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 constantly got killed as Tracy pursued his crusade for justice. Thus Capp's quibbling about "death-trap anxiety," as far as it expressed a comic inversion of something Gould's TRACY took for granted, was far inferior to the concept of Fosdick piling up hecatombs of dead citizens for the sake of his god of justice. 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. Capp continued to use him in comic-book ads, wherein Fosdick fought crime while shilling for "Wildroot hair cream." 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.   

 

 

    

THE READING RHEUM: THE DYING EARTH (1950)

 I did a semi-deep dive on the origins of this collection of interlinked stories taking place in the titular world. Apparently author Jack Vance was unable to sell the EARTH stories individually to SF magazines of the 1940s. However, in 1950 Vance convinced small-time paperback publisher Hillman (now remembered today mostly for their 1940s comics, AIRBOY and THE HEAP) to publish this all-original book of stories. I don't have any info on contemporaneous sales, but I theorize that Vance's exotic fantasy-stories grabbed readers in the relatively small SF/fantasy readership and so made possible the writer's long career from the 1950s through the 1980s.     

I have a rough theory that because Vance grew up reading magazines like WEIRD TALES in his youth (as he admitted in interviews), he wanted to do something like the "Big Three" of WT-- H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith-- by crafting fantasy-stories linked to one another. (Influence from the SF mags of the period is a definite possibility too.) In one interview Vance mentioned a probable (though not intentional) stylistic influence on him from Clark Ashton Smith. I don't know that Vance ever admitted that his Dying Earth stories were a reaction to the far-future domain of Smith's ZOTHIQUE. 

I probably read EARTH in the seventies or eighties, but the only story I remember really liking was "Mazirian the Magician." Oddly, Vance wanted to use that story-title as the book's title, which is odd given that Mazirian only appears in one story, while other characters appear in more than one tale-- though no single character appears in all six chapters. I like Thomas Monteleone's term "mosaic" for novels cobbled together from stories not related by a supervening plot. All that said, I didn't get much of a myth-vibe from Vance's stories. Mostly, I remembered that Vance isn't really very good with characterization. I've seen arguments that he's doing an "anti-heroic" type of fantasy opposed to the reigning American influence of Howard. But in these stories at least, Vance is not really any more firmly committed to irony than he is to adventure, so I suppose I would still consider these adventure-stories.      

TURJAN OF MIR-- This story introduces readers to the Dying Earth, a quasi-medieval domain which like Zothique exists millions of years removed from modern Earth, and one where magical entities and disciplines have returned to prominence, though there are still remnants of super-science. The titular Turjan is both sorcerer and scientist, first seen seeking to create artificial, intelligent life. He fails and decides to seek the help of Pandelume, a sorcerer in another dimension. Turjan accesses that dimension and is attacked by a swordswoman. This is T'sain, Pandelume's own failed experiment at creating life, for T'sais is mentally afflicted and views everything beautiful as hateful. T'sais runs off and Turjan solicits Pandelume's help. Pandelume requires Turjan to complete a dangerous errand for him, but once Turjan completes said task, the two wizards somehow have much better luck in creating another adult female, T'sain, the twin of T'sais. At story's end, T'sais meets her twin but cannot kill her despite the desire to do so. "Turjan" doesn't have much of a plot and largely exists to set up two other tales, which might be a big reason why it didn't sell as an independent magazine-story.

MAZIRIAN THE MAGICIAN-- The events here clearly take place after "Turjan," because the young sorcerer has been captured by evil sorcerer Mazirian and T'sain must come to Turjan's rescue. I think I liked the story on first reading because a large part of it contains what I'll term "the maiden's magical flight" trope, wherein a woman flees a male oppressor. In various myths and folktales, the woman either keeps changing shape, only to be matched by the pursuing male, or she throws magical objects into the hunter's path and he's delayed overcoming the obstacles. It's my recollection that I was aware of the myth-parallel when I first read "Mazirian."

T'SAIS-- This is the first emotionally satisfying of the collection, though it's not that deep. T'sais prevails upon Pandelume to send her to Turjan's Earth-like dimension, to see if she can find some way to overcome her alienation. She's able to conceive something like empathy when she meets Etarr, for he's been cursed with a hideous face by his ex-lover, the sorceress Javanne. Better delineation of the characters might have upgraded the story to something more than formula. I'll note that T'sais doesn't have outstanding sword-skills but owns a sword that kills her enemies independently of her will.

LIANE THE WAYFARER-- During the peregrinations of T'sais, she overcomes the brigand Liane but doesn't kill him despite his attempt to rape her. Liane then becomes the viewpoint character of a completely separate narrative. He hears about a beautiful witch named LIth (for "Lilith," no doubt), but when he tries to get cozy with her, she repels him with her magical arts. She swears to become his lover if he fetches for her a special item from the castle of a great wizard, but it's all a setup to make Liane the victim of both magicians. Liane is probably a dry run for Vance's amoral serial character Cugel the Clever, who became the main protagonist when the author executed his second "Dying Earth" story in 1965. 

ULAN DHOR (G)-- This story, whose title is the name of its protagonist, is the only one in the collection that I'd rate as having mythopoeic concrescence. Prince Khandive, who's mentioned in an earlier tale, assigns his nephew Ulan Dhor to travel to Ampridatvir. There, Ulan, who possesses skills in both swords and sorcery, will seek to recover the lost magicks of that city's former ruler, Rogol Domedonfors. Once he reaches the city, Ulan learns that two groups of residents who have been enspelled so that neither can see the other, apparently to prevent their fighting. Unlike a number of Vance protagonists, Ulan has a conscience, and he intervenes to prevent the needless execution of a young local woman named Elai. Togther Ulan and Elai plumb the mystery of the long vanished ruler Rogol, who rears a very ugly head to exterminate Ampridatvir. 

GUYAL OF SFERE-- This story had the most potential of all six, but Vance doesn't realize that potential. Young nobleman Guyal is an original idea in that he annoys his sire and others in the court by asking all sorts of ponderous, unanswerable questions. When Guyal learns of a legendary "curator" who possesses all knowledge, the young man seeks the curator out in order to become his disciple and to answer all questions. However, Guyal gets waylaid by a tribe and is forced to deliver Shierl, a sacrificial maiden, to the curator's door. I guess Shierl gives Guyal someone to talk to on the way, but she proves a distraction from the inventive premise. Similarly, the revelation of the Curator's nature and of his haunted domicile were merely boring standard fantasy-devices.       

None of these short stories are as evocative as the best tales in Smith's ZOTHIQUE. It's true that Vance isn't as obsessed with rotting corpses as Smith was, and that's a plus to those not looking for zombie action. But Smith had a much greater talent for mixing the pageantry of exotic worlds with the perversity of their inhabitants. Vance's style here is colorful, but not as poetic as I've seen in later stories by the author.  

THE RETURN OF THE TWO ELITISMS

 Back in 2013 I took advantage of a public debate between two comics critics, Gary Groth and Ng Suat Tong to show how both were wrong about their chosen subject (the artfulness of EC Comics) and I, of course, was right. In my essay ELICITING ELITISM I observed that although I considered both critics to be elitists (in contrast to the pluralism I practice), Tong's approach consisted of "form elitism," in that he only recognized art in terms of the form of a given work, while Groth's approach (at least in his defense of the EC comics he was re-publishing) consisted of "content elitism," in which he recognized art in a work's elements of content. This week I found a similar opposition in the public arguments of one acclaimed artist and one not-so-acclaimed performer, put on display in this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. 

(Note: before proceeding I should note that I have not seen the MCU "Shang-Chi" film, so I have no opinion of the merits of Simu Liu's performance in that film, only of his public remarks.)

Liu's remarks respond to two interviews given by Martin Scorsese and one given by Quentin Tarantino. I don't know why Liu includes Tarantino in his screed at all, given that Liu's main complaint is about "Hollywood racism," and Tarantino has distinguished himself for having scripted strong starring and supporting roles for POC actors. Further, though Tarantino has made his share of ideological statements over the years, his comments about not wanting to be a "hired gun" for the MCU are merely practical in nature, and do not condemn the superhero genre as a whole as does the remarks of Martin Scorsese. So I'm focusing here on Scorsese's remarks, which show him to be a "form elitist."

Scorsese takes exception to the box-office dominance of Marvel films, by which he means superhero films, though he says nothing about the films of any other studio. Scorsese says:

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

The famed director's remarks spring forth as a defense of his personal tastes, and that's why they are vague at best in a critical sense. Phrases like "revelation" and "mystery" may have special meaning to Scorsese, but they mean nothing in a wider critical context. Both in this excerpt and the rest of the essay, Scorsese's main complaint is that superhero films depend on "a finite number of themes," while with the filmmakers he loves, Scorsese feels that he's going to be "taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience."

Without my defending the overall quality of 21st-century superhero films, though, I believe what Scorsese really wants are works that fit the mythos of drama, in which most of the central characters are put through rigorous tests of their beliefs or personal loyalties. In contrast, most though not all superhero works fall into the mythos of adventure, where the main purpose of each narrative is to fill the viewer with excitement and invigoration rather than the purging of one's belief-system. Even in the many botched storylines of the MCU, this potential is always present. It's certainly possible to work purgative elements into an adventure-context. In my review of the BLACK PANTHER film, I pointed how it had given shorter shrift to its dramatic elements than had the Don McGregor comics on which the film was partly based. But had Scorsese been exposed to the original "Panther's Rage" arc of the Marvel comic, I tend to think the director would not have recognized the dramatic elements therein, because they weren't as important to the story as the hero physically triumphing over his various opponents. Almost all of Martin Scorsese's work falls into the mythos of the drama, and though he probably enjoys films that fall into other mythoi, most of the filmmakers he applauds also excel in dramatic works, not those of comedy, adventure, or irony. This is what causes me to label Scorsese a "form elitist," who cannot fathom excellence apart from the form he likes best.

Scorsese's essay ends with a complaint about the "financial dominance" of the films he cannot bear to call cinema, and his case is at least strong in terms of his personal tastes, not just his own prosperity. Simu Liu's remarks, as represented in the BOUNDING essay, start and end with the philosophy that "if it's good for me, it's good."

Even if Liu had only attacked Scorsese and left out Tarantino, his vile "everything that doesn't benefit me is racist" would not be any better. Since Scorsese does not bring up racial concerns of any kind, aside from (over)praising Spike Lee, Liu's attack seems grounded in nothing more than. "Scorsese doesn't like the genre which allowed me Sam Liu to get a starring role." 

Liu also manages to talk through both sides of his mouth, praising the two directors' "filmmaking genius" but condemning them as "gatekeepers" who, unlike Woke Disney and the MCU, would never have allowed an Asian star to star in a major Hollywood film." Of course Liu also tries to link his ascension to the entire Asian-American community, to their "lived experience." The entirety of White Hollywood existed for no reason but to keep POC performers down, and any work that does the opposite, no matter how meretricious it might be, is good for possessing that racism-defying content-- making Liu a person who makes his choices on the basis on content, though calling him any sort of "elitist" is a stretch.

I acknowledge that Liu is not engaged in an intellectual discussion as were Scorsese, Groth, and Tong. Yet the ideology he represents (but certainly did not originate) has permeated much of the Hollywood business community, insofar as even hard-hearted businessmen perceive the need to virtue-signal to gain cultural approval. Indeed, though Scorsese makes no comment upon the political content of MCU superhero films-- which it's possible the director did not even notice-- the virtue-signaling aspect of those films bears much of the blame for the aesthetic failure of most modern superhero films to measure up to the comics they pretend to emulate.

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 3

 My recent discourses on "the limited and the limitless" aspects of creative expression reminded me of a passage from Northrop Frye. I discussed it in greater detail in this 2009 essay, but here I'll confine myself to looking at the passage from a new perspective.

...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme...-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Frye brackets two of his literary mythoi, tragedy and irony, as having appeal for the "realist" critic, while the other two, comedy and romance, are the preference of the "romantic" critic. In the essay Frye's principal distinction between the "Iliad critic" and the "Odyssey critic" is that the latter reads the narrative to enjoy the story for its own sake, while the former is looking for an "imaginative allegory" whose purpose is to illuminate "the immediate world outside literature." 

Frye doesn't precisely formulate a reason as to why the Iliad critic seeks his illumination in two of the four mythoi, irony and the one I've renamed "drama."  Nor does he do so for the Odyssey critic with respect to comedy and the mythos I've renamed "adventure." But I believe the essential contrast is that between "the happy ending" and "the unhappy ending." The Odyssey's denouement is moderately "happy," insofar as Odysseus, despite many ordeals and lost years with his family, succeeds in his goal to return to his homeland and to be reunited with his wife and son. In contrast, The Iliad concludes with Achilles yielding the dead body of slain Hector to his father, an outcome that looks forward to the fact that in the greater continuity Achilles too is doomed to perish before the walls of Troy come tumbling down. The Iliad fills the reader with an awareness of the dramatized limitations of life, and while The Odyssey is not unaware of those curtailments on freedom, the adventurous elements of the journey fill one with a sense of limitless potential, in that a mortal hero has managed to survive against the ill will of the gods.

Though I didn't address the limited/limitless dichotomy in my four essays on THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, the fourth essay touches on similar territory.

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

One more installment to go...

 

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

FRYEAN BLIND

 One detail I didn’t mention in my quasi-review of THE POETICS OF MYTH is that when the author presents his rather rushed summary of Northrop Frye’s contributions to myth-criticism, Meletinsky conflates two different selections of Frye’s work, quoting from both ANATOMY OF CRITICISM and from an essay from six years earlier, “The Archetypes of Literature.” But Frye’s arrangement of his mythoi is not the same in these two works. Meletinsky ends up telling readers that Frye has equated comedy and romance with the seasons of summer and of spring, which is true in the essay. But in ANATOMY, Frye reversed the two comparisons. Given that the book represents the fullness of the critic’s thought, this was a rather clumsy mistake on Meletinsky’s part.

However, Meletinsky’s section on Frye did remind me of a topic I brought up in my essay THE FOUR AGES OFDYNAMIS. I said in that essay that I couldn’t find any evidence that Frye had based his four-season, four-mythos schema on anything in Ovid. A fresh scrutiny, though, reveals that a page or two before Frye begins his first section on this subject, entitled “The Mythos of Comedy: Spring,” he does make reference to other famous quaternities, including “the four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death).” There’s not much chance that Frye was unaware of Ovid’s famous poem. It’s more likely that the “Four Ages of Man” as Ovid conceived them simply did not line up with Frye’s conception of his four mythoi, which took its principal influences from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray and Theodor Gaster.

Without question Ovid’s four ages are more persuasive than Frye’s foursome, not least because “death” is not really a period of life. In the ANATOMY Frye is acutely conscious that spring is associated with images of rebirth, not least in his own religion of Christianity, and also that historically Greek New Comedy tended to focus on the attempts of young men and women to be married despite the opposition of tyrannical authority figures. Thus, the critic leapfrogs over the period of actual childhood—Ovid’s “frail shoots and grasses”—so that he Frye can draw symbolic comparisons between mundane marriages of young people and the sacred union of God and humankind. In my early readings of the ANATOMY I was blown away by all of these mythopoeic allusions. Yet in later years I’ve come to decide that there are some problems with pages and pages of criticism on the subject of comedy that barely addressed the functions of humor.

Just as problematic is Frye’s attempt to disassociate the mythos of adventure-oriented romance with the “age” in which heroes venture forth to battle dragons and witches. Since Frye’s spring-protagonists must necessarily be adolescents, his summer-protagonists would have to be of a somewhat later age in order to represent “maturity.” In real life, however, adolescent males are more likely to seek combat-glory before they marry and settle down, even if New Comedies and their descendants tend not to depict that aspect of life. In my own writings, I tend to see that all of the strivings of adolescents, whether relating to Eros or Thanatos, belong on the same plane, since both activities are dominantly associated with persons in their “hardened” summer-phase. Raymond’s FLASH GORDON provides an example of focusing upon both romantic love and on romance in its connotation of a story of great conflict and adventure.

As I stated in FOUR AGES, comedy depends upon the frustrations of incongruity, and these frustrations aren’t exclusive to, say, the “heavy fathers” of Greek New Comedy. Slapstick humor, which may well have been prominent in Greek Old Comedy, may involve no romantic interest whatsoever. The incongruity can arise when the victim’s expectation of immunity from harm is thwarted by a banana peel under the shoe or a pie in the face. Yet Frye was right in thinking that comedy was essentially a mythos about “coming together:” it’s just not a union defined by romance. Rather, nearly every mortal ever born can laugh when a fictional character, good or bad, gets humiliated because every mortal ever born had experienced humiliation in some form, if only during the vicissitudes of childhood. Frye’s concept of comedy, centered upon the experience of adolescents, would seem to have nothing to say about a humor feature like SUGAR ‘N’ SPIKE, where the titular toddlers are constantly trying to make sense of the confusing adult world, but always fail because they see things “through a milk-bottle darkly.”

Frye’s period of “age” lines up loosely with what Ovid calls “the temperate season…midway between quick youth and growing age,” but Ovid’s conception remains superior here as well. The protagonists of serious drama need not be middle-aged, any more than the protagonists of comedy need be children (although it’s been remarked that Hamlet seems to have been a student at Wittenberg long enough to have left adolescence behind him). But in the mythos of drama the protagonists begin to feel the limitations of their personal power, just as living things begin to wane in autumn. Despite many of the adventure-trappings in the teleseries STAR TREK, the serial is at its heart a drama, given that it constantly deals with such limitations, even in such triumphant narratives as “Arena” and “Day of the Dove.”

Clearly what Frye means by “death” is a specific period of human decrepitude, the last phase for any given mortal before he or she dies, and Frye is entirely correct in lining up this state of existence with the season of winter and the mythos of the irony. Comedy levels human beings because everyone shares the humiliations of early life, but in a state of being in which life still holds endless hopes. Irony levels human beings in the opposite manner, separating rather than uniting, reminding us that we all die alone. The only redemption from the season of winter in actual life is the knowledge that one’s limited life may be perpetuated by either literal offspring or by “good works” that go down in history. In literature this slight satisfaction may give rise to a bittersweet black humor, so that even when an irony-tale ends with some sort of romantic alliance—as we see in both Voltaire’s CANDIDE and Elio Perti’s THE TENTH VICTIM —the romance only succeeds because the principals manage to isolate themselves from the madding world.

NOTES TOWARD A MORE EXTENSIVE BAT-ANALYSIS

So I ask myself the question: given that I’ve become keen on the idea of sussing out how many, if any, episodes of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries (hereafter BATMAN ’66) qualify for myth-status, I must ask myself if there’s any special approach I should use.

Whenever I’ve reviewed individual episodes or story-arcs within the open-ended DC BATMAN comic-series, it’s been possible to deal with each discretely. However, a closed series—one which, as I noted earlier, simply came to an arbitrary end upon cancellation—is somewhat different. When teleserials last no more than three years, they usually keep roughly the same roster of producers and creative talents. It’s not impossible for such a series to change its creative priorities in some radical way, as can be seen in the differences between the first and second seasons of BUCK ROGERS IN THE 2TH CENTURY. But on the whole, the episodes of a short-run show tend to cohere a little better than those of a long-running comics series.

Another complication is the distinction between a “one-tier” approach and a “two-tier” approach. Without altering my position about dominant mythoi—that every serial concept is dominated primarily by one mythos—it’s obvious that some serials are more overtly devoted to one mythos, while others may seek to “sample” from other mythoi to “switch things up.”

For the most part, every generation of BATMAN comics offers its readers the invigorating elements of adventure, with only minor references to modes of drama, comedy, or irony. This would be a one-tier approach.

BATMAN ’66, however, explicitly sought a “two-tier” approach according to the public statements of producer William Dozier, offering invigorating thrills to the kids in the audience, while giving the adults campy, ironic asides about the absurdity of the events depicted. I’ve repeated my reasons for viewing ’66 as dominated by the mythos of adventure various times, so I won’t repeat those reasons here.

Now, in my essay FANTASIES OFINNNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE, I made a direct comparison to two “two-tiered” concepts: that of BATMAN ’66, an “adventure-irony,” and that of Wally Wood’s WIZARD KING duology, an “irony-adventure.” In the essay, which focuses primarily on my reasons for pronouncing WIZARD KING an irony, I attempted to show how the invigorating elements of normative fantasy-adventures—LORD OF THE RINGS, PRINCE VALIANT—proved secondary to Wood’s concentration upon motifs of doom and deception. Yet, it must be admitted that although Wood’s version of a fantasy-scape can’t be taken at face value, his mortificative ironies are not nearly as harsh and discordant as those found in the most severe "one-tier” irony, such as the Mills/O’Neill MARSHAL LAW. The story’s reluctant hero (and viewpoint character) is not especially appreciative of the strange beauties he encounters. But the reader sees what Odkin does not—the wonder in winged boats floating across the sky, or mammoth earth-ogres coming to life after eons. Thus there is a sense that the fantasies of innocence exist to comment on the fantasies of experience, even if the latter get the primary emphasis.

Any analytical approach to BATMAN ’66 would have to be note how the episodes play off the two mythoi constantly, even though the emphasis goes in the opposite direction. To illustrate, here’s a brief cross-comparison.

Very few actual Batman comics-stories were adapted to the teleseries, but a telling exception is 1952’s “The Joker’s Utility Belt.” In every way the original comic is a thoroughgoing adventure-story, with no elements of drama, irony or even comedy to distract from the tale’s focus: yet another duel between Batman and the Joker. As the title implies, the villain’s main ploy is that of biting the hero’s style, as the Crown Prince of Crime begins wearing a belt full of useful gizmos, albeit all patterned upon jokey conceits, like sneezing powder and a hand buzzer. Naturally, the Joker puts Batman and Robin through their paces—literally, on a conveyor belt leading to a furnace—until the heroes turn the tables and consign the villain to durance vile once again.

Dozier and his staff adapted this story to the fifth and sixth episodes of the teleseries’ first season, which were respectively entitled “The Joker is Wild/Batman is Riled.” Not many comics-stories were adapted at all, but “Joker is Wild” is amazingly close to the original model, particularly in comparison to the Riddler-story that was used for the season’s first and second episodes. The TV-script doesn’t use nearly as many campy asides as did the average first-season episode, but the most significant departure appears at the end of the sixth episode. Batman has defeated the Joker’s minions, including a beautiful gang-moll named Queenie (not present in the 1952 comic-tale). As the sober-sided crusader prepares to take the malefactors in, Queenie tries to see if she can negotiate some leniency via her tempting body. Batman’s response—calling the gang-moll a “poor, deluded creature”—is out of character for the comic-book hero, but totally appropriate for the campy series. Having Batman sound a bit like a priggish defender of moral virtue does not in any way diminish his heroic accomplishments, those of figuring out the Joker’s plot and defeating his forces. But it’s a transparent signal to the adult audience, that the Cowled Crusader is first and foremost a hero for children who don’t know anything about the temptations of sex.

Now, pointing out the particular usages of either adventurous or ironic elements does not in itself constitute the value of “mythicity.”Mythicity is, as I’ve written before, not equivalent with artifice. The literary devices of artifice are the primary vehicles through which mythicity is expressed, but the "driver" of each vehicle is only mythic in nature if he’s communicating not just the bare facts of his artificial existence, but also the manifold joys of epistemological reflection. How many such “drivers” I will find in BATMAN ’66 is at this point an open question even to me.

THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD

I concluded my GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES post without formulating a “bachelor thread” for the Batman comics-series, because I wanted to rethink the matter somewhat more in relation to the influential 1966 teleseries. I’m never going to attempt to review all the Batman comic books, but I have considered doing an episode-by-episode myth-analysis of the teleseries. To do so, I would need to determine what aspects of the comic’s “bachelor-thread" the series-writers chose to follow, and what aspects they replaced with others.

My original thought for the Batman comic in toto was going to be something like, “the darkness of trauma, though usually breeding monsters, may also breed a slayer of monsters.” I even had this approximate notion in mind as I began GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES, but in the midst of crafting the essay, I began to think a lot more about how Robin had altered the aesthetic of the series. Though he as much as Batman suffered a trauma that caused him to become a crusader against evil, Robin certainly does not become a “creature of the night.” If anything, his bright, colorful costume suggests the stubborn renewal of life and light after the temporary reign of darkness. The legendary Robin Hood was almost certainly the exemplar on which the teen hero was modeled, but arguably over time the more important connotation was that of the robin as “the first bird of spring.”

 Robin’s vernal presence certainly doesn’t dispel the monsters of fear and darkness, of course. He debuts after Batman’s encounters with a handful of early, somewhat crude grotesques—Professor Hugo Strange, the Monk, and the Duc D’Orterre—but the Boy Wonder is on the scene for all the major grotesques: the Joker, Clayface, Scarecrow, Two-Face. And because of the visual and narrative interplay of the grim Dark Knight and his playful “squire,” the writers began coming up with more villains who were more sprightly in nature, foremost being the Penguin. (As noted elsewhere, it took the writers a while to come up with a well defined version of Catwoman.)

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall developm ent of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

The idea of obsession, incidentally, glosses my earlier ruminations on the nature of artifice. Most if not all familiar literary tropes incite in their ardent readers a heightened feeling like that of obsession, but one channeled through the matrix of game-playing. The very attraction of a literary trope lies in the fact that it is artificial, like the rules of any game. Truly ardent lovers of mystery-fiction never tire of the consummatory pleasures they receive from the masterful resolution of a whodunit, while an outsider to such pleasures can only wonder, as did Edmund Wilson, “who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd?” Obviously the love of the game runs deeper in some than in others. A Gary Groth may start out loving the aggressive fantasies of superheroes and barbarians, only to lose his taste for those pleasures, and to spend most of his career lecturing other readers on the childish nature of their fantasies.

When such fantasies are seen through a distancing lens, such as that of the campy irony present in the Batman teleseries, some audiences are pleased to think that they’ve escaped the hidebound rule of the old game, and entered a more challenging, more adult form of play. This would seem to the case with a 2014 essay by Noah Berlatsky, in which the author could not imagine why Bat-fans didn’t want to toss out old; childish Batman in favor with new, ironic Batman. I answered his question with my essay-series THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, but for the purpose of this essay, I want to look at how the teleseries attempted to rewrite the rules of the comic book’s scenario.

The essence of the word “irony” is that of saying one thing and meaning something else. William Dozier and his collaborators were certainly not the first pop-culture dabblers in this domain. Al Capp’s LI’L ABNER, though dominantly a broad comedy, is full of instances where characters revisit familiar story-tropes to indirectly make fun of them.The most famous of these appeared when simple-minded Abner would geek out on the gory misdeeds of his comic-strip hero Fearless Fosdick, a blatant send-up of DICK TRACY. There had been various superhero spoofs in comics and in cartoons before ’66 BATMAN. But Dozier and Co had the inspired notion to adapt the overall mythos of an established superhero-serial, playing it straight for kid-viewers but injecting any number of sly asides to please the adult audience.

This was, of course, a game no less restrictive than the rules of the Bat-comic, and nothing shows this more than the pastel-filled visual approach of the ’66 show. At the time of the show’s airing, DC’s two Bat-features had just made an attempt to reject the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, since the books weren’t selling as well as desired. This shift in editorial policy led to a very modest revival of grotesque/Gothic imagery, as seen in the May ’66 appearance of the Death-Man.

 However, though Dozier et al borrowed from a few stories that appeared during the post-Candyland phase, the show-runners were largely married to the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, where villains with weird obsessive traits popped up for no particular reason, almost existing purely to counter Batman’s own crime-fighting obsession. Mister Freeze was one of the few TV-villains to be given a particular reason for his criminal career. Usually, though, if there wasn’t something about a villain’s modus operandi that really begged for explanation, the writers dispensed with even simple melodramatic motivations.

In the universe of ’66 BATMAN—a admixture of both adventure-tropes and ironized versions of them— both the heroes and their villains still had their obsessions, but they barely tied in to any life-events (Batman mentions the cause of his crimefighting obsession once or twice, almost as an afterthought; Robin, like the majority of villains, gets no origin at all.) Thus the rules of the show were far more formalized than those of the comic book. For instance, during the first two seasons, the two-part episodes all have cliffhangers at the end of the first segment. Building on producers’ statements about their audience, presumably the idea was that kids would be worried about the heroes’ survival while adults would wonder what absurd trick the writers would use to save the good guys. Since all episodes in those seasons had to have a cliffhanger, every villain had to nurture the impossible dream of devising a deathtrap good enough to extinguish the Dynamic Duo. In such a ritualized world, neither darkness nor dark obsessions really exist. So my makeshift Bat-bachelor thread, when passed through the devouring gullet of the ’66 Bat-serial, becomes: “Virtue and vice alike take the form of pastel, often psychedelic arabesques, and virtuous arabesques only triumph over those of vice because the rules say that they must.”

That said, Dozier et al knew that they couldn’t quite undercut all the rules of the comics-feature, or they couldn’t be sure of winning over the kids. Thus, Batman and Robin’s fights are never burlesqued as one sees in most superhero spoofs. The gigantic sound-effects provide a distancing effect for adults, but do not efface the effects of two heroes who are just so good with their dukes that they can outfight three or four plug-uglies at once. Similarly, though Robin no longer serves the purpose of “brightening” Batman’s Gothic domain, he still fulfills the same role of the junior hero receiving tutelage from his elder. Though the duo’s goody-good personas are often subverted, the familial affection between the two is played straight.

To conclude, if I was ever to perform a critical analysis of ’66 BATMAN, I would have to look at each episode to see how well it balanced the use of adventure-tropes with irony-tropes, and whether or not the balance attained the higher levels of mythic discourse—just as a sustained analysis of all Batman stories might emphasize the balance between dark grotesques and colorful arabesques.

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR

... "ought to wear," that is, in terms of impressing adult readers and thus giving rise to the reception of the genre as a legitimate category of what I've called "adult pulp."

In one of my old JOURNAL essays I started off by noting that superheroes wearing costumes was the one element that made adult readers consider the genre as pulp-fiction of an irredeemably juvenile kind. And there's no question that a lot of adults say that the thing they find most off-putting about superheroes is their tendency to wear their underwear on the outside. (Incidentally, this excuse for a joke made the most sense back when Americans wore "long underwear" of one kind or another.)

However, I've come to think that the costume-complaint may not really be as substantial as I thought earlier. In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy). For every one of these that became moderately well known, there are presumably dozens that have been forgotten. The question is, did even Dick Tracy-- arguably one of the most famous "plainclothed crusaders"-- earn any deep and abiding respect because he pursued Flat Top and Pruneface while wearing regular clothes?

Say, for sake of argument, that the leotard-style costume never caught on in comic books. Early sketches of Superman suggest that Joe Shuster originally meant for the hero to wear street-clothes a la Doc Savage, and that the image of the costume that was added later, almost at random, in imitation of  such carnival performers as strongmen and acrobats. Given the appeal of a "modern-day Hercules," it's not impossible that a non-costumed Superman might have begotten an extended  family of mufti-clothed crimefighters, and that costumes might have appeared only occasionally, as they did in the period of the "hero pulps." Assuming that the level of talent and production of such comic books stayed the same, is there any reason to think that comic books full of supermen in plainclothes would have earned any more deep and abiding respect than the costumed versions?

Despite the fact that a lot of adults have scorned costumes as elements of childish make-believe, I think the genre of adventure itself is the real source of contempt. In an earlier essay I referenced Ursula LeGuin's animus toward prose genres like space opera and sword and sorcery, which certainly don't involve "costumes" as such. There are a few 19th-century prose novels in the adventure-genre that have become acknowledged classics-- IVANHOE, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But it took about a century for academic critics to embrace adventures with metaphenomenal content, such as DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In the last twenty years academics have become somewhat more latitudinarian about the adventure- genre, with or without elements of fantasy. But old attitudes die hard.

There are various "adult superhero" graphic novels out there, and it may be significant that a lot of them aspire to literary quality by using the tropes of irony and satire. I think a great "adult superhero" graphic novel in a purely adventurous mode is still a possibility, but it would have to have the complexity of a Melville novel to overcome the casual contempt so often directed against the genre.