MYTHCOMICS: “WHY DO WE DO THESE THINGS WE DO” (NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, 1986)

 

In this story—hitherto abbreviated as “Things”—the roster for the New Mutants included Mirage, Cannonball, Magma, Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Magik, Warlock and Cipher—though to be sure, the narrative strongly emphasizes the actions of the last two. A three-page prologue sets up the action when two of the villains of the LONGSHOT universe, Mojo and Spiral, capture Betsy Braddock, the blind-but-psychically-endowed sister of Captain Britain. (Mojo, by the way, is the first to bestow the name of “Psylocke” upon Betsy, foreshadowing the intent of either Claremont or his editors to bring the character into the Marvel mainstream.) “Things” then shifts to the New Mutants’ training academy. Doug Ramsey, a.k.a. Cipher, complains to his team-leader Mirage about the problem that most assails Marvel heroes: a discontent with their existential status. In Cipher’s case, he feels alienated not only by virtue of being a mutant, but also for being unable to talk to anyone about his experiences but his fellow mutants. Mirage counsels him to avoid self-pity and “make the best of things.”

Ironically, though the other mutants on the team have much more power than Doug, they appear to be more vulnerable than he to a psychic seduction via that most insidious seducer: the idiot box. Most of the New Mutants, as well as the younger siblings of Karma (who’s not in the story proper), are caught up in a TV-show called Wildways, starring Mojo, Spiral, and a brainwashed Betsy, now given the name of Psylocke. Over in England, though, Captain Britain recognizes his missing sister in the program and jets over to the former colonies to investigate, though he’s quickly nullified by an unseen foe.

For the New Mutants, life seems normal, though only the reader sees it when Mojo and Spiral manifest to young Sunspot and seduce him to enter Wildways, like a couple of extra-dimensional Pied Pipers.Then, in the midst of a mundane task, Cipher—who has learned how to wear the metamorphic Warlock as a suit if armor—accidentally kills Sunspot. Almost all of the young heroes mourn their loss, but Warlock points out to Cipher that the body is a fake, a “changeling” of sorts.

A shift to Mojo’s dimension shows that he’s also managed to kidnap Wolfsbane, three kids from the LONGSHOT series, and the two grade-school siblings of Karma. All were lured into the Mojoverse by the seductive Wildways program, and Mojo remakes all of them into hyper-sexualized adults, implicitly unleashing their own latent fantasies to serve the madman’s purpose. The two siblings, despite coming from Vietnam, take on a sort of “Siamese twin” image—albeit without being literally bound to each other—and are given the shared name of Template. When the New Mutants show up at the same site that Britain explored earlier, Mojo causes Psylocke to make the heroes quarrel with one another. The brainwashed pawns appear and rough up the good guys, after which Template, acting the part of a disappointed father and mother, also mindwipe most of the heroes into thinking they’re naughty children. Magma alone proves able to resist Template’s power, so Template regresses Magma into a literal child,

Warlock spirits his best friend Cipher away from the villains before the two of them can be suborned. Moments later they come across Captain Britain, also regressed to childhood, and half-brainwashed into thinking that he really is a rebellious child. Cipher has to give Britain the same “buck up and hang tough” speech that Mirage gave him earlier. Britain then rushes forth to rescue the fugitive Magma, and Cipher/Warliock invade Mojo’s sanctum to nullify Psylocke’s influence. Psylocke retaliates, drawing the two heroes into her psychc matrix. There Cipher must fight not only the mental defenss of Psylocke, but also the influence of Spiral, who has somehow bonded herself with Psylocke’s inner self. Cipher’s heroism gives Psylocke the power to disassociate herself from Spiral, though once again Spiral speaks the language of the seducer:

The Wildway offers wonders beyond comprehension, adventures beyond imagining, eternal youth and beauty, the fulfillment of every heart’s desire.

Not surprisingly, Psylocke, being a hero, rejects Spiral’s offer and brings all the good guys back to the real world. As a nice touch, though, Betsy still retains one of the bounties given her by the devilish Mojo—a pair of bionic eyes-- and she can’t quite give up this particular gift—which for all I know may have presaged a later plot-thread. Cipher gets to wind it all up, reflecting that all the things that happened to the heroes and their allies could have happened to “the souls of innocent kids.” Claremont’s trope of Faustian seduction applies particularly well to teenagers, discontent with their lot by virtue of burgeoning hormones, but even better to real children. Indeed, one of Alan Davis’s outstanding images in the Psylocke-world is that of artificially grinning New Mutants riding a Wildways carousel. I don’t think the majority of journeymen artists could have pulled off the seductive horror of the Wildways world, so “Things” is one story which absolutely required both artist and writer to be giving their utmost to the project.

NEW MUTANT ROUNDUP

 

I’m halfway through a reread of Marvel’s first NEW MUTANTS series, and I want to sum up the series at the point where my forthcoming mythcomics review becomes relevant. I’ll probably try to reread the whole series, though I may or may not blog about everything.

Since NEW MUTANTS was not a favorite of mine, aside from the one mythcomic I reviewed years ago, I hadn’t read most of them for thirty years. Further, I probably collected all of them from the quarter-bin and read them out of order. Originally my only motive for the re-read was to ground myself in the “Demon Bear” sequence, since this narrative plays a role in the 2020 NEW MUTANTS movie. Yet because writer Chris Claremont scripts most of his features with multiple soap-operatic plotlines, I thought I had better chart the feature’s course from the beginning. I did find that Claremont foregrounded the heroes’ encounter with the Bear as early as NEW MUTANTS #1, so my approach proved justified. As it happened, while the Bear-story was visually memorable thanks to the art of Bill Sienkiewicz, it didn’t meet my standards as a mythcomic.

In the course of the re-read, though, I found I was more forgiving of the series’ formulaic stories, if only I’ve seen so many later Marvel comics unable to master even the rudiments of good formula. The New Mutants debuted in 1984, as a spin-off from the enormously successful X-Men, most of whom were full adults and did not precisely need Professor Xavier’s “school for mutants.” Four of the fledgling heroes—Cannonball, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, and Psyche (later renamed Mirage)—were created by Claremont and Bob McLeod, while the fifth, Karma, had already appeared in an issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP. Karma was for whatever reason quickly shuttled out of the series, making only minor appearances up to the point of my current re-read. Claremont devoted much more space to such new members as Magma (a lady able to command volcanic phenomena), Magik (a mutant sorceress), Warlock (a techno-organic teenaged alien), and Cipher (a young mutant with no abilities beyond being able to decipher any language of man or machine).

Having been a strong X-Fan since the relaunch of that title in the 1970s, I found the New Mutants to be weak sauce, with stilted characterization by Claremont and poor decision-making with respect to the heroes’ powers, which did not complement one another in battles as did the powers of the X-Men. The New Mutants did not have colorful individual costumes as did the X-Men, but rather wore rough imitations of the dull yellow-and-black school uniforms worn by the first X-Men in the 1960s. However, with one exception (that of Iceman) all the 1960s uniforms came equipped with masks, the better to guard their identities when they went out crusading for justice. The New Mutants, who almost never wore masks (much like the majority of the New X-Men), weren't supposed to be running around playing superheroes like their elders. But of course they did. Thus it would seem the "school uniform" notion was counter-intuitive in terms of the logistics of identity protection, and probably didn't elicit all that much nostalgia from Marvel Comics readers.

The most interesting aspect of the early issues is Claremont’s use of the “Faustian seduction” trope.Not a few fans noticed that Claremont’s X-Men, despite having been born as mutants, frequently underwent further changes, sometimes aimed at making them into physical travesties of themselves, and sometimes oriented on their giving in to the forces of evil in their own souls. I haven’t counted how many times the X-Men experienced such melodrama-filled alterations, but the New Mutants’ quantity of such shifts must at least come a close second.

As with any trope that gets overused, many, of Claremont's Faustian seductions were contrived, even chintzy. However, he did do better in the NEW MUTANTS/X-MEN crossover, reviewed here, wherein the evil Loki becomes a stand-in for the Christian “lord of lies.” And around the same time, Claremont and Alan Davis wove a memorable nightmare from another crossover: NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, which not only brought some of the continuity of Ann Nocenti’s LONGSHOT concept into “mainstream Marvel,” but also imported two characters from Marvel’s British comics-line, Captain Britain and his sister Betsy Braddock, later to go though her own tumultuous changes under the name of Psylocke.

MYTHCOMICS: AMAZING FANTASY #15/ SPIDER-MAN #1-2 (1962-63)

(Note: I wrote the original version of this essay years ago, and have updated it for this series.)   

The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud are no longer central to the practive of modern psychological treatment. Yet in literary criticism, it’s nearly impossible to speak of the psychosexual concepts underlying fictional characters wthout addressing Freud, if only to refute him.   The early Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN is an ambivalent example in this case, conforming to Freudian patterns in some respects but not in others.

The centerpiece of Freudian theory is the concept that the son’s dawning sexual desires become centered on the mother and inculcate in him a murderous jealousy of the father. Freud named this concatenation of love and resentment after Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX, not because the play depicts such a relationship but because (Freud believed) Oedipus unknowingly performed the actions that such a jealous son would like to perform: killing his father and marrying his mother.   Freud also claimed that this wish-fulfillment pattern could be displaced in devious ways, such as the son’s displacing his animosity onto some third party.  Freud asserts that this occurs in HAMLET, where Hamlet’s uncle kills Hamlet’s father and sleeps with Hamlet’s mother, thus incurring Hamlet’s anger because these are supposedly things Hamlet wants to do. 

In broad outline the early adventures of SPIDER-MAN conform to the displacement angle of Freud's theory, particularly in the classic origin tale in AMAZING FANTASY.  High school student Peter Parker is valued by his teachers and by his elderly surrogate parents, Aunt May and Uncle Ben for being a “clean-cut, hard-working honor student.” 

But the accomplishments of a "professional wallflower" count for nothing in the eyes of Parker's fellow students, particularly the female ones.  Parker is embittered by his ill-treatment-- not unlike protagonists of many standalone horror-stories on which creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko collaborated prior to SPIDER-MAN. He dramatically swears that “someday they’ll be sorry!—sorry that they laughed at me!”  In horror-stories, embittered protagonists usually sought to take revenge by appealing to supernatural forces.  If the horror-protagonist devoted himself entirely to an unjust revenge, the narrative often levied upon him some terribly ironic punishment.  If the protagonist came to his senses at the eleventh hour, he might be pulled back from the abyss with a new-found sense of guilt and responsibility. 

Parker never makes any literal pact with the devil for supernatural powers. But from the point in the origin-story where he desires to make his peers “sorry,” the narrative evolves as if he had done so.  His preoccupation with science leads him to a radiation exhibition, and, as most comics-fans know, an irradiated spider bites Parker and infuses the teen with spider-powers. Though he's initially bewildered as to what to do with these powers, he gets the idea of testing them against an opponent in the wrestling-ring. This is the story's first meaningful mention of Parker's desire for money, as opposed to sexual favors. His success in the bout brings Parker into contact with a promoter, and so Parker adopts the identity of Spider-Man not to pursue a destiny of selfless heroism, but to enrich himself and his surrogate parents. He declines to act the part of a good citizen by helping a policeman catch an unarmed robber, explaining to the frustrated cop that, "From now on, I just look out for Number One-- that means me!" A few panels later at his dwelling-place, one of Parker's thought-balloons makes clear that he will protect his aunt and uncle as well: "I'll see to it they're always happy, but the rest of the world can go hang for all I care."

But fate will demand its ironic pound of flesh. Because Parker ignores his societal obligations in the pursuit of filthy lucre, his Uncle Ben dies at the hand of the same burglar whom Parker allowed to escape days earlier.  While the protagonist of an episodic horror-tale would simply be humbled by the experience of being hauled back from the hellmouth, Parker must assume a never-ending responsibility as payback for having “murdered” his uncle through neglect. For Parker, the costume of the superhero often becomes a hair-shirt, though not surprisingly, subsequent stories manage to find many ways for Spider-Man to have fun being a superhero, to say nothing of occasionally being able to humiliate old enemies.  From then on both the triumphs and tribulations of being a superhero become so merged that one cannot say if Parker's fate is punishment or reward.

A doctrinaire Freudian reading of the origin-story might end up accusing Parker of having murdered his uncle through an "act of omission" in order to be closer to his surrogate mother, Aunt May.  And this might be a reasonable suspicion if Parker’s aunt were given any aura of sexuality.  Instead, Aunt May is always an icon of aged, sexless virtue.  Rather than being a source of sexual temptation, she becomes the objective correlative of Parker’s implacable new sense of responsibility. Further, though she's in a position of relative authority over him, she functions in the series more like a child whose health and peace of mind Parker worries over.  So a doctrinaire Freudian reading does not apply, particularly since Parker's sexual needs are still turned outward, toward women more or less his own age. One might make something of the fact that the character's first major girlfriend is a little older than he is: Betty Brant is a working woman, roughly of college-age, when she starts dating the high-schooler. Few stories treat the Betty character as significantly older than Parker, though. So despite the occasional reference to her age-- in one story, her rival Liz Allan makes Betty feel "a hundred years old" simply by addressing Betty as "Miss Brant"-- she doesn't work as a mother-substitute any better than does Aunt May.

However, Uncle Ben does continue to throw his shadow over Spider-Man's destiny, in a manner analogous to both Laius in the Sophocles play and Hamlet's father in Shakespeare. But Hamlet, according to Freud, is plagued not only with desire for the forbidden mother but also with a new "older male rival," in the form of his uncle Claudius. SPIDER-MAN #1 not only features the hero's debut in his own title, but also appearance of a "bad father" in the hero's life.  There’s no causal relationship between the death of Uncle Ben and the “birth” of newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, but from issue #1 on, Jameson becomes a second shadow in the hero's life. Whereas the spectre of Uncle Ben continues to chastise Parker for his sin of omission, Jameson comes at the hero from the other direction: publicly castigating the figure of Spider-Man, deeming the hero a vigilante who "takes the law into his own hands" and accusing him of being a bad role model for children. (It's not hard to imagine that aspects of the comics-critic Frederic Wertham found their way into the figure of Jameson the irresponsible pundit.)  Further, it's clear from Jameson"s first appearance in issue #1's lead story that the publisher's real grievance is that the real heroism of his own son, astronaut John Jameson, may be overshadowed by the superhero’s deeds. 

Usually supporting characters in superhero comics-features were one-dimensional in their opposition or their advocacy of the hero's goals, but Jameson was something of a breakthrough: a character who "knew himself but slenderly." By the end of this story Spider-Man saves the life of John Jameson during his space-capsule's malfunction. Despite this, the publisher regards the hero as a menace, accusing him of causing the malfunction. Because Lee and Ditko did not choose to keep the character of John Jameson as a regular-- though the astronaut did return much later, after Ditko's departure from the feature-- Jonah Jameson's motivation was soon re-interpreted as the jealousy of an older, essentially selfish man for the courage and fearlessness of a young hero.

So if there is an Oedipal conflict in the early SPIDER-MAN of Lee and Ditko, it might be glossed less by Freud than by Leslie Fiedler’s remarks about the father/son conflict of DON JUAN: that “[Don Juan’s] legend projects the naked encounter of father and son (the women mere occasions), of the alienated individual and the society he defies.” By these terms SPIDER-MAN might be an even more “naked” encounter, insofar as there are no women at all standing between Parker and Jameson. It's true that since Betty Brant works as a secretary at Jameson’s newspaper, she could have taken on the connotations of a "daughter-figure" to a "heavy father," which would conform not only to DON JUAN but also to ARCHIE comics. But no such relationship develops: Jameson does not care whether or not Parker dates his secretary. 

The Parker-Jameson relationship is defined by the conflicts of money and fame.  Jameson has some degree of public prominence because of his wealth, and uses his position to suppress the superhero’s growing popularity with the public.  But Spider-Man’s selfless actions in themselves don't put any money in Parker's bank account. Though Parker frets over money all through SPIDER-MAN #1, only in the first tale of SPIDER-MAN #2 does he find a way of making heroics pay, without neglecting the mantle of responsibility. He elects to start using his powers to go around town taking photographs that no ordinary journalist could get-- in particular, photos of a new super-criminal, the Vulture. In fact, nowhere in "Duel to the Death with the Vulture" does Parker assert that he plans to round up the super-crook for the benefit of the law. When some classmate tosses Parker a copy of a magazine Jameson publishes, this gives the hero the idea of photographing the Vulture-- and when the flying villain next appears, all Spider-Man does is to follow him, snapping pictures. The Vulture tries to kill his pesky shadow, fails, and on their next encounter Spidey beats him and delivers the Vulture to the cops-- although not before the hero gets more pictures to sell to the new "parental authority" in his life.

From then on, this becomes the new status quo: to make money Parker must continue selling photos to an older man who hates Parker's alter ego, while Jameson, who hates Spider-Man, must continue feeding the fame of "the menace" or face losing the interest of the paper-buying public. (One later tale even asserts that the paper's newsstand sales go down whenever Jameson writes another of his many anti-Spider-Man editorials.) For the young hero, there's no final duel with the older authority. The alienated individual simply goes on jousting against the older man and the conservative society he represents-- on and on, world without end.