MYTHCOMICS: "ANIMAL CRACKERS" (ARCHIE GIANT SERIES #196, 1972)

 

I didn't have too much luck this month looking for my annual "Xmythcomic" until I just randomly decided to look through some online Archie Giants. I don't usually expect much if any mythicity in Archie stories, having said here that "I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures." Still, since I have found myth-stuff in other teen humor comics, so I thought an Archie mythcomic a mild possibility. I just wouldn't have thought it would be a Christmas comic.

It's also from Al Hartley, an ARCHIE artist who became a born-again Christian in the late 1960s. Supposedly he got into his religious crusade so much that his editors had to tell him to tamp it down. I'd seen a few stories into which Hartley worked Christian polemics, but I wasn't sure if he had the artistic ability to emphasize vision over dogma. Yet I was slightly impressed by a 1972 "near myth" in which Hartley tried to communicate a sacral attitude toward nature and American history.

"Animal Crackers" was printed the same year as the "Bus Fuss" story, and it draws upon a few aspects of Christian faith that I suppose a Christian might not consider "mythic" (except maybe for Jordan Peterson). There's a slight irony that the story is introduced by the character of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The character debuted in 1962 but only became part of the Archieverse seven years later, first by dint of getting an animated cartoon in 1969 and then graduating to her own title in 1971. This led to Sabrina getting a "giant" collection of stories like this one, though "Crackers" only gives her two panels of a "half-frame" story. Clad in a Santa-outfit, she gives the reader a quickie intro to the idea that animals also celebrate Christmas, and then promptly does a fast fade.  

So here begins the main conceit: it's the regular Archie characters, as animals. Archie, though not exactly a commanding presence in the comics, gets to be the Lion because he's the King of the Archie Universe. Jughead is a kangaroo who envies a pelican for his food storage capacity but doesn't appreciate being able to use his pouch for Xmas presents-- though this really doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the story.

So in quick succession most of the Archie characters get their beasts on: Moose the Gorilla, Reggie the Tiger (because the tiger is the lion's "rival"), Big Ethel the Giraffe, Dilton the Owl, and Veronica the Peacock. Strangely, Hartley leaves out any iteration of Veronica's rival Betty. Maybe it was a bit of conceptual strain to animal-ize any other females, since he doesn't draw Veronica as a female critter, but as a humanoid with a peacock-tail and bird-feet. But aside from some minor sex-jokes-- Big Ethel turns off all the boys while Veronica only has to "flutter her tail" to mesmerize the males-- nobody's doing much of anything, good or bad. So is Dilton going to excoriate the gamboling beast-people for not going to church?

  Yes-- and no. Lion Archie defends whatever games they've all supposedly been playing at the "Christmas party," because "Christmas is a sort of make-believe time." This ought to sound logical to most readers, juvenile and otherwise: isn't Xmas a festive time, to gambol about with friends and family?

However, Dilton does have a point beyond being a spoilsport. In the remaining two pages of the story, he sketches out a time before Christmas, when animals-- and, by extension, the humans they represent-- were ruled by "the law of the jungle." People ruled by that law fought all the time, governed only by the "survival of the fittest." (Not much love for Darwin here...) However, though without explicitly mentioning the birth of Christ, Dilton states that Christmas was responsible for introducing the current state of all creatures, able to appreciate one another despite any differences that might divide them. I hypothesize, though, that since Hartley's editors didn't want him proselytizing in the Archieverse, the artist chose not to invoke "the Prince of Peace" as such. Instead, he employed a cognate principle: that of Isaiah 11:6, in which "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" (as opposed to the popular "lion and lamb" misquote). And though I'm agnostic (albeit with a Christian background), I have to appreciate the skillful way Hartley managed to communicate his feelings on the millennial nature of his faith with Aesopian version of the Archie cast and a fusion of the Christmas holiday with the vision of Isaiah.

I have to admit, though, that I still haven't found a myth-tale for those immortal kids of Riverdale in their own personas. But if I never find one, this is an adequate substitute.                 

THE LOVER, THE DILETTANTE, AND THE CLINICIAN

 For once the new terms I'm tossing out are not full-fledged aspects of my personal literary theory. They're just approximations of the different orientations I find in different creators. 

THE LOVER is the type of creator who finds something deeply important to him/her in whatever fictional narratives he/she encounters, and who seeks to reproduce those moving elements or tropes in his/her own works. That doesn't preclude working on projects that do not excite the Lover personally, but if the Lover has a sustained career, the Critic can usually see one or more favored tropes, often a "master trope," repeated again and again. As a kid Jack Kirby (born 1917) belonged to the first generation of American juveniles to be exposed to periodicals centered upon the still gestating genre of science fiction (beginning with AMAZING STORIES in 1926). The totality of SF-tropes, far more than the related tropes of horror and fantasy, became an endless resource for Kirby, and I would venture that his creative "master trope" was the ceaseless exploration of all the most famous sci-fi scenarios-- lost cities, prehistoric domains, alien worlds. I for one see this trope in everything from TUK, CAVEBOY to FANTASTIC FOUR to CAPTAIN VICTORY.

 THE DILETTANTE might sound like a putdown in comparison to the Lover, but it merely signifies that the creator in question didn't become strongly cathected to a particular theme or trope. From what I've read, Stan Lee probably enjoyed the SF/adventure pulps of his time as much as did Kirby, but I don't see any particular trope from any particular genre looming large in Lee's oeuvre. That doesn't mean that he didn't have particular tropes that he used again and again, only that he used them more for professional convenience, rather than for personal expression. I might argue, hypothetically, that over time Lee became invested in using the trope of "the suffering savior" that one can find in his fifties SF-stories (like this one) on through SPIDER-MAN and SILVER SURFER. But I can't really claim that trope dominates his work anymore than that of the "quarreling best buddies" trope I see in pairings from "Millie and Chili" to "Ben and Johnny."

For THE CLINICIAN I cheated on my categories a little, for my initial example is Timely/Atlas publisher Martin Goodman, who was not to my knowledge a creator of any kind. However, the ALTER EGO article referenced establishes that at times he did show a rough, if not always correct, instinct about what sort of stories would prove popular with his target audience. Of course, Goodman is most famous for indiscriminately flooding newsstands with quickly produced titles, purely to grab shelf-space, so it's fair to say that he didn't make many, if any, decisions based on what moved him personally. I call him a Clinician because I see in him a clinical attitude toward creative efforts. 

       

But of course I can find many more examples of all three types in all media. Michael Carreras, who wrote and directed several movies for Hammer Films (founded by his father James), strikes me as another Clinician. I've never read a biography of MC, but from looking over the movies he did before and after the birth of Hammer horror, I get the sense that he like Goodman just went with the flow most if not all the time. In my review of THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, I took note of how he used a complex Egyptian myth-tale for no better purpose than to make one more mummy-movie. A Clinician type of creator can produce exemplary work, though in Carreras's case, CURSE and the risible PREHISTORIC WOMEN are probably at the top of his creative roster.

In line with some of my recent ruminations on LOST, I tend to think that some of its blown potential stemmed from the different creative types involved. In the early seasons, I might have believed that head honcho J.J. Abrams to be a Lover ensorcelled by a multitude of tantalizing tropes. But exposure to his work on the STAR TREK and STAR WARS franchises showed me that he was at best a Dilettante. Had he remained active in guiding the six seasons of LOST, the show still might have emerged as a media landmark. But the producers to whom he relegated LOST were in my estimation just Clinicians with not much skill at keeping the tone and content consistent-- which is why, in this month's LOST essay, I said that the only way I could analyze the program would be to go armed with both a "good shit" detector and a "bad shit" detector-- or words to that effect.        

TO BE HULK-KORRECTED

 Useless boomer-kid recollection #337: back in the Silver Age of Comics, a few HULK comics, upon ending on a cliffhanger, would end with the goofy phrase, "To Be Hulk-inued." Hence, my title.

So on the CRIVENS blog, I was talking with Kid on a response-thread about the evolution of the HULK comic in the sixties. I wished I could have found a certain old article by Will Murray, in which he discussed the Hulk's sixties career in detail. But not only did I not remember where it appeared, I was briefly on a listserve with Murray, and when I asked him where he'd done the piece, even HE did not recall. So I did my own quickie history of the period of the Hulk's career in between the cancellation of his own title and his getting a berth in TALES TO ASTONISH.

So HULK 6 is dated March 63. It's roughly 7 months later that Stan and Jack have Hulk join the Avengers. Two months after that, they do a callback to FF#3, where the Torch splits from his group--- but the guys keep things unpredictable. Not does the Hulk not rejoin the super-group, he becomes an ally of a Public Enemy, the Sub-Mariner, in AVENGERS 3. (That by itself might've got the pardon revoked.) But after #3, Hulk-- still more or less "Tough-Guy Hulk"-- doesn't do much of anything. The Avengers supposedly keep looking for him but somehow don't manage to cross paths with Greenie until FF #25-26, starting in April 64. Was Stan thinking about launching the TTA series even back then, which began in Oct 64? In the FF stories, I might argue that Hulk is more obsessive than he is in the "Tough Guy" stories, getting into a massive snit because his kid-partner has supposedly started hanging out with the WWII living legend. SPIDEY 14 follows two months later, which also might be advance publicity for the TTA series. One issue before the Hulk officially gets his own berth, he also fights Giant-Man in Sept 64, suggesting to me that Stan may've thought that even though Greenjeans had been cancelled before, he still couldn't do worse than Gi/Ant-Man. And from here, it looks like Stan's policy of farming the Hulk out in various features built up reader curiosity about him, improving TTA's sales enough to jettison Henry Pym-- who certainly went on to a better class of stories once he rejoined the Avengers than he'd ever had in his own title.

17 December 2025 at 16:51

All the dates are correct, but I'm not sure I was correct about the Hulk-promotion being Stan Lee's idea. ALTER EGO #60 (2020) contains an overview of the career of Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, and in the course of said overview, author Will Murray (him again) paraphrases an unsourced Ditko quote:    

Circa 1964, Steve Ditko recalled Lee telling him that Goodman directed him to revive three underutilized characters, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and the old pulp hero Ka-Zar. Lee gave Ditko his choice of which to work on...    

Now, I absolutely believe that Ditko quoted what he recalled Lee saying. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lee was accurately reporting what Goodman had told him, though there would seem to be no obvious reason to prevaricate on the subject of his boss's commands. So Goodman probably said something along those lines.

At the same time, the overview gives evidence that Goodman only intermittently interacted with editor Lee about the operation of Goodman's comics-line, so the statement seems a little anomalous. All we know, as crusty old fans, is that Goodman's bottom line was always whether or not he could make a comic temporarily popular, preferably by following a trend or imitating a show from a more mainstream medium.

So I'll break down the three characters Lee mentioned to Ditko.

What would have prompted Goodman to stump for more Sub-Mariner exposure? By early 1964 Namor had become a regular featured player in FANTASTIC FOUR for about two years and had appeared in various other Marvel comics. Still, I don't get any sense of a huge fannish demand for a new SUB-MARINER comic, and not until 1965 does Namor displace Giant-Man in TTA. It does make one wonder if Stan would have put Namor, rather than Hulk, into TTA had Ditko said he wanted to draw the sea prince.

Why Ka-Zar? Unlike Namor, the jungle man hadn't been anything but a backup feature in Golden Age comics, and even his own pulp had only lasted three issues. But maybe in 1964 Goodman looked around at the still popular Tarzan movies, and at the Dell/Gold Key comics for the character, so the publisher just thought Ka-Zar could coattail on his inspiration. That at least might explain why Ka-Zar started showing up as an occasional guest star in DAREDEVIL-- though the first of the DD appearances didn't occur until late 1965.   

The Hulk is a little odd, though, because his only comic had not sold well. One possible motive might be that Hammer Films was still producing Frankenstein films in the early 1960s, and maybe Goodman thought kids would still buy HULK comics because he looked like the Monster. As I said, Stan almost certainly made the decision to stick the cancelled colossus into the AVENGERS in late 1963, and then to have Greenskin depart the super-group in the second issue. But the only result of Hulk's defection is that he teams up with Sub-Mariner in AVENGERS #3 (dated Jan 64), and when that coalition breaks up, the Hulk wanders off and not much happens to him until the FF issues (dated April 64). 

So if the Hulk's appearances in FF and SPIDER-MAN were meant as advance hype for the TTA series, dated for October of that year, that only gives Lee roughly three months to start pouring on the juice for the Hulk, maybe to make sure that Greenie's second shot at stardom would get every chance to succeed-- which it did. Another alternate explanation for Goodman's Hulk-positivity could just be that AVENGERS #3 sold really well and the publisher wanted to jump on that success. I don't think for a moment that Goodman would have cared about the character for any reason but that of sales potential. But Stan could still have made the decision to take things slow and build up the Hulk's profile in Marvel's best sellers, because he appreciated the Hulk's dramatic potential and thought he could do good, profitable stories with the character.   

The only other nugget from the ALTER EGO piece is a mention that when 1950s Goodman found out about an impending WYATT EARP TV show, he had Lee launch an EARP comic that came out a few months before the show hit the airwaves. This sounds a little counter-intuitive, trying to coattail on a show that hasn't appeared yet. But apparently Goodman did the same thing with Atlas' YELLOW CLAW feature, which also appeared on stands a month or two before the airing of the ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU teleseries.

THE READING RHEUM: SUNDIVER (1980)

 

David Brin enjoyed a pretty strong breakout in the early 80s. It's been said that his "Uplift Trilogy" conferred the fan-term "uplift" on a standard SF-trope: that of superior aliens using genetic manipulation and breeding techniques to transform non-sapient beings into fully sapient entities. The second book in the series, STARTIDE RISING, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The third. THE UPLIFT WAR, failed to win a Nebula but won awards from Hugo and Locus.

But the first book in the series, which was also Brin's first published novel? Well--

I must note that the Uplift Trilogy is a discontinuous series, sharing a common universe but no continuing characters, so far as I know. SUNDIVER is implicitly centuries in Earth's future, when humans have made contact with assorted aliens ("Eatees"), some of whom are "patron races" have uplifted "client races" into sapience. Earthpeople are something of a scandal to other Eatees, because humans evolved to sapience without a patron. However, Earth-tech did at some point advance to the point that humans could "uplift" semi-intelligent animals, mainly chimps and dolphins, to co-equal stature. SUNDIVER's main character is a scientist involved with uplift procedures, though we don't see him doing his specialty. 

Instead, Jacob Denwa, because of his relationship with some of the friendly Eatees. gets invited to join a crew of humans and Eatees on a ship, the Sundiver. This vessel journeys to the periphery of Sol itself, to study what seem to be sentient "Sun Ghosts" dwelling in the midst of the solar orb. Sounds like a "blazing" good time, right?

Sadly, SUNDIVER is not an enthralling investigation of a new form of life, but rather, what might best be called a "locked ship mystery." In this situation, a group of passengers on a vessel are confined in each other's company, only to find that there are one or more parties aboard who have insidious or ulterior motives. In fact, the novel even has a wrap-up chapter in which one of the "detectives" sums up, in the best Scooby Doo manner, how the culprit attempted to perpetrate "the hoax of the anthropomorphic Ghosts."    

Since I mildly enjoyed Brin's later novel THE POSTMAN and plan to read the second UPLIFT book, I think SUNDIVER was mostly just an excuse for Brin to set up his conceptual universe, not to tell a compelling story. The characters are two-dimensional and not all that consistent, and Brin injects some modern political content that dates the novel somewhat. Early in the novel, Denwa describes in glowing terms how Eatees on Earth have turned some humans out of their own cities, which is not universally a good thing in the 2020s. There's a political debate about whether or not Earthpeople might've been covertly uplifted by some unknown patron, but this has no resolution and is merely an excuse to motivate a couple of those parties with ulterior motives. 

SUNDIVER offered a quick and easy introduction to the Uplift universe, but it's pretty thin stuff overall. 

LOST, IN THE MAIL

 Posted on CHFB.

_____________

So no one, including me, has added to this LOST TV show thread since the program went off the air. Similarly, the last time I blogged about LOST was also 2010. I've thought about doing a rewatch, but it has always seemed too daunting. I wonder if others here, who got something out of the show (albeit maybe not total satisfaction) have ever done partial rewatches (as I have), or if it's just too much trouble. 

Today I had the notion that the only way to approach LOST, lo these 15 years later, would be to go in armed with two instruments: (1) a profundity detector, and (2) a BS detector. Because whenever I think of the show, I think of some ideas that were incredibly profound, ad others that-- were just thrown into the narrative "fire" to keep the pot boiling. 

Now, I've done series-rewatches for whole shows before-- Classic TREK, BATMAN, KUNG FU. But in traditional episodic shows, it's usually easy to separate the good episodes from the bad episodes. In a show with a soap opera structure, it's a lot harder to separate good from bad, because everything in the narrative flows together.

Maybe before attempting the monster that is LOST, I need to find something roughly similar, but not as overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of characters and incidents. 

ADDENDUM: Here's a quickie example of detected BS. Many LOST characters are named for famed philosophers or scientists, but how often did the names signify anything beyond ntriguing nerd-viewers? The "immortal man" Richard Alpert was given the birth-name of the 20th-century yoga popularizer Ram Dass. Why? Possibly just because the Hindu name "Ram Dass" means "servant of God," and that's what fictional Alpert was to Jacob. But did the name mean anything else in Alpert's overall story-arc? No, so what small meaning it might have had devolves to relative bullshit.      

EXTREME UNCTION FOR FUNCTIONS

 A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities. -- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY, 2014.

 

Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude. -- BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE, 2018.

I recently conjured forth the ideas of functionality and super-functionality from the vasty deeps of 2014 in my last essay. I then found myself cross-comparing those early thoughts to those more recently expressed this October, in both QUICK NUM NOTES and THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD. In the latter essay I opined that both the "metaphenomenalities" privilege tropes of artifice over those of verisimilitude, though works of "the uncanny" seek to create the impression of greater alliance to verisimilitude than one finds in works of "the marvelous." (Thus everything that falls into the pattern of "the uncanny Gothic" always comes up with some artifice to explain away phenomena that seem to be marvelous.) My "October surprise" was the insight that from one POV, the artifice of the uncanny may be just as "artificial" as that of the marvelous, even if the rationales are opposed to one another.

So, by the logic established in the 2014 essay, both the uncanny and the marvelous are defined by "super-functionality," at least in an ontological sense. This means a potential to take on multiple functions within the ontological structure of the narrative, which functions may align with the epistemological structure, or may not. But this "super-functionality" is also an "anti-functionality" insofar as pure functionality is being overshadowed in favor of things that track only in terms of literary artifice. To recapitulate one of the examples from QUICK NUM NOTES, when Ian Fleming has his crime-chief Blofeld execute a subordinate with an electric chair rather than with a pistol or baseball bat, it's because Fleming wants his readers to sit up and take notice of what a singular crime-boss Blofeld is-- that he's NOT a mundane criminal like Al Capone.                                

DOUBLING YOUR IDENTITY PLEASURES

A random turn of mind took me back to some of my ruminations in my 2012 post FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE.  In this essay-- in which I was still using "focal presence" rather than what I now call a "focal icon"-- I gave two examples of narratives in which "fake phenomena" outshone the actual characters in the two stories. One is the Headless Horseman, who, as any reader knows from reading the tale, may be a boogieman spawned entirely by the imagination of Brom Bones, trying to freak out his competitor in romance, timid Ichabod Crane. Yet despite the possibility that the alleged Hessian ghost might just be Brom in a costume, the Horseman has arguably transcended his origins, becoming a diegetically-real character in other narratives.

In the same essay I also discussed the 1935 film MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. In this film, a man is murdered by some blood-letting contrivance. A year later, two apparent vampires begin stalking the family of the murdered man. Unlike the Hessian ghost, these supposed bloodsuckers, Count Mora and his daughter Luna, are apparently a part of the region's established history. The narrative twist is that the haunting horrors are just actors, hired by a detective to expose the murderer from the previous year. Yet though the actors themselves are not important, any more than the detective or his quarry. The images of Mora and Luna, of a father-and-daughter clutch of vampires, are the icons that dominate the movie-- even though, like the Horseman, they're not diegetically real.

I then had the thought that most of the "double identities" throughout the history of fiction carry the same dynamic. Brom Bones doesn't get unmasked as the headless phantom, but a million other Gothic ghost-makers do. Yet even once the hoaxers' identities are revealed, who cares about them anymore? From reading Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, I know that the phantom hound is an illusion created by a schemer named Stapleton, and I even dimly remember his motivation behind his scheme. But readers don't remember Stapleton. They remember the giant hound.

The same thing is generally true of both heroes and villains who assume costumed identities. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne sustain more interest than Stapleton, but still, not as much as their costumed identities. The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man might be the first superhero in which there was a strong concentration on the trials and vicissitudes in the life of the hero's private life. Still, Peter Parker is only important because he's Spider-Man.

Now, it's not impossible to have someone don a mask or costume in which no new identity is created. In the 2014 essay PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, I mentioned a minor masked rustler from Zane Grey's RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. Yet this character, name of Bess, does not sustain a separate identity; she just goes about wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she's female. This sort of action I termed merely "functional" in the narrative; it doesn't carry any symbolic value beyond its base function in the story.

By extension, then, "super-functionality" applies to all those stories-- no matter how well or badly executed-- in which a schemer creates a phantasmal second identity. To be sure, I'm not sure there's ever been a masked western badman who was "mythic" in the full sense of my use of the word. In comics there seem to be dozens of these mediocre sagebrush malefactors, often based on animals-- the Fox, the Cougar, the Tarantula, The Masked Maverick. None of them are super-functional in an epicosmic sense, but they can be considered so in an ontocosmic sense. Similarly, most of the masked champions in all popular media aren't too much more memorable than their regular identities, except for Zorro, the Lone Ranger (and Tonto), and possibly the 1950s Ghost Rider.

Indeed, the act of a character donning what in my system is called "an outre outfit"-- whether or not the outfit is meant to mask his/her identity-- is an illusion that conveys the truth within the story-- and thus this trope becomes intimately associated with that of the "phantasmal figuration." 

ADDENDUM: For a lark I scanned through all the "outre outfit" entries on my movie-blog, to see how often such uncanny works had resulted in movies with epicosmic mythicity. Tarzan got the most entries, which is interesting because his "outfit" is his near-total lack of clothes, signifying not a calculated illusion but his linkage to his beast-patrons. The Phantom of the Opera does fit the "phantasm" category, since he does pretend to be a ghost, though his imposture is not the most compelling aspect of his mythos.

         

          

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 2

 in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.” -- Freud quote from "The Economic Problem of Masochism."

Sublimation (psychology):  the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. -- Dictionary.com

Freud located the etiology of masochism in personal guilt. I assert that the real source of true, syndromic masochism is that of a transpersonal manifestation of shame, arising from being physically or psychologically unable to protect oneself. 

Having never been a woman, I don't know how mothers talk to their daughters (or any parallel relationship) about their gender's getting the short end of the sexual dimorphism stick, at least in terms of self-defense. Mothers may tell their young ones that there's nothing they can do about the biological factors that make men stronger, except to figure out ways to get around the male of the species. But internally, there should be, in females as much as males, some distress at knowing that one's physical nature puts one in danger of humiliation and/or death. 

One coping mechanism-- termed "sublimation" by Freud and others -- might be for female humans to enhance their potential for reproductive security by feeling awe at superior male strength, which then serves the long-term biological purpose of benefitting their offspring's survival. This biological imperative may be the source for female preference for a male type that Leon Seltzer called a "caring caveman." The caveman part might not be strictly necessary once humans were no longer living in caves, but aesthetic programming is not easily superseded, even in an era where, in theory at least, money takes the place of muscle as a means of males protecting females from incursions.  

Sigmund Freud certainly understood that sublimation was necessary to allow any humans, males or females, to cope with uncomfortable social situations, judging from this quotation:

What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation...-- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

 So I don't know why Big Sigmund had to characterize women alone as "masochistic" for embracing whatever aspects of pain and/or humiliation were involved with the act of coitus. It's possible that the first human to experience pleasurable pain was of the female persuasion, but if so, I suggest that the pleasure didn't stem from a uniquely feminine nature. And compared to the females of various lower species-- such as lionesses, who have to put up with barbed penises-- human females have it fairly easy in the copulation department.

At base sublimation might be best viewed as an endurance test, one that also applies to males. What did it mean to caveman males-- assuming that any of them figured out how much a role their primeval thrusts played, in the formation of progeny-- to know that for all their strength, only women could keep the race alive? Going on archaeological evidence, it seems that humankind's earliest human-form deities were the so-called "Venus figurines," embodiments of female procreative power. Did males sometimes feel irrelevant before that power? Did they sublimate that sense of powerlessness into other goddesses? That might explain the rise, in historical times, of war-goddesses like Athena, Anath and Ishtar' deities who broke down the normal categories of "men make war, women make babies." And maybe, in later eras, this sublimated sense of humiliation resulted in quotations like the following, from the pen of the man whose name was used to categorize the syndrome called "masochism."

I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My guess as to why Freud didn't intuit masochism in both genders as a sublimating activity is that for him, anything that wasn't normative heterosexual intercourse flew in the face of his idea of sublimation. For him, sublimation was all about adapting to reality, rather than indulging formulating elaborate fantasies, be they of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or of Margaret Mitchell. 

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure. 

     

  

RAVISHMENT OVER RAPE PT. 2

 I concluded the first part of this "series" with this passage:

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

Today I decided to amend all of the tags reading "rape" into a word-pair, "rape/ravishment." This allows me to take in any discussion of the real-world crime, or its unambiguous representations in fiction, as well as "actions that look like rape but are better called ravishment." One famous ravishment discussed in the earlier essay was Margaret Mitchell's ambivalent climax (so to speak) of the Scarlett-Rhett relationship in GONE WITH THE WIND.

Of course all fictional representations of rape exist only as functions of particular stories. In TARZAN OF THE APES, the hero's rape-happy ape-brother Terkoz exists to threaten Jane Porter and give Tarzan the chance to rescue his lady love. Rape is an ordeal that heroines like Ghita of Alizarr and the Marvel Comics Red Sonja endure in order to become heroes. It can also be an ordeal for male heroes, though obviously the cultural connotations for males will be different than for females. 

"Ravishment," though, carries a distinct value which is related to, but not identical to, the real-world act of rape. Whether ravishment has a real-world counterpart is often difficult to ascertain, because it would depend not on a physical act but on the emotional motivation that facilitates the act. My next essay will explore some of those emotional nuances.     

 

CORRELATING COGITATIONS PT 2

Of all the concepts I correlated in Part 1, I have not previously shown reasons to bring together William James' two forms of knowledge (even when seen purely through the lens of my literary formulations) with Kant's two forms of sublimity, which I altered more extensively to meld with literary considerations. So what if any links can be found between James and Kant?

Everything I wrote about the Kantian sublimities derives from his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and in his first chapter, long before he broaches the subject of sublimity, Kant announces that he will discuss two sets of concepts:

Now there are only two kinds of concepts, and these admit as many distinct principles of the possibility of their objects, viz. natural concepts and the concept of freedom... Thus Philosophy is correctly divided into two parts, quite distinct in their principles; the theoretical part or Natural Philosophy, and the practical part or Moral Philosophy (for that is the name given to the practical legislation of Reason in accordance with the concept of freedom). 

When Kant set forth his project in 1790, I assume that he took some influence from previous philosophers in one way or another, and I similarly assume that most of the great philosophers who followed Kant were at least aware of this assertion. I do not know if Schopenhauer, reputed to have been a major interpreter of Kant, had this theme statement from JUDGMENT in mind when he distinguished between "perceptual knowledge" and "conceptual knowledge," or whether James or anyone else who discoursed on "knowledge-by-acquaintance" and "knowledge-about" and their congeners. Those matters of philosophical history don't matter; only the fact that all of Kant's JUDGMENT meditations spring from his division between natural concepts and moral concepts. In my mind the literary aspects of "knowledge-by-acquaintance" translate as the lateral meaning of any text, which is the unmediated, literal account of what happens in the narrative, while the aspects of "knowledge-about" translate as the text's vertical meaning, which is mediated by the interpretations made by the characters in the narrative, the author's observations independent of the characters, and the responses of the audience.

So even though Kant has a specific orientation in his "moral philosophy" toward his particular concept of "freedom"-- which I believe he considers essentially "a priori," as against the "a posteriori" concepts of nature-- his system is roughly in line with the later terms for the two forms of knowledge as advanced by James, Grote and others.

Now, Kant's uses examples taken from nature to explicate his twin concepts of sublimity. Here's Kant on what he terms "the mathematical-sublime:"

Examples of the mathematically Sublime of nature in mere intuition are all the cases in which we are given, not so much a larger numerical concept as a large unit for the measure of the Imagination (for shortening the numerical series). A tree, [the height of] which we estimate with reference to the height of a man, at all events gives a standard for a mountain; and if this were a mile high, it would serve as unit for the number expressive of the earth’s diameter, so that the latter might be made intuitible. The earth’s diameter [would supply a unit] for the known planetary system; this again for the Milky Way; and the immeasurable number of milky way systems called nebulae,—which presumably constitute a system of the same kind among themselves—lets us expect no bounds here. Now the Sublime in the aesthetical judging of an immeasurable whole like this lies not so much in the greatness of the number [of units], as in the fact that in our progress we ever arrive at yet greater units.

And here's some of his examples of "the dynamic-sublime:" 

Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height, and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.

Probably Kant would consider all of hie examples to be "natural concepts." However, the examples of the dynamic-sublime have to do with discrete physical phenomena, which are things of which we know "by acquaintance." The perception of seemingly infinite phenomena, though, are mediated in MY opinion through the knowledge-faculty termed "knowledge-about," because the infinite-seeming phenomena come into conflict with the human desire to suss out proportions in an analytical manner.

The chances that some Kant scholar will dispute my interpretation of the "mathematical-sublime" are the opposite of infinite-- "infinitesimal." But such objections would not matter, because in this essay I translated Kant's formulation into one dealing exclusively with literary experiences of a different form of "infinity:"

it has occured to me that in literature, there are ways to express "infinity" that are not ineluctably entangled with the idea of might, and which will prove consequential for my attempt to formulate the foundations of the three worlds of artistic phenomenality.  This kind of "infinity" may have some "overwhelming" characteristics, but it is not really related to "might" as such.

It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.
 

 The "infinity" of which Yeats speaks here-- like the "richness and profusion of images" I found in Edmund Burke-- suggests another form of the sublime with a different nature than the "dynamically sublime."  It is one that overwhelms in a manner roughly analogous to the "mathematically sublime," but the "magnitude" is one that stems not from physical size, but from the magnitude of how many conceivable connections can be made within a given phenomenality.

Hence the name I coin for this exclusively artistic property--

The COMBINATORY-sublime.

In 2013 I had not extrapolated the four potentialities from Jung's four functions; that took place the next year, in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR. Thus my word "connections" is vague at best. Still, the context, that of Yeats' "infinity of truths," aligns far more with the "knowledge-about" epistemologies characteristic of mythic narrative than with "knowledge-by-acquaintance." 

Or so it seems to me now, eleven years later. If I come across any posts of the combinatory-sublime that seem to contradict this current formulation, I reject them in advance, just for the satisfaction of having a sense of symmetry in my system.          

          

SYMBOLS, SEX AND SELECTION

 While going through books I hadn't read yet, I encountered a 1997 item by evolutionary biologist Terrence W. Deacon, THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES. This time I decided to sample a chapter out of order, to get a general idea of Deacon's approach to symbols in the context of evolution with the standard priority of organisms maximizing species survival through sexual selection. The random chapter I chose, "Symbolic Origins," happens to concretize one of Deacon's most interesting takes on the evolution of symbols in culture.

What was the spark that kindled the evolution of symbolic communication? If symbolic communication did not arise due to a "hopeful monster" mutation of the brain, it must have been selected for. But by what factors of hominid life? How can we discover the context of this initial push into such a novel form of communication?

One of the first ideas Deacon dismisses is the notion that language must have come about to optimize many of the standard societal interactions between prehistoric hominids of the Pleistocene. he points out that at a time when most animals, including hominids, communicated many day-to-day interactions with nonsymbolic strategies such as gestures and call-and-response vocal exchanges.    

 A generally less efficient form of communication could only have gained a foothold if it provided something different, a communicative function that was not available even in a much-elaborated system of vocal and gestural indices. Given these disadvantages, what other possible selective advantage of symbolizing could possibly have led a group of hominids to incur such costs? 

Deacon then points out that "intense sexual selection" is usually the factor that causes "significant evolutionary changes in communication in other species." He references the evolutionary use of the term "ritualization" to describe lower animals taking on patterns to optimize sexual selection, whether the patterns are gestural (male and female grebes dancing together on a lake's surface or visual (the familiar example of the peacock's tail, a distinct individual disadvantage for the sake of gene transmission). These examples initially suggested to me that Deacon meant to argue that symbolic language might have evolved to facilitate sexual liaisons, but it turned out that Deacon pursued a more roundabout conclusion.

After some general comparisons to other animal species' habits of both mating and provisioning for the young, Deacon focuses on one of the distinctive provisioning strategies of hominids: the regular seeking of meat as fodder, even in times when there are not shortages of edible plant-life. Again, all or most of the hominid strategies for mating and provisioning can be handled by nonsymbolic communications.

Although there is a vast universe of objects and relationships susceptible to nonsymbolic representation, indeed, anything that can be present to the senses, this does not include abstract or otherwise intangible objects of reference. This categorical limitation is the link between the anomalous form of communication that evolved in humans and the anomalous context of human social behavior. 

The thing that hominids do, that other animals do not do (and yes, Deacon addresses so-called "pair bonding"), is the abstract system of marriage.      

Marriage, in all its incredible variety, is the regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means, and it is essentially universal in human societies. It is preeminently a symbolic relationship, and owing to the lack of symbolic abilities, it is totally absent in the rest of the animal kingdom. What I am suggesting here is that a related form of regulation of reproductive relationships by symbolic means was essential for early hominids to take advantage of a hunting-provisioning subsistence strategy.

In this chapter at least, Deacon does not address the social evolution of religion in detail. But he seems to imply broadly that the pressure to negotiate a non-Rousseauan "social marriage contract" came first, and therefore all other forms of ritualization utilizing symbolic constructions came later.

Deacon concludes his argument by stressing "co-evolution:"

The argument I have presented is only an argument for the conditions which required symbolic reference in the first place, and which selected for it despite the great difficulties and costs of collectively producing and maintaining it. Much of the story of this intermediate evolutionary history, extending for over 2 million years from language origins to the present, has yet to be even imagined in any clarity. But putting evolutionary causes and effects in appropriate order and precisely identifying the anatomical correlates of this transition are a prerequisite for providing anything beyond "just so" versions of the process. The key to this is the co-evolutionary perspective which recognizes that the evolution of language took place neither inside nor outside brains, but at the interface where cultural evolutionary processes affect biological evolutionary processes.  

And I conclude my argument, for now, by adding that though I agree with the basic concept of co-evolution, I don't necessarily think that marital customs alone, with their emphasis upon "social altruism," necessarily preceded religious customs, which certainly carry much of the same valence. Since according to the index Deacon does not address prehistoric religion in the rest of the book either, it would be stimulating to compare Deacon's hypothesis with those of an "evolutionary biologist" who had studied the historical manifestations of prehistoric religiosity.      

MYTHCOMICS: "ANYFACE" (LI'L ABNER, April 19-May 31, 1947)

 Rather than wasting time summing up how Al Capp's "comic-within-a-comic" FEARLESS FOSDICK evolved within Al Capp's LI'L ABNER feature, here's the Wiki writeup on the subject. 

The most interesting things about the 1942 introduction of Fosdick within the continuity of the ABNER strip are (1) the fact that what one can see of Fosdick looks almost indistinguishable from Tracy, without the pencil mustache seen on later versions, and (2) the short spoof concentrates only upon the idea that Fosdick's real-world creator "Lester Gooch" puts the fictional detective into death-traps without knowing how to extricate said hero. Jay Maeder's superlative survey of Gould's groundbreaking strip, DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, attests that on occasion Chester Gould did have to scramble to find some way to save Tracy from his final curtain. However, in retrospect the critique seems petty, given that Al Capp shared Gould's penchant for placing characters in cliffhanger situations and then getting them out with ridiculous contrivances-- probably more so than Gould ever resorted to.

Over the next four years Capp continued to develop new elements of the Fosdick character. He was just as much a moral ramrod as Tracy, but Fosdick had no brains whatever and so was incapable of anything like detection. He was sexually abstemious, telling one female pursuer that no woman's lips but his mother's would ever touch his (which would lead to some Freudian conclusions Capp might not have intended). And in one adventure, cartoonish Gooch learns that his new villain for Fosdick, a rock-headed crook named "Stone Face," actually exists in Gooch's world. The criminal wants to force Gooch to destroy the fictional Fosdick's reputation with adoring kids by forcing him to get married, a fate which particularly horrifies Fosdick's number one fan, Li'l Abner Yokum. After various contrivances, Stone Face encounters Abner and tries to kill the youth by hitting Abner with his rocky noggin-- and the hard-headed hillbilly wins the contest.

The first truly ambitious Fosdick story ran through May 1947, though it includes some setup in April within the "Abner universe." Gooch's publishers harangue the artist to create yet more grotesque villains to enthrall FOSDICK's readers, "the kiddies." (Two years later, Gershon Legman would republish some of his anti-violence essays in the book LOVE AND DEATH, saying in all seriousness the same thing Capp said for a joke.) Gooch's artistic insanity gets him put into an asylum. Further, when a rival publisher threatens Gooch's life, a certain hulking hillbilly is hired to guard the artist's welfare-- and to make sure that the strips keep coming out on time. This provided Capp with the excuse to have Abner periodically interrupt the FOSDICK continuity to remind readers, "it's only a comic strip about another comic strip."

"Anyface" seems to be the first arc in which Capp steps up the ultraviolence to epic levels, to parody DICK TRACYs legendary levels of mayhem. The detective, informed that a villain named Anyface can make himself look like anyone, comes to the random conclusion that the fiend would logically make himself look like the city's most beneficent philanthropist, so Fosdick immediately shoots the innocent man through the head. Further, the real Anyface was masquerading as the official who gave Fosdick the assignment-- though, contrary to his boast, Anyface doesn't do or say anything to the klutz-cop to suggest offing the victim. (BTW, nowhere in the narrative does Capp explain how Anyface duplicates the clothes of the people he imitates, since he can only change his physical form.)

             

Unlike the majority of ABNER villains, Anyface never seems to have any specific aim in mind. He seems to exist merely to torment Fosdick, as Mr. Mxyzptlk does Superman. Anyface hits on the idea that the best way to utterly humiliate the idiot officer is to pretend to be his long-suffering girlfriend (here named "Bess Backache" in emulation of Dick Tracy's girl Tess Trueheart) and inveigle Fosdick into marrying "her," his worst enemy. Capp does not drop even the slightest hint as to how Anyface presses his suit when the real girlfriend couldn't get Fosdick to the altar over the course of twelve years. The logical conclusion that modern audiences would make, that of premarital sex, might or might not have been an idea Capp toyed with. Still, he would have known he could not have even implied the subject in a family comic strip. So, he passed over the matter. In the "real world," Abner is deeply distressed by his "ideel" being turned into a pathetic fool. Daisy Mae and Mammy become concerned that Abner might "kill himself in grief." Mammy deduces that Gooch has come up with this "worse-than-death trap" because he's gone crazy, so Mammy lays plans to go straighten the artist out.

Unfortunately for Abner, Insane Gooch finishes one more insane set of strips before Mammy makes the scene and scrambles his brains back into normalcy. Abner is initially exultant to see that Fosdick, his brain possibly prompted into something like thought by his mortification, lay a trap for Anyface, though of course it's one that shows the super-cop's utter disregard for collateral damage. Fosdick forces 69 persons suspected of being Anyface (why?) into a single room and cranks up the heat to 500 degrees, believing that the heat will melt the fiend's taffy-like features. But in the last strip produced by Insane Gooch, Fosdick's features begin melting, revealing that he, the incorruptible lawman, is actually Anyface. Abner confronts Gooch and demands a rational explanation. But Gooch has had his brains "normalized," and now he has no idea what he was thinking while insane. Capp leaves his hillbilly star on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, implying the complete identity between good and evil--

--Well, for roughly two months. Capp probably never devised an escape-hatch at all but instead exploited the situation by encouraging his readers to invent some solution that would "save" Fearless Fosdick. Capp chose a suggestion that he printed in a single strip on June 28, 1947, and that was technically the end of the "Anyface" arc. Said solution was worse than anything either Gould or Capp had ever devised. While Anyface-Fosdick's face is melting, the real Fosdick walks into the hotbox-room and captures the felon. So-- if Anyface was just masquerading as Fosdick, why did he participate in Fosdick's trap, knowing that his face would melt in front of all those witnesses? It might've made a little sense if Anyface had caught and tied up the klutz-cop, planning to kill all of the suspects in the hotbox and blame the deed on Fosdick. But I doubt that Capp cared about anything but keeping Fosdick in play, and most of the readers who liked Fosdick probably held the same opinion.

Since Capp didn't really provide the lame solution, I'd argue that the Anyface arc really does end with the revelation that hero and villain are one, even though throughout the story they've been repeatedly seen as separate beings. These fourth-wall shenanigans remind me of the overpraised Berthold Brecht, but Capp was no Brechtian ironist, just a joke-teller who felt like taking shots at any target. If I had to choose which artist, Capp or Gould, devised the greater number of lame cliffhanger resolutions, I'd choose Capp. So it's puzzling that he would jab Gould over the practice of improbable death-traps. Capp was actually more on target in his implication that the world of DICK TRACY was one in which innocents were getting killed as Tracy pursued his crusade for justice, and thus all the gags about hecatombs of dead citizens make a much better spoof on Chester Gould. Finally, when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

ADDENDUM: Though Capp wasn't shy about dealing out dire fates to his villains-- at least, no more so than Gould-- Anyface is still alive by the end of the story. Not only did Capp continue to use him in comic-book ads for a hair cream Fosdick shilled for, in the 1960s the villain somehow showed up in the LI'L ABNER strip, without even the piddling explanation given in the "Stone Face" arc. That arc had not been reprinted, but I recall that Anyface pops up in Dogpatch and impersonates Daisy Mae Yokum. I don't recall what becomes of the villain in that story.