COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in these terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 3

 I began devoting lots of space to literary crossovers in 2021, but I don't think that concentration appreciably changed the narratological project with which this blog began. I'm sure I would have conceived something along the lines of my "Primes and Subs" distinction, but the crossover-factor allowed me a perspective one may not find in a lot of other lit-crit circles-- certainly not those I have dubbed "the ideological critics." Thus, in the first COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I asserted that the term interordination, more than Julia Kristeva's better-known "intertextuality," best described my definition of narrative:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

However, I've become aware of a shortcoming in my explication of interordination with respect to how it plays out in the two main forms of fiction: "serials" and "monads." Prior to 2022 I'd written a great deal about the nature of serials, but not much about that of monads until THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Now I'll try for a more synoptic view of both monads and serials with respect to interordination.

In DANCE I only defined monads as "stand-alone works," but this needs finessing. The purest example of a monadic fictional work is one in which every icon in the story, both Prime and Sub, is entirely fictional, whether one is dealing with a short work like London's "To Build a Fire" or a long work like Dickens' OLIVER TWIST. I make this specification only because along such "pure works" exist "impure monadic works" in which one or more icons, whether Primes or Subs, have some existence outside the stand-alone work. Such icons fall into three categories:

Historical figures, like Louis XI in Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.      

Legendary figures that may have no firm grounding in history (such as Joaquin Murrieta) or who have been transmuted, by fictional treatment, into figures more of legend than of history (such as King Arthur and Jack the Ripper).

Fictional figures not created by the author(s) of the monadic work, such as the appearance of a character implied to be James Bond in the TV-movie RETURN OF THE MAN FROM UNCLE.  

As I've established elsewhere, works in the latter two categories may be crossover-works, while works in the first category will not be, since purely historical figures lack a purely fictional nature. But all stand-alone works can only be valued in terms of what I call "qualitative escalation," which is the process by which critics and their culture distinguish important works from non-important works. I commented in EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad.

The same essay also specifies how serial works can be analyzed for their durability, or lack of same, in terms of either qualitative or quantitative escalation, but only when the serial actually produces two or more works. A work that is intended to spawn further serial stories, but does not do so-- say, a pilot-film for a never-realized teleseries-- defaults to monad-status.    

Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in these terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives.  

 

    

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of qualitative durability.      

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

 In Part 3 of this essay-series, I asserted that the characters Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne were better defined through their collective statures, as members of the Avengers team, than through whatever individual stature they had accrued in their original stint as the bonded ensemble they comprised in the original "Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp" feature. This statement went in contradiction to the more general rule that when members of either inclusive or semi-inclusive ensembles had sustained their own features, as did other Avengers like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, then their individual stature was of paramount importance.                                                                                 

 Now, inclusive teams need not always be as expansive as the Avengers, for there have also been inclusive teams where publishers united just two heroes under the same banner. The best-known is that of the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, but though this pairing became famous, the two heroes not only retained their individual stature from prior to the shared banner, they enjoyed individual serials afterward that added to their stature in both the quantitative and qualitative senses. But with some characters, it's hard to judge whether their individual or collective stature is greater in isolation or in tandem-- and such is the case with Power Man and Iron Fist.                                                                                                     

 As individual features, both Power Man and Iron Fist lasted somewhere between two and three years before both were threatened with cancellation. Aside from a few stories written by Don McGregor, almost all of the Power Man stories are at best just adequate formula, though still better than most of the tales in the oeuvre of the "Giant-Man/Wasp" feature.                                              

Iron Fist's solo career was roughly the same, though the character's title benefited from work by Chris Claremont and John Byrne during their salad days, including the debut of the villainous Saber-Tooth, who eventually became a major X-Men adversary. Presumably the two creators enjoyed Iron Fist enough to pitch the idea of merging his failing book with Power Man's failing book. However, Byrne was gone after the debut issue, and Claremont only stayed a few more issues. However, in issue #56 the title's assistant editor Mary Jo Duffy took over as writer and kept the title going for another three years. Though the title lasted until #125 (1986), my general impression is that the Duffy years made the team most viable and produced the most memorable stories-- although most of these, too, were also just adequate formula, like the stories in the individual titles. I cannot claim, as I did with my examples of Pym and Van Dyne, that the collective stature of Power Man or Iron Fist in their ensemble excelled whatever individual stature they had in their individual-focused features.                                           

   Further, after the original POWER MAN AND IRON FIST was cancelled in 1986, the two characters continued to appear in both solo-featured serials and in revivals of their ensemble. My scant impression is that most of these manifestations were of even less consequence than the most meretricious junk from the earlier runs. However, there is one aspect of the Luke Cage-Danny Rand ensemble that makes their collective status more significant than that of their individual adventures-- and that is the idea of taking these two exemplars of Marvel Comics responding to 1970s cultural trends-- blaxploitation for Cage, martial arts for Rand-- and creating an ensemble in which those cultural aspects played off one another in a salt-and-pepper combination. The "Netflix Marvel" serials built some of their concepts around that ensemble, and while I don't view those tv shows as supervening the comics themselves, they do at least verify that non-comics professionals found the ensemble-idea appealing for their narratives. I suppose I would have to say that the ideal of that combination, even if it has never quite been fully realized by any single story or group of stories, makes me feel that the ensemble of Cage-and-Rand gives both of them more stature collectively than they have ever possessed individually. Unless there are tons of great individual Power Man or Iron Fist stories of which I'm unaware, I would tend to say that they form a bonded ensemble, in contrast to the semi-bonded one seen in the short-lived GREEN LANTERN-GREEN ARROW feature.  

FINE-TUNING DURABILITY AND DURATION

 ...not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative icons within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture. -- A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1.

Since typing the first part of this five-part essay series, I said very little about my use of the offhand term "durability." The other essays, however, generally imply that I judged the highness or lowness of icons' stature or charisma on the basis of quantitative escalation-- though I would only adapt that earlier term a few weeks later in December of 2021. For instance, in Part 2, I noted that the Golden Age character of Miss Victory had transferred her stature from a solo feature to that of the ensemble of the Bronze Age title FEMFORCE:

Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

In contrast, in Part 3 I noted that The Blue Diamond was an example of a character who didn't accrue much stature, having had only two starring appearances. Also, the character of Magik, prior to joining the New Mutants ensemble, didn't get much stature by virtue of appearing in one four-issue mini-series.

In Part 4, I noted that I might not assign High Charisma to a villain-interaction between Joker and Catwoman, who'd only just been created, but that I definitely would in the first crossover of Joker and Penguin, who by the time of their meeting in 1944 had already logged in several appearances as Bat-foes.

And in Part 5, I gave examples of two narratives-- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC-- in which numerous Primes function as little more than background-characters to the featured Primes.

Now, all of the above examples depend on an idea of "duration," of how much narrative time a given icon has enjoyed as either a Prime or a Sub, either within a single narrative or in a series of linked narratives. This form of duration I henceforth subsume under the general concept of durability.   

Then, a week or two later, I wrote ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, in which I formulated a term for the type of escalation depending on an icon's duration: Quantitative Escalation. But I also specified that another type of escalation could also take place with respect to a narrative assuming the nature of a cultural touchstone, as per the example of Walter Scott's IVANHOE, which was a single work with no additional installments. About a year and a half later, I would show in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PART 3 that qualitative vectors could also influence serial narratives: specifically, as to whether the characters of "Giant Man and the Wasp" were qualitatively more important in their AVENGERS appearances than in their solo feature.

So, though I did not see the distinction in 2021, the "durability" I was describing took two distinct forms:

Narrative Durability relates to how much time an icon occupies within a story, or series of stories.

Significant Durability relates to how much time an icon accrues in literary history, thanks to whatever the icon does or doesn't do that some sizable audience imbues with significance.

A further elaboration is that in some narratives, though a crossover between stature-icons may be relatively short within a story, that crossover can accrues greater significance because of its impact upon the audience. The crossover between Ivanhoe and the pre-existing icon of Robin Hood lasts only a few chapters in Scott's narrative. Yet even if the icons' time together has little Narrative Durability, their crossover possesses Significant Durability because Scott managed to relate his newly created hero to the ideals of the Lord of Sherwood, in such a way that many readers found that part of the story significant. 

The same significance applies to works outside the sphere of canonical literature. In the 1918 book THE GOLDEN SCORPION, Sax Rohmer pits his established detective Gaston Max against a new villain, The Scorpion. Only on a few pages does Rohmer establish that the new villain belongs to Fu Manchu's Si-Fan, and on one of those pages a witness describes an encounter between The Scorpion and his master, though the latter is not explicitly named. Since the Scorpion never appears again, and thus lacks Narrative Durability, the novel cannot be termed a villain-crossover. However, the established figures of Gaston Max and Fu Manchu sustain the crossover-vibe between their universes, even though the two of them never meet. And Significant Durability applies solely because the SCORPION narrative was an important development in the history of the touchstone character of Fu Manchu. But there was no such Significant Durability for Gaston Max, given that he faded from prominence and never, like Fu, became a cultural touchstone.

 

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 3

 As I reviewed the original INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE, I decided that I had been too vague in giving my reasons for stating that a particular pair of icons had transitioned from being defined by "individual stature" to "collective stature."

In that essay, I stated:

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

I did not give any reasons for saying why I believed the Wasp and the former Ant-Man/Giant-Man had, by their appearances in the AVENGERS title,"excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series." I didn't make it a matter of the sheer number of the two icons' appearances in AVENGERS as opposed to their own feature, though one might construe as much. If so, that would relate to my established principle of Quantitative Escalation.

However, my intent as I recall it was that the appearances of the two icons was of greater qualitative consequence than their appearances in their own feature. This distinction relates, rather, to the principle of Qualitative Escalation, first mentioned in ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2.

There, too, my earlier statements require expansion. A quantitative assessments requires little explanation; it only signifies, "how many times did a serial icon appear in distinct narratives?" But I possibly should have expanded on my definition of "qualitative," though I've made clear, throughout many other posts, that I believe that "literary quality" always inheres in an author's mastery of one or more of the four potentialities. 

If the corpus of stories that starred Giant-Man and the Wasp had shown mastery of one of the potentialities, then I might consider that that corpus was a qualitative success, even if the series failed to catch on with readers and become successful. But on the whole, the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN serial was marked by generally inferior art and writing in comparison with the other Marvel serials of the period. 

In contrast, though there were some subpar AVENGERS stories following the re-entry of Goliath and the Wasp, the overall level of quality was much higher in all four of the potentialities (even there wasn't much more *didactic* appeal in AVENGERS than there had been in ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN). 

For instance, if I choose to focus upon "the creation of new villain-icons" as an indicator of a superhero serial's mythopoeic potentiality, then most of the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN villains barely stir one's memory, except for The Egghead and The Whirlwind.  (And they, like their enemies, generally got better stories when they made appearances in AVENGERS.) In contrast, the AVENGERS feature, even confined only to the first period in which Goliath and the Wasp were members, boasted characters like Ultron and the Grim Reaper, both of whom generated far more consequential narratives for the evolving Marvel mythology. And writer Roy Thomas was certainly at his most inventive in terms of extending parts of the mythology that he did not invent, as with the Kree-Skrull War.

Therefore, Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne benefit from their association with the better stories of AVENGERS, as opposed to those of their own feature, and "qualitatively" their Collective Stature supervenes their Individual Stature. And of course, this is also true given that these two icons made many more appearances in AVENGERS in the ensuing decades, and remain best known to comics-fans as members of that team, not as solo acts. Even stories that may be dramatically bad, like "Henry Pym, Wife Beater," have become inextricable to the cosmos now designated as "Earth-616" in a limited mythopoeic sense.

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 1

The main reason I devoted time to sussing out "the two escalations" was because the earlier-conceived term bears on my also sussing out the quantitative form of "conflict-escalation" with respect to the long neglected topic of fictional sadism. To be sure, this line of thought was generated when I began thinking about how the quantitative form of "stature-escalation" depended on duration, and this led me to think about duration's influence upon a particular type of conflict-escalation.

My most concentrated observations on sadism were made in essays like POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, aimed at disproving the simplistic attempts of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman to define all forms of fictional violence as "sadism." In the same month I also observed, in SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND, that the majority of audience-members are not vulnerable to becoming syndromic sadists just because they get a little jazzed reading about some criminal going on a crime-spree, which was another piece of nonsense from Wertham and Legman.

But while all forms of violence are not reducible to sadism, sadism and its "opposite number" masochism (which will have to wait for later discussion) have their own respective dynamics. 

Sadism, as previously related, is the ethical opposite of combat. Combat almost always involves two or more subjects in contention, where all have some ability for self-defense. Sadism depends upon one subject wielding control over the other subject and imparting physical (and sometimes emotional) violence upon the latter. I distinguish four patterns of fictional sadism. Two categories are the newly minted "prolongation" and "repetition," which are further subdivided (at the risk of inducing terminological overload) by my earlier categories of "the exothelic and the endothelic."

ENDOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- This type of scenario largely focuses upon one sadism-victim, or a group of victims, suffering prolonged acts of sadism, whether it's just one repeated scenario or an assortment of assaults. In fiction one of the most famous scenarios is that of Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," in which an unnamed prisoner must endure the agonies of the titular horrors, without his even interacting with the sadistic authors of his predicament.

ENDOTHELIC REPETITION-- Repetition, in contrast to prolongation, often depicts several independent scenarios separated by assorted time-frames. One of the most famous victims of repeated sadism appears in Sade's JUSTINE. Toward the end of the book the afflicted heroine provides a long chronicle of the many persons who have tormented her just for the hell of it, a list which apparently includes whatever God rules her world. Just a partial list:

During my childhood I meet a usurer; he seeks to induce me to commit a theft, I refuse, he becomes rich. I fall amongst a band of thieves, I escape from -hem with a man whose life I save; by way of thanks, he rapes me. I reach the property of an aristocratic debauchee who has me set upon and devoured by his dogs for not having wanted to poison his aunt. From there I go to the home of a murderous and incestuous surgeon whom I strive to spare from doing a horrible deed: the butcher brands me for a criminal; he doubtless consummates his atrocities, makes his fortune, whilst I am obliged to beg for my bread. I wish to have the sacraments made available to me, I wish fervently to implore the Supreme Being whence howbeit I receive so many ills, and the august tribunal, at which I hope to find purification in our most holy mysteries, becomes the blcody theater of my ignominy: the monster who abuses and pluncers me is elevated to his order’s highest honors and I fall back into the appalling abyss of misery.

As "endothelic" describes centric icons with whose will the reader is expected to sympathize, "exothelic" describes centric icons who ought to inspire antipathy.

EXOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- Whereas the unnamed narrator of "Pit" is the sufferer, the narrator of Poe's "The Cask of Amontilado," one Montresor, shows the slow and careful progress of Montresor's plan to trap his perceived enemy Fortunato into a death-trap; that of being confined behind a wall of bricks in a catacombs, where Fortunato will, and does, suffer a lingering demise.

EXOTHELIC REPETITION-- And, to maintain parallelism, my selection here also comes from Sade, who followed up JUSTINE with JULIETTE. The latter book takes the point of Justine's sister Juliette, who prospers despite visiting pain and death on innumerable victims, the most notable of which I discussed in this essay. 

More variations to come in Part 2.

TWO ESCALATIONS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

I've used my own term "escalation" twice on this blog for separate literary operations, though with the sense that they do connect up in a general sense. In 2012's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION I said:

Though I specified in NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT 2 that narrative conflict did not require literal violence, narrative violence does have a potential, beyond that of any other literary device, for escalating the immediacy of the conflict.  Even the kinetic appeal of sex—so earnestly defended by Legman above—cannot match violence in terms of fomenting the narrative principle of escalation. 

So "escalation" in this sense refers to the way in which narrative conflict is increased when violent threats are made or carried out in a repeated fashion, in order to better engross an audience in the resolution of said conflict.

Then in 2021's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, I shifted the term's use "with respect to the concepts of high and low forms of both stature and charisma." I began by distinguishing two types of escalation, quantitative (which has a direct parallel to the quantitative uses of narrative violence in the previous formulation) and qualitative. My main criterion for the latter was that of a work, or a series of works, becoming a "cultural touchstone." A more precise way of wording this would be to specify that the only works that become cultural touchstones are those that realize concrescence in one or more of the four potentialities. Though I didn't consider the idea at the time of writing Part 1, I'll now state that there is also a qualitative form of "conflict-escalation," and that this is identical with the term I styled "variety." 

I articulate this distinction in order to focus upon the quantitative aspects of both forms. Within a given text, narrative conflict is enhanced by repetition of a threat even if the text manifests an extremely low level of concrescence-- for example, one of the worst slashers of the 1980s, TO ALL A GOODNIGHT. But levels of stature and charisma do not multiply within one text; only in a series of texts with icons in common. In ESCALATION 2 I mentioned two characters, Miss Victory and Magik, whose levels of individual stature were low because they simply hadn't starred in many serial stories as solo characters-- but who went on to accrue greater collective stature once they became members of comparatively more popular teams, respectively "Femforce" and "The New Mutants." In a separate post I mentioned that despite the fact that Marvel's Ant-Man/Giant-Man had enjoyed a solo series for a couple of years, and was better known to contemporary readers than either of my other two examples, over the next sixty years he also became better known for his participation as an Avenger, and thus his fictive career was dominated by collective rather than individual stature.

In yet another 2012 essay, GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4, I set down two significant values that should serve to explicate these two functions of escalation. 

One significant value I termed "conviction," which I aligned with the reader's generally subconscious sussing out as to how much emotion, and of what type, he should invest in a text. Conflict-escalation within a text is one technique used to stoke a reader's identification with fictional concerns, though clearly there are very types of conviction involved between, say, a slasher in which a killer knocks off several victims, and a Roadrunner cartoon in which the Coyote suffers one injury after another until the story reaches some usually arbitrary conclusion. Though I didn't continue using the term "conviction" on a regular basis, I've never contradicted this 2012 formulation, and I may find new ways to better incorporate this formulation in future.

In contrast, I've devoted several thousand words to centricity, and the entire formulation of stature/charisma is dependent on showing how this or that icon has the greatest resonance while the other icons in the narrative are of a lesser narrative order. So escalation that comes about due to an icon having appeared a few times, or many many times, is entirely congruent with all of my writings on centricity.

And all of these terminological ruminations will tie into an essay intended for tomorrow.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 3

 In ICONIC BONDING PT. 1 I formulated three types of bonded ensembles using the Dick Grayson Robin as an example of a character who had participated in all three, to wit:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

In all of these examples, Robin is a superordinate icon, as are the majority of fictional heroes. In contrast, most fictional villains function as subordinate icons. So when villains appear in ensembles, they usually do not possess the quality of stature, only charisma. But this charisma-action also manifests in line with the three models seen above.

"Unbonded ensembles" would be any sort of short-term teams, or teamups that prove loose at best over time. For instance, there have been many gatherings of Bat-villains in the Bat-verse, ranging from RESURRECTION NIGHT to HUSH. No reader expects these peripatetic assemblages to have any durative value. The same applies to teamups that may last a few issues before dissolving, such as the alliance of Daredevil's foes the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. However, in the above cases the charisma-crossover action depends on the fact that the villains have been previously established. So when both the Enforcers and their boss the Big Man first appear in SPIDER-MAN #10, they had no crossover-charisma because they had no previous iterations. Further, their ensemble expires with that issue, for the Big Man never returns. When the Enforcers make their second appearance, which is also the first appearance of the Green Goblin, the "familiarity" of the Enforcers sustains a "proto-crossover" with the "novelty" of the Goblin, but only because the Goblin himself will go on to future appearances.

"Semi-bonded ensembles" are those that have some impressive duration, even when the icons aren't joined at the hip. I've written a couple of times about how Stan Lee took two THOR villains who no longer fit that feature, the Cobra and Mister Hyde, and made them a semi-regular team. However, even in the period when the two malcontents were most often allied, one would occasionally appeared independently of the other, or in alliance with some other super-fiend. In the 1980s Cobra severed his alliance with Hyde and his short-lived 1970s group of serpent-themed villains, the Serpent Squad, became reworked by later hands into the Serpent Society. I can't speak about Cobra's status in current Marvel comics, but up until the end of the 20th century he became much more prominent as the member of the Society than he was as a solo player, or as the partner to Mister Hyde.

"Bonded ensembles" are those in which the durative value is even more noteworthy, and may involve qualitative escalation as well as the quantitative kind. The Enchantress and the Executioner appeared together in their first appearance, and tended to appear together more often than not, with a slightly different angle: that the Executioner desired Enchantress as a bed-partner. There's a hint that this finally came to pass in a 1970 AVENGERS story, and future stories built on that development. None of the THOR stories in which Enchantress and Executioner are the only villains are charisma-crossovers, any more than Batman and Robin are stature-crossovers when they're the only heroes in a given story. And if the renegade Asgardians appear together in a non-aligned feature like THE HULK, it's not any more a charisma-crossover than Greenskin squaring off against a single non-aligned villain like Maximus the Mad.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there, any more than Sergeant Rock being separate from the grunts under his command. An exception was the Apokolips-Lord's brief role as the organizer of the first "Secret Society of Super Villains." But even there, the charisma-crossover would be between (a) Darkseid and any minions, such as the pictured Kalibak, and (b) the Secret Society as a whole, which functions as a semi-inclusive team. 

Heroes and villains may be the only two of the four personas that regularly appear in all these configurations. Even I, the author of said personas, will probably not bother trying to suss out if my models to apply to the other two, the "monster" and the "demihero."

 

QUICK CROSSOVER CORRECTION

 In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I wrote:

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

At the time I wrote these words in 2021, I hadn't yet formulated the linked terms of "novelty and familiarity," first seen in slightly different form in 2022's THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Once I had made this formulation, the description of Qualitative Escalation became strained. Yes, Ivanhoe became a "cultural touchstone" despite the fact that in his original medium he enjoyed only one story, and possibly would have become just as "escalated" had Scott not included the subplot of Ivanhoe's crossover with Robin Hood. But if I truly restricted Qualitative Escalation only to famous works, then it would be impossible for me to term the minor Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS in the ranks of crossovers, because its hero only enjoys one appearance but never becomes a touchstone of any kind.

So I will revise the exclusionary terms of my criteria for Qualitative Escalation. I was seeking in that criteria to come up with a form of "durability" to parallel that of the Quantitative type. But an icon's assumption of the stature of superordination, whether that icon appears just once or not, is de facto a Qualitative Escalation in comparison to all the subordinate icons within the text. So Tan Hadron, though never able to match Ivanhoe in any other way, does possess the same superordinate status.

This does not apply, however, to "back-door pilots," episodes of regular serials (usually but not always television shows) which attempt to launch new serials. A few such pilots may take over almost the whole run-time of a given episode, so that the pilot-characters can amass more time onscreen than the regular serial-icons. Nevertheless, such pilot episodes are still under the aegis of the ongoing serial's main characters, and if said episodes do not generate even one independent monad, and are not adapted from previous narratives, then the characters have no crossover-mana whatever. One comic-book example of this practice are the three issues of Marvel's INVADERS, in which Roy Thomas created the "Kid Commandos" team in order to hustle the sidekick characters out of the title. In this essay I expressed the notion that I might regard that team as an "adjunct" to the regular superordinate icons, but I now reject that line of thought to be consistent with my statements on other forms of "pilots" that go nowhere.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 2

My entire formulation of bonded ensembles is oriented upon trying to discern which subordinate icons are, or are not, bonded to which superordinate icons in terms of alignment.

Here's my first statement on the ways in which a given subordinate icon, in particular a famous villain, is aligned with a given superordinate icon:

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe.

Now, I said "often" because there have been times that a subordinate icon (I may as well say "villain" for the rest of the essay, since that's the only icon I'll address here) is introduced under the mantle of a given "hero," but the latter has not yet been aligned with a strong superordinate icon, Thus Thanos first appears in an issue of Iron Man, alongside a heroic subordinate icon (Drax the Destroyer), but Thanos is in a "floating alignment" until he's aligned with Captain Mar-Vell.

I've established so far that if the Joker had appeared in a Batman story before Batman teamed with Dick Grayson Robin, Joker would still be aligned with Grayson-Robin, but that no Bat-foe who meets Batman after the dissolution of the bonded ensemble is aligned with Grayson-Robin. But how does this theory apply to the next strongest form of ensemble, the "semi-bonded" ensemble?

Here, I will draw, as specified, upon the AVENGERS title as an example of a semi-bonded ensemble. 

In the earliest AVENGERS stories, all members of the team had their own features. In AVENGERS #6, Baron Zemo, making his first appearance, brings together three villains from each of three heroes' features: the Black Knight from GIANT-MAN, the Melter from IRON MAN, and the Radioactive Man from THOR. As soon as these established villains appeared fighting heroes with whom they were not aligned, this resulted in a charisma-crossover.

However, the reverse is true when a villain introduced as a foe to the Avengers-team fights one Avenger, because by fighting one Avenger, he has in essence declared war upon them all.

So when the Living Laser debuts, he's obviously aligned with all of the Avengers he fights.

But say for argument's sake the Laser never fights the Avenger Iron Man within the sphere of the AVENGERS feature, but that his first one-on-one encounter with the Armored Avenger takes place in the first of two Iron Man stories I analyzed here. This would not be a charisma-crossover, because of the ensemble-bond between Iron Man and the other Avengers. I will leave open the question of whether this bond extends to Avengers who have very limited stints as Avengers, though. Spider-Man was an Avenger for a time, but his time in the group was so short that this membership did not become a major part of his mythos. Thus in his case the Laser fighting Spider-Man in the latter's solo feature probably would qualify as a charisma-crossover, because the bond between Spider-Man and the Avengers is so transitory.

Short-lived team memberships characterize the last form of ensemble discussed, the unbonded ensemble. In addition to the example of a short-lived membership in a greater group, this applies also to such phenomena as "rotating teamups" (such as THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD) and to short-lived partnerships. For instance, for about two years the CAPTAIN AMERICA feature was transformed into CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON, but the escalation factor was not sufficient to create a bonded ensemble. Therefore the Falcon is in alignment only with those Cap-villains he encounters, but not any villains before or after the limited partnership.

Rotating teamups have a similar impermanence, but they incorporate a different alignment-dynamic. I've stated earlier that when the Second Molecule Man debuted in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, wherein he fights the temporary team of The Thing and The Man-Thing, the villain became equally aligned with both icons, despite his father's association with the Fantastic Four. But if one of the temp-team's villains has fought one of the two hero-icons, that villain remains in alignment with the hero with whom he (or she) has been previously acquainted. The above seen villain Blackstarr first appeared as a Supergirl villain. Then said villain appears later in a DC COMICS PRESENTS teaming up Supergirl and her cousin Superman, and thus there is a charisma-crossover there between Blackstarr and Superman. This crossover-over vibe would not exist, hwoever, if Superman were simply guest-starring in a Supergirl story wherein he and his cousin fought Blackstarr as the menace of the day, and both Blackstarr and Superman were subordinate icons within Supergirl's story.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 1

 So in GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN, I sketched out three types of "bonded ensembles" in which fictional icons could take part. Here I'll expand on those categories.

For all three, I used Robin the Boy Wonder as an exemplar of each ensemble-type, stating that:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

All of these bonds depend upon the principle of escalation, as described in the February 2023 essay INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2. Most of the time the categories of bonded ensembles are determined by quantitative escalation, that is, how often the characters in the ensemble have appeared together. It's not impossible that a bonded ensemble could result from qualitative escalation, which is what determines the crossover-status of Walter Scott's IVANHOE At present no examples of bonded ensembles stemming from qualitative escalation occur to me. 

In addition, I asserted that the Barbara Gordon Batgirl participated in two separate configurations. 

In the comics, Batgirl was independent of the Batman-Robin team, so that her peripatetic guest-star appearances, both before and after she graduated to her own stature-series, so she was not in any ensemble at all, except for the brief unbonded ensemble she formed with Robin in the BATMAN FAMILY magazine. (This ensemble was not even constant for the run of the title, since some issues featured the two heroes enjoying separate adventures.)

However, when the television version of her character was created for the third season of BATMAN, she formed a fully bonded ensemble with both Batman and Robin for the duration of that season. 

Roughly thirty years from her debut, though, Barbara Gordon, in her new incarnation as Oracle, formed an ongoing "semi-inclusive ensemble" with Black Canary in the first BIRDS OF PREY tryout. As Batgirl she had enjoyed her own series, and the Canary had received her first headliner series in 1992, if one chooses to ignore the Golden Age incarnation, with which the post-Crisis heroine was no longer coterminous. So theirs was a inclusive ensemble at first, as defined previously:

The Inclusive Ensemble is one in which the members of the team all originate in other features, and thus all of the starring characters have some degree of stature when they appear in the team feature, a stature independent of the ensemble feature.

However, over time the Birds team became more of a semi-inclusive team on the loose model of The Avengers, including some temporary members who no longer had their own features (The Dove from HAWK AND DOVE) or who debuted in the BOP feature, such as Misfit. Both versions of the team would still be "semi-bonded" given that there was some degree of stature-independence due to the continued presence of Barbara Gordon and Dinah Lance. 

And it's propitious that I mentioned The Avengers, because that will be one of my subjects in Part Two.

Incidentally, the essay-title ICONIC BONDING riffs on a scientific term for a form of quantum entanglement:

Ionic bonding is the complete transfer of valence electron(s) between atoms. It is a type of chemical bond that generates two oppositely charged ions.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2

In the previous post on this subject, I specified that whenever two or more icons with their own stature, a stature resulting from their appearances in featured serials, appeared together in Inclusive Ensembles, all such team-appearances would be crossovers. By contrast, though, when icons possessed a single or combined stature-icon and one or more charisma-icons-- that is, icons who had only been Subs in in the universe of a Prime icon-- only the first encounter of the stature-icon and the charisma-icon(s) would rate as a crossover. My example in the essay was that of an early Avengers ensemble, combining stature-icon Captain America with three charisma-types. Another example that I've cited in a previous essay is the title Femforce, which teamed a bunch of neophyte heroes with "Ms. Victory," a reworking of a forties heroine named "Miss Victory." 

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. 

One of the more convoluted ascents to Prime stature, though, is the "Barbara Gordon Batgirl." As a distaff version of Batman, she followed in the wake of two previous Sub Icons, the "Kathy Kane Batwoman" and the "Bette Kane Bargirl." There's no indication that either of these Bat-dames were considered for any sort of starring status. But although Batgirl Two debuted as a Sub as well, she had from the beginning a better shot at Prime stardom.

Barbara Gordon came into being thanks to the ABC BATMAN teleseries that lasted from Spring 1966 to Spring 1968. Sometime in 1966, ABC asked the editors at DC Comics to conceptualize some new female characters for the TV show to adapt. The show's writers particularly wanted to add a female crimefighter to aid the Dynamic Duo, and the result was that the second Batgirl appeared in DETECTIVE COMICS #359 (dated January 1967 but probably distributed at least two months previous). A few months later, Commissioner Gordon's daughter Barbara was mentioned in a BATMAN episode broadcast in March 1967, paving the way for ABC's version of the heroine to officially appear in September 1967.

For the next two years following Batgirl's first comic-book appearance, she made guest appearances in various BATMAN stories, as well as one in JUSTICE LEAGUE. However, while in comics she didn't immediately ascend to Prime status, in the BATMAN teleseries she was immediately a full member of the Bat-team. This ensemble I would judge to be Semi-Inclusive because in it Batman and Robin, though separate characters, functioned as a unit and thus as a "combined icon," while Batgirl was a new member inducted, however unofficially, into the ensemble. By the rules I advocated in the previous essay, only the first episode in which Batgirl became a regular Prime within the ensemble would be a crossover-episode.

The same basic principle applies to the cartoon series that quickly followed the demise of the live-action show. Although ADVENTURES OF BATMAN displayed some indebtedness to the West-Ward-Craig ensemble, Batgirl only appeared in 12 out of a total of 17 episodes. However, that's enough of a majority to make her at least a semi-regular rather than just a guest star, with the result that Batgirl's first episode on the cartoon, name of "The Joke's On Robin," counts as a crossover.

The year after the cartoon Batgirl started appearing on TV, comic-book Barbara Gordon received a long-term berth, starting in DETECTIVE COMICS #384 (1969). Thus, all of Batgirl Two's previous comics-appearances qualify as "proto-crossovers," and every time she guest-starred with another hero AFTER getting her own series, that was a crossover. This also includes the short-lived "Batgirl-and-Robin-Team" in BATMAN FAMILY, which became Gordon's first-- but not last-- Inclusive Ensemble.