CURIOSITIES #44: BLACK RIDER

 This retelling of The Black Rider's origin from 1950 struck me as a little more fulsomely dramatic than the average Golden Age origin.         

 And from issue 12 in 1951, this atypical oater shows the hero defending the right of Mormons to practice their own customs in a democracy. The message is undermined a bit by the consistent misspelling, "Mormans."                                                                           

  

THE READING RHEUM: "SECOND VARIETY" (1953)

 

I'm reviewing this lone Philip K Dick tale purely as a prelude to reviewing the 1995 film adaptation. Although "Second Variety" shows some of Dick's familiar tropes, it's mainly a gimmick story with a surprise ending. In a future where the US and Russia go to war, most of Earth is annihilated. The surviving American forces send a military detachment to their Moon base as a defensive maneuver, but the Soviets have a base there and do the same thing. However, Yankee know-how allows the Americans to stymie the Commie forces with a series of robots called "claws." Humans originally crafted these mechanical attack dogs-- which burrow beneath the ground and spring out to attack living things with sharp implements. However, over time the humans left the creation of the claws to automatic factories. As a result, the claws began to make improvements on the forms they take. These alterations include emulating the forms of humans-- a trope Dick would explore to much greater effect in 1968's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?                                                                                   

American soldier/ viewpoint character Hendricks-- who, like the other characters in the story, is a cypher-- receives intel that the Russian contingent wants a parley. Alone, he proceeds to the Russian moon base. On the way he's joined by a pathetic little ragamuffin, theoretically the survivor of some armed conflict. Once he reaches the other moon base (nothing is said about how the moon has been terraformed for human survival there), the Russians shoot the kid, who proves to be a new variety of "claw." Once Hendricks is inside the compound, he finds that the three soldiers, one of whom is a woman named Tasso, fear that they've been infiltrated by a "second variety" of human-mimicking robot, in contrast to the other two varieties that they can recognize. Suffice to say, they're right. There are a couple of other tropes Dick works into the story. One is the idea that the claws' relentless self-improvement is a form of evolution, hearkening their replacement of humankind, which does not transfer to the 1995 movie. The other is the idea that the robots are going to be just as divisive against their own kind, which does make it into the film, albeit in altered form.   

NULL-MYTHS: IT'S METAMORPHOSING TIME!

Before the Silver Age, if a series-character didn't sell, no publisher tried to bring said character back. But four years after the cancellation of METAMORPHO in 1968, writer-creator Bob Haney paired with editor Murray Boltinoff-- who had edited the Element Man's title-- to interest fans in the character. Their attempt failed, but a couple of the stories now give me examples of two species of "null-myths." In past essays, I've asserted that this category covers two types of story: those that are just flatly stereotypical, bringing no insight or emotion to the symbolism of their content, and those that make inconsummate use of those symbols. I'll now distinguish these as "passive null-myths," in which no real mental activity is in evidence, and "active null-myths," in which the mental activity goes down some weird pathway.                                                                                               

In 1972 Haney had been writing most if not all of the scripts for DC's teamup title THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD for seven years, and although Metamorpho had appeared once before in that title, the pulpishly-titled story "Cold Blood, Hot Gun" re-introduces the hero to readers. The 1968 title, BTW, had ended on an unresolved cliffhanger, but to my knowledge neither Haney nor anyone else ever tried to wrap up that story.                                                                   

  According to Haney's new scenario, Metamorpho has been off the grid for four years because he's been undergoing an experimental treatment to undo his freakish mutation, courtesy of conniving rich guy Simon Stagg, father to Metamorpho's beloved Sapphire Stagg. Much to the Element Man's frustration, Simon prematurely aborts the treatment because Simon has received news that an assassin seeks to kill Sapphire, who needs extra protection.                               

The source of this info is none other than Batman, but the means by which the Dark Knight acquires the intel is extremely dicey. After a businessman is flung to his death from his office on a high floor, Batman investigates. Haney needs the detective to find a list of the other people the assassin plans to knock off, but the author isn't content with simply having the hit man drop a written list in the office. Instead, after offing his target, the killer sits down and types out such a list in the office and takes it with him-- but Batman's able to reconstruct what was typed from analyzing the typewriter ribbon. And you thought the Internet was bad about preserving deleted content. Inevitably Batman and Metamorpho team up to prevent heiress Sapphire from getting killed, though Sapphire doesn't take the threat seriously and makes the heroes' job harder. The only distinction of this routine formula-tale is the typewriter nonsense, but this is a failure of verisimilitude, not mythicity.                               

 Haney managed to sell DC on giving Metamorpho a backup feature in ACTION COMICS, but the Element Man only hung in there for six installments before getting pushed out by the Human Target. However, by that time Bob Haney was writing WORLD'S FINEST, so he used a story in issue #217, entitled "Heroes with Dirty Hands," to re-relaunch Metamorpho. Fans sometimes complain about modern writers expecting the readers to remain clued in on whole histories of characters, but Haney is no different here, clearly expecting that the WORLD'S FINEST reader is going to remember the setup about Metamorpho undergoing the experimental treatment. The splash above barely shows the hero stewing in a nearby laboratory vat, while focusing mostly on a burly fellow wearing a costume that's half Superman and half Batman, who were, as most will know, the co-stars of the title. Is this some freaky return of the team's old villain, The Composite Superman?                                                               

But no, it's Java, Simon Stagg's dull-witted assistant, a Neanderthal man pulled from a bog and restored to something like sentient life. I'll forego citing Java's lame reasons for wearing the half-and-half costume, but the last panel of page 2 is one of those examples of an active null-myth I spoke of-- though I'll elaborate on it later.                     

                                       

   Haney then throws in a BS explanation about how the computer programmed the powers and propensities of Batman and Superman into the makeup of the Element Man, so that when he emerges from the vat, he's now wearing the half-and-half costume. He doesn't seem to be able to change back to his regular form, but maybe that's because hes been a D-lister for about seven years now, and he kind of likes biting the style of the World's Finest team. Simon Stagg dubs Metamorpho "Super-Freak," anticipating the Rick James song hit by eight years. Off goes Super-Freak to fight crime, and in jig time he's embarrassed Superman and Batman by doing their thing better than they can. So the heroes do the logical thing and defect to a foreign country, Slavia.                                                                                           

                                                               

I doubt that even the dumbest kids in 1973 didn't anticipate that DC's foremost heroes were just running a scam. In this case, they're hoaxing Rastinyak, Slavia's evil ruler, so that he'll accept their allegiance and reveal to them his special secret weapon. Apparently, this overly complicated "mission impossible" also requires the US President to ask Metamorpho to fetch the renegade heroes back to their country, as if they don't have the right to defect, just because. Metamorpho isn't informed of the deep fake and fights the heroes for real, so they have to throw the fight so that the evildoer will show his hand. The villain is defeated and Super-Freak's career ends with the fading of his bogus powers. This guest-star appearance led to Metamorpho getting a handful of backup strips in WORLD'S FINEST. But there was no real comeback for the Man of a Thousand Elements, and even membership in that lame super-team THE OUTSIDERS didn't get Metamorpho off the D-list.                                                                                                                                                                                                            Unlike "Cold Blood," "Dirty Hands" does have the kernel of a myth at its mostly hollow center. In a literal sense, the costumes of Superman and Batman don't confer any power on the heroes. But on the symbolic level, even imitations of the heroes' actual costumes incarnate the mana of the two crimefighters, and it's that mana that's being transferred to Metamorpho, rather than attributing such a power-boost to Simon Stagg's computer. As an extra added attraction, Haney blows his own fantasy-rules for Metamorpho's powers. Supposedly Metamorpho can only alter his body into new shapes if those shapes are made of elements naturally in the human body. So-- how does he manage to imprison Superman in a globe made of "anti matter?"                                                                                                      

MY CAPTAIN AMERICA REPLACEMENT THEORY

 To some extent the recent debut in theaters of CAPTAIN AMERICA BRAVE NEW WORLD plays into some aspects of my essays about totalitarian tokenism, beginning here-- though there are also some other aspects to consider in the response of reviewers to the controversial movie. In this essay I'm not responding to the movie itself-- which I don't plan to see until it hits DVD-- or to complaints about its narrative failures. I want to address just one subject: the question of how Captain America should have been replaced.                                                                                  

The conclusion of AVENGERS ENDGAME laid down the new dispensation: whatever the MCU's behind-the-scenes reasons for getting rid of the Steve Rogers character, as essayed by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers was written out of the Marvel Universe. I didn't think much of the idea of the MCU rather arbitrarily transferring the shield and costume of Cap to Sam "The Falcon" Wilson, and many of the reviewers I mentioned have cited reasons why they thought the replacement was badly executed. I would probably agree with most of these arguments. However, I also disagree with one of the most-cited alternatives of said reviewers: that the MCU should have put Bucky "Winter Soldier" Barnes into the star-spangled costume instead.                                                                                                         

                                                                                    


 To boil down many of the complaints about Sam Wilson to one narrative, the dominant gist seems to be that the showrunners presented no compelling reason for the Falcon to take on the Captain America mantle. What I think many if not all of them wanted was something along the lines of the "grenade scene" in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER. In that scene, pantywaist Steve Rogers, one of many candidates for the super-soldier transformation, proves his fitness for the role through an act of imagined self-sacrifice. The logic with which AVENGER's script makes Steve' selection seem credible proved key to making Steve Rogers himself compelling to a mass audience that had no particular investment in the Rogers Cap of the comic books.                                                              

Now, the 1940s MCU version of Bucky Barnes also makes his debut in AVENGER, but that character has next to nothing in common with the juvenile sidekick of the comics. The new Bucky is a strapping young adult, a friend and contemporary to Steve, and what little the audience knows of him in that movie is that he just seems like an all-around nice guy. Also, he's able to join the army during WWII, unlike Sickly Steve. But Bucky, just as much as Sam Wilson, is given no specific connection to the American ethos, of which Steve Rogers is the embodiment, according to AVENGER's script. So if neither Bucky Barnes nor Sam Wilson was justified in terms of symbolizing that ethos, why would Bucky be any better a replacement than Sam? And these considerations don't even take in the problem that in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER, Bucky of the 1940s is preserved beyond his original lifespan, after which he's transformed into a brainwashed assassin with one metal arm. Call me crazy, but that personal history doesn't resonate with the ideal of Captain America any better than a Black military officer whose feelings about the United States of America are left vague, whether by design or by incompetence.                              

I personally don't want to either Falcon or Winter Soldier to assume the mantle; their characters are already set, and I don't think they can be retooled to make them resonate with audiences as Steve Rogers did. Nor do I think the current MCU can produce a new character, of any race, creed, or color, who can replace Steve Rogers. I assume that the current showrunners are married to the idea that the Rogers of the "official timeline" must go back in time and live out his life with his destined wife, so even though that outcome could be altered with the usual time-traveling BS, I don't think it will be. But now that DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE established that alternate-world versions of characters can travel to the main timeline, that means that a new Steve Rogers could still show up in the MCU, though not necessarily one played by Chris Evans, in case the MCU is too cheap to pay his price.      

THE READING RHEUM: PELLUCIDAR (1915)

 I didn't mention in my review of AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the book ended with a cliffhanger in which hero David Innes ends up back on the surface, separated from the primitive interior world of Pellucidar. But compared to the suspenseful ending of A PRINCESS OF MARS, both the concept and the resolution of CORE's cliffhanger in the sequel seems lazy by comparison. It's my unsupported opinion that ERB wasn't nearly as invested in Pellucidar as he was in Barsoom and even Caspak. Certainly, throughout the remainder of PELLUCIDAR the author doesn't expand much on this pocket prehistoric cosmos.                                             

Though the sequel is just as episodic as CORE was, ERB no longer has to devote time to explaining his world, so overall there are more action set-pieces. David Innes still seems like a cypher, an incarnation of Manifest Destiny, eager to convert all the primitives to 20th-century progress. Admittedly he does this to liberate the humans from the ravening Mahars, though these ruthless reptiles only appear a couple of times in PELLUCIDAR. Dian the Beautiful isn't improved by more narrative-time either. She almost gets a Xena-moment as seen in the Roy Krenkel cover above, but exigent circumstances sideline her potential as a heroine. Her best character-moment may be indirectly explaining how she never got raped during her captivity by the villainous Hooja, revealing to Innes that she still has on her person a poison that would have prevented "the fate worse than death." The novel holds a smattering of okay character moments for the various humans Innes encounters. Still, the most involving scenes in the book involve Innes taming a savage hyenanodon as if it were a surface-dog. When a book is more interested in the hero's dog than in his lady love, there's a problem.                                                   

   I must admit that I forgot what a threat Hooja was since I last read this novel. He and Innes share no scenes here, and Hooja was mostly offstage throughout the first book after Innes beat him up for getting grabby with Dian. But compared to a lot of weakling villains in ERB, Hooja does his enemy a lot of damage. He's not any better characterized than Innes and Dian, and his being offstage lessens his impact. But he's smart enough (unlike most humans of the pocket world) to recognize the nature of the science-marvels that Innes and his elderly buddy Abner Perry bring to Pellucidar, and to copy those marvels to garner power for himself. Hooja is apparently slain at the end of this book, but I guess I won't know if ERB really knocked off one of his better villains until I finish the PELLUCIDAR series.                             

  Due to his prolonged absence since the end of the first novel, Innes spends most of this book trying to unite all the human tribes against the Mahars, though ERB's idea of diplomatic relations always a consists of saving this or that tribal member from peril. After lots of episodic dangers, Innes gets the chance to consolidate his empire in the last twenty pages, though the author is smart enough to let some of the evil reptiles escape capture/death. From peeking at the next book in the series, I know that Innes' empire gets torn down almost as quickly, though he's restored to his throne at the end of the fourth in the series, TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. I suspect the other three books may be more one-offs than part of a greater continuity.               

   In my review of CORE I speculated that ERB probably wouldn't re-use the tailed Black monkey-men, and PELLUCIDAR shows I was half-right. The monkey-men never come on stage again, but when Innes runs into a tribe of hairy white men whose eyes are supposedly like those of sheep (?), ERB has Innes compare the two tribes in his mind. The hero notes that the Black people didn't seem to have a real language, but they did have civilized habits not seen in any of the White tribes, like building huts and holding livestock. The sheep-eyed people have a language, but they seem pretty dumb otherwise. They occupy the top of an escarpment, and when their tribe is attacked by invaders coming up the mountainside, Innes has to point out that the sheep-guys ought to toss rocks down onto their enemies' heads. Clearly ERB had no agenda in describing all of his imaginary evolutionary quirks. His approach would be best likened to the fantasists of Marco Polo's day, who would spin stories of tribes in Asia with all sorts of bizarre nonhuman aspects. In these books, it seems that ERB only wanted to divert his audience-- though I'll only be sure when I make my way through the last three in the series.                                  

MY SHORTEST POST YET

 Since I brought up my essay COORDINATING ORDINATION 2 in the course of a new line of thought in ICONIC PROPOSITIONS 2, I found myself asking myself: "Given that I'm founding this theory on the twin literary processes of *trope emulation* and *icon emulation,* did I ever really define how tropes and icons relate to one another?" I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. And that, for once, is "'nuff said."     

MYTHCOMICS" "THE ANATOMY LESSON" (SWAMP THING #21-24, 1984)

 

In 1984 Alan Moore and Steve Bissette had only barely started working on DC's SWAMP THING comic, which wasn't precisely setting sales records. With issue #21, they began a four-part story which I've given the collective title of "The Anatomy Lesson," after the first installment. I won't comment on any of the ongoing subplots that had been set up in earlier issues and that would bear fruit (so to speak) in future issues, but will concentrate on the main plot, involving the character of Jason Woodrue, first introduced in a 1962 ATOM story, reviewed here.   

To be sure, this was not the Woodrue of the 1960s, an unremarkable-looking scientist in a lab coat. In the 1970s Woodrue became something of a forerunner of the "eco-terrorist" trope, transforming himself into a plant-human hybrid who called himself The Floronic Man. In this guise he championed the cause of the plant world against that of humanity, so that he came into conflict with heroes like the Justice League. In this story, Woodrue has been liberated from prison by General Sunderland, head of your basic evil corporation. Sunderland's forces had captured their frequent nemesis the Swamp Thing, and so the economical overlord wants Woodrue to suss out the swamp-monster's nature, to learn if there's any way the company can profit from the "bio-restorative formula" that made scientist Alec Holland into a muck-encrusted creature. Woodrue subjects the swamp monster's body to various anatomical analyses, and soon reveals the payoff that would change the course of the SWAMP THING series from then on. Swamp Thing is not a human being transformed into a humanoid made of plant matter, but an actual plant that consumed the dead body of Alec Holland, preserving his memories in a new organic form. When Sunderland dispenses with Woodrue's services, implying the scientist will be sent back to the jug, Woodrue releases Swamp Thing from captivity, and also makes sure the creature learns his true nature-- which does not result in happy times for Sunderland.         

Somehow Swamp Thing manages to make his way back to his de facto home in the Florida swamps, and Woodrue follows. Swampy's friends Abigail and Matt find their old ally when he's succumbed to existential despair, losing the will to think himself human, so that his body begins merging with the vegetable growths of the swampland. But Woodrue has not followed out of mere curiosity.

                                                                          

 

Because the former Alec Holland's confused mind wanders in a limbo between plant and animal life, Woodrue somehow taps into Swampy's mind and uses it as a gateway into "The Green," a sort of collective unconscious for plant life (and one of those expansive concepts that I imagine Alan Moore regrets selling to DC Comics). Once there, Woodrue experiences a vast communion with many if not all of the plants on Earth. He becomes convinced that they are telling him to avenge their mistreatment by eradicating all animal life.                                                                                                            

Whereas the old Woodrue tried to conquer the Earth with a bunch of gimcrack plant-weapons, the Floronic Man comes up with a new tactic (which is not to say that he doesn't still take control of vegetable life and make it do things that real plants cannot do). He causes the plants to flood the Earth's atmosphere with oyxgen, which will eventually bring about the destruction of all animal life. Woodrue's old foes the Justice League can't figure out what to do. Luckily for them, the creature that thought it was Alec Holland has also been in communion with The Green, and he arises from his torpor to intervene.                                                                                                        

 

Although the two chlorophyll-critters exchange a few blows, Swamp Thing conquers The Floronic Man with simple logic regarding the ecocystem: get rid of all the animals, and where do plants get their carbon dioxide? Woodrue loses contact with The Green and suffers from what Swampy tellingly calls a "fall from grace." The Justice League find Woodrue as a babbling idiot and take him into custody, having no idea of what forces saved their (literal) bacon. Thirty years later, I'm still impressed with the power of this denouement, and how subtly the plants' oxygen threat foreshadowed the peril plants would then suffer from the ruined ecosystem.                                                 

   

As for Swamp Thing, he gets a new lease on life, learning that it is much easier being green than moping around for decades about a human identity that he was never going to recover (without ending the franchise, that is). Not every story in the Moore-Bissette SWAMP THING run possesses the quality of ANATOMY LESSON. But LESSON isn't just a good story. It's also one of the few "origin-revisions" in comic books that doesn't just content itself with the brash statement that "everything you knew is wrong," but taps a deep well of emotion and mythopoetic imagery to make the new dispensation thoroughly compelling. 

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 I first started systematically speaking of fictional narratives as "propositions" in the 2018 essay-series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, beginning here. True, the main thrust of this series was to talk about the differing strengths of a given work's "lateral meaning," as against the more elusive "vertical meaning." But since both of these complementary elements of narrative have always been inextricably imbricated with one another, it would be correct to state that fictional narrative as a whole was proposition-based: "icons X, Y and Z interact in such a way as to produce results A, B and C."                   

In contrast, I began writing about "centric characters" and "focal presences" close to the beginnings of this blog, though it was only in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON that I settled on the current term "icon" for any individual or collective entity within a narrative that had any sort of agency, using "Primes" and "Subs" to distinguish their level of importance to the story. By this definition even an amorphous force could be an icon, like the one that engenders chaos on Earth in the 1924 film THE CRAZY RAY, or a collection of beings that comprise an environment, like The Planet of the Apes or Kern's World.                                                                 

 However, I'd never precisely brought together the interrelated concepts of icons and propositions, though obviously no one would pay attention to any fictional propositions if there were not fictional icons with whom the audience might identify. Now, drawing partly on my distinction between "trope emulation" and "icon emulation" as established in 2022's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2 by distinguishing between "originary propositions" and "variant propositions." A work like Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD would be an originary proposition because the narrative does not directly derive from an earlier narrative, even if the author uses tropes seen in other narratives: "fatherless boy endures privation," "fatherless boy finds protector," etc.                     

A "variant proposition," however, does follow some pre-existing iconic model. It might be a historical figure altered for fictional purposes, like Scott's ROB ROY--                                                         

--Or it could be a narrative based on a completely fictional figure, as with Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiche SEVEN PER CENT SOLUTION. Both of these I would give a further distinction, the PURE variant proposition. The idea behind both propositions is that they are telling stories of established figures, whether historical or fictional, which vary in some way from whatever has been previously established about said figure.                                                   

The corollary category to the PURE type is of course the IMPURE type. This would be a narrative in which the main thrust of the narrative centers upon an originary icon, but the story also includes a variant take uoon some pre-established figure. Scott's IVANHOE is one I've returned to a number of times. The 12th century knight Ivanhoe is entirely fictitious, but his story is enmeshed with that of Robin Hood and some of the mythology derived from the Robin Hood cosmos. Hence, the latter example is IMPURE.                                                                                                                 More on these matters later.        
                                                                                                

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

"The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon." --A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2 (2021)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   "Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover."" --THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD (2022)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 Since in 2021 I started assiduously pursuing the narrative pattern-analysis I *may* dub "crossology," I've struggled somewhat with trying to account for the situations described in the examples above. In both, some raconteur executes a version of an established icon that strongly deviates from previously established descriptions of the icon in one or more ways. In the case of Kong in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, no change was more monumental than the idea that Kong II, unlike the Kong of the 1933 film, was alive. The script for the 1962 movie could have specified that this was a different Kong than the earlier one, just as the Godzilla of GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN is a different but essentially identical "Godzillasaurus" as the one in the 1954 original. But the writers of KING KONG VS GODZILLA did not make any such distinction. In my view the writers wanted to encourage the identification of Kong II with Kong I, the better to sell to audiences the mythic battle between the foremost kaiju of America with the pre-eminent monster-child of Nippon.                                                                                                       

The example of Billy the Kid in BLOODRAYNE DELIVERANCE is arguably more extreme: not only was this Billy a bloodsucking vampire, he didn't even originate in the era with which both the real William Bonney and his fictional congeners are associated: the Old West. Yet the writers of that movie also wanted more recognition-value out of associating "Vampire Billy" with the legendary outlaw, or else they too could have pursued the strategy I described for Kong II: just say it's some bloodsucker who came along and assumed the identity of a famed gunfighter. I tried to rationalize this narrative identification with phrases like "recognition of motifs" and "template deviations," and while those aren't precisely wrong, they may not get to the heart of the problems inherent in the process of icon emulation. My current solution will phase out the term "template deviations" in favor of a brand-new headscratcher, "variant propositions," which Part 2 will attempt to justify.                                                                                                                                                                             

MYTHCOMICS: "MASTER OF THE PLANT WORLD" (THE ATOM #1, 1962)

                   

 

In many ways "Master of the Plant World" is a better example of a cosmological myth than my other entry for the Silver Age Atom, seen here. But for now I'll just dilate upon "Master's" introduction of the character who is arguably the hero's best known villain, certainly more so than "The Bug-Eyed Bandit."                         

 

 

An ordinary guy happens to be on the street at night when he alone witnesses the robbery of a bank by a flying wood dryad and a couple of improbable plants, both of which disappear by the time the cops show up. John Q is arrested and he hires lady lawyer Jean Loring to represent him. Jean, having passed the bar at Perry Mason U, plays gumshoe and seeks info from a horticulturalist to find if there's any chance of real plants being able to display aspects like the ones John Q described. Jean's opinion of her client's story about the flying wood dryad is not recorded for posterity, but she does put off her ardent, proposal-happy suitor Ray Palmer by telling him a little about her case. Palmer, in his secret ID of The Atom, watches as Jean stakes out the horticulturalist's greenhouse, on the flimsy theory that because someone stole something from the greenhouse, the thief may return that very evening and provide material evidence for the case of Jean's client. 

 

The culprit's henchpersons, this time two flying wood dryads, do indeed return to the scene of the crime. Jean gets gassed and does not see them, but the Atom trails the miniature ripoff artists to the laboratory of their master Jason Woodrue. Woodrue overcomes Atom with a combination of touch-me-nots and a Venus flytrap, but the villain doesn't check to see that his adversary is really truly dead.         

 

As the hero reconnoiters, he comes across the captive queen of the wood dryads, Maya, who provides some much needed, if confusing, exposition. Maya is under Woodrue's control, and she in turn compels her dryad subjects to do Woodrue's bidding. When Gardner Fox reveals that both Maya and Woodrue are extra-dimensional beings, the author seems to be setting the reader up for the old trope "exiled criminal comes back to the kingdom that exiled him and takes over." Instead, for some reason that must've made sense to Fox at the time, he claims that Maya and Woodrue came from two separate dimensions where people have lots of knowledge about plants in terms of both scientific and mystical lore. Artist Gil Kane either didn't follow Fox's train of thought or didn't care. In panel 5 of page 12, Kane simply draws "Faery-Woodrue" being exiled by a bunch of small spirits who look just like Maya and her dryads. In later iterations of the villain, everyone pretty much forgot that Woodrue had such origins and just treated him like an Earthman mad scientist.  

       
The long game behind Woodrue's criminal activities is that he unleashes what one assumes to be a plant-conqust of the world. Of motives he has none: Woodrue just wants temporal power over the whole world because he's "wicked," as one text-box calls him.  The Atom scores the deciding victory when he turns one of Woodrue's plant-weapons against him. Woodrue is imprisoned, the dryads go back home and Jean's client is liberated.                                   

The main virtue of "Master" is almost entirely all the clever plant-weapons the evildoer comes up with, though arguably Fox mixes in a little plant-metaphysics by bringing in dryads, even other-dimensional ones. On one page Woodrue even chants a sleep-spell to put out Maya's lights, so the writer's definitely mixing his mad scientist and evil sorcerer tropes here. Fox distinguishes himself by trying to find real-world analogues for his fantasy-plants, and I give him a pass on the more far-fetched conceptions. (Touch-me-nots don't shoot missiles, but they have some sort of pseudo-muscular apparatus that allows them to close their petals when someone tries to touch them.) Speaking of touching, the Palmer-Loring relationship might seem a bit dysfunctional to modern readers. Jean wants to be Ray's wife some day, but first she wants to make her mark as a lady lawyer, though it's not clear what her endgame will be when she gets there. Ray helps her in cases like this one not because he's altruistic-- although he's that in a general sense-- but because he figures that if Jean chalks up enough wins, she'll eventually feel validated and quit her profession to become a housewife. But this was set up as a sitcom problem with no real solution, not a negotiation between two adults, so by the end of the sixties the relationship sputtered out in the hands of other raconteurs, and finally was trashed by the superficial IDENTITY CRISIS. But the original relationship wasn't that much better and doesn't rise to the level of a psychological myth.