COSMIC ALIGNMENT

The sort of "cosmos" I'm talking about in this essay is essentially the same as the word "mythos" as I've been using it to apply the totality of elements within any narrative, where a variety of Subs-- mostly antagonists and supporting characters-- interact with one or more Primes. This cosmos may be generated within the space of one narrative, as per my earlier example of the novel IVANHOE, or throughout the progress of a series, be it short-lived or long-lived. All subordinate presences within a narrative-- characters, settings, and certain types of artifacts-- are defined by their *alignment* with the stories generated by the superordinate character(s).

I indirectly alluded to this concept, not then named, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1,  regarding the character of Fu Manchu. Since Fu is the sole superordinate character of the series of books named for him, all other characters in those books are aligned with him, even those opposing him. However, when Fu becomes a subordinate character in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, he then becomes an aligned figure within the Shang-Chi cosmos.

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe. However, it's possible, particularly when the individual features of a given publisher share continuity, for subordinate presences to cross over into other features. 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.

 OTOH, in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock. However, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the nasty titan becomes an Avengers foe-- and will probably never be re-interpreted further in the movie-medium.

As it happens, a number of famous historical figures also cross paths, though of course these events are not being contrived for anyone's entertainment. In this essay, I addressed the subject of notorious western marauder Billy the Kid, focusing on how little all fictional treatments of the outlaw related to the real historical personage. But even though the real Billy the Kid never met a lot of the famous people of his time, much less Dracula, some "real crossovers" did take place. The Kid's sometimes criminal associate Dave Rudabaugh, for instance, is credited in this Wiki-article with also encountering Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Earp and Holliday may have met for the first time due to Earp's hunt for Rudabaugh.

The real-life association of Earp and Holliday became the stuff of many fictional westerns, most of which tended to make Earp a Prime protagonist while Holliday was relegated to Sub status. Nevertheless, Holliday had enough charisma that he occasionally migrated into other fictional cosmoses, dueling with the Rawhide Kid in one comic and making an appearance in an episode of the TV show THE HIGH CHAPPARAL.

Strangely, Holliday gets a post-mortem encounter with three western folk-heroes in the 1999 movie PURGATORY, none of whom he knew in life: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wild Bill Hickock (though the last character seems more like a faux Wyatt Earp in his characterization, since he's not that "wild.") Again, these would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

Moving from folk-legends to folklore, there are a wide number of crossovers which focus on associating figures from folktales and fairy tales. Usually these type of tales are too amorphous to establish a "cosmos" for, say, Little Red Riding Hood. But on occasion the Wolf, aligned as a subordinate character in that story, becomes the star of a given story, or he may become one of many stock folk-figures to cross over with some superordinate character, often a new, non-traditional character like Shrek.

In conclusion, I will admit that full-fledged myths are harder than folk-tales to judge in terms of alignment. Suzanne Langer and others have noted that in mythology proper figures like gods and their monstrous antagonists often become set in their own "continuity," however often this or that detail may change. Yet some gods and heroes, theoretically in the same universe, never really cross paths, despite "continuties" like those of the Iliad or the Argonautica. Does it count as a crossover if Perseus and Jason, who never meet in the old myths, appear in the same story? I would not tend to consider it a crossover if some ordinary schmuck conjures up the goddess Venus. But Venus crossing over with the mythology of Satan would certainly be a different matter. More on these matters later, perhaps.

WHAT'S IN A NOMINATIVE TEXT?

 In A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 4 I wrote:

Moving away from this type of High Charisma crossover, I want to return to the matter of "crypto-continuity" introduced in Part II, I asserted that "King Kong II," though not technically in continuity with "King Kong I," borrows enough motifs from the original that the later character may be seen as what I term a "weak template deviation." 

However, there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.

Though I may have reason later to utilize these "template deviation" terms, I'll put them aside for this essay to discuss the two types of texts from which a later narrative may deviate: the *nominative* text and the *innominate* text. Innominate texts are all texts that arise from anonymous sources, whose history is hard to determine. Nominative texts are all texts whose origins and authorship are easy to verify. 

Some texts from very archaic times may combine aspects of both, in that we know the historical placement of the BEOWULF poem and of the EPIC OF GILGAMESH, but not who wrote them. We know the name of Homer, who composed the two epics once believed to be the earliest literary works in existence, and we know the probable times in which the epics were circulated, but we know next to nothing about the author himself. Homer's epics, Beowulf and the GIlgamesh Epic were most probably built up from assorted shorter stories of myth and folklore, and indeed the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY might be considered the world's first major crossovers, given that they are forging connections between legendary characters who may not have been associated with one another in anterior eras.

 To further complicate the matter, even some legendary characters may have verifiable historical associations. The figure of Gilgamesh is attested to have been a mortal king in an early period of Sumerian history. However, in keeping with the theory of the Greek scholar Euhermus, later Sumerians used the name Gilgamesh for one of their gods, and it is as a demigod that the character appears in the aforementioned epic. For this reason I tend to regard all of the archaic works, even the epics of Homer, to be innominate because their full history is sometimes murky in its specifics.

In contrast, the majority of texts produced since the rise of European culture in the post-Renaissance era are usually known quantities for  the most part. From that time on, a much stricter distinction between fiction and non-fiction pertains in Western culture. In Shakepeare's historical plays, he feels free to change details of real history-- sometimes of historical eras very close to his own-- and this may be because he knew that his audience would dominantly regard his plays as fiction based on fact, in contrast to any archaic Greeks that may have regarded the ILIAD as the history of Troy's fall. 

In CROSSOVERS PART 4 I contrasted two characters whom I regarded as a "high-charisma crossover," the titular figures of the 1966 weird western BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA. It should go without saying that the Dracula of this film, despite having little if anything in common with the Dracula of Bram Stoker, nevertheless descends from a *nominative* text: a book published in 1897.

Billy the Kid, however, was a real historical personage, who became over time a folk-hero in a process roughly analogous to what may have happened with the historical Gilgamesh. A scholar knowledgeable in the subject of dime-novel westerns could probably cite a particular work that contributed to the growth of the Kid's repute. However, it's unlikely that any single literary or even cinematic work was responsible for the articulation of the legend. Most of the real-life exploits of the outlaw born "Henry McCarty" are not in the least admirable, and maybe not even all that daring. Yet simply because the real-life person became a figure that people could talk about, the people began building him into a legendary personage, even to the extent of making him a righteous hero. 

Thus in my system every fictional story including Billy the Kid is an *innominate* text-- even one that purports to represent the "real" Billy, like the 1972 film DIRTY LITTLE BILLY. 

An *innominate* text, because its main characters are not grounded in a text with a particular history, cannot boast characters that have any stature relevant to a crossover. Every Billy the Kid in every serial or stand-alone work is different from every other one, and so there exists not even the tenuous "crypto-continuity" that exists between the Dracula of Stoker and the Dracula of William Beaudine. 

To be sure, it's not impossible for an author to use the name of a character from a nominative text for a new character who has nothing in common with the original save the name. In a series of B-westerns starring Ken Maynard, the hero rode a horse named 'Tarzan." I assume the filmmakers legally got away with using the name of the Burroughs ape-man because no one in any audience would have believed that the horse was an attempt to imitate the copyrighted Tarzan character.