THE FALSE RATIONALE OF "FOUND ART"

 Here's another one of my comments I'm preserving from a forum-post in case I'm moved to build on it later.                                                     

(1) I haven't read too much on the evolution and justifications of pop art. By sheer chance the other day, I happened to listen to a podcast arguing for a connection between the dadaism of the 1920s and the pop art of the fifties and sixties, in which the expert used Duchamp as an example of the former and Warhol as an example of the latter. I did seem to remember something about the use of "found art" in dada, and a quick search came up with an interesting quote from the first guy: 'In a few words, Marcel Duchamp aptly summarizes the work of this movement: “…an ordinary object could be elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of the artist”.' So absent any further info, I'm going to guess that's a fair representation of the rationale of guys like Lichtenstein too. (2) I'm not personally wild about the rationale of "found art," but like anything else there could be good and bad examples thereof. I do not consider any popular art in any medium to qualify as "found art," however, for reasons I won't enlarge upon for now. (3) I don't consider the quality of any popular artworks defined by whether or not they are owned by a corporation. If Tony Abruzzo did an impressive illustration for DC's SECRET HEARTS romance comic, then it's an impressive illustration, regardless of whether Lichtenstein changed the image for his swipe or what his rationale for using the art may be. (4) I will agree that artists like Russ Heath have little justification to be torqued at seeing their art-panels excerpted in this manner. While there may be particular examples these days of comic book original art that may fetch high prices, there's also a lot of low-level art that would never reach that level in the comics market, much less be prized in the context of gallery art. The original art of guys like Heath and Abruzzo, done for formula comics, isn't "found art" in my opinion, but it's also not that impressive compared to the heights of better art done by other comics-artists. The context that Lichtenstein and others place on popular art in the new context of "pop art" is part of the concept that makes the gallery art exceptionally valuable, whether I personally validate that rationale or not. Anyway, good debate on the subject of swipes in this context.         

MYTHCOMICS: "SCOURGE OF THE SKELETAL RIDERS" (TEEN TITANS #37, 1972)

 

As I stated in my previous post, I only revisited the 1966-73 TEEN TITANS comics-run because I wanted to cross-compare one of the stories with one of the TITANS cartoons of the 2000s. I had no expectations of finding a concrescent mythcomic in any of those 43 issues. Even though TEEN TITANS went through three distinct marketing phases, most of the stories were written by longtime DC journeyman Bob Haney, which didn't make for great variety. Like most of the people writing for comics in those days, Haney turned out a huge volume of tales, usually predicated on some wild premise that would theoretically grab the fancies of juvenile readers. Much like Robert Kanigher, Haney's ideas weren't always logical, though he was capable of producing tight plots around them. I considered all of his TITANS tales to do no more than time-killers, and I certainly did not expect to find any mythicity in a story from the title's least impressive phase, what I called "Spooky Titans." During this period, BTW, the heroes-- four costumed crusaders and two non-costumed-- were being sent on assorted assignments by a grey-haired eminence named Mister Jupiter, who I believe largely disappeared from DC continuity after the first TITANS series perished.                                 

 

To my great surprise, the routinely titled story "Scourge of the Skeletal Riders" started off with the heroes having a close encounter with a mystery that's never entirely solved. On their way to finish an assignment for Mister Jupiter, the Titans crack up their camper, rendering it undriveable. The only sign of civilization is a "weird old shack," where an unnamed blacksmith plies his trade. Though he speaks in an archaic fashion, he accepts the job of fixing the vehicle, but only after he finishes shoeing four lively-looking horses. The blacksmith hints darkly of some danger if he doesn't finish the shoeing on time, but the Titans are focused on their mission. They leave the camper behind and catch a ride to their destination (no roadside assistance back in 1972). Once reaching their home base, the Titans learn that their next assignment is to look for a famous teenaged photographer, Grady Dawes, who went missing in a country torn by civil war. The Titans all claim to have been well acquainted with Grady, though it's axiomatic that the character never appeared before this.                                                                                     

      

So off go the Titans to war-torn "Ranistan," pledging not to get involved in the conflict while looking for their friend. For a time I thought "Scourge" might be one of the many "anti-war" stories DC was producing in this time-period. However, though the heroes do get involved, they only seek to prevent loss of life on both sides, and the nature of the quarrel is never specified. And their first hint of something unusual is that Kid Flash seeks to warn a troop of soldiers from being attacked. A rider on a red steed overtakes the hero despite his super-speed and stuns him, so that the troop gets slaughtered.                                                                                         

Though the previous incident involved the Titans trying to save soldiers of the current regime, they seek out a rebel stronghold, looking for info on Grady. They try to liberate stores of food for starving rebels, but another weird horseman appears, beats down the heroes, and sets the food on fire. The Titans then continue their journey, with Robin playing skeptic when the psychic Lilith theorizes that they are been opposed by the legendary Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the first two riders having been War and Famine.                                                               

    The Teen Wonder is duly converted, though, for their next mission is to deliver a vital serum to mountain tribes. Plague, who naturally wants more suffering from disease, booby-traps the heroes, and though all the good guys survive, the serum is destroyed.                               

   

Naturally, there's one more Horseman to encounter: Death. The heroes are on the way to the fortress where Grady's being held for ransom, but on the way, they see "a rider on a pale horse" menacing two refugees with a scythe. Kid Flash rescues the refugees and exults in having beaten Death. However, when they get to the fortress, they learn that Death has already been there, and that the pale rider tricked Grady into getting killed. Mister Jupiter tries to assuage the despondent heroes' feelings by saying they won a "small victory" by saving the refugees (without mentioning that the heroes failed at their other three efforts). However, Haney explicitly states that Death only menaced the refugees to delay the Titans before they could reach Grady, so if they hadn't been there, the refugees would not been threatened. So this is one of the few superhero stories of the period in which the heroes have no success whatsoever in their endeavors.                                                                                              

As a capper for this dolorous downturn, the Titans return to America to get their camper. The blacksmith and his smithy have been replaced by a car repairman and his modern-day shop, and he professes not to have done any blacksmithing for decades. There is an old smithy there, but clearly this exists only so that Haney can close out the story with a "what is reality" schtick. Yet the framing narrative of the "fairyland blacksmith" confers some extra mythicity on what could have been just another spook-tale. The Four Horsemen clearly don't set up the encounter, for they have no trouble overcoming the mortal champions at every turn. The blacksmith assumes the role of a prophet of doom, casting a minatory shadow over the heroes, as if to say, "You can win a lot of battles, but against fate, even Titans strive in vain." 

TITANIC NEAR-MYTHS AND CURIOSITIES

 I wasn't expecting to write more than a quickie piece on DC's first TEEN TITANS title, which lasted (not counting three try-out stories) from issue #1 in 1966 through issue #43 in 1973. And this is still only a selective view at best, at that.                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

      

What prompted me to revisit this moldy oldie from my youth was my having reviewed all five seasons of Cartoon Network's TEEN TITANS teleseries. In this post, I evaluated the mythicity of the fifth-season episode "Revved Up" as "good," stating: 


'In the 1960s TITANS comic, the writer introduced a villain with the improbable name of "Ding Dong Daddy," who executed crimes with the help of specially rigged vehicles. This was a rare (for the time) shout-out to a cartoon character outside the boundaries of four-color comic books: the artistic persona of Earl "Big Daddy" Roth, a caricaturist renowned for weird monsters driving fast cars. REVVED UP introduces the animated Ding Dong as a guy who somehow gets hold of a secret treasure owned by the Teen Wonder himself. When Robin and the other Titans try to reacquire the mysterious item, Ding Dong compels them to participate in a car-race-- and Cyborg, who dearly loves his T-car, is more than happy to oblige.'                                                                                                                     I didn't adequately explain why I thought the episode had better than average mythicity, but it later occurred to me that I'd implied that the mere use of the imagery of the artist Roth and some of his caricatures alone conferred mythicity. I could have corrected the language of the post, and no one would have noticed but me, but I thought I could expand on my thoughts better in an ARCHIVE post. What I was trying to get across was that the images of "Big Daddy" Roth and his creations were not mythic in themselves but only accrued sociological mythicity as representations of the "car culture" of the time. I felt "Revved Up" tapped into some of the same sense of humans' fascination with high-velocity vehicles. That fascination comes across by the way the Titans, Ding Dong Daddy and other malefactors cpme up with inventive car-creations, albeit with a certain degree of reflection about how cars work in the first place. (Without that reflection, "Revved Up" wouldn't possess any more mythicity than an episode of WACKY RACES.)                                                                                                       

So much for the TITANS cartoon episode, but what about the original comic book, to which the cartoon occasionally paid homage? In the title's seven-year-run, it was comprised of three periods: "Wacky Titans" (the one all the fans joke about for its un-coolness), "Relevant Titans" (wherein some of the heroes put aside their costumes and tried to have more "street-level" adventures), and "Spooky Titans" (wherein the heroes reassumed their costumes but tended to get involved in markedly supernatural difficulties). Ding Dong Daddy appears in the third issue of the "Wacky Period," but it's one of the better issues on which writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy collaborated. There's still a lot of bad "hip" dialogue that made the Wacky Period so celebrated for its nuttiness, but the plot's not that different from one of Bill Finger's Golden Age tales about Batman and Robin trying to keep young boys on the straight and narrow.                                                                                                 

  The story opens when an automated car robs a bank in Gotham City and escapes the Dynamic Duo, managing even to outmaneuver the Batmobile. By dumb luck, a governmental education committee asks the Teen Titans to investigate a high incidence of dropout high-schoolers, right in River City (OK, not really). From typical teen Danny, the heroes learn that many local teens are deserting school thanks to the high pay they earn at Ding Dong Daddy's car shop. Ding Dong is a crook of course-- he must be, since he's contributing to the delinquency of minors-- but Haney doesn't bother describing what sort of business the villain's using as his cover for his nefarious activities-- like, does he repair vehicles, or does he sell both cars and motorcycles of his own personal design? What he really does in his crime-career is to design other vehicles, like the bank-robbery buggy in Gotham, to pull off automated robberies. It's the sort of crime-career that only makes sense in the world of superheroes and their "pattern villains."                                                                                     

One might expect that once the Titans pay a call on Ding Dong, he might just quell his criminal activities and lay low. Instead, the superheroes' advent functions like a thrown gauntlet, and he sends forth three different gimmick-vehicles to confuse and confound the Titans. When Robin spies on the "Hot Rod Hive," Ding Dong sics thugs on the Boy Wonder and puts him in a death trap-- the sort of thing that practically begs a visit from the local constabulary.             

                                                

Instead, the Titans respond with a flanking attack, masquerading as ordinary bike-riders and talking Danny into getting them jobs at the Hive. The heroes don't do a really good job of staying undercover, since they use their special powers to stomp some nasty bikers who have nothing to do with the main story. (Note the bizarre headgear Nick Cardy gives to the bad bikers.) What's to keep any dropout loyal to Ding Dong from exposing the Titans to the villain?                         

                                                                                                                                              

  Nevertheless, the subterfuge works, in large part because the wig-wearing Wonder Girl distracts the maker of crime-cars by shaking her moneymaker for him in private. In jig time the heroes are able to expose Ding Dong's criminal nature to his student-employees, who are duly aghast at being involved in felonious doings. Ding Dong unleashes one last gimmick on the heroes-- a killer gas pump, of all things-- and then River City can go back to the status quo. I don't believe Ding Dong appeared again until the cartoon show, but he's a decent enough pattern-criminal, given a little novelty by the Roth caricature and by the fact that there aren't that many vehicle-themed villains.                                                                                                       

As I said, I'm not going to attempt an overview of even one of the TITANS periods, but I will note a few other curiosities in the Wacky Years. Beast Boy, who was a vital member of the super-group in the 1980s, only got one guest-appearance in the 1966-73 run, when he tried to join the Titans in issue #6. The main story's not very good, and the art by Bill Molno is subpar, but the page I reprint above does show writer Haney seeking to emulate a little of Marvel's "misunderstood hero" trope, which was on fuller display in DOOM PATROL, where the animal-imitating teen originated.  For good measure, the letters column for the issue contains one letter of no particular consequence from future pro Mark Evanier. Also, a continuity-minded fan asked the editors of TITANS if Wonder Girl would get phased out since she'd been written out of the WONDER WOMAN series by Robert Kanigher, which event I addressed here. The TITANS editors did not respond to the continuity confusion.     

                                                                                           
Finally, just for grins, here's a page from the first appearance of the Mad Mod, who got more than a little exposure on the TEEN TITANS cartoon show. Haney and Cardy introduced the character, whose raison d'etre had more to do with fashion-gimmicks than with mind-control-- and who was apparently Cockney, since he had the habit of dropping his "H's." Though I rather doubt that any Brit of any linguistic division went as far as Haney's depiction, since Mad Mod even laughs without the use of the "H-sound," going, "'Aw, 'Aw" or occasionally "'Ar, 'Ar."  

THE READING RHEUM: CHILDREN OF TIME (2015)

 

Unlike the majority of 21st century science fiction and fantasy, Adrian Tchaikovsky's CHILDREN OF TIME is a very good read, which always keeps readers intrigued in terms of what's at stake for all of the characters and for the imperiled sets of species they represent. The book was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though I don't plan to read them, as I think more "children" wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     In the far future, though humankind has pioneered space and established a small handful of colonies on terraformed worlds, factional differences between political groups have almost decimated the population. This exigency breeds two separate but intersecting reactions. The first reaction is a scientific project is established orbiting a terraformed planet, with the intention of breeding a new race of human beings. The project-head, Doctor Avrana Kern, essentially wants to play "God of Evolution" by sending to the planet a nanovirus that will promote rapid evolutionary advancement in the subjects of Kern's experiment, a troop of monkeys that will become a new race, one able to facilitate human colonization. (To be sure, Kern has a god-complex and becomes more invested in her creations than in any plans for colonization.) Much later in Earth-history, a spaceship departs from Earth. The ship and its cargo of mostly coldsleeping passengers plans to colonize that same terraformed world, unaware of Kern's project.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Bad things happen aboard the satellite: everyone dies and so do the payload of monkeys as they're sent to "Kern's World." But Kern herself survives in the form of a computer simulation, albeit one with mangled memories. And the nanovirus finds other species in which to flourish-- mostly arthropods for whatever reasons. And the foremost advanced beings are a race of intelligent spiders. Inevitably, the book leads to a face-off between the humans, desperate for survival on a new world, and the spiders, intent on protecting their own territory-- though Tchaikovsky works things so as to promote a non-combative rapprochement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          The mythicity here is entirely cosmological in nature, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates the biology of Earth-spiders to describe the way these ET-spiders progress to a state of high intelligence and culture-- even working in a small sociological motif with regard to "male liberation" within the arachnids' matriarchal background. In fact, aside from Doctor Kern, none of the humans are any more mythic than the spiders, except as collective groups. I might even designate the two groups as subsumed by the world they inhabit, the same way that (in my system) "The Planet of the Apes" connotes the totality of apes and humans who occupy that domain.                                                                                                                                                                                   

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

THE READING RHEUM: THE HELLBOUND HEART (1986)

 My general negative estimation of Clive Barker's work probably discouraged me from bothering to check out "The Hellbound Heart" until now. But given that I did read the 2015 SCARLET GOSPELS, in which Barker sought to construct a "Cenobite mythology" independent of the movie franchise, that probably motivated me to gauge the origins of the Cenobites in prose fiction. In my review I rated the "iconicity" of those characters in the movies over that of the GOSPELS novel, and that made me more a little curious about the source novel. There's also another reason for my reading-reticence, but I'll come back to that later.                                                                       

 To my great surprise, HEART was the best Barker prose work I've ever read. The characters are clearly delineated and confined to a small group of necessary functions in a tightly plotted tale. At base HEART is a "devil's bargain" story, in which a mortal makes a deal that he thinks will be to his benefit, but that instead ends up leaving him both burned and burning. The transgressive mortal this time is Englishman Frank Cotton, a hedonistic reprobate who travels from city to city, getting by on his charm and looks. His one relative is his brother Rory, but Frank holds Rory in contempt for his dull conservatism. On the day Rory wed his glamorous bride Julia, Frank secretly seduced Julia and then blew town.                                                                                                                                                       

But a life of heedless pleasures leaves Frank wanting something beyond ordinary experience. At a family house in England, Frank uses that iconic "puzzle box" to summon other-dimensional beings called "Cenobites." They're not connected to any religious entities, so there's no soul-bartering going on, but Frank thinks that he can make a deal with them anyway, one he thinks will result in his gaining access to new levels of heterosexual pleasures. Instead, the Cenobites' definition of pleasure is the imposition of endless forms of torture upon the body, until pain becomes synonymous with pleasure. Frank is taken into their dimension for the Cenobite games, and the book loosely suggests that these strange entities, with their body piercings and mutilations, may have been humans who became enthralled with self-inflicted mortification. None of the Cenobites in the story are as vivid as their movie-counterparts, by the way.           

Barker's first HELLRAISER movie followed the novel's plot fairly closely, and since I minutely described the plot-action of the 1987 HELLRAISER in this review, I won't repeat myself here. The greatest alteration the movie made to the book is that Kirsty Singer, a friend of Rory's nursing unrequited feelings for him, gets changed in the 1987 movie into Kirsty Cotton. This Kirsty is the unmarried daughter of Rory (whose name is changed to Larry), who resents her stepmother without knowing precisely why. In both book and movie, Kirsty is responsible for consigning Frank back to "Hell" after Frank has murdered his brother. So, in the book Kirsty's no relation to either Rory or Frank. Yet HEART includes a strange scene in which Frank's trying to masquerade as Rory to deceive Kirsty. To lure the young woman, Frank utters a come-on that Barker himself calls "incestuous:" saying "Come to Daddy" to Kirsty Singer. But if Kirsty's not related to either man, how can the come-on seem "incestuous" to anyone, least of all Kirsty?                                                                                                           Despite the various actions of Kirsty, Frank and Julia, Barker throws his narrative spotlight upon the mysterious Cenobites, though they're much more nebulous in prose than in cinema. One Cenobite displays the "pinhead" look and gets more lines than the others, so obviously in crafting the movie Barker built up that character to be more of an authority over the others, so as to take advantage of the talents of actor David Bradley. The movie still edges out the novel in terms of iconicity, but the mythicity of the two is about equal. Lastly, the other reason I was reluctant to read HEART was that I wondered if Barker, who has been public as a gay author for many years now, might not have constructed Frank's "bad bargain with the Devil" as a punishment for his heterosexual excesses. I've seen no shortage of modern narratives willing to punish fictional characters for the sin of being "heteronormative." But while I don't dismiss the possibility that Barker might have had some sort of punitive notion in mind, at least subconsciously, he succeeded in creating myth-figures that went beyond the boundaries of ideology. That the Cenobites deserve that status is suggested by the fact that other authors could excel in depicting the infernal pain-freaks in terms Barker would not have attempted, not least the HELLRAISER movie sequel. Ironically, though SCARLET GOSPELS wanted to stand apart from those other works, Barker's character of "The Hell Priest" owes a lot more to the movie's Pinhead than to the vague figure from HEART.                                               

THE GAIMAN CONTROVERSY

 I've recently finished listening to the six-part "Master" podcast series from the British news outlet Tortoise, which collated interviews from five women, all claiming that they had been sexually assaulted in differing ways by famed comics-author Neil Gaiman.                           

First, though there have been many public "he said she said" allegations that lacked corroborative evidence-- not least the 2018 accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey-Ford and her copycats-- I must admit that the Tortoise reporters generally seem to play fair. They present both evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the allegations of the five women. That doesn't mean that Tortoise's conclusions are correct. But the journalists are not guilty of constructing a hit-piece.                                                                         

  All that said, of the five women who spoke with Tortoise, only two prove consequential. This Wikipedia article provides a summing-up of the testimonies. Two of them report their getting nonconsensually kissed or groped by Gaiman, while the third, a tenant on land owned by Gaiman and his then-wife, alleges that Gaiman required sexual favors in exchange for her tenancy. But these three don't have nearly as much punch as the other two testimonies. One woman said that in 2003 she began a romantic relationship with Gaiman (he was about forty, she had just turned twenty), but she was distressed by an incident in which he initiated anal sex with her despite her stipulation that he should not do so. The other of the two, and the one who provided Tortoise with the original testimony, alleged that she became a nanny for Gaiman's young child in 2022 at Gaiman's house in New Zealand. Gaiman, then a little over sixty, encouraged the woman to take a bath to relax. The nanny says that Gaiman then inserted himself into said bath and fingered her. This woman did not state that she refused his attentions, however. And I believe the last two are the only ones who reported that during their experiences with Gaiman, he required that each woman call him "Master"-- hence the name of the Tortoise podcast.                       

   Gaiman insists in a recent response that even though he wasn't always as "caring" as he should have been in his relationships, everything that transpired was consensual. This may be a rationalization, but as one of the podcasts explains, under British law at least, consent does not protect the accused from the law if the law determines that the accused has wrought harm. Yet some of the testimonies don't support the allegation that the rough sex was non-consensual, and thus the New Zealand police, after the nanny filed a change of sexual assault against Gaiman, declined to charge the author precisely because the nanny's own texts and recorded phone calls suggested that she had consented.                                                                                                                                                                                       As a reader who only spoke briefly with Neil Gaiman once, I have no idea of the true nature of his character. The testimonies certainly indicate that he likes rough sex and rough talk in his relationships, which for some might seem a one-eighty away from the affable, literate persona Gaiman adopts in public. At the same time, I think it's important to note that all the faux-horror generated by the use of the term "master" does not indicate Gaiman's devotion to the principles of a full-time sadist like the Marquise de Sade. I think Tortoise did slant their reportage somewhat to reflect a horror of whips and chains, much as Frederic Wertham did when he accused comic books of turning all juvenile readers into budding young sadists. In one podcast, Tortoise raises the topic of BDSM, but only to make an invidious comparison: regular practitioners of BDSM have "safe words" and even contracts, and Tortoise comments that Gaiman had no such restrictions. But none of the testimonies allege anything about rituals of dominance and submission except that of the New Zealand nanny, who said that in the past she had indulged in "light BDSM." But none of the five women testify to being whipped or placed in bondage. So the only connotation of "master" is one of playing a humiliation-game: "I have power and you don't," "You need me more than I need you." Maybe Gaiman, reacting against the nice-guy persona he projects as a celebrity, enjoys acting like a jerk in private. But at present I'm not seeing that anything Gaiman had been alleged to have done rises to the level of criminality. However, he probably will suffer some economic penalties for these accusations, and for once I can't entirely say that's a morally wrong response. This situation isn't comparable to the cowardly vilification-in-advance of Kevin Spacey, where he was denied employment years before he met his accusers in court, and their testimonies were shot down. I think Gaiman's too important an artist to suffer total cancellation for being a horndog-- but I could be wrong on that.                 

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES PT. 4

 For once I'm writing an essay here that I plan to use part of in some online forum discussion. Because of such a discussion on one such forum, I began reviewing the history of the American Civil War in Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's masterful 1996 overview EMANCIPATING SLAVES, ENSLAVING FREE MEN. I won't go into the many complexities of Hummel's work, but even in the first chapter I found an interesting statement that corrects one of my claims in this not-really-a-series agglomeration of essays. In Part 3, I said:                                                                                                                 Though anti-slavery abolitionists campaigned for the end of the institution even before the signing of the Constitution, Northern politicians did not become highly invested in anti-slavery rhetoric until the 1830s-- which just happens to coincide with the establishment of the "Tariff of Abominations," whose purpose was to make Northern goods more appealing than the lower-priced European goods, all of which led to the Nullification Crisis.

  Hummel, however, pegged the genesis of the anti-slavery issue as about ten years earlier.  "Not until the decade following the War of 1812 did slavery fully divide the South from the North... Opponents beat back last efforts to legalize the institution in Indiana and Illinois. Simultaneously, the free states were beginning to overwhelm the slave states in total population. Already in 1819, the North outvoted the South in the lower house of Congress, 105 to 81. Only the Senate maintained a balance between the country's two sections: eleven free states to eleven slave states."                                                                                                                                            Hummel cites the 1819 efforts of New York Representative James Tallmadge to set arbitrary limits on slave-state Missouri's admissibility to the Union. I've been aware of Tallmadge's influence on the slave-free conflict for many years, not least because the conflict that legislator introduced led to Henry Clay's "Missouri Compromise" of 1820. But I didn't realize that the Northern states had swelled in population so early, though Hummel specifies in the same section that a number of Northern politicians, termed "doughfaces," sometimes made common cause with Southerners, being "northern men with southern principles." Hummel concludes this line of thought thusly:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  "Southerners furthermore became advocates of inviolate states' rights. What particularly disturbed them was that Tallmadge's amendment would have imposed antislavery upon a full-fledged state, and not just a territory. Previously states' rights had been an ideological issue with support and opposition in all parts of the country. But once the Missouri controversy exposed the South's vulnerability as a minority, states' rights increasingly turned into a sectional issue. Southerners came to realize that only strict limits upon national authority could protect their existing slave system from hostile interference."                                                                                                                                                           

WHERE VICTIM AND SADIST MEET

It was only coincidence that I finished writing my analysis of the 2004 manga ZEBRAMAN a few days after two parallel, but apparently unrelated, mass murder rampages in New Orleans and Las Vegas respectively. I don't have any expertise in the typology of mass murderers, but I can look up such things on the Net as well as anyone, and it got me thinking about the three types of mass murderers that others have identified, and how those formulations compare with artist Yamada Reiji's puzzling evocation of famous killers' names in his entirely fictional story.                                                                                                                                                                                     The salient distinctions between types of mass murderers rely on categories of time. Serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, generally pick individual victims and commit their murders over a significant span of time. Spree killers, such as Charlie Starkweather, commit a series of murders in a short span of time, often in a particular area. Rampage killers (whom some sources also call "mass murderers") execute (or try to execute) a group of victims in one place and all at one time, as did both of the New Years' Day killers, Matthew Livelsberger (Las Vegas) and Shamsud-din Jabbar (New Orleans).                                                                                                                                                                                                      Rampage killers are often slain at the scene of their crimes, though sometimes they leave behind manifestos, as did the deceased Jabbar and Livelsberger. (Technically Livelsberger did not succeed in killing innocents, but he injured enough people that his intent seems clear.) The precise reasons each gave for their actions are not important to this essay, though both subscribed to a type of mentality I've labeled "victimology," by which I meant "the politics of victimization." Their idea seems to be that they can emancipate themselves from their own sufferings by reducing others, usually complete strangers, to dead or injured victims, and this crime gives the victim-types some perverse status in their own minds.                                                                                                       

  Now, Yamada's ZEBRAMAN is not principally about mass murderers, but it does make an odd usage of the names of three real-life killers for three of its villains. The 2004 movie from which Yamada derived the manga's loose structure included a costumed maniac named "Crab Man," who was supposed to be an analogue of the many bizarre villains from Japan's superhero TV shows, but one brought into real existence by alien influences. Yamada eliminated the movie's aliens from his story and also altered "Crab Man's" name to "Crabjack the Ripper." He then introduced new opponents for his hero: both named after mass murderers: "Scorpio-Dahmer" (who is seen in all the pages I reproduce here) and "Shrike-Manson."             

I don't think Yamada had any particular insights about the social or psychological phenomena associated with mass murderers, and his use of particular historical names is questionable. But I believe Yamada wanted to contrast the sort of "dead-end ideologies" represented by such callous lust for multiple victims. In the sequence I reprint here, Zebraman refutes ScorpioDahmer's belief that the sins of his victims justify him taking their lives.                                         

In contrast, Zebraman proposes an ethic of forgiveness over that of punishment. The dialogue implies that the fictional killer subscribes to the ideology of "the victim who wants to create more victims." However, it's strange that Yamada would use the name "Dahmer" for such a fictional figure. In my view of the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, he didn't kill to quell his own past tragedy. Real Dahmer was a sociopath who took sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others, and so in my own private typology, he's a "sadist type" of mass murderer-- as well as being the type of serial killer who elaborately plans his killings.                                                                                   

One can't speculate on the typology of Jack the Ripper, since that mass murderer was never identified. But as it happens, the third ZEBRAMAN villain with a mass murderer's name goes to the other extreme. This character, Shrike-Manson, wears a bird costume and emulates Charles Manson in that, instead of committing crimes himself, he brainwashes younger persons to do the dirty work. Ironically, though, Charles Manson was a far closer match to the "victim ideology" I'm propounding than was Jeffrey Dahmer. That doesn't mean that Real Manson wasn't capable of sadism. Yet sadism doesn't seem to have been his main motive in inspiring/directing the Tate-LoBianco slayings. Everything I've read by Manson seems infused with the idea of his being the victim who's getting back at people who wouldn't give him the things he deserved, like a studio recording contract, or leadership of a post-apocalyptic social order. Though his modus operandi was obviously different than that of other rampage killers, the effect was the same: a group of innocents killed in a single place at a single time.                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Though all mass murderers wreak violence mostly on innocents, often on strangers who have no personal associations with their killers, the rampage killers prove particularly difficult to cope with. Most strike without signaling their actions in any way, as seems to have been the case with both Jabbar and Livelsberger, neither of whom was on any watchlist. Again, I emphasize that I'm not drawing direct comparisons between real criminals and fantasy-villains from a manga. But I was intrigued by the dichotomy Zebraman offers to persuade ScorpioDahmer. In essence, this victim-type of killer is imprisoned by his past, forced to keep killing to assuage his pain. Both the hero and his allies suggest that the true orientation should be the future, because, as Kana says above, "You only have this life." (Though to be sure, that sort of logic refutes only the victim-ideologue: the sadism-ideologue may be perfectly fine, consecrating his life to the suffering of innocents.)