ONCE AGAIN-- ALAN MOORE, UNMOORED

Last month, thanks to the auspices of the British weekly THE OBSERVER, Alan Moore once again bestowed upon a panting public his thoughts on comic books and one particular comic book personality-- though he's been retired from the medium for close to seven years. The OBSERVER piece is just the usual potpourri of Moore's grievances and floggings for his latest non-comics book, with one exception.

Two-thirds of the way through the short interview, the questioner decides that, having encouraged Moore to offer his hot takes on politics and the comics industry, he simply must ask about Moore's opinion about Frank Miller. Surprise, surprise-- Moore's negative assessment has not changed since 2011, when the two creators expressed opposing opinions of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And then, over the next 15 years, Moore continued to pillory Miller, who became Moore's third favorite whipping-boy, right behind DC Comics and Margaret Thatcher.

Miller for his part has done little to keep up his part of the feud, barely if at all commenting upon Moore or his works. 

My own "feud" with Moore concerns not a defense of Miller but a condemnation of the meretricious nature of Moore's comments. In the interview Moore only says that Miller's one of the things about the comics industry he finds embarrassing, but he obviously still harbors the same knee-jerk opinions he proffered during the genesis of the feud, when he called Miller's work misogynistic, homophobic and fascist. 

Now, Moore MIGHT be able to articulate those opinions into real discourse. since he's done so passably well at times in full-fledged articles, or in debate, as seen his extended metaphysical argument with Dave Sim in the pages of CEREBUS #217. However, when Moore confines himself to lame brickbats, he sounds a good deal worse than a "grumpy old man," which is the most frequent characterization I've seen of him. Rather, he sounds like some triggered moron a la Joy Reid.

I don't think Alan Moore's a moron, but he sure seems to enjoy playing the triggered fool for the sake of sound bite interviews. If he has something substantive to say about Miller or anything else, superficial rants are not the way to express those thoughts. But if he's really just whipping out barbs because that's what potential readers expect, he's in no position to critique anyone else.     

NULL-MYTHS: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, THE GOLDEN CHILD (2019)

With most of the works I term "null-myths," it's easy for me to see how the artists involved messed up the symbolic discourse of something like a simple formula-tale. But with Frank Miller's newest work in his ongoing DARK KNIGHT RETURNS series, I have no idea what Miller was trying to accomplish.

The original DARK KNIGHT RETURNS from 1986, while not flawless, remains a monumental story, as well as signaling the irreversible movement of the superhero genre into the domain of adult, rather than juvenile, pulp. In 2001 Miller returned to that "future-Batman" universe and produced THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, which resembles nothing more than an artist tossing together a bunch of wild ideas into a semblance of story, though some critics liked STRIKES just because it was so brain-fried. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Brian Azzarello to produce THE DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE, which I asserted to be the closest thing one could get to Miller doing a Justice League story, and this was the first worthy successor to the original 1986 work. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Azzarello and John Romita Jr on the single-issue outing, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: THE LAST CRUSADE. This prequel to RETURNS purported to show some of the events that led up to the murder of Jason Todd.

GOLDEN CHILD begins a few years after MASTER RACE. Superman's daughter by Wonder Woman, Lara, is about the same, but the super-couple's son Jonathan is now perhaps five years old. Rather than displaying the talents of either parent, Jonathan possesses some non-specific mental powers, while he's drawn with receding hair, as if to give him a resemblance to all the "big-brained future men" that once populated pulp magazines and Silver Age comics. Superman is only briefly seen, and it's later explained that he and other adult heroes are off on some mission. Batman's heir Carrie Kelley still maintains the role of Batwoman. We later learn that the three youngsters are charged with keeping an eye on things, and for some reason that leads Lara and Jonathan to go floating around Gotham City, as Lara scorns the masses of humanity, much as she did in MASTER RACE.

A riot breaks out between political factions. One is a group of violent hoods wearing Joker-style costumes, one of whom shouts the slogan, "Buy American! Be American!" The other faction is not identified by anything but a couple of signs expressing dislike of Donald Trump, and they're getting the worst of the encounter until Batwoman and her cadre of erratically-garbed Bat-enforcers show up and kick butt. The Joker-goons flee.

So far, it sounds like the sort of thing that happens in Gotham City in any era. Then Lara and Batwoman converse in some Bat-habitat, and it's revealed that somehow this mundane fracas was organized by-- Darkseid, Ruler of Apokolips and the Guy Who Got His Thunder Stolen by Thanos. Neither heroine comments on the hoods' Joker-motif, but since they don't seem surprised when the Miller version of the Clown Prince is walking around, all alive again, I guess the reports of his earlier extinction were grossly exaggerated. And these two reigning DC villains have teamed up in order to-- elect Donald Trump????

Is there an alternate Earth on which someone could write a good satire based on this dippy concept? Anything is possible in the multiverse. But Miller didn't write one, in part because he drops whatever critique he has of the Presidential candidate and zooms right to the Big Honking Battle-Scene. Joker flees when Lara and Jonathan show up at the campaign HQ and attack Darkseid, who apparently decided to visit Earth with none of his usual Apokolips retinue. An odd sidebar: Jonathan grabs a couple of midget-looking guys in Joker-makeup and Lara tells her brother to drop both midgets-- who launched no attack-- from a great height. Are they robots, like the animated dolls Joker used in the 1986 story? Who knows? (We don't see Jonathan do so, anyway.)

After some super-power exchanges, Jonathan uses his undefined powers to zap Darkseid while Lara turns his own omega-beams against him, and the villain seems to get disintegrated. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

For three pages the disembodied spirit of Darkseid shunts around the cosmos for a while, meditating on his status as "the end of all that is" and marshaling his power to destroy the Earth-- which I think he could have done a long time ago if that was his motivation, and without rigging any elections.

Then, as if to compensate for all the cosmic chaos, Batwoman spends the next eight pages with "street-level" action, taking down the Joker and his thugs. Then Batwoman hears Donald Trump broadcasting a speech that's apparently having a hypnotic effect on the populace, just as Darkseid did briefly in a separate scene. (So, if Darkseid and Joker could do that the whole time, why were they bothering with the ballot boxes?) Batwoman jams the hypnotic signal, and Darkseid just happens to manifest the next moment, blowing up a few city streets. 

Lara shows up, and the two super-beings fight for a couple of pages before Darkseid casts his hypnotic mojo over her, his speech implying that he's got plans for her nubile body. Jonathan hurls another humongous power-zap at the overlord, freeing Lara, and then--

And then Darkseid kneels on the ground while Batwoman shows up and gives a speech about how the spirit of free-thinking mankind will never die. Or something like that. And that's the end of the story.

This muddled and incoherent excuse for a narrative probably resulted from Frank Miller's attempt to serve two masters, and both are Jack Kirby-- though for argument's sake I'll call one "Social Commentary Jack" and the other "Cosmic Jack."

The figure of Donald Trump, while a valid target for well-done satire, is just the half-baked spawn of Miller trying his hand at the social commentary Jack Kirby worked into his NEW GODS saga. Trump-as-Darkseid-pawn is just a retooling of Glorious Godfrey, Kirby's religious-fanatic satire of Billy Graham. However, Godfrey made sense within the context of Kirby'[s setup. His Darkseid used assorted strategies to find the Anti-Life Equation within the minds of the teeming Earth-people, and Godfrey was just one of such strategy of mental manipulation. 

But in the latter half of GOLDEN CHILD (a title that doesn't seem to have much meaning), Miller's Darkseid-- who never has any reason for his election-fixing scheme-- suddenly pivots into Cosmic Kirby territory. Yeah, Kirby-Darkseid spouted some Macbeth-like line about being a "tiger-force," but he didn't go jaunting around the universe like Galactus, playing the role of Cosmic Hot-Shot. This sort of powerhouse doesn't need to play mental games, or to employ maniacal clowns as stooges. And given that he almost decimates the world, one wonders what errand kept the elder heroes busy wherever.

GOLDEN CHILD, in short, is nothing but a leaden bore.

ADDENDUM: Raphael Granpa shows himself to adapt well to the Millerverse despite the incoherence of the story. Granpa came to prominence with the highly enjoyable graphic novel MESMO DELIVERY, a hyper-violent shaggy dog story. Possibly Miller had some notion of emulating Granpa's more successful foray into wacky humor.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS,THE LAST CRUSADE (2016)

LAST CRUSADE was a one-shot comic from some of the same collaborators that produced the previous year's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: MASTER RACE. This time out, co-creators Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello partner with John Romita Jr to produce a much shorter take on one aspect of the Dark Knight universe: the events leading up to the Joker's capture and murder of The Jason Todd Robin.

To be sure, the creators aren't bothering to synch up their story with the well-known "Death in the Family" events, but instead produced a new narrative spun off from a brief reference to Jason's death in the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The Joker's act of slaying Todd-Robin was not mentioned in DKR, but not surprisingly in CRUSADE the Clown Prince is still the culprit, albeit under different circumstances.

The Joker and Batman actually don't square off at all here, for the villain spends most of his time in Arkham Asylum, telling quixotic stories and eventually breaking free. Batman and Todd-Robin spend most of their time investigating a plot set up by Poison Ivy and abetted by Killer Croc. Oh, and a de-costumed Catwoman has a few scenes. (Guess one could take that two ways.)

CRUSADE's only notable element is how Miller and Azzarello address that frequent that bete noir of realistically-minded comics-fans, the moral queasiness over under-age kids becoming the sidekicks of adult heroes. Of course when the kid-sidekick trope began in comics' Golden Age, it was nothing more than a transparent attempt to appeal to kids who wanted to fantasize about being heroes close to their own ages, rather than identifying only with adult crusaders. It's therefore ridiculous to treat a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy as if it were subject to moralistic evaluations.

To be sure, Miller et al don't pursue the "black beast" all that much. Rather, because Batman is getting old, he begins to worry about Jason Todd taking chances-- and, in addition, whether or not he's become increasingly ruthless. The problem with these two intertwined elements is that they work against one another, and against the expressed idea that kids in general shouldn't be exposed to dangerous activities. I suppose the authors might have formulated the argument that Jason's faults, as seen through Batman's eyes, were tied to his youth, but they didn't precisely do so. 

In fact, I speculate that the main reason Miller et al build up Jason Todd's penchant for violence is not because of anything in Todd-Robin's original career. IMO it's more likely that the authors were responding to the developments of "Reborn Robin" in 2005, in which Jason re-appeared as a bloodthirsty vigilante, The Red Hood. Later narratives redeemed the Hood so that he became a virtuous hero again. But CRUSADE suggests that even in his "innocent youth" Todd-Robin had somewhat sadistic tendencies-- which is ironic, since this was a mental quirk Miller imputed to his version of Batman in the classic DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

MYTHCOMICS: ELEKTRA BLOODLINES (ELEKTRA #1-5, 2014)

Though Frank Miller's Elektra had a somewhat rocky beginning in the pages of DAREDEVIL, he and his collaborators produced two outstanding works centered upon her spiritual growth out of darkness, the RESURRECTION arc and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN. However, the story goes that someone at Marvel promised Miller that they wouldn't use the character without his permission, and that, when they reneged on that promise, Miller ceased to work for the company. And for a time it seemed like Marvel had reaped the consequences of this disagreement. None of Marvel's post-Miller features starring Elektra seems to have sold particularly well, despite her high level of recognizability, and neither of the live-action movies in which she appeared earned much approbation. But though the 2014 ELEKTRA was no more successful than other iterations, the BLOODLINES arc from the first five issues is at least in line with some of the symbolic discourse used in the Miller mythcomics.

To be sure, while writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Michael Del Mundo agree that Elektra came back from the dead as she did in the RESURRECTION arc, they ignore Miller's idea that Daredevil purged her of the spiritual pollution she'd suffered since the death of her father, and the activation of her eternally unsatisfied "Electra complex." This Elektra begins her story by focusing on her utter lack of identity, ticking off all the things she is not-- not dancer, nor artist, nor hero, but only "somebody's assassin." The dominant suggestion is that her lack of identity has allowed her to be molded into whatever shapes others wished her to take.

So for this arc, Blackman and Del Mundo gave Elektra two new adversaries-- and when I read their names on the back cover, I thought, "These guys have no talent for naming super-villains. 'Bloody Lips?' 'Cape Crow?' Even Bill Mantlo came up with better names, and he made up a character called Razorback." Well, Bloody Lips grew on me, but Cape Crow is still a lame name and not much better as a character. In fact, the part of the story involving Cape Crow and his son Kento is meant to play on Elektra's anomie about not having had a proper familial upbringing, and so bears a resemblance to the 2005 ELEKTRA film. Blackman's BLOODLINES script is not as stickily sentimental as the movie, but the resemblance does the writer no credit. Lest you wonder, he doesn't even try to come up with some justification for the guy to use the weird cognomen "Cape Crow."

Like Elektra, CC-- which abbreviation I'm adopting to avoid that awful name-- is a bounty hunter, but he's pissed off a whole guild devoted to the profession, and they've sent a passel of other hired guns after him. He kills or half-kills all of them, including Elektra's onetime murderer Bullseye. Elektra accepts the commission to seek out CC, but so does a metahuman assassin, "Bloody Lips."

Bloody Lips is not given a straight origin as such, but it's implied that he's an Australian aborigine who can absorb the memories and skills of adversaries after eating their flesh. Blackman and Del Mundo work in a lot of references and imagery suggestive of aboriginal religion (these are the "metaphysical myths" of the narrative), but Bloody Lips' main attraction is that he revels in the lack of identity that distresses Elektra. He doesn't care that his identity is compromised by absorbing the strengths and skills of other beings, just so long as he can kill people. 

In a long sequence, both Bloody Lips and Elektra are plunged into mental psychodramas in which shadows of their pasts seek to task them with their foul deeds. Elektra feels but rejects her guilt. Bloody Lips, who slaughtered his family for whatever reasons, realizes that even if he hadn't done the deed in that way, he would have committed some other version of the crime. He's practically the incarnation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

Elektra, however, remains haunted by the possibility that things might have been different, If Only. But her ninja training leads her to a conclusion similar to that of Bloody Lips, but without any false self-aggrandizement. When a psychic image of her mother tries to guilt her for the scores of deaths she's caused, Elektra rejects the notion of feeling guilt for her carnage. "You want me to see victims," she tells the false mother-image, "when all I see are murderers, terrorists, sadists, despots." She slays the image of the mother she never knew in life.

Later, Elektra later learns that all the psychic specters experienced by her and by Bloody Lips were conjured up by the mental powers of Kento, who wanted to protect his father against both bounty hunters. She doesn't know this when she saves Kento's life or when she battles CC, though her lust for battle is sufficient that it overrides any "rational" attempt to reason with the rival bounty hunter. She spares CC, only to figure out what Kento did to her. Yet because he did it for his father, she essentially forgives him that trespass.

But the CC battle is just a prelude to the heroic assassin's duel with her opposite number. All through the story, Bloody Lips has gone on and on about how much he likes incorporating the experiences of his victims as well as their skills, and he hungers to take in "everything you've felt, everything you've seen," to which Elektra responds, "See if you can survive being me."

There's nothing blazingly original about the villain who realizes he just can't measure up to the hero he wants to overwhelm, but it's an appropriate punishment, however temporary, for the omophagic evildoer. But once again, Elektra is tempted by the "If Only" lure of becoming someone other than who she is-- and again she rejects it, accepting eternal recurrence with far more self-awareness than her erstwhile opponent.

MYTHCOMICS: MARTHA WASHINGTON GOES TO WAR (1994-95)

 In the first installment of RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS, I said:

...I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures.

I wasn't particularly seeking to validate my take on Miller's "megalothymotic" tendencies when I got around to reading the second of his serials about futuristic soldier Martha "named-for-wife-of-first-U.S.-President" Washington. Some years previous I'd read the introductory arc of Martha stories, GIVE ME LIBERTY, and the last arc, MARTHA WASHINGTON SAVES THE WORLD. Both were very good adventure-stories, but without rising to the level of modern myths. However, WAR, the middle arc, not only satisfies my criteria for mythicity but also shows the artist adroitly frustrating many of the political labels comics-critics have affixed to him.

WAR commences with the status quo set up from GIVE ME LIBERTY. Martha, a Black American raised in the squalor of Cabrini-Green, joins the Pax Army of Future United States, less out of patriotism than expedience. The young woman proves to have exceptional military competence, which comes in handy in a period when America is being broken apart by a horde of secession movements. (My favorite, seen in GIVE ME LIBERTY, was a group of gay Nazis, the Aryan Thrust, whose motto was "America's future is white-- and male-- and gay.") In LIBERTY, Martha keeps a usurper from taking over the Pax government, but at the start of WAR, it's clear that there's something rotten in the United States. While she's fighting in the field, Martha's equipment repeatedly fails, and the soldiers she encounters pass rumors of strange invisible beings called "ghosts." 

She survives a battle but gets wounded, during which time she apparently hallucinates her friend Raggy-Ann, a mutant she liberated from Pax before she died. Her injury puts her in the hands of an old foe, the Surgeon General, one of several robots-or-cyborgs presumably modeled on some unscrupulous original. While in the Surgeon's power, Martha beholds another friend she believes dead, her Apache-chief boyfriend Wasserstein, who "ghosts" into the installation to let her know he's still alive.

She's rescued from the Surgeon by a superior officer and taken to the orbital satellite Harmony as security. There Martha finds that even this superlative construct is suffering from constant breakdowns that emphasize Pax's attrition. Sure enough, no sooner does Martha arrive than the Ghosts strike. She pursues the Ghost craft into an irradiated zone, where she meets a bunch of mutants who, surprisingly, don't try to eat her.

Then, by dint of her relentless quest into a domain that ought to kill her with radiation poisoning, she finds her way to a mysterious redoubt-- the home of the Ghosts, whose membership does include her old friends Wasserstein and Raggy-Ann, both still alive and part of a movement to overthrow the illegitimate Pax government. Martha is converted to this movement when the Surgeon General uses her radio transmitter to send missiles to destroy the redoubt-- after which Martha leads an assault upon her former superiors.

I return to the popular canard that because Frank Miller has produced stories about violent heroes, he must perforce be a fascist. But the amusing thing about WAR is that all of the things that Miller critiques about Pax are the same things liberals always attack about conservatives: pointless militarism, an "old boy network" (which ties into the rottenness of Pax technology), the reduction of the marginalized (like mutant Raggy-Ann) into property, and the use of religion to justify government policies.

In contrast, the unnamed government that Martha brings forth is defined by dissent: the fact that even those governing constantly disagree with one another but manage to unite for the common goal of improving the world. For all the current tendency of Ultraliberals to shame people about American history, be it over slavery or colonialism, they overlook that American politics are infused by the desire to improve life. Miller, the alleged "fascist," incarnates this American spirit in a far more intelligent manner than any liberal comics-writer of the past few decades. 

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." Nietzsche's definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 2

I made this statement in the first essay wherein I discussed the concept of alignment:

In CROSSOVERS PT. 3,  I reviewed the way in which two villains, Mister Hyde and the Cobra, had debuted in the THOR feature but were recycled into that of DAREDEVIL. The two super-crooks never became firmly attached to the latter feature either, and they subsequently drifted into such venues as SPIDER-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Since the two evildoers never became strongly associated with any single feature, I would still tend to view them as Thor-villains who bring about a charisma-crossover every time they venture into a new character-cosmos.

But the more I thought about it, the less necessary it seemed to align such all-purpose villains as Hyde and the Cobra with any particular hero-cosmos, be it that of Thor, Daredevil or Captain America. The continuity-nut in me is driven to note that the Cobra probably ended up battling Captain America more than anyone else, due to a large quantity of stories where he took charge of the "Serpent Society."

 Yet, because of the nature of the Marvel Universe, wherein editor Stan Lee broadened the parameters of inter-company crossovers beyond any previous comics-company. it's possible for a figure like Cobra or Hyde to have what I like to call "floating alignment." They are never identified with any single cosmos, in the way the Riddler, my example from CROSSOVERS PT. 5, is always aligned with Batman. 

Ironically, though, the earliest major example of a floating alignment appeared not at Marvel but at Silver Age DC Comics. After the original Doctor Light debuted as a foe of the Justice League, it became a running schtick that afterward the florescent felon went around challenging individual members of the League, managing to log in appearances in three of Julie Schwartz's 1960s superhero features: the Atom, the Flash and Green Lantern.  

Of similar relevance is the alignment of new protagonists when they appear within the corpus of established features. If a given new character appears within an established feature and then graduates to his or her own feature within a very short period of time, then it's a High Stature crossover, in which the protagonist(s) of the established feature cross over with a new character thrust into the position of a series-star. For instance, the TV-character of "Maude" debuted on two episodes of ALL IN THE FAMILY before she got her own series. She would have been a Sub in the 1971 episode, but since the second episode, aired in 1972, spawned the regular series about four months later, I would judge that she was a Prime in the 1972 crossover. 

(ADDENDUM: Changed my mind since writing this: now both "Maude" debuts are examples of proto-crossovers.)

Of course, dozens of characters may debut with the author's hope of creating a "spin-off" serial feature, and many never go beyond "Sub" status. One example was the 1985 Atomic Knight, a revamping of an earlier Silver Age feature, but despite a handful of guest-starring appearances, DC never gave this polished paladin a shot at a feature, and as far as I know he went back into Sub Limbo thereafter. 

Others can be much delayed. Marvel's Inhumans debuted in a 1965 issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and the Black Panther appeared in the comic in the following year. It practically goes without saying that Lee and Kirby intended for both the Panther and the Inhumans to appear in serials at some point, but neither did for some time, and so for all of those appearances they register as Subs. In a special FF issue dated November 1967, both the Inhumans and the Black Panther crossed over with the Fantastic Four in fighting Psycho-Man. The Black Panther would not get a regular berth for another year, when he became a regular member of the Avengers in 1968, so within the compass of that story, he remained a Sub type. However, the special placed a more immediate push to see if readers wanted an Inhumans series, since in an issue of THOR, also dated November 1967, the denizens of Attilan received their first feature, albeit only a backup strip. So the FF ANNUAL would be a High-Stature crossover because the Inhumans had just become Primes around the time when the issue came out, while the equally enjoyable Panther had to wait another year for Prime status. 

Now, I reiterate that although all of these examples have dealt with ongoing serials, crossovers of varying types also appear in more limited forms, and the alignment of characters may be judged qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

Take the character of Nancy Callahan from Frank Miller's SIN CITY. She makes a very small debut as a support-character in the first graphic novel, THE HARD GOODBYE. with no hint that she's going to be important later.

She is still a Sub when she shows up in THAT YELLOW BASTARD,  but she's integral to the story of the Prime character John Hartigan, who protects her from a maniac while falling into age-inappropriate love with her. Her importance in this story trumps any of her other, more minor appearances, so she becomes a Sub aligned with the cosmos of John Hartigan.

To date Frank Miller has not created a sequel to BASTARD in comics-form, but he did write one for live-action film in SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR.  In this story, which I should note does not really line up with the continuity of HARD GOODBYE, Nancy decides to train herself in archery to gain vengeance on the man she holds responsible for the death of John Hartigan, and she also persuades the muscular Marv to join her in her quest. Given that Miller seems to have dropped all interest in further installments of SIN CITY, this was probably his final word on the character, as she becomes a Prime by reason of taking on the same level of superordinate presence as Marv. Thus in this story-- one of several in the anthology-film-- we have another High-Stature crossover, between Marv and Nancy. even though there will probably be no further appearances for either character. The alignment of Nancy-to-John is in fact reversed, for within the DAME tale, Hartigan becomes a subsidiary character in Nancy's story, in that Hartigan appears as an almost impotent ghost who simply observes the exploits of his beloved and her rough-hewn accomplice. 

MYTHCOMICS: THE DARK KNIGHT, MASTER RACE (2015)

They'll kill us if they can, Bruce. Every year they grow smaller. Every year they hate us more. We must not remind them that giants walk the earth.-- Superman, Book 3, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

When Frank Miller wrote those words circa 1986 for THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- his "brass band funeral" for superheroes-- he gave no indication that there was any real way to reconcile the domain of  the colossal super-crusaders and the domain of the Lilliputians whom the heroes are destined to save from peril.

(Sidebar: In THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche often railed against mediocre people, for whom one of his many epithets was "the small men.")

Over rhirty years later, Miller and Brian Azzarello raise these same issues once more in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. (To be sure, the progress from TDKR to TDKMR was interrupted in 2001 by a weird, carbuncle-like growth called TDKSA, but so far as I can see, this interruption plays no role in the progression between the 1986 work and the 2015 work.) Seven pages into Book One of MASTER RACE, Wonder Woman-- who has moved with her Amazon sisters to the Amazonian rainforest in South America-- saves a tribe of Indians from a rampaging minotaur. And as she vanquishes the monster, she thinks:

When they are threatened, we are there, and they name us saviors-- until they call us threats.

However, in contrast to Superman's frustrations in TDKR, the Amazon Princess seems to accept the absurdity of the sacrifice with samurai-like stolidity:

The same, a hundred times. A hundred hundred times. We know that, and we are still there for them. You taught us to be that way.

The "you" of which the Amazon thinks is Superman himself, the father of Diana's two children, an infant son named Jonathan and a teenaged daughter named Lara. Later the reader will learn that the Man of Steel has become a man of ice, retreating from his heroic duties into a frozen stasis due to his disappointment with the people he's served so long. The reader sees his self-exile through the eyes of his half-Kryptonian, half-Amazon daughter, who gets no answer when she asks her entombed father, "Why did you let the ants knock you from the sky?"

To be sure, Batman, the ostensible star of the show, has been gone for a while too, though a caped crusader makes the scene in Gotham City. However, it's not the aging and ailing Bruce Wayne, but his protege Carrie Kelley, formerly the first female Robin and now masquerading as her mentor for reasons that are never entirely clear. Really Old Batman doesn't make an on-panel appearance until Book 3, but he seems to have lost most of his zeal for crimefighting.

Though other superheroes are still around, DC's "Big Three" are largely removed from the current scene. Superman's hibernation in particular gives rise to his opposite number: a cult devoted not to the service and protection of humankind but to mastering all life. And his own daughter is the vehicle of the cult's rise, for while visiting her comatose father in his Fortress, she discovers the Bottle City of Kandor, and decides its inhabitants ought to "get big." And to accomplish this, she seeks DC's smallest hero, the Atom, who as it happens is just as given as Diana to waxing philosophical, though he's more scientist than samurai:

Everything-- for Stephen Hawking's brain to a molten flash of goo bubbling at the earth's core-- shared an undeniable commonality--

This belief in commonality, profound though it is, leads him to assist Lara and her Kandorian friend Baal (note the Old Testament cognomen) in enlarging a coterie of Kandorians to human-size. The Atom assumes he's going to get good men and true. What he gets a cult of Kandorians, led by a Manson-like old fellow named Quar, who believe that the ants ought to be worshiping them.

It's not clear how aware Lara is of the cult's purpose when she abets their ascension. However, she's a hot-headed teenager, who resents her father's absence and her mother's attempts to control/discipline her, and she doesn't exactly rush to combat Quar's cult. (It's strongly suggested that she's hormonally motivated, since she's a teenager who perhaps wants a boyfriend able to survive mating with her, though she ends up falling out with false-god Baal.)

 At any rate, the cult runs roughshod over humanity and neutralize most of the heroes, starting with Atom and moving on to Flash and Green Lantern, though Aquaman and the two offspring of Hawkman and Hawkgirl remain on the periphery. (This is perhaps the closest we'll ever get to seeing Frank Miller write a Justice League story.) Though the Kandorians can't rid themselves of Superman quite so easily, their real foe is Batman and his protege, who are able to combat the cult more with strategy than with brute force. Miller and Azzarello certainly make much more judicious use of DC continuity than Miller did in TDKSA, though only hardcore insiders will get the references to the Lazarus Pit, and even I, hardcore though I am, have no idea why Green Lantern conjures up the image of Bat-Mite in one panel. Yet, for all of the juicy superhero action and continuity, MASTER RACE's greatest accomplishment may be that of giving the lie to all the penny-ante intellectuals who dismissed THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as "fascist."

In my 1987 review of TDKR, I challenged this canard, though I qualified that view by suggesting that Miller might have "left himself open to such criticisms." But over the past thirty years, I've witnessed the irrational attachment that most psuedo-intellectual critics have to the "superheroes=fascism" meme, and now I believe that nothing Miller could have written then would have deflected that knee-jerk reaction.

Miller, as I said elsewhere, deals in visceral scenarios, not abstract propositions, so his answer to the fascist accusation appears in the form of the heroes having internal dialogues about heroism. The Atom's early musings about commonality prove central to Miller's response, and though the hero's meditations are qualified by some of his own experiences, he's certainly validated in that he ends up saving the day when the bigger heroes (yes, even Batman) fail. In Princess Diana's internal monologue provide a counter to Quar's ascension to godhood via the rays of a yellow sun, she argues that "specialness" must be cultivated as "something we can grow into, through curiosity, exercise, and discipline." And Superman, whose voice dominates the final coda, reverses his earlier animus to the incredibly shrinking mediocrity of humankind:

Ultimately, we understand how small our role really is-- that the lives we affect are potentially even greater than our own.

Superman also refutes the tendency of human beings to think of superheroes as gods, stating that "that's not even what we aspire to be." Miller and Azzarello are clearly not speaking only of four-color mystery-men, but of all human impulses toward heroism, however one may choose to define them. In a balanced viewpoint one could never be conflated with the ambitions of either historical fascists or super-villains like Quar, who sacrifices one of his own daughters as a "super-suicide bomber" whose exploding body annihilates Moscow-- though I feel relatively sure that some reviewer somewhere has complained about Miller and Azzarello having used Islamic motifs for his villains. (Quar has three Kandorian wives who wear veils. Oooooohhhh--)

In this post I've left out a lot of good stuff about TDKMR and some not so good stuff. Regardless, it's a given that, even if MASTER RACE's philosophy is more articulate this time round, this graphic novel can never surpass the place TDKR occupies in comics-history. But given that dopes like Frederic Wertham attacked superheroes by conflating Nietzsche and Nazism, it's fascinating to see these creators echo certain Nietzschean conceits that I identified in this meditation on the INCREDIBLES movie:

Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. 

MEDITATIONS ON MILLER

I don't have any plans to review THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, Miller's 2001 follow-up to the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. However, with the help of Google I see that I did insert one observation on the messy sequel in my 2010 essay LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION:

It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. 

But I felt I should make a few comments on the 2001 work, given that I, like many fans, probably expected more of the same when Miller teamed with Brian Azzarello on the 2015 DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE. I don't know what the critical consensus on MASTER RACE was, though Wiki asserts that it received more "positive reviews" than TDKSA. But for me, reading MASTER RACE was like reading a thirty-years-later sequel to TDKR in terms of the continuity of theme and content. True, MASTER RACE used a lot of stuff from TDKSA, but I almost felt that Miller and Azzarello were simply obliged to pick up on story-material executed by some other bozo, the way (say) Roger Stern might concoct a good story based on some moldy, half-forgotten plot-thread.

Of course, that's just an idle fantasy, since I know that TDKSA wasn't an exception in the Miller oeuvre. There's also HOLY TERROR, to which I gave a negative review despite my tendency to condemn all the politically correct hand-wringing I saw from most critics at the time. I faulted TERROR for its many narrative failings, but Miller also produced a number of lame projects that had no connection to his ostensible political leanings.

For instance, there's the 1994 one-shot SPAWN/BATMAN, a monumentally stupid crossover that combines the worst excesses of writer Miller and artist Todd Mac Farlane. Whereas TDKR had been basically respectful to the Batman mythos despite pushing some of its characters to extreme positions (Batman has sadistic tendencies, Catwoman becomes an implicit prostitute), SPAWN/BATMAN seems to be the birthplace of the near-parody known as "the goddamn Batman."

Speaking of which, about eleven years later Miller and Jim Lee teamed up to produce an even more acidulous version of the Caped Crusader, in the form of the 2005-08 serial ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN.

Yet, even though I think all three of these are mammoth wastes of time, I feel that they aren't simply the work of a disinterested hack. All three spring from Miller's distinct creative impulses, which include (1) a conviction to move the reader with any number of visceral appeals, and (2) a tendency to defuse all the intense visceral stuff with sprinklings of absurdist humor. When I look upon these three Miller misfires, I see them as Miller letting his taste for absurdity overrule all of his other creative propensities.

That said, 2001's TDKSA, while it sometimes seems like Miller's love letter to the craziness of Silver Age DC (right down to a gratuitous reference to the Legion of Super-Heroes). does have a few inspired moments, which is more than the other three have going for them. I've forgotten a lot of the silly shit in the rambling storyline, but I must say that I was amused by the idea that some weird version of Robin-- less a DC creation than the "Burt Ward Robin" of television-- becomes immortal in order to take down Batman, and even has conversations when his head's been separated from his body.

 Happily, though, MASTER RACE didn't continue in this dubious direction-- more on which later.