MYTHCOMICS: "THE GREAT OXYGEN THEFT" (THE MARVEL FAMILY #41, 1949)

 For a change, here's a Golden Age story in which the name of its artist is lost to time, but GCD attests that the writer was Otto Binder, known to Fawcett fans as having been responsible for a great quantity of stories about Captain Marvel and his kindred. "The Great Oxygen Theft" is not one of Binder's more celebrated stories, but it merits a little notoriety for rendering elementary-school environmental science into a decent cosmological myth.

  

THEFT wastes no time in setting up the action of this 10-page tale. A radio summons from the evil Doctor Sivana lures the Marvel Family to an unnamed, inhabited world in the star-system of Sirius. Sivana gives the heroes a story about his having reformed and directs their attention to the fact that the world's plant life is almost gone thanks to a plant-killing blight. The inhabitants haven't noticed this mass extinction, but they start paying attention when they start finding it hard to breathe, due to the lack of plants generating oxygen. Sivana then leaves the good guys to sort things out while he jets back to Earth, revealing that he created the blight just to keep the Marvels out of his non-existent hair.

   The Marvels' first task is to save the populace. Mary Marvel purifies the soil of Sivana's poison, Captain Marvel Jr disperses the excess carbon dioxide that has built up in the absence of plant life, and Captain Marvel brings in a glacier of frozen oxygen to give the air-breathers temporary relief.

The Marvels then play Johnny Appleseed, transporting Earth-plants to the Sirius-world. Naturally, Binder doesn't trouble with ALL the scientific niceties regarding the practicality of one world's vegetation adapting to a totally different environment. However, on one of the heroes' trips to Earth, they find that certain areas of their own world have been hit with the plant-blight. Before they even have to wonder if the blight might have travelled back to Earth on their boots or capes, Sivana announced that he's responsible, and that he wants supreme power to keep Earth's plants healthy.

  Since THEFT is as I said just a ten-page story, Binder needed a quick wrap-up, so he cheats a little. Captain Marvel gets the bright idea that just as miners had used canaries to test for bad air inside mines, he and the other Marvels can just pick up a random potted plant and use it to "detect" the presence of plant-poison in Sivana's ship. It would probably made just as much sense for the Marvels to race all around the world until they made a visual sighting of the ship-- which, after all, they all got a look at, back on the unnamed planet. But Binder also knew his audience would like a little ironic touch at the end, in which a villain who poisoned a world's plants gets defeated by the use of another plant. The unknown artist even shows, in the penultimate panel, Sivana "wearing" the potted plant atop his bald head, leading one to assume that some hero "crowned" him with it. THEFT probably violates as many scientific principles as those that it gets right, but the payoff at the end, with the Marvels expressing their appreciation for plants and the order of nature, is not diminished by said violations.    
  

CHALLENGER AND DEFENDER PT. 1

Over a year ago I formulated two terms, “investment” and “fascination” in this essay. According to my system, these are the affects inspired by the two respective modes, the “endothelic” and the “exothelic,” which apply to a given literary work’s focal presence. Now I’ve formulated broad terms for each type of focal presence, to better illustrate the multifarious ways in which investment and fascination manifest.

Though Aristotle’s POETICS is the earliest extant work to speak of conflict as necessary to all narrative, not until the 19^th century did ArthurQuiller-Couch distinguish particular dominant tropes by which conflict was organized. To this day, people who don’t know Aristotle, much less Quiller-Couch, should recognize these tropes-- “man vs. man,” “man vs. nature,” and “man vs. society”—from their use in middle school lit classes. Quiller-Couch’s formulation seems to follow the basic structure handed down from archaic Greece, in which a “protagonist” was the star of the show and an “antagonist” challenged him. But in the twentieth century, sometimes the antagonist proved the more fascinating narrative presence, even if a protagonist-like figure might be around to give the reader some investment. H.P Lovecraft’s 1927 SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE boldly stated that in supernatural fiction the “phenomenon” was the star, while in 1982 Frank Cioffi stated that narrative conflict came about when some “anomaly” interfered with the status quo.

Without a doubt, the trope “sympathetic protagonist vs. antipathetic antagonist” is the dominant mode in the whole of literature. Thus most works are concerned with showing the reader how a character in which the reader has invested positive emotions defends himself against a given challenge. The opposite trope, however, puts an antagonist—be he real or perceived—in the driver’s seat,, so the reader’s dominant response is that of fascination with “the other” (little as I like invoking Sartre’s tired concept). Contrary to Cioffi's somewhat Marxist tendency to extol the anomaly—what I am calling “the challenger”—as a positive force that breaks down the status quo, many challenger-focused narratives end up validating the “status quo” viewpoint of the figure I call “the defender.” As I type these words, I’m half-watching a film that’s yet another take on Richard Condon’s famous short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” There’s no question that Condon’s narrative focus is entirely upon the corrupt Count Zaroff, the man who decides to start hunting his fellow human beings. Yet this narrative strategy in no way compromises the POV of the defending protagonist, which maintains that Hunting Humans is Not a Good Thing. The same principle obtains with the various film-serials that focus less on the heroes than on the villains. The villains of THE PHANTOM CREEPS, THE WHISPERING SHADOW, and THE BLACK WIDOW are more interesting than the phlegmatic heroes, but the heroes still represent the right moral orientation.

As I discussed in INVESTMENT ANDFASCINATION PT. 3, sometimes the position of “challenger” can be an entire environment, often combining two Quiller-Couchisms: “man vs. nature” and “man vs. society.” In H.G. Wells’ TIME MACHINE, the nameless viewpoint character is essentially a rather passive defender of his time’s values. Those values are challenged and conquered when his time-machine reveals the horror at the heart of reality, summed up by the predacious relationship of the Morlocks to the Eloi. In the 1960 film-adaptation, Rod Taylor’s two-fisted scientist successfully defends his time’s ethics so strongly that he may be able to reverse the future world’s fall into entropy. Thus the original novel and its film-version evince the investment and fascination strategies respectively. However, the triumph or failure of the viewpoint-character is not the determining factor. WORLD WITHOUT END presages George Pal’s 1960 film by showing another corrupted future that can be saved. However, the titular world, the challenger, is the star even though its monstrous aspects are overthrown and tamed by the film’s dull defenders of the eternal verities.

Next up: curse-challenger and cursed defender.

ADDENDA: Just to line up all the categories, any work centered on a "challenger" would be exothelic, while any work centered on a defender would be endothelic.

INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION PT. 3

I don't consider "the Time Traveler" to be the star of Wells' TIME MACHINE, and from one standpoint I might teem "time itself" to be the star. However, the bulk of the narrative does center itself upon the Eloi/Morlocks period of future-history, and so it's possible to see that one period as the focal presence of the Wells narrative.-- TREES, MEET FOREST (GOD).

 The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.-- H.P. Lovecraft.

Since I've recently reviewed both H.G. Wells' TIME MACHINE and the 1960 George Pal adaptation, I decided to analyse both these works and those works most probably influenced by Wells' "Eloi-Morlocks" trope in terms of the "investment/fascination" concepts.

The fact that H.G. Wells chose not to give his focal character a name would seem to underscore Lovecraft's observation that "the phenomenon" is the star of the novel. Since an abstraction like time can't really be the "star of the show," I've determined that "Morlock-Earth" is the exothelic center of the Wells narrative, since it's the "entity" through which Wells expresses his beliefs about the ultimate degeneration of Earth and/or the universe. Thus Wells' work functions by concentrating the reader's emotions on fascination with the phenomenon of the decay of Earth and its inhabitants.

In contrast, though the 1960 movie starts off almost identically to the novel in terms of plot, the David Duncan script gives the traveler (Rod Taylor) the name of George (with other elements in the script implying that he's actually "H. George Wells"). Further, Duncan builds up George's relationship to his Victorian contemporaries, particularly with David Filby (Alan Young), so that George seems like a much more well-defined character, and so indicates that the scripter's strategy is to create the viewer's emotions on investment in George's fate.

The scenes of George's first time-ventures reinforce this strategy, for in contrast to the novel, George travels to the near future and meets James Dilby, grown son of George's now-deceased friend David. George's moments of grieving for his friend give him greater dimension, as do his humorous moments observing the changes in a dress-shop opposite his own domicile, allowing him some very mild "voyeurism" as he watches a dress-dummy continually undressed and re-dressed. This plays into George's later romance with Weena, in contrast to the Time Traveler's largely paternal relationship to the (much younger) Weena of the novel

Duncan's main purpose in having George visit the 20th century is to make Wells' vision of cosmic degeneracy more relatable to 20th-century audiences, by grounding the events of "Morlock-Earth"  in the development of nuclear-war and America's use of bomb shelters. Of course, given that Morlock-Earth is many thousands of years in the future, Duncan's future only works if one assumes that the pattern of aerial bombing and human retreat into bunkers kept happening over centuries-- though, to be sure, Wells' SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME does describe a situation in which aerial bombing gets lost and has to be rediscovered over the eons.

Finally, as I noted in the film review, Rod Taylor's George is much more proactive than the Time Traveler. The Time Traveler, even though he has some affection with the child-like Weena, never raises the possibility of educating the Eloi to advance themselves. Every contact he has with them suggests that they've descended too far into imbecility for that. In contrast, George's efforts to get the Eloi to think and fight for themselves bear fruit: not only does Weena start wondering about how the women of George's time wear their hair, one of the male Eloi comes to George's defense during the big fight-scene, actually striking a Morlock in emulation of George's fisticuffs. This revelation, that the Eloi are not beyond saving, telegraphs Duncan's ending to the film. In the book, the reader doesn't know just why the Traveler, having returned to Victorian London to relate his story, gets back in the machine and leaves, never to be seen again. But the film makes it indisputable that George is returning to bring 19th-century enlightenment to the Eloi and to defeat the savage Morlocks, more or less following the pattern of 19th-ceutury concepts of imperialistic noblesse oblige.

Having described George's impact as a culture hero, though, I have to remark that a protagonist's act of playing "culture hero" doesn't always lead to the pattern of investment. I remarked in my review of the TIME MACHINE film that four years earlier, the studio Allied Artists produced a B-film, WORLD WITHOUT END which anticipated the quasi-imperialistic developments of David Duncan's adaptation of the Wells work. In fact, the estate of Wells allegedly filed a lawsuit against the company for copying the author's book, even though the film's writer-director Edward Byrnes reversed the basic setup of the Eloi and the Morlock, though it's not impossible that he also borrowed from other SF-works for his scenario. In WORLD, four modern astronauts accidentally time-travel to a post-apocalyptic future, where they find savage "mutates" on the surface and an effete, though technologically gifted, civilization dwelling beneath the Earth.

Now, though Bernds' four protagonists have a few distinguishing characteristics, I stated that I found them "exceedingly dull," which didn't help me invest any emotions in their project to restore the ravaged Earth (anticipating Duncan's concept by four years). There is, as I discussed in the review, a concluding battle in which an astronaut named Borden (Hugh Marlowe) fights and kills a mutate in single combat, but Bernds underplays this potentially exciting scene, as if it's no more than a necessary evil. With neither strong characterizations nor physical vitality to enliven the astronauts, they seem to play a role not unlike Wells's Time Traveler: they're just there to illustrate a theme. The true star of the show is the fallen Earth that is to be redeemed, what I tend to call "Mutate-Earth" even though the mutates are destined to pass away. Even the film's title, apparently derived either from a passage in King James or some secondary use of said passage, affirms the idea that humanity, though bifurcated into savages and decadents, will be brought together, and that even the brave astronauts who accomplish this are merely part of some cosmic scheme.

Four years after the debut of Pal's TIME MACHINE, the idea of bifurcation is again used in Ib Melchior's THE TIME TRAVELERS. A group of scientists, all pretty unmemorable, accidentally travel to the far future, to 2071 A.D. Once there, they find the world rendered uninhabitable from nuclear radiation, and haunted by deformed mutants above-ground, just as in WORLD WITHOUT END. And there's also, as in WORLD, just one enclave of technologically-advanced humanity left, though TRAVELERS' script does not in any way portray the future-people as decadent. Their only fault is that the future-humans are devoting all of their efforts into escaping Earth for greener pastures in Alpha Centauri. However, at the climax the mutants invade the enclave and destroy the Alpha Centauri rocket. Humankind is only redeemed because the time-travelers are able to access their temporal portal once more, and to transport themselves and some of the future-humans into an even more distant future-- one in which, in contrast to Wells' novel, Earth has become a virtual Eden once more. And just as I considered Wells' "Morlock-Earth" to be central to the novel, even though the hero also travels to the time of Earth's ending, "Earth 2071" is also central to THE TIME TRAVELERS, even though that fallen world, like that of WORLD WITHOUT END, implicitly leads to the rebirth of humankind with a tone of Judeo-Christian transcendence.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 4

Here I'll cite a couple more categorizations with respect to classifying environments as potential focal presences. In ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2 I wrote:

...though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."

The same designation applies to last week's mythcomic, LUCIFER RISING. In this 1985 manga story, the mysterious tenth planet Lucifer is a phenomenon that the two main characters, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver, must investigate in order to learn its nature, both in its cosmological and metaphysical. There are any number of science fiction stories in which the narrative focuses upon the viewpoint characters sussing out the nature of a star or planet, so that in effect the phenomenon is "the star." However, LUCIFER RISING is endothelic, since the story focuses on the human conflict of faith and science, as represented by the initial outlooks of, respectively, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver.

A narrative may also focus upon an environment as the concatenation of the sentient culture. This is the case with the Byrne-Mignola WORLD OF KRYPTON. In my review I noted that writer Byrne had failed to invest his characters with much in the way of "dramatic heft:"

Given Byrne's tendency to rewrite earlier stories. it's not hard for me to believe that he caught onto the way Jerry Siegel concealed the quasi-incestuous theme of his story by giving Superman's Kryptonian lover the name "Lyla Lerrol," a shuffling of the name "Lara," Byrne thus creates both a bad mother and a not-so-good girlfriend, Nyra and Vara, before introducing the "good mother" who will make possible the birth of a "savior" of sorts. Byrne doesn't devote nearly as much attention to the two main male characters, dramatically or symbolically. Van-L's name doesn't seem to hold any strong associations, though an old SUPERBOY story does state that one of Superboy's ancestors is named "Val-El." As for "Kan-Z," I can't help but note that his name resembles that of the American heartland where the infant Kal-El ends up; i.e., "Kansas." But the latter confluence may not have been consciously intended.

Yet none of these characters looms larger than the world they inhabit, although the perverse mother Nyra, a sort of "anti-Lara," has the greatest mythicity. Rather, Krypton is the exothelic focus of the narrative, as I showed in this passage:

 I will give props to the schematic sociological myth he devises for Krypton: first too sensuous, then too abstemious. This stratagem succeeds in characterizing the homeworld of DC:s pre-eminent hero in terms of unpleasant extremes, as against the "divine middle" embodied by the Planet Earth.

MYTHCOMICS: 'MY WORD" (BIG APPLE COMIX, 1975)

Last month Flo Steinberg passed away, and as I read the obits, I was surprised to learn that she'd had a very brief career in underground publishing once she left her job with Marvel. For over twenty years I'd owned a copy of her one-shot, BIG APPLE COMIX, and I was more than a little familiar with all of the artist-contributors, such as Neal Adams, Archie Goodwin, and Wally Wood. However, I'd never troubled to look at the magazine's indicia, where Steinberg's name was clearly displayed.

I've not come across any online recollections as to how the project came about, but it's likely that it was done by a bunch of artists who knew one another. The idea shows a "let's put on a show" mentality, as opposed to the demands of working for the Big Two. Steinberg, who had observed Marvel's production methods during her tenure at the company, possibly volunteered her services in that regard, with added help from both Linda Fite and John Verpoorten.

BIG APPLE was, even by 1975 standards, not an especially marketable idea, given that all of its contributions shared one  theme: life in New York City, "the Big Apple." The stories in BIG APPLE run the gamut of underground humor from farce to satire, but only one tale, Wally Wood's "My Word," uses layered symbolic imagery to create a demonic vision of the city. In addition, the three-page story recapitulates. in ironic form, some of the visual setups found in a longer Wood presentation, "My World," published in WEIRD SCIENCE #22 (1953). Scripted by Al Feldstein, the earlier sequence was not really a story as such, but more of an adoring meditation on the wonder-inducing tropes of science fiction. On the last page, the narrator speaks of his world as being "what I choose to make it," and in the last panel he reveals himself to be Wood poised over his drawing-board, identifying himself as "a science fiction artist."

"My Word," however, depicts a world over which the artist has no control, except in the sense that he can exaggerate the already dire reputation of New York City in the 1970s. In the far left of the splash panel, for example, one sees not only a demented version of Batman's villain The Penguin exposing himself to a little girl, while the Shadow stands to one side, apparently willing to let the Penguin do as he wants since the two of them belong to the Cyrano de Bergerac "huge schnozz" club.

But "My Word" is more than a few MAD-style in-jokes; it's a vision of a "sin city" in which sin has lost its ability to titillate. Wood calls New York many things-- "Bagdad on the Hudson," "Sodom on the Gomorrah,"  and "sin capital of the Western world." But by the third panel one of his character's remarks-- playing on the opening of the 1960-63 teleseries THE NAKED CITY-- that "there are ten million stories in the Naked City, and they're all BORING." The artist follows this up with a parody of the religious homily "where there is creation, there must be a creator" by attributing the thought to a pile of dogshit, recently "created" by a passing canine.

For the remainder of the piece, nameless characters are seen gratifying themselves in one way or another, always with the implication that sexual congress is barely distinguishable from any other form of mundane activity. Page two shows a couple locked in copulation, but the woman's also reading a book while the man's reading his newspaper.

"You must love yourself before you can love anyone else, but how many people really can?" This pessimistic appraisal is immediately followed by the old joke about the guy trying to give himself oral sex, but even in the context of satire, the narrator's line suggests that he finds himself not much less tedious than the quotidian nature of New York City, where getting mugged is the most exciting experience one can have. Most fascinating is the image in the fifth panel of Page 3:

Here, amid many other images of soul-dead sex, Wood gives the reader the ultimate recursive fantasy: a bird-like humanoid laying an egg which the creature drops into its own mouth, presumably to be devoured. (Despite this and a couple of other fantasy-images, the dominant phenomenality of the vignette is naturalistic in tone.) The main point of burlesquing the "My World" vignette seems to provide a reversal of the earlier work's boundless enthusiasm for wonder-producing tropes, one in which both professional comics-artists and their fans have no more immunity to the soul-killing influence of modern life than any other modern-day persons, whether they reside in New York City or not.

I mentioned that this is a vignette, but it does, like the examples of short mythcomics covered here and here, possess a clear progression of ideas that roughly parallel a normal-length story's "beginning, middle, and end." And of course, it is an irony in terms of its mythos, one far more acidulous than Wood's ambivalent KING OF THE WORLD.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 3

I've added the tag "environment" to the blog because I've decided that some of my formulations on that subject don't fit neatly under the tag "focal presences."

In the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS, I examined the trope "exotic lands and customs" from the standpoint of phenomenality, while the second part of the "essay-series" focused on the topic of environments in terms of mythicity. This third essay is closer to the first part, in that here I'm concerned with phenomenality again, but in a more restricted fashion, along the lines of PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS.

When I first formulated my ten tropes, I lumped together "lands and customs" as being functionally part of the same trope. That is, in most cases audiences are most interested in "exotic lands" because of the "exotic peoples" who live in them. A given narrative may of course separate the exoticism of the physical land from that of the people living in it. The 1942 serial PERILS OF NYOKA was one of the many films I labeled with the trope-title "exotic lands and customs." The trope applied to both Nyoka's adversaries-- a tribe of Arab bandits, led by exotic-looking Vultura, a female chieftain who keeps a pet gorilla-- and to a bizarre wind-tunnel created by a freak geological formation. It would be possible, though, that by drawing on Spinoza's distinction between "nature in the active sense," the uncanny people of the land, and "nature in the passive sense," the uncanny land itself can be conceptually separated from any of the people occupying the land or making use of the terrain to kill their enemies.

Though I currently don't plan to change my trope-terminology on the film-blog, I want to specify here, in line with my writings on focal presences, that what I'm calling "environment" primarily applies to "nature in the passive sense," and that this form of nature falls into three necessary categories.

(1) TERRAIN-- this applies to the formations of the land proper, and anything under it. The aforementioned NYOKA wind-tunnel belongs here, and so do the two examples cited in PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, even though I determined that the land of Surprise Valley registered as naturalistic while the description of "Sheba's Breasts" in KING SOLOMON'S MINES registered as uncanny. In Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD novel, the entire terrain of the prehistoric plateau registers as marvelous, but only because it harbors so many fantastic forms of extinct life. Alice's Wonderland is technically uncanny, since all of its incomprehensible inhabitants are figures within a dreamer's dream.

(2) FLORA-- as far as visible life goes, you don't get much more passive than plants. Marvelous flora are the best known type, like the man-eating plants of both TARZAN'S DESERT MYSTERY and THE LAND UNKNOWN. I can't think of too many uncanny plants, unless it would be a plant that appears marvelous within the context of an uncanny dream--

Like the magic mushroom in ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND--

And the poppies in the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ.

(However, the poppies are not uncanny in the original Baum book, because they exist in a marvelous universe.)

(3) FAUNA-- Animals, unless they come off as distinct characters in their own right, are often coterminous with their environment. I've usually assigned the trope-title "astounding animals" to creatures who generate an uncanny phenomenality. Often they have no overt connection to the environment in which they dwell, but there are works in which there is something of an overlap between the animals and their setting, such as can be seen in the 1972 "uncanny" film FROGS.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

This is not so much a follow-up to the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS essay as to my recent myth-analysis of LOVE IN HELL-- reason being that this is the first mythcomic I've examined in which one might argue that the locale is just as important to the story as the two principal characters.

Environment varies in its amplitude throughout the mythcomics, just as that of any presence, even a focal character. In one of my earliest essays on focal presences, I mentioned that in Arthur Conan Doyle's original novel THE LOST WORLD, Doyle's heroes were the focal presences, but that the Lost World itself became the focus in the 1925 film.

There's great precedence for this sort of "man vs. nature" opposition, but this formula has never been nearly as popular as "man vs. man." It's not uncommon, even in the most strongly mythic narratives, for the environment to fade into the background, even if that environment is sometimes a major generator of mythic content. Thus, even though many THOR stories describe the power of the Lee-Kirby Asgard to generate all manner of Nordic strangeness, in "The Mangog Saga" Asgard might as well be the Pyrenees for all the impact that the locale has upon the struggle between main character Thor, his various allies, and the seemingly invulnerable Mangog.

In some situations, the environment retains its mythic nature within a given narrative, but its myth-power stems from a particular character. In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

 There's also a sort of ambiguous middle ground. as seen with"the Palace of Ice," In this extended dream, Nemo experiences what I termed "a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole." McCay probably does not mean to assert that either Jack Frost or his realm possess any reality independent of Little Nemo's imagination. Nevertheless, this ice-world possesses far more amplitude than most real dreams.

In contrast, the Hell of LOVE IN HELL does not seem to be an expression of any character's imagination or personality. Hell does have its ruler, Japan's traditional hell-lord King Enma (who according to some references is actually female), but Enma only makes one appearance in the narrative, and then only toward the very end, where the ruler's gigantic foot intrudes upon the inferno to mete out justice. Rintaro, the "new fish-soul" in Hell, is not especially mythic in himself, any more than any other "everyman" character, given that most such characters are meant to heighten the significance of other characters by their ordinariness. The demoness Koyori serves to explain the ways of Hell to Rintaro, but she's new to the job of being a soul-torturing demon, so she's not a pure representative of Hell, in the same way Darkseid is a pure representative of the ethos of Apokolips.

All this said, though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."


Note: since writing the above I've changed my mind: Rintaro and his sins comprise the series' focal presence, with Koyori qualifying only as a support character.

OBJECTS, GIVEN LUSTER

I've never asserted that it's unilaterally easy to identify the focal presence of a given story. I've stated before that I think Dracula is the focus of his eponymous novel. Yet I understand what an author like Marv Wolfman means when he states-- as he did in ALTER EGO #113-- that the human protagonists are the real stars of the book. I presume that Wolfman strove to write his renowned TOMB OF DRACULA along the same lines, emphasizing the vampire's various foes more than the vamp himself. Yet, though I respect this POV, I'd still argue that DRACULA is an "object-oriented" novel, in that the narrative is far more concerned with mapping out the villain's nature than any of the heroes. It's certainly possible to revise the Stoker narrative so that the revision focuses on one or more of the vampire-hunters, as with the 2004 film VAN HELSING. However, I wouldn't say that the TOMB OF DRACULA feature accomplishes this shift in emphasis.

One can scarcely argue against a narrative's "object-oriented" status, though, when that narrative's only viewpoint character is the abstracted mass of all humanity. Case in point: "The Destruction of the Earth," from EC Comics' WEIRD SCIENCE #14. "Earth" is one of many Al Feldstein stories of the period that preached against the destructive capabilities of hydrogen bomb technology.

The story begins in  a standard manner. A scientist named Holman meets with two government officials in Washington, trying to convince them not to execute a new hydrogen-bomb test. He shows them copious proofs to indicate that the bomb can trigger a chain reaction that will destroy the Earth. The politicians, concerned only with their own political advancement, ignore Holman's warnings and conduct the test. But Holman doesn't get to come back on stage for an "I told you so," nor does either politician get any chances at a mea culpa. Once the chain reaction begins on page five, the rest of the story is devoted to showing the spectacle of Earth's devastation and the extinction of humanity.

So, in such a story, what is the story's focal presence? The chain reaction? It causes chaos on a global scale, just as Rene Clair's THE CRAZY RAY causes all humanity to become frozen. But the story really isn't concerned with the abstractions of physics. The focus would seem to be the Earth itself, albeit in the status as a planet whose violent destruction illustrates mankind's hubris. Further, it doesn't stand in the relationship of "monster to victim," as Wonderland does to Alice. Rather, the Destroyed Earth itself is a victim, and therefore aligns more closely with the concept of the demihero.


Elsewhere I've written that it's almost impossible for a place to be a heroic entity, but the closest I've been able to find-- albeit without readily-available illustrations-- is a Gardner Fox story from STRANGE ADVENTURES #109 (1959), more easily found in reprint form in FROM BEYOND THE UNKNOWN #24 (1973) . Whereas the Feldstein story is rife with moral preachment, the Fox story-- "Secret of the Tick-Tock World"--  is an almost ludicrous example of the sort of "gimmick-oriented" story published by DC Comics in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"Tick-Tock" is the second in a series called "Space Museum." Each story, to the best of my knowledge, began with a father and his young son visiting their local museum in a generic space-opera future. The boy would inquire about some relic, and the father would tell a stirring story associated with the relic.

In this case, the relic is a simple, regularly-ticking Earth-watch. (It will surprise no one that Fox did not anticipate the digital revolution.) The watch was worn by an Earth-astronaut as he departed home in a spaceship equipped with a faster-than-light drive. The astronaut makes it to another solar system, where he finds a succession of planets that reproduce exactly different time-periods that parallel those on the single planet Earth--an idea probably borrowed from E.R. Burroughs' Caspak trilogy, in which a prehistoric land reproduced different evolutionary eras within the same terrain.

Once the Earthman reaches a planet that approximates the Earth of his time, he descends to talk turkey with the natives. He learns that the planet is threatened by an energy-burst that has already destroyed other worlds in the system. The Earthman, showing boundless faith in exact historical parallelism, jumps to the conclusion that the same destructive phenomenon once menaced Earth, but some mysterious something kept said phenomenon from dooming Earth.

Without regurgitating the story in depth, the Earthman figures out that the "something" were Earth's watches, whose regular ticking somehow drove the destruction away. Therefore, on the Earthman's advice, the planet's population mass-produces Earth-style watches-- and so they transform their planet into a "tick-tock world" that banishes the evil energy-phenomenon.

From the viewpoint of verisimilitude. "Tick-Tock" is a very silly story. However, despite its overarching silliness, it is in one sense more deeply mythical than "Destruction of Earth." Fox knew a great deal about primitive traditions, and surely knew that in some cultures a mundane activity is given soteriological status-- a trope also seen in the mythic tale trope that declares that Nordic peoples should always be careful paring their nails, lest the toss-offs be used in constructing the doom-ship Naglfar.

Again, though one might argue that the Earth-astronaut plays an active role in the story, he really is not the story's focus. Its focus is the spectacle of an entire world resounding with titanic "tick-tock" sounds, by which planetary doom is averted. This trope loosely aligns the "Tick-Tock World" with the agon of the heroic figure, though I would hesitate to classify this particular focal presence as a "hero."

PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS

In ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS, my extended contemplation of my trope "exotic lands and customs," I wrote:

For a time I flirted with the notion that maybe the "jungle-adventure" film was unique in offering so many uncanny versions of its cultures, both real and imagined. Westerns, for example, are full of real and imagined "exotic" Native American cultures, but the majority are almost always naturalistic.

I've read very few western prose stories, so I'm far from an expert on that subject. But I've viewed a few hundred western films, and most of them, in my opinion, regularly take the same elements that are usually "uncanny" in jungle-stories and render them as "naturalistic."  In this essay I mentioned that the original Zorro story from 1919, "The Curse of Capistrano," was an exception to this rule, and I'm sure that there have been various others in all media. But my recent reading of an avowed prose western classic, Zane Grey's 1912 RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, gives me an example of how westerns more often than not use tropes with uncanny potential in a thoroughly naturalistic manner.

I've mentioned before that a character's wearing of a concealing mask is not enough to confer an uncanny phenomenality-- that of the trope I term "outre outfits, skills and devices"-- upon a narrative.  RIDERS makes an excellent counter-example to figures like Zorro and the Durango Kid, in that the Grey novel also contains a "masked rider," and not just in the context of a commonplace holdup artist.  About a third of the way through the novel, Bern Venters-- a young hero who occupied a sort of "B-plot" next to the primary tale of hero Lassiter and his romantic partner Jane Withersteen-- encounters a masked rustler. Because no other rustlers go masked, the locals have dubbed this figure "Oldring's Masked Rider"-- that is, a member of a rustling-gang bossed by their leader, an owlhoot named Oldring. Venters comes across the masked rider and another rustler, whereupon the unnamed fellow tries to shoot Venters. Venters slaps lead, killing the second rustler but only wounding the masked rider-- whom he soon discovers is actually a female who has been passing herself off as a male bandit. Venters nurses the young woman back to health, and eventually learns that the woman, Bess by name, was explicitly masked so that no outsider to the gang would know that she was female.

This employment of a "masked rider" trope is thus entirely functional.  Bess wears a mask not to create an attitude of awe, as Zorro and the Durango Kid do, but only to camouflage her gender. (Since she is not known by any locals save the rustlers, the mask doesn't even serve to conceal her identity.)

RIDERS comes slightly closer to the domain of the uncanny in its creation of Surprise Valley. This valley is imbued with slight overtones of the Garden of Eden, particularly since it's the place where Venters nurses Bess and where they mutually fall in love, though neither ends up staying in the valley.  The entrance to Grey's Eden is metaphorically guarded not by an angel with a whirling sword, but Balancing Rock, a gigantic stone that nature has positioned at the valley's only passageway to the outside world. But though Balancing Rock serves an important role in the novel's conclusion of the Lassiter-Jane plot, it is not given any uncanny phenomenality whatsoever.

However, inside one of the valley's multitudinous rock formations is a cave-aperture which makes a bell-like sound when the wind rushes through it. Bess tells Venters that the superstitious rustlers call the sound "Oldring's Knell," claiming that it will sound when their boss Oldring meets his maker.  Under the right circumstances, this geographical peculiarity could assume an uncanny phenomenality. In Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Allan Quatermain's voyage to exotic Kukuanaland is presaged by his expedition's encounter with a pair of peaks called "Sheba's Breasts:"

These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman's breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. 

Or, on a much less ambitious note, another wind-produced sound lends an uncanny tenor to the B-western RIDERS OF THE WHISTLING SKULL.

But Zane Grey, though he has created the opportunity for a spooky moment-- say, of having the wind create its "knell" through the caves just as the rustler Oldring perishes-- the author does not follow up on this narrative opportunity. Oldring does die in the novel, but he perishes in town, far from Surprise Valley. Thus I would conclude that the only reason Grey creates the Knell is a purely functional one: he wants to prepare readers for the inevitability of Oldring's death, just as the author uses a "masked rider" purely to conceal the gender-identity of the character Bess.

In closing I'll note that I'm using my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality" in a different manner than I did in A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY. In that essay I said that a stereotype was merely functional because, unlike an archetype, it was a simple variable that could not garner more than very limited associations. This essay was concerned with the symbolic complexity extrinsic to narratives, not the intrinsic factors that determine a narrative's phenomenality.  When speaking of phenomenality, functionality applies rather to the idea of pure materialistic causality, in which every effect has but one cause, and so on, while "super-functionality" applies rather to the ways in which the phenomenalities of the uncanny and marvelous ally themselves to principles that oppose pure causality, i.e. "anti-intelligibility" and "anti-coherence."

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

In POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2 I gave some examples of ways in which some of my "ten tropes" could indicate uncanny phenomenality based on whether their subjects-- astounding animals, outre heroes, etc-- "seemed like" they possessed greater potency than similar entities of a naturalistic phenomenality. Within my system this means that they have effectively exceeded the intelligibility aspect of causality. I did not explore each of the ten tropes in the light of this formulation. However, one of the tropes, "exotic lands and customs," merits special consideration because it deals not with entities but with environments.

Of the films thus far examined on my blog, the majority of "exotic lands and customs" narratives have fallen into the genre of the "jungle-adventure film." In my review of TARZAN THE TIGER, the first film I analyzed for this trope, I wrote:

"Exotic lands and customs" applies to the fantasized jungle-setting in which the Tarzan films take place, and this trope alone would be enough to label certain jungle-films as metaphenomenal, even if they lacked the presence of a mostly-naked hero raised by apes.

Now, the question might arise: what sets aside these "fantasized jungle-settings" from others that also might be deemed "exotic," at least on the naturalistic terms of a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC mentality. It's one thing to say that an entirely made-up society, like that of Tarzan's Opar, should be deemed "exotic" in an uncanny manner. Yet I've also made that claim with respect to real-world cultures like that of the African Masai tribe, who make an appearance in BOMBA THE JUNGLE BOY. In theoretical terms, what would separate the Masai in this BOMBA flick from the Masai in a naturalistic romance-drama like 2005's THE WHITE MASAI. 

Again, the answer is that though both tribes do not exceed "causal coherence," the latter seems entirely intelligible, while the former *seems like* it is unintelligible.  From a naturalistic NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC perspective, the exotic nature of the Masai, with their famous lion-hunting rituals, is merely a curiosity that exists on the same plane as any other culture's customs. But even as mediocre as BOMBA's treatment of the real-life tribe may be, the film's intent is to make the Masai seem like something exceptional, even "magical," at least on the terms of "the uncanny."

For a time I flirted with the notion that maybe the "jungle-adventure" film was unique in offering so many uncanny versions of its cultures, both real and imagined. Westerns, for example, are full of real and imagined "exotic" Native American cultures, but the majority are almost always naturalistic.

However, I've recently come to certain new conclusions thanks to my meditations on the many ways in which "exotic lands and customs" evolve from the intermingling of entities or historical occurrences that produce "uncanny" narratives, such as THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, 300, THOR AND THE AMAZON WOMEN, YEAR ONE, RED DAWN, and SON OF SINBAD. What all of these films-- and the jungle-adventure stories as well-- have in common is the transposition of "things that do not belong" within a milieu that the viewer is expected to believe should be unitary; governed only by "things that belong together."  As I argued in my recent SON OF SINBAD review, these jumbles are not just textual errors by writers who did not know any better: they are intended to create a specific effect that I have labeled through terms like "anti-intelligibility" and "the uncanny."  This is not to say that there are not real historical or sociological errors that are made through pure carelessness, just that not all errors are made for the same reasons.