MYTHCOMICS: "THE (SECOND) ORIGIN OF THE CHEETAH" (1944)

 'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'  -- GOOD WILL QUANTUMS 

Thanks to my acquisition of IDW's collection of the complete run of the 1944-45 WONDER WOMAN newspaper strip, I found a good example of a prominent author-- i.e., William Moulton Marston  -- taking a second shot at an early story and infusing it with greater density. 

Though Marston put a lot of (shall we say) mature content into the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN comic book, often the creator of the Amazon heroine tended to write down to his audience in terms of plotting. This was true of most raconteurs of the era: they assumed kids who bought comics just wanted as many marvels to gawk at as possible. But Marston took a different tack with the newspaper strip. He knew there was at least a chance of reaching an adult audience-- a chance eliminated by the strip's cancellation-- so in many cases he dialed down the sheer quantity of wild inventions. And in the case of his rewrite of the 1943 comics-story "Wonder Woman and the Cheetah," he upgraded a story with only fair mythicity into an exemplar of good myth. Unfortunately, there are almost no free scans of the newspaper strip available online. Thus I'm flung back to my practices during this blog's early days: depending on textual description with minimal illustration, partly taken from the 1943 story.

In the original CB story, Marston starts out by having Wonder Woman show off her prowess at a stateside benefit. However, she doesn't show up on time, and the chairman of the relief fund tries to placate the anxious audience by introducing debutante Priscilla Rich. This only exacerbates the audience's fervor to see the Amazon, and there's just one panel devoted to Priscilla being slightly miffed that the audience ignores her. Then Diana Prince shows up on stage, demonstrates her inability to move a heavy piano, and then cedes the stage to her powerful alter ego.

But in the CS version, Marston takes a more layered approach to introducing Priscilla. In a sequence that took up two weeks of daily strips, Priscilla shows up at the office of General Darnell, barges past his secretary Diana, and asks the officer to put her in contact with Wonder Woman, to ask her to appear at the benefit. This establishes a slight animosity between Priscilla and the heroine, but Wonder Woman quickly shows up and agrees to appear. However, on the night of the benefit, Diana Prince goes out dancing with Steve Trevor and just happens to forget her commitment. Thus, not only is Priscilla personally embarrassed by the absence of the special guest, Marston subjects the upper-class woman to more humiliation. She tries to placate the audience by performing "The Death of the Swan" with her balletic skills, but she earns only catcalls. Then the heroine shows up, curiously in both her guises, and satisfies the audience's desires.

 In the CB story, Wonder Woman proposes a second stunt-- apparently one she arranged with the relief effort in advance-- which involves her being chained and submerged in a tank. CB Priscilla, for no reason, decides to bind WW with her own magic lasso, making the heroine's escape more difficult. But in the CS story, Priscilla does have a reason to resent WW for her superior popularity. 

In both versions, Wonder Woman escapes despite the added difficulty, and Priscilla pretends she didn't mean to endanger the Amazon's life. In the CB version, Priscilla is merely miffed because the heroine goes to dinner with the benefit chairman, though there's no real indication that Priscilla cares about him in a romantic sense. Out of nowhere, the rich girl simply looks into a mirror in her room at home and her "evil self" manifests in the mirror. There's no particular reason for Imaginary Evil Priscilla to wear a cheetah-costume, except that there happens to be a cheetah-rug in the room, and Evil Priscilla tells Normal Priscilla to make it into a costume.

The CS version is much more psychologically compelling. After WW breaks free, she lets Priscilla off the hook, but Steve Trevor and a half-dozen other people accuse the girl of attempted murder. This sort of attention Priscilla did not want, and she flees, thinking, "Everybody adores Wonder Woman and hates me... I feel so low, so inferior!" She hides in a theatrical prop room, and there she encounters the dummy of a woman in a cheetah-costume. In this arrangement, Marston juxtaposed Priscilla's desire to escape her inferior feelings with her discovery of the dummy, and thus a more believable symbol-association is made, whereon she again imagines herself talking to her evil self, convincing her to become a costumed criminal.

In the 1943 story, Cheetah steals the benefit money and tries to improbably frame both the chairman and Wonder Woman for the crime. Since Priscilla doesn't really care about the chairman, the next five pages of the cops arresting the accused are nothing but filler. However, the 1944 continuity has Cheetah set fire to the theater-- which arguably involves her taking vengeance upon the audience that rejected her. In the former tale, Cheetah lures the heroine into a death-trap, while in the latter, the villainess captures the Holiday Girls, friends of her nemesis, which amounts to a more personal attack. 

In the CB, Marston then devotes two separate sections to Cheetah finding new ways to assail Wonder Woman. One involves using a beauty salon and a mind-reader to learn military secrets, which leads WW into a tangential battle with Japanese troops in the Pacific. In the final section, WW gets involved with training female soldiers on Paradise Island, and Cheetah infiltrates the program. There are several moments in which the villainess continues to express the hatred of all Amazons for their athletic superiority, but this twist means that Cheetah is no longer specifically focused on her star-spangled nemesis. She steals the magic girdle of Aphrodite, which empowers her to battle WW on her super-strong level, but she's defeated and consigned to an Amazon reformatory. The first section of the 1943 tale garners at least fair mythicity, but I'd probably rate both of these sections as poor, being just a collection of random incidents.

As for the remainder of the CS story, Cheetah imprisons all the Holliday Girls at her mansion and subjects them to various humiliations (with copious bondage of course). Cheetah also lures WW to the mansion, and despite various upsets, finally binds WW with her own lasso and forces her to make an Amazon "shocking-machine." This device (admittedly the most ludicrous item in the story) brings out the "subconscious personalities" of the Holliday Girls in a manner supposedly analogous to the way Cheetah was born, though in the case of the Hollidays, they actually become anthropomorphic animals. (Etta Candy naturally becomes a pig-girl.) WW finally defeats Cheetah and restores the girls to normal. However, when Priscilla is arraigned at trial, WW's personal lie-detector, the lasso, can't prove that the rich woman's the Cheetah, because in the Priscilla ID she no longer remembers being a super-villain. And so ends the career of Comic-Strip Cheetah, as Priscilla is sent to an asylum for examination. Obviously, it was Comic Book Cheetah who became an enduring opponent for the Amazon Princess, but the "Second Origin" provides an interesting example of a revision being more symbolically complex than the original, which is generally not the norm.  

      

                  

 
                                                            

SOME BASICS OF BLONDIE

I'm entitling "some basics" rather than "The Basics" because I'm not writing a distanced, Wikipedia-style article about the comic strip/comic book BLONDIE, but about particular aspects of it that are relevant to my critical system. And if I weren't setting up a mythcomics-essay on the subject, I might not delve into all this ancient comics-history.

I'll start out by stating that I'm aware that even to younger comics-fans with some interest in the medium's history, BLONDIE isn't exactly a hot topic. For at least the past 20 years, the daily strip has been exceedingly dull, with gags as mediocre as the worst sitcoms. And I can't claim that the original run of creator Chic Young, from 1930 to 1973 (when Young passed away), made his most successful strip into any sort of major breakthrough in American humor.

BLONDIE's significance is that though Young wasn't doing anything transformative within his limited sphere of domestic comedy, he built up a trove of running jokes that, over time, illuminated some interesting aspects of American culture. He did so in contrast to newspaper strips that some critics would find superior in artistry, like Cliff Sterrett's POLLY AND HER PALS or Frank King's GASOLINE ALLEY. It wasn't that there was anything startlingly original about the couple dozen running gags that became associated with Young's BLONDIE in its heyday-- Dagwood crashes into the mailman on his way to work, Dagwood makes himself colossal sandwiches. It was that Young kept variations of these jokes running for so long that they assumed an almost folkloric status, a shorthand for the ordeals of married, middle-class life.

Yet for the first four years of the BLONDIE strip's existence-- collected in the hardbound book seen above-- the narrative barely touched on any of the tropes that made the later version of the strip world-renowned. 

Young broke into the world of syndicated comics in the 1920s. He specialized in what some have called "pretty girl strips." It may not be total coincidence that Young's first strip premiered in 1921, one year after the United States instituted universal suffrage-- though there had been many manifestations of the phenomenon of "The New Woman" during the previous twenty years. One of the most famous was that of "the flapper," usually seen as an independent young woman of means, and one who felt free to date men without making firm commitments. Some flappers were even known for adopting quasi-masculine fashion statements, like mannish clothes or bobbed hairstyles. This description seems appropriate to Young's third pretty-girl strip, DUMB DORA, which was his greatest success up to that point. Young used the relative success of DORA to launch BLONDIE, of which he had some if not total ownership. 

BLONDIE began in September 1930. In some ways it was much like DORA, being dependent on gags in which the female protagonist would stun her listeners with some display of quixotic feminine logic. However, the above collection notes in its intro that Young expressly distanced his new heroine Blondie from the earlier flappers by making her more hyper-feminine in her attire. His most constant beau was also introduced in the first strip: Dagwood, an empty-headed young heir to a wealthy family. The two were passionately in love but their marriage was opposed by Dagwood's rich parents, who deemed Blondie a gold digger.

For four years the strip followed this rather tepid pattern, without becoming more than a modest success. I surveyed all of the daily strips collected in the cited tome, and less than twenty of the nine hundred or so entries ended with any sort of slapstick, in contrast to the dominant pattern of verbal jokes.

One of the few interesting exceptions-- for which I have no illustrations-- was a pair of strips from June 19 and 20, 1931. In these strips, Blondie and Dagwood are considering how they will survive on a limited income if they marry. So, executing a trope I'll call "the Peacemans vs. the Bickersons," they seek out other couples, only to find all of them violently quarreling with one another. The first strip shows a married couple arguing about money in front of the young lovers, and as the latter couple leave, the reader sees the husband getting clubbed by his wife. The second strip shows two more encounters in which the couples are verbally arguing all the time. Blondie tells Dagwood that not all married people fight, and she uses Dagwood's own parents as an example of marital bliss. Naturally, the young lovers then walk in on a scene in which the elder Mrs. Bumstead is threatening to crown her hubby with a vase, while he's haplessly climbing a curtain to get away from her. This "Peacemans vs. Bickersons" trope would be one Young returned to again and again. On the face of things, Blondie and Dagwood were "Peacemans" who did not physically fight each other, while others-- their neighbors the Woodleys, and Dagwood's boss and his wife-- were "Bickersons" constantly having violent quarrels, usually with the wife hitting her husband with vases or other bludgeons. More on this trope in my mythcomic-post.

In 1933, Young was encouraged by his syndicate editor to make over the strip into a middle-class marriage strip, jettisoning the whole format of "young rich guy dating a lower-class girl." Dagwood's parents disinherited him and never to my knowledge appeared again, even in comic book originals not produced by Young. And as others before me have observed, Blondie morphed away from an air-headed young woman. She became a sensible homemaker, able to manage a household of kids and dogs-- though she still showed some of her old frivolousness in yet another repeated joke-trope: constantly spending Dagwood's hard-earned money on new apparel. 

Dagwood, who wasn't the brightest bulb to begin with, became the Goat of the World. This was one of the psychologically significant tropes that I believe made BLONDIE widely popular in many countries: the trope of the wage-earning male as the constant target of abuse from everyone. When he wasn't under physical attack by his most familiar nemeses-- neighbor Herb Woodley and boss Julius Dithers-- he was frequently assaulted by total strangers. As I pointed out above, slapstick was rarely a big feature of the first four years of the strip, and there wasn't even a lot of verbal humiliation for Dagwood in particular,

Amusingly, when Blondie and Dagwood did marry, the wedding sequence contained the following humiliation for Dagwood:

However, a few strips later-- for which I have no illustration-- is even more apposite. Immediately after the wedding vows, Blondie warns Dagwood that they ought not to leave the church through the front door, as well-wishers will pelt them with rice and old shoes. Dagwood scoffs at this warning and opens the front door, only to get hit in the face with a thrown shoe. I don't imagine Chic Young immediately shifted into slapstick gags right away, and even in the BLONDIE in the 1960s-- the period with which I grew up-- there was never a total absence of verbal humor, wherein Blondie would confound Dagwood with feminine anti-logic. But the BLONDIE comic books-- which included both original stories and reworkings of comic strips-- are replete with images of Dagwood's physical torments. For instance:

Even when I was reading BLONDIE as a kid, I didn't think it was an exceptional strip. But I was impressed by the intensity of the slapstick violence in the series, whether the violence resulted from Dagwood doing stupid things or other people putting him in dangerous situations. In contrast to fans who represent BLONDIE as being a success for depicting the stalwart love between the titular wife and her spouse, I think that the strip retained its popularity for most of its history because it allowed its audience to dally in "sadism of the casual kind."

But that's a separate essay in itself.

NEAR MYTHS: "WHY ME? WHY NOT?" (HAGAR THE HORRIBLE, 1973)

 In THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PART 3, I wrote:

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

Most of the time, there probably still won't be any good reason to explore the simple vignette-type of gag strip. But here's one that garnered a certain amount of political fame. According to this online essay, Presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that he'd kept the following HAGAR THE HORRIBLE strip on his desk since the 1972 loss of his son Beau.

Now, a lot of people keep comic strips that have a special, snapshot-like personal association for them. But the HAGAR strip relates well to what Jung called "transpersonal" associations, because it's patently using Hagar's particular situation-- the wreck of his Viking ship in a storm-- to put forth a condensed version of Job's argument with God. Admittedly any reader of the strip will know that Hagar's troubles are transitory; that by the next strip he'll back in his little Viking hut with his family, no worse for wear, because he's that type of cartoon character. But the answer of the unnamed sky-deity is one that many people can apply well to their real troubles. Why, in a world full of travails, should anyone expect not to be plagued by ill fortune?

All that said, there's nothing more than can be said about this two-panel strip, so "Why" does not present, as a concrescent work would, a "dialogue between a variety of symbolic representations."

MYTHCOMICS: “PUBLIC ENEMY/LIFEDEATH” (X-MEN #185-186, 1984)

 

Though the X-Men character Storm was not the first Black superheroine, she became, within the subculture of comic book readers, the first one to gain fame both within the medium and in both live-action and animated adaptations. As one of X-MEN’s faithful readers, I wasn’t always happy with the directions long-time writer Chris Claremont took with either Storm or most of the other protagonists. Nevertheless, whatever status any of the seventies X-Men might have as literary myths comes principally from Claremont, even though said heroes had been created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum.

At least one of Claremont’s virtues as a writer of superhero melodrama might be seen as a vice from the vantage of formulating mythic discourse. In my essay STRIP NO-SHOW I advanced the notion that comic strips, even though they started off with a better reputation for quality work than did the rival medium comic books, labored under restrictions of format presentation that inhibited their mythic potential. Most comic strips remained satisfied with a simple lateral plot-progression, wherein the only “subplots” were usually introductions of future new plotlines. In the sixties comic books revealed a far greater capacity for what I’ve termed “vertical meanings,” some of which arose out of the ability of comic book authors to explore their concepts of character and society more than had their comic strip forebears.

Stan Lee was a pivotal figure in taping this potential, making him the Father of the Soap Opera Comic Book, and even if he didn’t hit one out of the park every time, he and his collaborators comprehended how to give the readers enough satisfaction that they kept coming back for more. Claremont didn’t deliver on satisfying wrap-ups quite as often, but he exceeded Lee in quantity, as an average issue of an eighties X-MEN might be juggling at least four plotlines at a time. True, sometimes the plots were editorially imposed. This fact is evident in the two X-issues I’m examining here, which coordinated one X-plot with developments in the “Rom Spaceknight” continuity. But Claremont also kept his readers coming back for more, and it’s in these stories that he took one of his most daring steps: to divest Storm, one of the group’s most popular members, of the very powers that made her unique.

“Public Enemy” places its focus on two of the group’s X-Women, Storm and Rogue. Unlike Storm, a charter member of the seventies team, Rogue had been introduced as a villain. After bouncing around various features, always being misunderstood like Marvel’s other outlaw-heroes, she switched teams and joined the X-Men roughly a year prior to “Public Enemy.” The cover teases the reader with the idea that Rogue may have returned to villainy, showing the image of Rogue grinning as she clutches the jacket of an apparently defeated Storm. In truth, the perception of Rogue as a public enemy is a false one fostered by two government officials, both hostile to mutantkind: familiar support-cast faces Henry Gyrich and Valerie Cooper. Rogue has been accused of killing a SHIELD agent, and that’s enough reason for Gyrich to lead a task force in order to hunt her down. Because Rogue is especially powerful—having assimilated the powers of the more celebrated heroine Ms. Marvel—Gyrich takes along with a special power-neutralizing ray-gun, invented by government-employed inventor Forge (introduced the previous issue).

By coincidence, Rogue, though unaware of the charges against her, suddenly gets antsy about her association with the X-heroes and flees their company without explanation. Storm, despite having been less than taken with Rogue when the latter joined the team, has conceived a respect for the newbie’s “sense of honor and decency,” and so she tracks down the fugitive heroine, concerned that she may suffer a “relapse.” Rogue, a Mississippi girl, has sought surcease of sorrow at a familiar old haunt: a section of the state’s most famous river, where Rogue first learned of her mutant powers. (One can tell that the issue was written pre-PC: Claremont writes elegaically of the Fall of the South without once mentioning the Evils of Slavery.)

Storm finds Rogue, and they talk, with Rogue expressing her continued concerns, that she could endanger her teammates because her ability to absorb others’ powers could hurt them. Storm proposes an experiment, giving her consent to let Rogue assimilate Storm’s powers and memories. (Later, in “Lifedeath,” Storm mentions how she had to cultivate mental serenity to keep her emotions from affecting the local weather, so in effect Storm seeks to give the tormented Southern belle a taste of the equilibrium she so desires.) After the transfer has been made, Storm passes out, but Rogue does experience an oceanic sense of connectedness to the elements, without any concomitant danger to herself or others. (To be sure, Rogue does suffer the temptation to vampirize Storm for more serene memories, but the better side of her personality wins out.)

However, Gyrich’s team tracks down Rogue and attacks. Rogue’s attempt to wield Storm’s powers forestall the agents but also imperil some bystanders. While Rogue and a recovered Storm seek to help the innocents, Gyrich draws a bead on Rogue with his anti-power gun. Forge, by some contrivance, arrives on the scene to avert Gyrich’s fire, though the ray ends up hitting Storm (possibly because of Forge’s interference, though Claremont doesn’t say so). An explosion stuns Rogue, who gets washed away in the river’s current. Forge recovers the similarly stunned Storm and takes custody of the heroine victimized by the illicit use of Forge’s own technology.

Though “Public Enemy” concentrates most of its narrative on Rogue, arguably Storm plays the more mythic role: that of the elemental goddess who gives all things to her friends/acolytes (even if this is more the province of Earth-deities than sky-gods). Rogue surfaces in a subplot to “Lifedeath,” confronting Valerie Cooper and almost immediately getting entangled with the “Rom Spaceknight” subplot. But most of the issue is devoted to the interactions of Storm and Forge, between a man who could make miracle-weapons and a woman who “once upon a time” could fly.

Storm risked her life to let Rogue temporarily emulate her powers and identity, but it’s quite a different thing to lose the powers that she associated with her identity. At the start of “Lifedeath,” Storm has been languishing in the scientific citadel of Forge for at least a day, since the reader first sees Forge trying to make the disconsolate former superhero take some nourishment. Apparently, Storm is so disassociated that she hasn’t even appealed for help to her friends at Xavier’s school, and they can’t locate her because she no longer has mutant powers.

Nevertheless, though Storm has never met Forge before, and is unaware of his role in removing her powers, she rallies somewhat, needing to talk to someone about her crisis, even as Rogue needed her earlier. “I was one with all creation,” she protests. Forge responds with his version of tough love, replying, “The goddess has become just plain folks.” He later reveals that he understands her impulse toward suicide because the injuries he sustained in Vietnam made him desire self-termination as well. The bond of shared suffering sparks the possibility of romance, though both of them find it difficult to communicate their emotions accurately. Storm does confess how her extreme self-enforcement of serenity constituted a sort of “spiritual celibacy,” which is her reason for having put off her original “regal” appearance in favor of “punk Storm”—though Claremont also implies that there’s another “celibacy” that can’t be fixed via fashion. However, their tentative romance comes to an end when Storm serendipitously finds out who’s responsible for draining her powers. Though in the next issue the two of them will be forced to make common cause against a greater threat, Storm leaves him, telling Forge that he is “hollow, form without substance” and that sooner or later, “I shall fly again.”

Without even looking, I feel reasonably certain that Storm’s de-powering made the list on the nineties site “Women in Refrigerators,” with the implication that the heroine was nullified in the service of repressive patriarchy. Of course, losing her powers did not strike Storm off the list of the X-Men, even though she didn’t regain her abilities for some years. Clearly Claremont’s basic intent here parallels a dozen or so Superman stories in which that hero loses his powers and has to prove his heroism using only his courage and intelligence. But Claremont, drawing upon the spadework of Stan Lee, deepened the sense of trauma associated with a loss of power or prestige. Thus, in these two stories, both heroines—one who fears connection and one who has always felt connected-- are subjected to extended suffering. Claremont used this trauma-trope a lot, and not always to mythopoeic ends. Sometimes, the agonies only served to keep the plot-pots boiling. But in these stories Forge the isolated scientist becomes an overreaching version of Rogue, the isolated heroine. And in reaction against the scientist’s solipsism, Storm’s struggle to regain her own identity takes on mythic stature. And she achieves that stature not because the character is Black, but because she’s a well-written character who happens to be Black.

MYTHCOMICS: [“THE MOUTHWASH BOOTLEGGERS”], DICK TRACY (1946)

[Given that the original Gould continuity had no title, I’ve chosen to label the sequence after a phrase used by Tracy to describe his opponents.]

In Jay Marder’s definitive study of DICK TRACY and the strip’s author, it’s mentioned that Chester Gould tended to script his storylines in a rather free-form fashion, making things up as he went along. This may be one reason that even when Gould conceived compelling villains, their stories all follow the same pattern: (1) exposition on the type of crime being committed, (2) the detection of the crime by Tracy, another cop or some witness, (3) the criminal’s exposure, pursuit, and capture or demise.

Since the only comics I read up to age 10 were the kiddie-types, I don’t know that I saw anything comparable to a “rogue’s gallery” in such entertainments as Popeye, Mighty Mouse, or Uncle Scrooge. But I *may * have got my first taste of such an assemblage of diehard fiends in the 1961 DICK TRACY TV-cartoon. At a time when the ongoing TRACY strip wasn’t coming up with any decent do-badders, the cartoon culled weird crooks from assorted periods of the comic—most memorably, Flat Top, the Brow, the Mole, Pruneface, and Itchy. Even as a kid I knew that the cartoon was terrible—Dick Tracy barely appeared, serving only to introduce the hijinks of lesser comedy-cops—but I liked the villains. Eventually, the mass reprinting of the TRACY strip gave me a chance to see all of the great villains in their original storylines.

Having read the original stories now, I find that most of the famous villains boasted only fair-to-middling adventures, lacking the concrescence that makes mythicity possible. Flat Top, the Brow, and Pruneface were all masterpieces of visual design, but one was just a contract killer and the other two were just spies. Gould just didn’t give them personalities to match their physical attributes.

Gargles, principal villain of THE MOUTHWASH BOOTLEGGERS, is not as memorable as the more famous TRACY rogues. He doesn’t have a freaky physique like the Brow or Pruneface, or even a vocal peculiarity like Mumbles. Gargles is most like Itchy: defined by a weird habitual activity—Itchy scratches himself all the time, and Gargles habitually gargles at every opportunity. And though this felon doesn’t have a backstory, and barely anything like internal thoughts, it’s possible to imagine that at some point in his life he decided to channel his personal obsession with mouth-cleanliness into a racket, albeit the unlikely one of bootlegging mouthwash.

But BOOTLEGGERS doesn’t start with Gargles. Rather, Dick Tracy stumbles across a man who gets choked to death in a revolving door, apparently because his drunken girlfriend keeps pushing on the door, not comprehending that she’s killing him. On the face of it, the incident sounds like a candidate for “The Darwin Awards.” But it doesn’t take the master detective long to figure out that the dead man—George Empire, head of a pharmaceuticals empire—fell into the revolving door because some third party slugged the victim from behind. Tracy is uncommonly generous toward the drunken woman—a local radio celebrity with the bizarre name of “Christmas Early”—in that she’s never charged with accidental manslaughter. Later on, she even helps the top cop track down the real murderer of George Empire.

Though Christmas didn’t witness Empire’s assault, nor catch sight of the assailant, she later remembers that the rich man was complaining about trouble with a “mouthwash salesman.” But even before Christmas makes this recollection, the reader has the privilege of seeing said salesman in action. Gargles, who apparently doesn’t mind the nickname given that he’s seen gargling at every opportunity, runs an operation in which his confederates concoct phony mouthwash consisting of colored sugar-water. Gargles’ thugs then extort small druggists into buying the bogus germicide by damaging their stores—most often, by smashing their store windows (which will prove an important point later).

Here it should be interjected that it’s extremely unlikely that any crook anywhere ever made money with a “mouthwash protection racket.” Almost certainly Gould simply wanted to rework some of the story-tropes associated with the Prohibition years—during which time gangsters did force vendors to carry cheaply made, often dangerous liquor—so the author just transferred said tropes to the idea of “mouthwash bootlegging.” Probably the idea of Gargles and his freaky habit came first, and Gould tailored the crime to fit the villain’s compulsion.

Toward the end of the story, Gargles admits that he personally assaulted George Empire, but at the story’s opening, the reader does not see this, nor does Gargles see clearly the face of the woman in Empire’s company. However, by the God of Comic-Strip Coincidence, he happens to be very fond of Christmas Early’s morning radio-show—so much so that he writes her a fan-letter. At roughly the same time, one of Gargles’ victims makes a complaint to Tracy’s department. Christmas just happens to be on hand when Tracy reveals a clue that the analysts found going over the phony mouthwash, and the radio-star connects the clue with the fan-letter. Having determined that the unidentified bootlegger listens to the radio show, Christmas decides she’s going to “wring a dinner date out of a murderer” by pitching woo to him on-air. However, Chirstmas is spared this dubious date when Tracy tracks down Gargles’ current residence. But though Tracy’s squad exchanges gunfire with the bootlegger’s henchmen, Gargles himself escapes, hiding inside a rigged-up flower-box display.

Throughout this narrative, Gould also re-familiarizes readers with characters from a previous arc: professional singer Themesong, one of Gould’s many precocious brat-kids, and the kid’s mother. In the earlier arc Themesong and her mother lived in poverty while the little girl sang for pennies on the street while covering for mobsters. But like other such sinning juveniles, Tracy converts the child to the ethics of law and order, so that in BOOTLEGGERS Themesong supports herself and her mother with her singing-talents. However, being on the side of law and order doesn’t protect one from the vicissitudes of evil. Gargles, having temporarily eluded the police, wishes dearly for the chance to kill Christmas Early, having overheard that she was complicit with Tracy. However, the gangster realizes that he has to lay low, probably in “some germ-ridden dump”—and who does he choose to rent a room from?

For some days, neither Themesong nor her mother notices anything odd about their new renter, except that he gargles a lot. However, Themesong gets a new camera and snaps photos of several locals, including one of Gargles. Instead of simply ignoring the incident as any smart crook would, the bootlegger becomes hyper about re-acquiring the photo, even without knowing that Dick Tracy is acquainted with Themesong and her mom. As if to goad him further, Themesong and her mother just happens to take her film to a local pharmacy for development—and it’s one of the pharmacies Gargles shook down. The pharmacist only has a minute to recognize the photo as his earlier tormentor, when Gargles enters, killing both the druggist and Themesong’s mom. Themesong escapes with the photo, but Gargles escapes the cops by hiding in a coffin-sized tool box belonging to a repair truck. The repair truck is only nearby to fix the drugstore-window smashed earlier by Gargles, but this bit of good fortune proves deceptive.

While Gargles gets transported to the truck’s destination, a glass factory, Themesong mourns her mother. Christmas Early shows up, giving Themesong the chance to air her grievances on the air, warning Gargles to give himself up. The radio broadcast does reach the glass factory, but if it doesn’t soften Gargles’ hard heart, the girl’s description of the fleeing felon helps the factory-workers identify the fugitive. At the same time, Tracy’s squad arrives on the scene. Gargles takes refuge in a high room, but when Tracy makes a frontal assault—the detective being protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass—the villain loses his footing and falls. In addition, several sheets of breakable glass fall as well. Thus the glass-breaking thug—who, incidentally, complains twice about “cracked glass” being a source of germs—gets turned into the equivalent of veal cutlets. However, his throat remains whole long enough for him to confess to the killing of George Empire—a very uncharacteristic generosity from this brutal gangster, but one which Gould evidently wanted so as to tie things up 

neatly.

One impressive aspect of BOOTLEGGERS is that Gould evidently gave some thought to the ironic way in which he would kill off this particular transgressor. All of the early references to glass in Gargles’ life seem inconsequential until the reader sees that he’s destined to be impaled by glass shards. Another impressive aspect is that not until the end does Christmas Early’s name take on possible significance. The dominant connotation of the words “early Christmas” is that someone receives a gift ahead of the Christmas season. If as I believe this notion was being directed at the character of Themesong, then the “gift” is also steeped in irony, for Themesong loses a mother before she gains a musical mentor. “I’d like to get into radio like you are,” the grieving tyke informs Christmas, and although neither character made many more appearances, it’s suggested that Christmas becomes Themesong’s manager, and perhaps substitute mother. This scenario does not fulfill as obvious a wish-dream as the one in JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD, wherein Junior’s natural father, a blind old man, gets killed off so that it becomes convenient for Junior to be raised by his ideal dad, tough cop Tracy. Still, even without wish-fulfillment as such, Gould orchestrated a rather strange three-part harmony between a clean-freak gangster, a celebrity implicated in manslaughter, and a good-hearted brat-girl with talented tonsils and a termagant tongue.  

MYTHCOMICS: "THE EARTHBOUND" (AXA, 1979?)

In my incomplete reading of the British comic strip AXA (1978-86), I've generally found the feature to be a tolerable but unexceptional "future apocalypse" saga, in which a doughty hero navigates a wildly transformed terrain full of mutant monsters and bizarre societies. AXA's main distinction in comics history is that its hero was a buxom heroine, given to frequent unveilings of her upper chest, though Axa was not any less heroic for her tendency to unveil. Indeed, all of the plots are generated by Axa's mission, which stems from a loose mandate, given her by the city in which she was raised, to explore the ways in which humankind's past mistakes have changed the world.

The strip was created by writer Donne Averell and drawn by Enrique Badia Romero, the latter having made comics-history with a previous femme formidable, Modesty Blaise. Whereas Modesty had a regular partner in her follower Willie Garvin, Axa wandered her future-Earth with a variety of male lovers, including a devoted robot (with whom, so far as I know, Axa did not have sexual relations, unlike the heroine's French predecessor Barbarella). "The Earthbound," however, shows Averell and Romero giving a deeper mythic resonance to the apocalypse-adventure subgenre-- in large part by drawing upon the Biblical scenario that is directly opposed to the scenario of the End of Days: that of the Garden of Eden.

As "The Earthbound" commences, Axa is accompanied by two of her devoted followers from other cities she's visited in past adventures: her human lover Dirk, an ex-gladiator, and Mark, a robot with human feelings who bears an impossible love for the busty heroine. Dirk is Axa's only current lover, but he's a jealous devotee, disliking it whenever Mark comes galumphing around.

Axa comes across a forestland which appears, to her eyes, to have avoided the contamination of past human wars. However, the more cynical Dirk observes that the forest is mostly dead after all.

Nevertheless, Axa continues to explore the forest, dragging Dirk and Mark along with her. A full page before there's any mention of Edenic metaphors, this "Adam and Eve" are attacked by a living tree-creature, albeit with no mention of whether it's a Tree of Life or one of Good-and-Evil. After the couple's robotic servitor drives the monster off with its laser, Axa realizes that Dirk's been wounded and needs care. An extended search leads her to a secluded house which has an uncontaminated garden of food-plants growing within it (though later the reader learns that this area was a particular site for government military experimentation in the pre-apocalyptic era). Within the house Axa meets the house's sole occupant, a blind old woman with the name "Joy Eden." (It's surely no coincidence that "Eden" is sometimes translated as signifying "pleasure," "rapture," or "joy.")

Author Averell was apparently not satisfied with Edenic metaphors alone, for though Joy does tell Axa that her long-vanished family did call their house "Garden of Eden" due to the family's evocative surname, she also calls her domicile "Seventh Heaven." She cites a mundane explanation for this name, though it seems likely that Averell was referencing the most common use of the metaphor: that one's being in "seventh heaven" is also a state of rapture. At the same time, the "seventh heaven" would be the one most removed from Earth, and thus probably as hard of access as the mythical Garden.

Blind Joy has one shadow marring her solitude: the fact that she will die one day, and, with her family gone, she has no one to inherit her domain and her wisdom. Joy's invitation that Axa stay in Seventh Heaven implicitly resonates with the young heroine, given how much she wanted to believe in an untainted paradise. Dirk remains the skeptic, wanting to move on and distrustful of Joy's sanctum.

Dirk's suspicions prove justified. Axa witnesses the blind woman calling out to "spirits of the earth, of fire, of water," and moments later, another bizarre monster, a humanoid made of slime and water, attacks Dirk. Again the robot's laser drives off the creature. Joy claims to know nothing about either of the monsters but suggests that they may be wandering mutants that have been "squatting" in the abandoned laboratory, where human scientists unleashed "the Great Contamination." Mark argues that "mutants don't leave traces" like bits of mud and water, but Axa determines that she will investigation the old lab. There she, Dirk and Mark are attacked by a third monster, a man made of straw, and though the straw-man is driven away, the monster gives Mark an acid-bath. Axa's compassion for the damaged robot is expressed when she cries, "I'm not just rescuing Mark because he's useful! I love him!" Dirk could care less about his potential competition and still wants to leave the forest. A little later Mark becomes one with the horrors of the Garden, for his damage causes him to attack Axa, though the possibility of jealousy frying his circuits is mentioned. Axa repels her former protector with his own laser-gun, after which Mark staggers away into the mists, disappearing from Axa's world, at least for a time.

Moments after Mark leaves, Axa is drawn back to Seventh Heaven by Joy Eden, and when Dirk tries to stop Axa, she lays him out with a deft karate-chop. However, Axa comes back to herself once she confronts Joy, and she finally realizes that the attacking creatures aren't mutants, but supernatural forces conjured up by the old woman. Joy Eden has become demented by her long solitude, being unable to see that the "old gods" she's summoned up bear nothing but resentment for all humans, judging all to be equally guilty of having ruined the cycles of nature.

Joy Eden can't bear the notion that the old gods now hate all of humanity, including her, and the very idea causes her heart to fail. The vengeful spirits fade away once their summoner is dead, so Axa and Dirk leave the old woman in her burning domicile-- "the pagan shrine her funeral pyre." Despite this doleful conclusion to the adventure, Axa closes the story with a protestation of her own hopes: "perhaps there's another Seventh Heaven-- another Garden of Eden-- pure and unspoilt, beyond the horizon."

(Note: the whole story can be read here.)

Though other SF-flavored mythcomics have referenced the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for humanity's "fall" away from a paradise-world-- notably 1955's "The Inferiors" and 1980's "Planet Story"--  "The Earthbound" is the first I've found that concentrates upon the Garden-myth with respect to its feminine characters, with Axa roughly standing in for the "great mother" Eve while Joy Eden bears more similarity to Lilith, Eve's sorcerous predecessor (in the Talmud at least). Joy wants Axa to inherit her maintenance of an already corrupted garden, but this "Eve" escapes the enclosure not by eating an apple but by causing the blind old woman to 'see" her own folly.

MYTHCOMICS: THE WITCH QUEEN OF MONGO (1935)

"Witch Queen of Mongo" marks the first sequence in which Alex Raymond seeks to expand on the formulaic characters of FLASH GORDON. But it's not the central character who gets the attention, but his faithful inamorata Dale Arden.

As I pointed out in my previous Raymond essay, Dale Arden's role in the series is one of the strongest deviations from the strip's putative inspiration, Edgar Rice Burroughs' JOHN CARTER series. It may be that Raymond chose to give his hero a female "comrade-in-arms" in imitation of the science-fiction strip with which FLASH was competing, BUCK ROGERS. Dale Arden is, admittedly, not an experienced warrior-woman like BUCK's Wilma Deering. Yet Dale is much more gutsy than any of Burroughs' Martian princesses.

For example, in the second FLASH strip, Zarkov, having built a spaceship to combat the onrushing world of Mongo, forces Flash and Dale  to board the ship, after which he sends them all speeding toward the enemy planet. Flash fights with Zarkov, and though the hero slugs the older man unconscious in the next panel, Dale is seen grabbing a lug-wrench so as to crown Zarkov if necessary. And while Flash is always the main hero in the ensuing sequences, Dale frequently shows more than a little initiative. When Flash and Dale are held prisoner by the Hawkmen's king Vultan, Dale pretends to make up to the monarch in order to protect her beloved. Early in the "Witch Queen" sequence, Dale is seen ray-blasing Mongo-monsters as ably as her boyfriend could. However, since she is a woman, her priorities are not quite the same as the hero's, and on that the main plot of "Queen" hinges.

At the end of the sequence I termed "Tournament of Death," Ming awards Flash his own kingdom, but the hero has to tame it for himself. Flash, Dale and several Hawkmen provided by Vultan infiltrate this new domain, name of Kira. The first ten strips depict Flash's first efforts to extend his rule, in particular defeating a tribe of cannibalistic lizard-men. But at the end of the tenth strip, Dale takes issue with the male mode of continual conquest:

But Flash, if you keep finding new enemies, when can we hold our wedding?

This can't be dismissed as mere feminine pique, given that Dale was key to rescuing Flash from the lizard-men. Flash, being a man, gives Dale a sweetly reasonable answer that doesn't acknowledge her concerns (I suppose some today would call it "mansplaining"). Dale blows up: "I won't marry you now til you beg me to!"

As if summoned into being by this disavowal, Dale's next major romantic competitor, Azura the Witch Queen, enters the fray. Despite the slight similarity between the name of the queen and that of Ming's daughter, Princess Aura comes off as a poor second to Azura, an independent ruler with her own array of arcane weapons-that-look-like-magic. Azura appears before Flash's entourage, seeming to be such a "spectral figure" that the armed men are briefly cowed. Flash orders them to attack, but Azura has the situation in complete control. She uses explosives to trigger an avalanche, burying many though not all of the Hawkmen, while the queen uses sleep gas to take prisoner Flash, Dale and a Hawkman captain named Khan.

With the help of her soldiers, usually called "magic men" despite the fact that they too only use super-science weapons, Azura transports her captives to Syk, her "flame-guarded stronghold" (perhaps modeled on the folk-story of Venusberg). She seems to be unaware of Flash's intention to invade her territory, and is only interested in seducing him. Apparently her only reason for keeping Dale and Khan alive is to use them to keep Flash in line when he wakes up-- although it doesn't take long for Azura to take the next step: drugging the hero with a forgetfulness potion called "Lethium.."  Flash easily buys into the notion that this sexy witch-woman is his queen and lover.

Ar this point, Azura really has no reason to keep Dale and Khan alive, and Raymond doesn't even resort to the most logical excuse: that Azura takes sadistic glee in seeing Dale suffer when Flash no longer knows her. Both Dale and Khan are given servile jobs as servants, but aside from a scene in which a female servant lets Dale see Flash kissing Azura, there's no direct attempt to humiliate. However, though Flash doesn't know Dale as anything but a serving-girl, he objects to seeing a member of the weaker sex whipped for a minor infraction. This illustrates Flash's innate gallantry, given that he remembers nothing of his previous life.

Meanwhile, some of the Hawkmen under Flash's command weren't killed by the avalanche, and have sent for military aid to Vultan. Soon a small army of Hawkmen, accompanied by the peripatetic Doctor Zarkov, assault Azura's "magic-men."

The Hawkmen lose the contest, but Flash takes Zarkov prisoner and brings him into Syk. This proves costly for Azura, for with his super-science Zarkov slays several magic-men and cures Flash's amnesia. Flash feeds Azura her own potion, so that she forgets her evil ways-- temporarily at least-- and aligns herself with his rulership.

However, just to keep the pot boiling a little longer, Azura's generals stage a coup. Flash, Dale and Zarkov are forced to flee Syk, somehow leaving the Hawkman Khan behind in prison, and in the absence of the heroes, Azura's old identity returns. Zarkov then uses his science to give Flash a "super-power," turning him temporarily into an invisible man, even though Raymond draws him as a shadowy figure. Thus Flash invades Syk again, launching a "one-man war" on Azura and freeing Khan. However, Flash's invisibility begins to wear off. He takes Azura hostage and drags her into "the Tnnnel of Terror" to escape. This proves a mistake, for the tunnel is inhabited by "death dwarves."

Just as Flash and Azura stand on the edge of being overwhelmed by the dwarves, Dale and Zarkov show up in the Tunnel and drive away the nasty fiends. However, because Flash and Azura thought themselves on the verge of death, the queen begged the hero for a last kiss, and he obliged, just as Dale showed up. Thus the story comes full-circle, for although Dale has reclaimed her lover, he's displayed a certain amount of sexual infidelity before her eyes. At last Flash is able to smooth over the troubled waters by relating his transgression to his Manifest Destiny. When Dale asks Flash if he liked the kiss, "I liked it because it meant her friendship-- it meant that this bloody business was at an end-- that I had won my kingdom and the right to marry you."

However, Flash manages to find another new war that keeps him from getting married, which also brings the story back to Dale's original protest. When Flash announces the taming of his kingdom to Ming via radio, the Mongo emperor refuses to acknowledge Flash. In the following sequence, this begins Flash's first major martial assault on the empire of Ming, but "Witch Queen" in essence sets a pattern that would mitigate against marriage for the rest of the comic strip's history. In other words, Flash and Dale would perpetually have their virtue attempted by this or that powerful figure of Mongo. It's a virtual certainty that male readers enjoyed it whenever some beauteous ruler tried to seduce Flash, while female readers didn't get nearly the same vibe from Dale having to fend off unattractive seducers like Ming and Vultan. Still, there may have been some pleasure for women readers in seeing Flash prove his faithfulness again and again in spite of massive temptation, for, to my knowledge, Flash always remains devoted to one woman, despite not ever quite finding time to marry her.

NEAR MYTHS: "MAROONED ON MONGO," "TOURNAMENT OF DEATH" (1934-35)

In THE PLANET MONGO, Nostalgia Press's 1974 collection of the first two years of Alex Raymond's FLASH GORDON strip, the editors assigned titles to five sections of Raymond's work. I disagree with these assignments, for as I see it, these three years break down into three definable installments. I'm keeping their title, "The Witch Queen of Mongo," for the forthcoming essay, but the other two I've designated as "Marooned on Mongo," a title borrowed from the otherwise unmemorable 1996 TV-show, and "Tournament of Death," a title borrowed from one of the episodes of the 1936 serial. In all of the Raymond works I analyze here, I give Raymond sole credit for sake of brevity, though some if not all of the work was co-written by Don Moore.

_________

The comic strip adaptations of two prose creations-- Edgar Rice Burroughs' TARZAN and Philip Francis Nowlan's BUCK ROGERS-- launched what many have called "the Golden Age of Adventure Comic Strips." The two strips even debuted in American newspapers on the same day in 1929.  About five years later, King Features Syndicate invited artist Alex Raymond to create two ongoing strips, often if not always appearing together on Sunday pages, and both seemed to be biting the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs. JUNGLE JIM, though it concerned a white hunter rather than a ape-man, at least sought to compete with Tarzan's jungle thrills, though at no point was the former capable of eclipsing the latter. However, if it's true that King originally thought of doing an adaptation of Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, then there's not much question that Raymond'FLASH GORDON did indeed surpass the reputation of the Burroughs creation. (Additionally, King was possibly seeking to compete with the popularity of BUCK ROGERS, whom FLASH also excelled in popularity and repute.)

The sequence I've dubbed "Marooned on Mongo" is a long picatesque adventure that acquaints Raymond's readers with many of the colorful races of Mongo, and in this Raymond follows the lead of Burroughs's Mars books for the most part. Burroughs' Carter was an Earthman transported to a savage Mars inhabited by humanoids, one of whom, the "incomparable Dejah Thoris," eventually becomes Carter's wife. Mars's humanoids were largely characterized by skin-color-- red, white, black, and yellow-- though there were two quasi-humanoid races, the Tharks and the Warhoons, who were four-armed green monsters. In contrast, Raymond's Flash Gordon and his love-interest Dale Arden are both abducted to Mongo by crazed Doctor Zarkov when the scientist takes the two youths aboard his ship and tries to ram the hurtling planet Mongo to keep it from crashing into Earth. (The peril of colliding worlds is summarily dismissed and nothing more is said about the havoc Mongo's presence might be wreaking on Earth's solar system.) Mongo has a few humanoid races characterized by color alone, though the strips are inconsistent about depicting Ming, Aura and their congeners as "yellow," while Ming is the only one given a "Chinese Mandarin" image. However, Raymond was far more interested in creating humanoids with overt or implied animal natures: lion-men, hawk-men, and shark-men. Mongo is also, like Mars, rife with both primitive sword-battles and advanced technical gadgetry, underscored by sneaky court intrigues and romantic entanglements.

In contrast to John Carter's wooing of Dejah Thoris, the romance of Flash and Dale takes place somewhat on the fly, and is swiftly challenged by the ardor of Aura, daughter of Ming. In the "Marooned" sequence none of these four characters are very strongly characterized, and the attitudes of Ming and Aura toward the two Earthpeople reverse one another: Ming desires Dale and wishes to kill Flash; Aura desires Flash and wishes to kill Dale. In an early essay here, I discerned this as a "racial myth," but today I tend to think that this was just a surface imitation of the BUCK ROGERS strip, and that Raymond had little real interest in such matters. "Marooned" is largely a Cook's Tour of Mongo. There's nearly no social commentary on the various exotic tribes met by the humans, except insofar as many of them have grievances against Emperor Ming, who implicitly rules the planet with an iron hand.

"Tournament of Death," however, marks a transition in Raymond's work. Toward the end of "Marooned," King Vultan of the Hawkmen has been trying to make Dale his bride, and even comes to blows with Flash. However, when the floating city of the Hawks is imperiled, Doctor Zarkov saves the city with his scientific knowledge, and so Vultan befriends the three Earth-people. Ming and Aura then show up with their troops to seize the humans. So Vultan invokes "the ancient laws of Mongo," calling for a "tournament of death," in which Flash can compete to rise to the rank of rulership-- but only if Flash is the "last man standing" in the midst of dozens of ambitious warlords from all over the planet. It's with "Tournament" that Raymond abandons most of the storytelling tropes favored by Burroughs. Palace intrigue and romantic complications remained, but "Tournament" begins to portray Mongo with a sense of the pagantry emblematic of photorealistic book illustrations. In addition, Raymond advances Barin-- one of the rebel warlords seen in "Marooned"-- as a consolation prize for Aura. Though Aura makes one attempt to kill Dale during this sequence, she's overcome by Barin's charm and for the most part forgets her ardor for Flash, as well as deserting the cause of her father.

Though Aura's character diminishes in this sequence, Ming becomes a more majestic figure of evil here. He allows the tournament because he hopes to see Flash humbled before all Mongo. Instead, Flash wins in such a way that he allows his fiercest competitor Barin to live. But even though Ming is forced to assign kingdoms to both Flash and Barin, the wily emperor gives both of them wild, untamed domains, so that the two warriors will have to exert themselves mightily in order to attain their goals. It's at this point that Flash goes forth to conquer the lands under the sway of Queen Azura, "the Witch Queen of Mongo"-- which I'll consider in the next essay.