC's war titles, generally under the editorship of Robert Kanigher, began to evolve a regular lineup of featured characters, some of whom then began to cross over frequently in the sixties, seventies and eighties. The particular 1980s crossover I encountered was not surprising for its crossover of heroes, but for the way that Kanigher-- who certainly was not given to the Stan Lee method of endlessly recycling even the most obscure antagonists-- decided to exhume a "bad guy" so obscure, she isn't even indexed in Grand Comics Database.

So far as I can tell, the one and only time Nazi officer Helga Voss appeared in a comic was SGT. ROCK #422 (1978.)

 Lieutenant Helga Voss introduces herself to the redoubtable Rock by machine-gunning a small squad of Brit soldiers, fighting with the sergeant, and then trying to get him killed by a patrol of her countrymen, all of whom Rock kills. All the backstory we get is that Helga's father and brothers died in the field, so she took their place. Rock takes Helga prisoner and returns with her to his unit.

 

Once Helga encounters Easy Company, she finds it "easy" to make all the grunts drool over her, except for Rock-- and according to Kanigher's hints and Frank Redondo's art, even Rock is not insensible to her charms. Despite his refusal to let her cozy up, she still takes him by surprise, steals a gun and kills one of Rock's men. (Not one of the well-known ones, of course.) She leads the "feldwebel," as she repeatedly calls him, into a German ambush, but Rock triumphs even though Helga escapes. Though she swears to make another run at Rock, Kanigher apparently dropped her as a potential menace.

     Four years later, Kanigher and artist Dan Speigle launched SGT ROCK ANNUAL #2-- which I assume had a #1 under some other title. In the story proper, a flashforward scene shows Rock in the same situation seen on the cover-- Rock hanging from a cable-car while being menaced by a man with a gun-- but now we learn that that the would-be killer is Frank Rock's only brother Larry, who's fighting in the same war, but in the Philippines.

A montage, apparently in Rock's mind, rehearses how Larry, despite grievous wounds, saves the famed General MacArthur from an assassination attempt. Larry later saves MacArthur from a second attempt, and the creator of "Enemy Ace" gets into heavy poetry, using fraternal imagery to describe  Larry and the pilot of a zero plane as "murderous twins," until their bond is severed by the breaking of an "umbilical cord of madness."

Back in Rock's terrain, he gets two sets of orders (one open, one sealed) from fellow warcomics-star Lieutenant JEB Stuart and his "Haunted Tank," complete with the tank's resident Civil War ghost.  
   

When a battle temporarily incapacitates the Haunted Tank, Easy Company proceeds to follow the already opened orders, to seek out a German castle and to liberate a prisoner there. They encounter a ten-foot-tall Kraut robot whom the soldiers nickname "Goliath" before eventually taking him out with their guns. 

After the robot's demise, another pitched battle erupts, but this time Easy gets help from frequent guest-star Mademoiselle Marie, as well as returning evildoer Helga Voss. Given that Kanigher and others had already established an ongoing relationship between Rock and Marie, it's tempting to think that the only reason Kanigher revived Helga for just a few pages was to portray a machine-gun "catfight" between the French brunette and the ice-blonde Nazi.

    In order to justify the third hero-crossover, Rock gets an air-lift to the German castle by "Navajo air ace Johnny Cloud," while the rest of Easy keeps footing it overland. Somehow Marie and Cloud both know that Rock carries sealed orders that he can't open till he reaches the castle. Once Rock infiltrates the castle, he makes two discoveries. One is that Rock's frequent sparring partner The Iron Major is present in the schloss. The other is that the orders tell him to kill the prisoner if he can't rescue him. A page or so later, Rock makes a third discovery-- the identity of the prisoner-- but the more astute readers will probably have figured that Kanigher didn't keep bringing up Larry Rock for no reason.

          

As a minor twist, Kanigher reveals that the Iron Major is of an older German echelon and so doesn't approve of Nazi depravity. The depraved Nazi colonel orders the Major executed, so Rock has to save his enemy from his other enemies, and then clobber the Major when the more cultured villain gets in the hero's way. Surprisingly, Kanigher rushes past the revelation that the prisoner is Larry Rock-- maybe he thought it was so obvious, everyone would have seen the handwriting on the wall. The two Rocks escape the Germans by cable-car, but Larry's old wound makes him irrational. He demands his brother kill him to keep Larry from falling into enemy hands and being tortured to reveal vital information.  
   

   

For the big dramatic finish, Larry vanishes into the icy mountain wastes, sparing Brother Frank from having to execute the prisoner as his orders demanded. So even if the orders were "sealed in blood"-- that of fraternal blood, blood-ties that couldn't be allowed to trump the needs of the military-- Frank Rock actually defies those orders for sake of brotherly love. Larry actually has no good reason to tell Frank to kill him-- once they're on the cable-car, they're no longer in danger of recapture-- but I guess Kanigher used Larry's head-wound to justify the big sacrificial moment. Yet though it's a very contrived tale, there's just a few myth-tropes here worth preserving. And from what I've heard, I believe Larry Rock comes back later, so the big sacrifice gets overturned for the sake of another story in the Rock mythos. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: FLAME AND CRIMSON (2019)

Since this essay allowed me to deal with the questions of "escapism in entertainment" raised in Brian Murphy's FLAME AND CRIMSON, here I can concentrate on more of a straight review of the book. 

To my knowledge FLAME probably stands as the first substantive history of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in prose, with only moderate attention to developments in other media. The author not only shows a strong familiarity with all of the major authors in the subgenre-- even the bad ones-- he took pains to read most or all of the AMRA fanzines (1959-1982) in order to get a sense of how the magazine endeavored to keep alive a very niche type of entertainment, particularly in the days before the Lancer paperbacks of the middle sixties revived the subgenre and made it widely popular for roughly the next fifteen years or so. As I said in the previous essay, I don't necessarily think the subgenre fell out of favor due to "the bad driving out the good." It may just be that the competing subgenre of epic fantasy offered a lot more variety to the fantasy-oriented reader than even the best exemplars of sword-and-sorcery.

In any case, Murphy's research includes many topics of interest, such as the role of Sprague de Camp in launching the sixties Lancer reprints, apart from the work de Camp and Lin Carter did in adding to the saga of REH's most popular barbarian. Murphy provides a lot of detail about the possible influences upon Howard's almost "sui generis" development of sword-and-sorcery-- influences such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and A. Merritt. However, Murphy seems laser-focused upon positioning sword-and-sorcery within the tradition of what I call "magical fantasy stories," even though Murphy himself runs down a list of Howard's favorite authors and concludes that "Howard favored historical fiction authors and adventure stories largely absent fantastic elements." To support this claim, Murphy runs down a list of seventeen authors whom Howard is known to have read (and sometimes overtly imitated) and claims that only four of those on the list-- Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft were "fantasy authors." However, there were certainly well-known fantastic works in the oeuvres of such figures as Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, while the majority of Sax Rohmer works-- works which Howard emulated in his "Skull-Face stories"-- have almost as much focus on "real-world fantasy" as the works of EA Poe.

I won't rate Murphy's opinions of other, non-Howard prose authors of S&S or on S&S cinema; such things boil down to individual opinion. The only estimation I found hard to swallow was his overly politicized reading of CL Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, which were the only female-centric S&S stories produced during Howard's lifetime." When Murphy writes that "the dreamy, out of body sequences typical of the Jirel stories are battlegrounds of traditional gender roles," he not only sounds like he's parroting feminist academic scholarship, he also fails to make a good case for his interpretation.   

Lastly, Murphy tries a little too hard to create a radical opposition between S&S and the epic fantasy of Tolkien. He's somewhat on an interesting track when he quotes from the prologue to an anthology, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editor briefly ventures a comparison between the large scale of the epic fantasy subgenre and the similar scale of Homer's ILIAD, and also between the more limited scale of the S&S tale and the events of Homer's ODYSSEY. But Murphy tries to improve on what the anthology-editor wrote. For Murphy the iconic epic-fantasy hero traces from Hector, the noble antagonist, while the iconic S&S hero is embodied by-- Achilles, the ILIAD'S protagonist? I can only guess why Achilles appealed to Murphy more than Odysseus. But whatever the reason, his idea just obscured the more promising comparison: comparing the concerted, large-scale conflicts of the Trojan War to epic fantasy and comparing the generally peripatetic, small-scale adventures of the S&S heroes to the wanderings of Odysseus. But whatever my technical disagreements with Murphy, I never thought he was a phony, which was my reading of the authors of the proto-woke tome DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME.      

A TALE OF TWO COSMS

 Though the terminology introduced here may not stand the test of (my) time, I felt like better organizing my thoughts on "ontology and epistemology." I'm fairly sure that nothing I write here will supersede my literary definition of both, I formulated in 2023's WHAT VS, HOW. But the proposed terminology might be better than trying to repurpose the standard "tenor/vehicle" terms I put forth in 2024's VERTICAL VIRTUES.

My current difficulty stems from my realization that in essays like A NOSE FOR GNOSIS I've frequently been using "ontology" and "epistemology" as if they could stand for all the ontological or epistemological elements in a narrative, when in fact the words signify the disciplines involved in thinking about what things exist or how we have knowledge of their existence. "Tenor and vehicle" also don't work that well because each word sounds like a single unitary thing, rather than a combination of elements that comprise a greater whole. Since the connotation for Greek *cosmos* is that of an ordered whole, my new terms are *ontocosm* for the totality of lateral elements (relating to the kinetic and dramatic potentialities) and *epicosm* for the totality of vertical elements (relating to the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities). Whether I'll use the terms a lot depends on my future sensibilities. But at this point it seems easier to reword my statement in NOSE FOR GNOSIS re the respective potentialities of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm. 

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong virtual elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the western-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing.        

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 3

 More fun with geometrical approximations as in Part 2, but this time, a little shorter.

In that essay, I gave visual examples as to how the concrescence of vertical meaning in a narrative could be represented as an increasing amplitude of the up-and-down variations in a straight line, which represented the forward progress of lateral meaning. Now, the only complication to this illustration is that my previous essays have established is that such concrescence also appears in the elements of lateral meaning, the potentialities I've labeled "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." However, whereas the increasing concrescence of vertical values can be shown as greater amplitude, concrescence of lateral meaning is geometrically expresssed by the relative thickness of the line, as per these three examples:

 

 The thinnest, and thus least dense, of the lines represents the "poor" state of either kinetic or dramatic potentiality. the next thickest represents a "fair" state, and the thickest represents a "good" state.

Just to give three examples applicable only to the dramatic potentiality:

A story with possibly the least dense drama-- for instance, a Roy Rogers Z-western-- would be represented by the thinnest line.

A Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR would usually be in the middle, representing a fairly dense dramatic potentiality.

And something like Faulkner's A LIGHT IN AUGUST would merit the thickest line of good drama. Of course, the lines would also be more or less jagged depending upon the intensity of the vertical amplitude. The mythopoeic amplitude for particular FANTASTIC FOUR stories might vary according to each story's content, even though the thickness of the lateral representation might stay the same. Thus "The Impossible Man" and "The Galactus Trilogy" might have the same level of emotional drama (even though one is expressed through comedy) but very different levels of mythopoeic amplitude.    

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.                                  

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 3

 I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.-- RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROBLEMS, 2019.

In Part 2 of this series, I mentioned that Infantino's investment in infusing "Rational DC" with the irrationality of the Gothic was signified by (1) the "spookification" of HOUSE OF MYSTERY and the debut of DEADMAN, both in 1967, and (2) the reinvention of the 1950s character The Phantom Stranger in SHOWCASE #80, in 1969. But in between those two, another DC stalwart showed similar changes in 1968, a little before the Bat-books went full-bore Gothic. I have no direct testimony that Infantino intervened to alter the direction of DC's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which had dealt with rationalized versions of the metaphenomenal since its genesis under Jack Kirby and Dave Wood.

  

For roughly six years Arnold Drake had been writing the CHALLENGERS title, often with art by Bob Brown, and all of their contributions had fallen into the rational model. By some odd chance, their last two issues on the title effectively launched the irrational, Gothic direction for the remainder of the series' original run. In issue 62 (June-July 1968), Drake introduced a new set of villains for the heroes, The Legion of the Weird, which comprised five villainous wizards from different cultures: the vaguely East European Count Karnak. the Egyptian Kaftu, the possibly American Mistress Wycker, the archaic Brit druid Hordred, and the unspecifically Indian medicine man Madoga. Drake had used this multicultural approach to sorcerous evildoers before in a 1964 Mark Merlin story, which took much the same rational approach as everything else DC published in that year. 

The Legion "weirdies," as one panel calls them, uses various mystic forces against the Challengers, not least with a gigantic mummy named Tukamenon. However, for whatever reason Drake and Brown were unable to finish the Legion's battle with the "Challs."  

Though #63 ended in a cliffhanger, the next two issues of CHALLENGERS were fill-in stories written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Jack Sparling, who would be the closest thing the title had to a regular penciler. Though many of the stories that followed involved mad science as much as mysticism, Sparling, whatever his limitations, was much better than Brown at rendering freaky-deaky visuals, so it's not unlikely he was selected for just that purpose.

  

Issue #66 finishes up the Legion of the Weird story with Sparling and a Mike Friedrich script. The villains are defeated but escape, never (as far as I know) to return. Denny O'Neil then took over the series for the remainder of its original run, and he certainly showed even more penchant for supernatural mystery-stories than anyone previous. O'Neil's stories for the title were as pedestrian as those of Drake and Kanigher. but there are a couple of minor landmarks in his run. In #69 O'Neil finds a reason to get charter Challenger Prof Haley out of the way so that he can bring in the Challengers' first regular female member, Corrinna Stark, to take Prof's place. In the early sixties the Challs had a recurring "irregular female member"    named June Robbins, but Corrinna was the first regular female Challenger. 

O'Neil didn't really think that much about the character, though. She starts out helping the Challs because her mad-scientist father half-killed Prof, but though she offered to take Prof's place, she didn't really have any skill except that of being a hot girl, depending on whether she was drawn by Sparling, Dick Dillin or George Tuska. Three or four issues into O'Neil's run, Corrinna suddenly gets psychic medium-powers for the sake of some more spooky stories, and there's a moderately entertaining story in #74 that guest-stars both Deadman and O'Neil's private dick Jonny Double. Then in #75, Corrinna and the four guys finish the last of the mag's new material with a one-page introduction to a Kirby reprint, and such reprints take up the rest of the issues until cancellation with #80. (Technically the book on its bimonthly schedule ended in #77 and the last three Kirby reprint-issues appeared about two years later, in 1973.) There's a mention of Jack Kirby's new works for DC in the lettercol to issue #76 (1970), and that's probably the only reason the dying book went reprint at all. Someone, maybe Infantino, thought that Kirby fans might desert Marvel to pick up anything the King did at DC, even old work that was largely out of fashion. 

So the CHALLENGERS title spent most of its life as Rational Fantasy, detoured into Irrational Fantasy for its last two years, and then went back to its origins for its unspectacular finish. Infantino's Gothic preoccupations had some great results for the Bat-titles and tapped a market for horror-tales that Marvel never quite accessed. But despite preceding PHANTOM STRANGER into the new Weirdie terrain, "Gothic Challengers" is a mostly forgotten chapter in DC history.

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 2

 I decided to supplement last year's WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES with further details, but realized that the original essay supplied only the rationale of distinguishing "weirdie" metaphenomenal fictions from the "worldie" type, as per the Brian Aldiss history mentioned, and then I jumped to a particular late manifestation of "weirdies at DC." So to bridge that gap, here's my essay from OUROBOROS DREAMS where I dealt with the importance of Carmine Infantino to my schema. ___________________________

DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets without people much realizing what was going on. Which I did. And also we had a chain of them out there, if you remember, and they were all successful before anyone at Marvel realized what was going on. So we had those going for us, and the superheroes going for us. Meanwhile I kept experimenting with different things.

So in Evanier's book KIRBY, ME claims, maybe a little dubiously, that when Kinney Corp bought DC in 1967, they thought they were getting the top company, only to become displeased when they learned that Marvel was such a strong second. (I think Roy Thomas claimed Marvel didn't obtain the majority market share until the early seventies though.) Still, that story isn't absolutely necessary to put across the notion that someone in management thought it was time for some changes. Infantino was made first art director and then editorial director in 1966 and 1967, and it looks like promoting horror and the Gothic was his major "experiment." Not only did he get rid of the superheroes in HOUSE OF MYSTERY in '67, he also debuted DEADMAN in the failing book STRANGE ADVENTURES. The Spectre had been revived earlier under the tutelage of Julie Schwartz, but the initial format was so rationalized that any "weirdie" appeal of the hero was nullified. Spectre also got his own title in 1967, and though it didn't last long it soon converted into spookier stories before it died. In the late sixties and early seventies, even some of the "mainstream" DC superheroes began exploiting Gothic/horror themes on their covers, such as (obviously) BATMAN but also less obvious types like FLASH and TEEN TITANS. 

One fan attributed the big change to the influence of DARK SHADOWS in '66, but I think it was more likely that DC saw that the Warren magazines had been doing well since 1964 (EERIE) and 1966 (CREEPY) respectively, and that they hired guys like EC stalwart Joe Orlando to cut into that action. That also probably led to the revival of The Phantom Stranger in 1969, as well as another fifties character, Doctor Thirteen. The intersection of the two seems to be the first regular convocation of two "weirdies" at DC Comics, in 1969's SHOWCASE #80-- though the good doctor was dropped from the Stranger's adventures pretty quickly.