THE OBSESSIVE-TRANSGRESSIVE PT. 2

 Looking back at Part 1, I don't think I mapped out the relationship of the differing forms of cathexis with respect to the Bataillean concept of transgression.

First, I wanted to specify that cathexis in both forms, syndromic and casual, could apply to any sort of "interest," such as one's sympathy toward, or antipathy to, particular foods or music. However, I should also specify that even if an artist has a syndromic obsession with a particular food or musical composition, said obsession usually won't mean anything to the consumers of whatever work the artist works his interests into. If a given director really likes bananas and works them into all his films, most consumers won't even notice. Those that do notice will either like or dislike bananas-- but that favorable or unfavorable feeling won't have any impact on those consumers' perception of the films, because who cares if the director likes bananas?

Sex and violence, however, are transgressive by nature, as shown by my previous example of Russ Meyer. Some consumers will like Meyer's fetish for big breasts, while others will not-- and both attitudes arise from social codes about what is or is not appropriate in sexual relations. The same thing is true for the ways in which Meyer associates sex *with* violence, so Meyer shows syndromic cathexis with respect to both sex and violence.

Now, simply *depicting* lots of sex and violence may not be syndromically cathexis. Producer/director Roger Corman is just as strongly associated as Meyer with scenes of sex and violence, but I would tend to rate most of Corman's scenes as examples of "casual cathexis." Corman puts routine scenes of sex and violence into most of his movies because he knows that's what a lot of viewers want. 

However, in Part 1 I gave the example of William Read Woodfield as one creator whose oeuvre as a whole doesn't display syndromic tendencies, but who managed to "amp up" and produce a syndromic work, THE HYPNOTIC EYE. Possibly Woodfield was consciously or subconsciously emulating the popular works of Alfred Hitchcock and that may be the only reason he succeeded, even if he later downgraded his own accomplishment. And in Corman's case, a full analysis of his "Poe cycle" films probably would reveal his syndromic interpretation of the sexual codes in Edgar Allan Poe. I won't examine the whole Poe cycle here but will confine myself to what has been termed his "Poe knockoff" THE TERROR. In my 2017 review, I wrote:

TERROR's pre-twist plot might be considered a standard Gothic scenario, fraught with an Oedipal theme. Usually, when a young man penetrates the lair of an older one and steals away a beautiful woman, the woman is the older man's daughter. Here, the woman's youth is an illusion brought about by a old witch, and in terms of the generation into which the fictional Ilsa is born, she's closer to being a "mother-figure" to Duvalier than being a "daughter-figure" to Von Leppe. Technically, though Ilsa is sort of both, since in life she's explicitly said to be the Baron's second wife. (I would guess that this detail came about because the actor playing Von Leppe was over seventy years old.) The original script is built upon the notion that Von Leppe was responsible for the deaths of his wife and her lover, though it's still rather confusing as to why Katrina, who appears to be a quite powerful witch, would wait eighteen years after her son's death and THEN finally conjure up the ghost of Ilsa to take vengeance upon the Baron. It's also pretty fuzzy logic as to why it takes Ilsa a full two years to break down the Baron, who isn't exactly having a lot of laughs during his golden years.

Corman's last-minute twist is that Eric, the former lover of Ilsa, was not killed in the struggle that took Ilsa's life. Instead Eric took Von Leppe's life and was so traumatized by the deed that he convinced himself that he was Von Leppe. Symbolically, the twist does have the effect of making Eric and Duvalier virtual doubles, since both are young men trying to steal an older man's wife.

So this Freudian take on Poe demonstrates Corman recycling a very standard Gothic scenario, which he and others made up on the fly-- only to undermine the scenario with something very like Freud's "primal scene," but with the traumatized child transformed into an adulterous adult who, despite sleeping with a figurative "mother," is driven mad by his act of killing an equally figurative "father," to the extent that the adulterer *becomes* the father. 

In my 2017 review I said that I didn't think Corman was trying for any great profundity with the twist ending; that he just wanted something that would cause moviegoers to recommend the film to other patrons and thus result in positive box office. However, I'd modify that statement today. Corman certainly wanted the positive word-of-mouth, but he like Woodfield had certainly seen the impact that raconteurs like Hitchcock had upon the filmgoing market with "Big Reveals" like the one Hitchcock channeled from Robert Bloch's PSYCHO into the cinematic medium. So when he realized that he could "soup up" a dull-seeming picture by channeling some of his private thoughts about Poe and Freud, he did so. And I have little doubt that Corman improved his movie by thinking about sex in a syndromic manner, even though the vast majority of his productions, both before and after THE TERROR, demonstrate only the "casual cathexis" of giving a predominantly male audience what it wanted in terms of "T and A."         

            

MYTHCOMICS: SWAMP THING 1989 (2026)

 

So, the only vote is in, and all four stories of SWAMP THING '89 make the "mythcomics cut," unlike all previous 23 issues of Rick Veitch's run on the regular SWAMP THING comic.

This was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. I suspected, after reading just a few pages of the first of the four installments, "The Morning of the Magician," was fully concrescent, and so I easily could have written only about that story and dismissed the others as "near-myths." But in point of fact, Veitch does succeed in pulling all four installments into a larger theme of spiritual rebirth and resurrection that is as close as a work of popular culture can get to the Christian doctrine of salvation (or, for that matter, to any religious doctrine). Not that there aren't "literary works," from PILGRIM'S PROGRESS to THE SATANIC VERSES, that are as poorly conceived as any bad comic book. But I digress.

There are still flaws. Veitch never really furnishes readers with a decent answer to his gimmick of having the monster-hero propelled through time-eras by a chunk, or chunks, of amber, and I would have thought that before his run was suspended, the author should have had that particular plot-device worked out. To be sure, the gimmick isn't used in "Morning," though.

In any case, at the end of the 1989 issue known as SWAMP THING #87, Swampy is banished from Arthurian times by an amber talisman. However, this time he's pursued through the corridors of time by one of Arthur's paladins, The Shining Knight, who becomes one of the more consequential guests in Veitch's version of SWAMP THING TEAM-UP. At any rate, while ST is once more tripping the light temporal, in ancient Judaea things are coming to a head. A trio of necromancers-- loosely compared to the Three Wise Men-- summon the hell-demon Belial, to rid them of the "magician" Jesus. Belial sends his "only begotten son"-- and yes, the demonic parody is intentional-- to possess the Roman centurion Marcus Tiberius. (Marcus was one of three DC characters to have his own feature in the first incarnation of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, initially launched as a title featuring historical adventures.) Note that here Veitch has Marcus cohabit with prostitute Mary Magdalene, thus following the popular confusion between the Biblical woman of Magdala and one or more prostitute figures.

Swamp Thing manifests in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus's disciples have fallen asleep and Jesus sits alone with the vessel that will later be called The Holy Grail. Veitch doesn't explain why Jesus -- not explicitly said to be divine here-- brought the vessel along, given that the Last Supper had ended. The cup's presence gives ST the chance to offer the Messiah a soothing drink, though Jesus is too distracted by his mystic communion to quaff the drink. Then the possessed Marcus arrives with Roman soldiers. Swamp Thing appears to battle Etrigan, but Jesus sends Swampy back to the time-stream and exorcises Marcus. Jesus then endures all the rigors of the Passion and perishes. A greybeard, implicitly the non-Biblical character Joseph of Arimathea, is shown holding the Grail, and from somewhere he also obtains a shard of amber, which he places within the Grail, all the better to maintain continuity with the Camelot issue. ST continues his backward journey, meditating on Jesus' perfect sacrifice.

"Time Upon a Once" alternates between ST getting trapped in an earlier era by the super-villain Chronos, only to receive succor from The Shining Knight, and John Constantine's attempts to suss out the muck-monster's fate, with help from such figures as Jim Corrigan and "The Hairies" (from Kirby's "Fourth World" cosmos). Also, pregnant Abby is due to give birth, so naturally she does so in a stable in the swamplands. ST is once more sent into time by an amber talisman, and this time he seems to disappear into "The Big Bang," where even the Knight cannot follow him.  

However, Swampy encounters another Kirby Kreation, signaling that the Kirbyverse is closer to being the metaphysical heart of the monster's world than any religion's concepts. The "moving finger" of The Source counsels Swamp Thing to attempt reincarnation through "the shared collective spirit that binds reality." This entails ST's "sacrifice" of his conscious memories, and so he next appears as a sprout upon a primeval tree, "Yrgsll" (patently an ancestor of "Yggdrasil). After many centuries as an unthinking plant, ST encounters primitive humans, including that DC cave-boy Anthro. The exposure to humans reminds ST of his 20th-century incarnation, just in time for him to come to life and repel hostiles who attack the primitives. Readers get a very shaky rationale for the "amber gimmick" here, in that as a sapling, Swampy weeps "tears of amber sap" when wounded. But is there a conistent reason why exposure to amber talismans caused ST to jaunt through time? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Swampy's arch-nemesis Arcane has got paroled from Hell on the promise of his expunging John Cosntantine, but he proceeds to the stable, hoping to wreak havoc upon his niece and her child. However for some reason Constantine joins the fight, wielding an amber talisman-- and for some dubious reason, ST in the primeval past is able to reincarnate into the amber, because at that time the swamp-hero placed some of his essence in the amber chunk. Further, Swampy doesn't need to battle Arcane this time, for thanks to his exposure to the Prince of Peace, no hate abides in the elemental's heart, and Arcane cannot harm him or anyone else. Back to Hell goes the villain, while ST, Abby and their newborn child get to depart to a sort of figurative "heaven" where no one will trouble them. This wasn't the first or last time a creator sought to impose a sense of closure at the end of his comics-run-- even knowing that the character's adventures would go on under other hands-- but Veitch's closure is not without a certain rough appeal. And at least he saved the best parts of his tenure for the last.  

NEAR-MYTHS: "WILD THINGS," "TIME UPON A ONCE" (SWAMP THING #65-87 (1987-89)

 

My proximate reason for re-reading Rick Veitch's 23-issue run on the artist's run on the regular SWAMP THING was to remind myself of the setup for the conclusion of Veitch's storylines. As Veitch himself observed, that conclusion became the medium's most famous "unfinished story," since DC refused to publish Veitch's conclusion, resulting in his refusal to work with DC Comics again. DC for its part simply enlisted another raconteur to finish the Veitch storyline and went on publishing SWAMP THING comics. But now, after 30-plus years, DC decided to publish the Veitch conclusion, with the storyline unaltered though of course new art had to be produced and paid for. It's my intention to review this storyline in the next few days in a separate essay.

DC's moratorium on the conclusion did not prevent the company from packaging the Veitch SWAMP THING run-- as well as some ancillary materials I did not examine for this essay-- in three hardbound volumes, respectively titled "Wild Things," "Synchronicity," and "Time Upon a Once." Whatever the reasons for these divisions, I'd say the 23 issues break down into two distinct plotlines, and the titles "Wild Things" and "Time Upon a Once" are as good as any to denote those two stories.

Of the two, "Time" is easier to discuss, and the more pleasurable, so I'll deal with that one first-- even though it's the part that was left without a proper conclusion until recently. According to this interview, Veitch anticipated that DC's 1988 summer crossover event, INVASION, would oblige him to orient the SWAMP THING feature upon the "invading alien hordes" storyline. Instead, Veitch devoted two issues to setting up the contrivance that before the aliens could invade, they had to get rid of Swamp Thing due to his plant-based powers. So the aliens send the spirit of the muck-monster careening down the corridors of time-- which also gave the author the chance to revisit an assortment of DC characters set in other time-periods. As Veitch said:

“I figured if I got Swamp Thing off the planet and out of our time zone, then Swamp Thing comics could just be about that and they wouldn’t have to be a part of whatever that crossover was. The other aspect of the time-travel sequence was there were a few DC characters at the time who hadn’t been staked out by various creative people who wanted to retcon them. The richest vein of available characters were all in the past. The cowboys and the cavemen and the gladiators and the knights and all of that kind of stuff. I was really attracted to that, that I’d have that in my little sandbox and be able to play with all of them.”

Here's how the crossovers broke down.

#82-- ST interacts with DC's most famous war-hero Sergeant Rock in the closing years of WWII, as well as with an earlier incarnation of ST's enduring enemy Anton Arcane. With minor appearances by the Unknown Soldier and (in modern times) Jason Woodrue in his regrettable NEW GUARDIANS phase.

#83-- ST flashes back to WWI, and to the Germany of Hans Von Hammer of ENEMY ACE fame. He also meets a younger Arcane, who's been diddling his sister and almost kills his mother. 

#84-- ST takes a back seat to his girlfriend Abby as she deals with her dying husband Matt Cable, and also manages to host crossovers with Adam Strange, Morpheus and John Constantine.

#85-- It's "Go West, Young Thing," as Swampy is enslaved by a Native American wizard, and becomes entwined with such luminaries as Jonah Hex, Bat Lash, Johnny Thunder and his wife Madame .44, Hawk Son of Tomahawk, Firehair, El Diablo, and that short-lived savage superhero, Super Chief. Also, The Demon makes a cameo.

#86-- My favorite of the bunch. as ST jaunts back to revolutionary times, and meets DC's long running frontier paladin, Tomahawk. There's also another encounter with The Demon, and with the once and future Batcave, complete with a giant bat--which gets more or less explained in the ensuing issue.

        

#87-- Swampy witnesses the Fall of Camelot, as well as interacting with Merlin, his demon Etrigan, the villainous Morgaine LeFey, and the Shining Knight. A couple of background figures look like Prince Valiant and Hal Foster's version of the knight Gawain. The issue ends with the Shining Knight in modern times, informing Abigail of his interaction with the time-dispersed swamp-spirit, and then swearing to locate Swampy again-- at which point the tale ends.  

So "Time Upon a Once" is a great read, with the story being told backwards as the monster-hero keeps getting flung further back. It's fun but there's no epistemological pattern uniting the continuity, just playing in the DC sandbox.

"Wild Things" is harder to suss out. Given that Alan Moore changed the parameters of the SWAMP THING feature by importing a wealth of metaphysical concepts, Veitch was a good choice to follow Moore, since Veitch was at least equally invested in mystical matters as his English colleague. Veitch pencils many fascinating visuals depicting ST's journeys into the higher realms. Yet though I appreciated the intent, I found a lot of Veitch's design-work static. Just as a brief personal comparison, six years before Veitch's ST run, I remember being mesmerized by Marshall Rogers' vivid rendition of the DOCTOR STRANGE cosmology.

The title "Wild Things" references the storyline's main conceit: that due to ST's absence from Earth during an extended Alan Moore arc, Earth's plant-consciousness "The Green" generates a new spirit destined to merge with a dying human and to become a new Swamp Thing. ST would like to give up being Earth's elemental protector and let the "new guy" take over, but for some reason all the candidates prove inadequate and just die without hosting the new swamp-spirit-- and this repetitiousness drains whatever mythic grandeur might have informed the proceedings. On top of that, ST and Abigail get the idea to let "the Sprout" inhabit the body of Abby's unborn child, at which point they stop talking about the matter of the new Thing having to die violently. My overall feeling is that Veitch let the story's complexities get away from him.

Lastly, while Moore was no shrinking violet about his Liberal beliefs during his ST run, Veitch was twice as heavy-handed. I even remember being turned off by Veitch's political asides even though I was dominantly Liberal in the 1980s). The nadir of this virtue signaling appeared when Veitch took the old character of Roy Raymond (a know-it-all 1950s TV detective) and turned him into a conservative douche who got trapped for several issues in a car being driven by a mindless New Swamp Thing clone. There are certainly some weak moments in the Alan Moore, but as a reader I felt that he had a better control of the overall narrative.  But I must admit, at his worst Veitch's follow-up was better than 90% of similar follow-ups. 

     

CURIOSITIES: "SWEET LITTLE FOURTEEN"

 Now this one makes AMERICAN SHOTACON looks "normie" by comparison. I've mentioned that I usually don't read online humor comics issue by issue but skip around to see what I might click on randomly. Which is how I stumbled across issue 345 of ARCHIE'S GIRLS BETTY AND VERONICA, and found this:

 

 

 

I don't think I was reading any ARCHIE comics in the early 1970s, so I didn't know that there was a story in which Veronica had a little-girl cousin named Pamela, who created some mischief and then fell in love with Jughead. But GCD established as much for me, after I was thunderstruck by the bizarre 1986 follow-up to the 1972 story: "Sweet Little Fourteen."

I mean, I would never have blinked an eye had the story dealt with a SIXTEEN-year old girl who intruded on the territory of Betty, Veronica and their similarly ageless teen buddies. But the writer goes out of her way not to just state that Pamela is now a well-developed fourteen, but that both Archie and Reggie keep salivating over Pamela even AFTER they've been told she's nowhere close to legal.

My only guess as to why such a story would appear in a squeaky-clean ARCHIE title is that (1) someone in editorial was asleep at the wheel, AND (2) that the 1986 writer was exorcising some demons, maybe regarding some bf with freaky tastes.   

CURIOSITIES: AMERICAN SHOTACON

 I'm only slightly versed in manga based around characters whom Japanese culture deems "shotacons;" i.e, "women attracted to underaged males." I don't believe, from what I've seen, that all such "shotacons"-- meaning women with a complex for shotas (boys) -- result in actual sex, though there's not much transgressive stuff the Japanese DON'T get into. But in 1945, long before manga had any circulation outside Japan, JOKER COMICS #35 farted around a bit with depicting adult women fawning over an age-inappropriate male. (Supposedly said male is a teenager, so Western psychology would term the attraction "hebephilia.")

So in "Model Man" (no known credits), all the twenty-something models at the agency of Millie (Timely/Marvel's most famous model) go gaga over a new male model, Ron Franklin. Despite the jealousy of Millie's boyfriend Clicker, she and the other women don't say they have any intention of dating "Little Ronny." Supposedly, they just want to "mother" him in some vague manner. 

"Mothering" excuse aside, one page shows Millie and her ongoing rival Chili pawing Little Ronny in their ardor to do the next photo-shoot with the skinny teen. From what I recall, Timely humor comics usually kept the romantic entanglements on the same age-level, so this seems to be a one-off even if the writer meant to imply some "forbidden fruit," probably mostly to fill pages than for any other motives. It is worth noting that the two females insult each other with the aggressive terms "amazon" and "she-wolf," which are about as far as one can get from the image of motherhood.

The conclusion, such as it is, reveals that Little Ronny isn't a teen, but a married man who just happens to LOOK young. A story on the same theme, but less aimed at a kid audience, would probably establish that Ron meant to use his looks to get in with the gullible girls, but the slight story doesn't exactly say so. Ron is revealed to be more than barely legal, as indicated by his rather hefty wife, who shows up at the agency to put an end to Ron's "model-monkeyshines." I think it possible that the writer did have some sneaky scenario in mind, but he censored himself because that would have been a little too racy for a kid's humor comic. Anyway, "Model Man" ends with the ladies compensating for their goof by fawning over the age-appropriate Clicker, returning all to the status quo.

                

THE READING RHEUM: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1902)

I've probably read Doyle's HOUND two or three times just for pleasure, but not since starting this blog in 2007. I recall occasionally ascribing high mythicity to the novel in this or that essay, but I never analyzed the book, even though the story is one of the best-known in literature, making it something of a "popular myth." That, however, doesn't count in terms of my charting a narrative's epistemological patterns. I have reviewed at least four cinematic adaptations of HOUND on the movie-blog, and I've never discerned high mythicity even in the two best and most famous films, the 1939 Fox film and the 1959 Hammer outing. 

Having reread the book now with my myth-stalker's hat on, I find that Doyle was in no way subtle about his primary myth-theme. The author hints at that theme in the first chapter, when Holmes and Watson discuss the pedigree of their client Dr. Mortimer by consulting a medical directory (the Victorian version of the Internet). They find that the doctor has authored articles with titles like "Is Disease a Reversion?" and "Some Freaks of Atavism." This concern with the distant past plays into the case Mortimer had brought to Holmes. The doctor tells Holmes and Watson that he half-believes in the Baskerville curse, that may have killed the former baronet Charles and may yet take the life of the sole heir. Sir Henry.

I've mentioned in one film-review that there's never a possibility, in Holmes' modern London, that there exists a demon-hound that slew the Baskervilles' degenerate ancestor in the 17th century, or one that might take the life of Sir Henry. Holmes duly mocks the very idea, despite taking the case. In the end the existence of a demon-hound matters less than the fact that the world that bred such superstitions still endures. Thus the still-savage land of Dartmoor can cast a spell upon some Victorian men, as attested by Watson when, as Holmes' agent, he first views the wild moorland around Baskerville Hall:

MY DEAR HOLMES: My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.

The curse of the Baskervilles might not extend back to the days of prehistoric menhirs, but the event that brought about the supposed curse, in which a hot-blooded lord dedicated his soul to Satan for the sexual possession of an innocent maiden, remains no less remote from the experience of Victorian Londoners. 

And yet, England has its share of non-superstitious degeneracy. Selden, the murderer who haunts the moors, is directly compared to a caveman when Watson first sees him. Master plotter Stapleton, the one who arranged his uncle's death and tries to do the same with his cousin Henry, is called a "throwback" when Holmes descries how much a portrait of a 17th-century Baskerville resembles Stapleton. Stapleton's real name is the same as that of his father Rodger Baskerville, and no one knew of Stapleton's existence because he was born abroad, when his father left England under some cloud. In fact, a fair number of modern Britons have similar clouds. Stapleton and his wife Beryl get involved in some vague corruption long before the hound plot, and Laura Lyons, one of Stapleton's pawns, suffers from having made a bad marriage, though Doyle imputes all the wrongdoing to a no-good husband. If, as Mortimer believes, all disease really is a "reversion" to some less exalted state, that would include the disease of crime, which can be cured only by the relentless logic of a master detective.

While the cinema has its own ways of conveying mythicity, so far even the most faithful adaptations of HOUND known to me haven't been able to tune into Doyle's myth-theme. After finishing the novel, I re-watched the 1939 version again. Sure enough, the script only uses the prehistoric settings briefly and doesn't even show the villain meeting the harsh justice of a death in the Grimpen Mire. It's not impossible, though, that there's some HOUND-film I've not seen that taps into the deeper theme, and I look forward to finding it. 

ADDENDUM: I didn't originally apply the "clansgression" label to the 1902 novel, because Doyle downplays the fact that Stapleton is Sir Henry's cousin. And the author certainly does not pass comment on the fact that when Stapleton seeks to pimp out his wife by causing Sir Henry to fall for the glamorous Beryl, he's "sharing" her with a first cousin, even though (1) no sexual congress takes place, (2) Beryl does not become emotionally entwined with Henry as he does with her, and (3) Stapleton/Baskerville becomes jealous of the tete-a-tete even though no transgression has occurred. The novel ends with Stapleton's death and the assertion that Beryl knew nothing of the murder plot, implying that she'll be exonerated of complicity-- though Doyle also devotes little space to the cooling of Henry's passion for his cousin's wife.  

        

THE READING RHEUM: AYESHA, THE RETURN OF SHE (1904-05)

 

Roughly the same amount of time passed between this review and my 2008 review of Rider Haggard's masterpiece SHE (beginning here) as between the 1885 serialization of that novel and that of its sequel in 1904. I wll not, however, be devoting three separate posts to AYESHA as I did with SHE. While AYESHA also qualifies as a high-mythicity novel, the later book doesn't even come close to touching the hem of SHE's robe.

Eighteen years also passes between the climax of SHE-- wherein POV characters Horace Holly and his adoptive son Leo Vincey witness the immortal queen Ayesha when she re-immerses herself in the Flame of Life-- and the beginning of AYESHA. Haggard didn't have to wait that amount of time to write his story, but perhaps he felt he had to experience what his characters experienced: the sense of "time's winged chariot hurrying near." Still, it creates a mild continuity problem-- one that Haggard seems aware of-- in that once Ayesha is reincarnated in a new, living body, there's no strong reason she must wait a full eighteen years to summon her reincarnated lover Leo and his adoptive father. Haggard chalks the delay to vague metaphysical factors and moves on.   

In any case, Holly and Leo are summoned from England to Tibet, the new exotic locale where Ayesha hangs her veil. Almost certainly Haggard chose Tibet because of that culture's associations with reincarnation, a major theme of the first book. And Haggard did admirable homework in researching the physical perils the two Englishmen would face. as well as the often-dizzying complexities of Tibetan Buddhism. That said, what distinguished Haggard's African novels was his personal experience with African lands and tribes, and thus AYESHA lacks those touches of verisimilitude.

Ayesha's original body was destroyed at the end of SHE, but her magically endowed spirit has usurped the dying body of a Tibetan holy woman, and with that form she has become the queen of a new race of people, and she's once more seeking union with Leo. However, since the novel needs conflict, Ayesha's power is challenged by another female who also falls in love with Leo before he reaches Ayesha. This cosmic chick-fight was fresh when Haggard did it in SHE, and it worked because Leo fell in love with the tribal girl Ustane before he met Ayesha or knew of his archaic association with the immortal queen. Here, Leo is pursued by Atene, whose name alone indicates her non-Tibetan, "lost race" heritage-- but he's never interested in Atene. Thus Haggard chose to copy from himself and did so badly.

The strongest aspect of AYESHA is that Leo doesn't quite know how to take his beloved being in a new, older body, rather than in the dazzling female form he knew. He's still in love with her mind, so to speak, but he also desires her beauty. To compensate, Ayesha calls upon supernatural powers and essentially remolds herself into the image Leo loved. But at novel's end the transformation levies a price, not unlike the one paid by the mortal Semele when she demanded that Zeus reveal to her his ineffable glory. In addition, though Ayesha spouts a lot of Buddhist teachings and the unity of religions, her character remains the same as it was in the first novel: once she's united with her eternal love, she plans to use her great knowledge to conquer the world.  

There are a lot of good scenes in AYESHA, but they just don't add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, as was the case with SHE. The other two SHE novels are prequels, so SHE and AYESHA together constitute the entirety of the story of the Ayesha-Leo romance. And though Haggard would never put things this way, I can't help thinking that what the author committed to literature was the longest case of "male and female blue balls" in narrative history.         

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 5

 To cut to the chase, my answer to the question "why is heroic Reiko Mikami such a greedhead sadist" boils down to compensation for daddy issues. 

Given how little information artist Takashi Shiina offers about Mikami's developmental years, it's likely that he never meant to lay bare his character's soul. Though he wasn't unique in concocting a shonen heroine with both positive and negative traits, Shiina may not have wanted to kill his golden goose by dissecting its innards. But that doesn't mean he didn't contrive a working psychological concept of his heroine.  

Mikami's passion for the ghost sweeping profession is first highlighted in the arc "Message from Mother," in a flashback showing Little Reiko with her mother Michie. In present times, though, Adult Mikami believes that her mother has died some years back. Thus it's a considerable shock when Michie time-travels to Adult Mikami's era to ask Mikami and her team to guard over Mikami's younger self, Little Reiko. Then Michie disappears, and Mikami mentions that she was in middle school when Michie died. Mikami tries to contact her still living father Kimihiko Mikami, but he's out of the country, and the incident only reveals to the reader the existence of some emotional rift between daughter and father. Then Mikami and her allies must confront a demon trying to kill Little Reiko for reasons that remain somewhat obscure by the story's end. In any case, Michie returns, so that mother and daughter vanquish the demon, after which Michie and Little Reiko return to their own time.

Shiina later follows up with an arc named "Someday, Somewhere." Though nothing much has been said about Mikami possessing the same time-travel power as her mother, both Mikami and Yokoshima experience premonitory dreams about Mikami's mother. Then a convenient "accident" propels both of them through time back to Japan's medieval era. During a battle with a demon, Yokoshima is killed, and a rage-filled Mikami attacks the demon. However, the fiend hits her with lightning, and this triggers her power, bumping her back a few minutes, so that she's able to save Yokoshima and defeat her enemy. They then return to the 20th century, and the story ends just before "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm." 

Having seen Yokoshima perish doesn't make Mikami any more generous to him, but in "Storm," she does soften when she encounters her childhood crush Saijou. Michie Mikami is still alive at this time, but though we don't know anything about ten-year-old Reiko's relationship with her still unseen father, a much later story will establish that Kimihiko's an absentee father. There's no way to prove that Shiina had fully planned out his intentions with Kimihiko, but on the hypothesis that he always had something sketched out, then Ten-Year-Old Reiko could be compensating for an inattentive father by crushing on an older, and not much less inappropriate, male figure. The conclusion of "Storm," however, suggests that Mikami has become totally invested in making money as self-validation, as opposed to Saijou's selfless altruism.  

I've stated that the earliest "internal chronology" mention of Mikami's fierce desire to make money appeared in an early story, where a middle-school-aged Mikami finds herself at odds with her sensei's desire to exorcise demons without making any profit. This early tale, "Love Needs Its Time," doesn't mention either of Mikami's parents, but it would be interesting to speculate that by this time Michie has passed (or rather, Mikami believes that she's dead). In such circumstances, even a middle-school-aged girl might have needed her father, and if he was still unavailable, that might have caused Mikami to believe that she was totally on her own as a ghost sweeper. Thus the desire to amass wealth becomes the lady exorcist's sole source of validation, which is why in "Storm" she goes catatonic from stress after trying to pursue Saijou's altruistic standards. 

Several episodes later, the arc "Death Zone" starts off with Mikami diverging from her usual habit of disparaging her junior assistant, by showing appreciation of his efforts with a salary increase. That it makes her uncomfortable to think about treating Yokoshima as a human being, rather than as a tool for her profit, is significant. Then another time-travel trip to medieval Japan ensues. Mikami and Yokoshima encounter their "reincarnation ancestors," respectively a demoness named Mephisto and a young exorcist of the medieval era. This is followed, after various interceding arcs, by the previously discussed "Mom's Here," which goes even further in demolishing Mikami's assurance that she won't ever succumb to Yokoshima's dubious charms. 

"Zone" loosely sets up a later series of arcs, over 60 episodes in number, that pits Mikami against Ashtaroth, the "Big Bad" of her entire series. In the arc "Merciless War," Ashtaroth, a demon obsessed with destroying humanity, sends three emissaries to launch hostilities, demonesses whom he spawned, much the same way he earlier spawned Mephisto, Mikami's "reincarnation ancestor." In the arc "The Longest Day," Ashtaroth seeks to subvert Mikami's will by speaking to her as if she were his daughter, making him the first real Mikami "father figure" the readers have seen "on-panel." Little does Ashtaroth know that Mikami is already somewhat father-alienated, so she head-butts him. Unwittingly, Ashtaroth scores more of a point against Mikami in that one of his new "daughters," Luciola, falls in love with Yokoshima. Luciola becomes Mikami's first real rival for Yokoshima's affections, and this state of affairs will eventually lead to Luciola's extinction.

It's in one of these "endless arcs" that Mikami's time-traveling mother Michie returns, taking command of the operation to defeat Ashtaroth. Not till the end of the 60-something episodes does Mikami learn the truth: her mother actually did not die during Mikami's middle-school years but has remained in hiding ever since faking her death. Why? Frankly, I didn't follow the author's logic, but it does make one wonder if Mikami didn't get her manipulative streak from her mother.

Only in a very late sequence did the readers finally encounter Mikami's actual mortal father Kimihiko Mikami-- but in flashback for the most part. Mikami seeks out her trainer Father Karasu and he relates to her, and other members of the Mikami posse, the story of how Michie and Kimihiko met, fell in love and got married. In many ways Kimihiko is the opposite of Yokoshima. Kimihiko possesses a freakish level of super-telepathy, a talent which he cannot control and which causes him to read people's minds and know all their secrets. In fact, after the spirited Michie proposes to him, Kimihiko tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down and compels him, with the intensity of her affection, to marry her. Nevertheless, Kimihiko remains aloof from his daughter throughout her childhood for fear of having a bad effect on her due to his telepathic influence. Ultimately, adult Mikami is able to transcend the disappointments of her childhood, by promising her father-- seen only from a distance-- to mend fences.

That's the last word of the series on fatherhood, both from Mikami's true father Kimihiko and from her "false father" Ashtaroth. Mikami's greediness doesn't play a big role in either of these scenarios, so my critical analysis remains only a weak correlation, since Shiina does not expressly connect Mikami's greed to her paternal issues. Further, by the technical end of the series-- not counting the "earthquake relief" story Shiina produced in 2011, which I'll address in my next essay-- Mikami is still expousing her gospel of profit. 

The story *appears* to commence in the far future, when Mikami, Yokoshima and Okinu have all died, leaving behind their spirits, or possibly just approximations of themselves, to haunt their old agency-building in year 2199. Two modern ghostbusters, a robot and a cyborg, intrude on the "ghosts" not to send them to paradise but to capture their spirits for profit-- but Mikami's superior GS skill defeats her enemies. 

Then Mikami and Yokoshima wake up in present times, having experienced the same futuristic dream. They and their colleague Okinu are then drawn into yet another of many battles with supernatural foes, and Mikami's last words are her motto, "Present profit comes first." The connotation I take from this is that even though Mikami sometimes looks gauche or foolish for wanting money so much, at base her desire for profit is an excuse, a motivation to drive herself to heights of excellence in ghost-sweeping. Her wish to emulate her mother may have engendered that ideal, but there's a reality of running a business that goes with that idealism, and the conclusion suggests that Mikami has reached a perfect balance between idealism and realism. To be sure, the final stories in the series don't provide closure for the 1991-99 series with regard to the Mikami-Yokoshima bond. But the "really final" 2011 story does provide the best of all possible conclusions to GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI.

                              

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 2

 This post could have been a "near-myth" post, but as I get closer to finishing my reading of Takashi Shiina's GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, I want to keep all the SWEEPER stuff in one bundle.

In the first part, I provided an overview of early installments of the 1992-99 manga series with respect to the imaginary psychology of the principal characters: ghost sweeper/exorcist Reiko Mikami, her lustful assistant Tadao Yokoshima, and her other assistant, mild-mannered female ghost Okinu (who reincarnates into a mortal body late in the series). In MEDITATIONS 1, I questioned whether or not there was a thymotic romance between Mikami and Yokoshima in the series as a whole. I strongly suspected Shiina had that intention, though, based on a page I reprinted from a 1993 sequence entitled "Dad's Here." In it, Yokoshima-- who's never received the slightest encouragement for his erotic approaches from Mikami-- welcomes his father Daishuu to Tokyo, though the older man is more than a little extreme in his behavior toward his son.

Daishuu, though still married to Yokoshima's mother, remains the sort of smooth heartbreaker Yokoshima would like to be. Then by a sequence of events, Daishuu goes on a date with Mikami, which ties Yokoshima up in knots. He dreams that the ten-years-older Mikami has married Daishuu and becomes his mother.

 

  For her part, Mikami never shows even a slight interest in Daishuu, not least because he's married, though Daishuu almost certainly wants to seduce the ghost sweeper to become a mistress. "Dad's Home" ends with a meaningless comic brawl between father and son.

  While "Dad's Home" had no direct impact on the series' direction, clearly Shiina had it in mind when, about two years from the series' conclusion, he created a bookend-story called "Mom's Home." Yokoshima's mother Yuriko visits him, declaring that she intends to divorce her husband and have Yokoshima live with her. Yuriko even acts just as rashly as her husband did on his earlier visit.

      

Upon meeting Mikami and Okinu, Yuriko describes her reasons for wanting to divorce Daishuu for cheating (though he will turn out to be innocent of this particular charge). She also makes Mikami very uncomfortable when she describes how she Yuriko married Daishuu after having been forced to beat him up several times for inappropriate behavior.

 

However, Yuriko has another similarity to Mikami: she's a high-roller businesswoman, and she plans to leave Japan with her son. Privately she tells Yokoshima that if either Mikami or Okinu will speak up to keep the young man in Japan, she'll let him stay-- though Yokoshima can't simply ask the women to intercede. So just as Yuriko plans to fly out, Yokoshima uses a magical device to impersonate Mikami-- only to get exposed when the real Mikami shows up.  

   
 

Yuriko, however, is less concerned with her son's mendacity than with Mikami overstepping her bounds, punishing her former employee, when it's obviously the mother's right to punish the errant child (which she does, even while talking to Mikami). Only one thing can save Yokoshima: a full confession of Mikami's feelings for him.

 

  Well, that and one other thing-- the timely arrival of Daishuu, who brings proof that he didn't cheat on Yuriko. Immediately Yuriko drops the whole matter and leaves with her husband. Mikami's confession of her feelings is rendered incomplete, allowing things to go back to the status quo. And for good measure, it's suggested that Yuriko may have manipulated things to make sure her boy got hooked up with a proper mate-- a mate just like the girl who married dear old Dad.  

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN WHO CAN SUMMON A STORM" (GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, 1995)

 As I write this, I've not yet finished reading the entire GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga online, but paused at Volume 2 (1996), three years from the feature's conclusion. In MIKAMI MEDITATIONS I opined that mangaka Takashi Shiina intended to provide an epistemologically grounded psychology for his starring character Reiko Mikami, as to why she was both a peerless hero and a money-hungry businesswoman who exploited at least one employee. However, Shiina chose to dispense elements of that psychology in dribs and drabs. Shiina's biggest "drab" so far, 1995's "Storm," does not provide a total psychology for his heroine, but I'm seeing a strong pattern suggestive of Adler's compensation theory. So I'm writing this essay without reading all of the available volumes of SWEEPER, as something of a test of my method, before finishing the series and seeing what else the artist has in store.

"Storm" doesn't concern any sort of real tempest, and so far as I can tell, it's a metaphor for psychological upheaval. The story starts out largely with the status quo, although after roughly four years of acting the fool, Yokoshima has upgraded his skills, enough to function as an assistant ghost sweeper. But his ability to charm the skirt off Mikami remains non-existent.

Then Mikami learns that there's a competing GS outfit nearby, one subsidized by the Japanese government. She seeks them out, only to find that she knows the head of the agency-- and Yokoshima sees an unusual sight, that of Mikami acting "girly."

Saijou, head of the "Occult G-Men," lived with Mikami's family when she was just a child, because Saijou was training in GS skills with Mikami's mother. It's soon clear to Yokoshima that although Mikami calls Saijou "brother," her attitude toward him is hardly fraternal. Yokoshima immediately assumes that Saijou hopes to conquer Mikami's heart, especially since Saijou is taller, more handsome, and a stronger GS fighter than Yokoshima. However, it's soon disclosed that Saijou really doesn't see Mikami romantically, and his main purpose for seeking her out is to recruit her for his agency. And Mikami accepts, even though government pay is nothing like the money she makes as a private agent.

      

A flashback established that Saijou was the first crush of ten-year-old Mikami, and that she even confessed her feelings to him, though he didn't for an instant take her seriously. To be sure, Mikami only joins Saijou's agency on a probationary basis, and she expects Yokoshima and Okinu to keep running her private business, making big money for her. The young man, knowing Mikami better than Saijou does, enlists some of Mikami's colleagues to make the GS business more profitable than ever. However, when Mikami visits her agency, she's clearly depressed to see it functioning well without her.

Mikami overcompensates by trying to throw herself into her g-men work, but Saijou has seen the way she acts with Yokoshima. He gives Mikami a minor assignment to get her out of the way while Saijou has words with Yokoshima. The younger guy still believes that Saijou is a romantic rival despite the latter's denials, but Saijou still has only fraternal feelings for Mikami, and so he tests Yokoshima in battle. Yokoshima knows he's physically outclassed, so he not only flees battle, he humiliates Saijou with a variation on the old "order 100 pizzas for your enemy" trick.

   

However, Saijou accidentally pushes Mikami over the brink by giving her a mundane assignment--lecturing to schoolchildren-- that he'd easily perform with his altruistic mentality, but which is like poison to the high-spirited exorcist. Saijou, Yokoshima and Mikami's other friends find her in a hospital, not responding to anyone. She mechanically repeats the word "money," but doesn't respond when Okinu holds a pile of cash in front of her nose. She also doesn't respond when her first crush speaks to her. Then Yokoshima declares that her coma-like status means that he can take advantage of her, and Mikami immediately snaps back to normal and elbow-slams him. Saijou realizes that even though he only wanted to work with Mikami for non-romantic reasons, she's more suited to non-altruistic pursuits, so he fires her and returns her to Yokoshima. However, Saijou gets the last laugh by duplicating Yokoshima's "100 pizzas" trick, which has the added effect of putting the hapless schmuck back in the crosshairs of Mikami's wrath.

 So in "Storm," Shiina isn't quite ready to tell his readers exactly what makes Mikami coo-coo for currency. He does show that ten-year-old Mikami crushes so hard on "brother" Saijou that she acts just like a self-sacrificing female, willing to do anything to please her man. Yet when she tries to do it in her mature years, the effort almost destroys her, even though she can face down ghosts and demons without blinking. Further, whatever gave Mikami "gold fever" apparently happened between her pre-teen and teenaged years, going by the story I summarized in MIKAMI MEDITATIONS. "Storm" suggests to me that after ten-year-old Mikami was left behind by her crush when he sought altruistic pursuits, she overcompensated by pursuing a parallel course of heroic action, but only when she was well-paid. So she both followed Saijou's example and deviated from it.

And yet, if money was really all Mikami desired, she would have been pulled out of her coma by the presence of greenbacks. Instead, what awakens the sleeping beauty is not love's first kiss, but the (probably feigned) threat of rapine. Experienced readers are not likely to believe that Yokoshima would ever really rape a woman, in this story or in any other. He's a reader-proxy for very minor acts of molestation-- groping boobs, stealing kisses-- and in this story, he seems to realize, if only instinctually, that Mikami gets "fired up" when he molests her. In part, it stokes her ego to know that she can always kick his ass, while still feeding her sense of self-worth with his constant appreciation of her looks-- both pleasures she could never get from noble Saijou. Where Shiina will take his heroine from here, I don't yet know. But even if he goes in a different direction from "Storm," I expect I'll find his psychological twists just as engrossing. 

ADDENDUM: It belatedly struck me that although the title implies that the new character may be the "man who can summon a storm," Yokoshima actually brings forth the full storm of Mikami's emotions, as opposed to causing her to repress them. That's assuming there's no special Japanese cultural meaning to the phrase, of course.