MYTHCOMICS: ["THE DEMON DOORWAY"] (DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE #2, 1978)

In the comment-section for my 2021 analysis of Gerry Conway's SUB-MARINER story "A House Named Death," I said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that "if I can find mythcomics for writers like Len Wein and Cary Bates. surely I can find something for Conway." I wasn't thinking of Conway at all when I decided to do an overview of the early MADAME XANADU stories, since I didn't associate him or any other raconteur with the short-lived series. Only during re-reading all the issues and their editorial pages did I learn that editor Joe Orlando made the conscious decision that DOORWAY TO NIGHTMARE would not be executed by any steady writer-artist team, but would instead continually change up the combinations of raconteurs. The only constant elements would be the Michael Kaluta covers and the general setup of fortune-teller Madame Xanadu, who would help tormented young lovers out of supernatural trouble, after which she would often capture malignant entities in mystical glass jars.

As noted in the overview all of the other DOORWAY stories are not much more ambitious than an average story from one of DC's horror-anthologies. Possibly Conway, who scripted stories for many DC and Marvel titles, managed to cut loose somewhat with the story I've titled "The Demon Doorway," though the art by Vicente Alcazar is largely pedestrian. Since the nature of Madame Xanadu's participation in the narratives remained static, here Conway could give more mythic emphasis to the one-shot pair of young lovers menaced by the psychological flaws in the mind of Melissa Mann.

When Douglas Holt escorts Melissa to the fortune-telling shop of Xanadu, Conway shows them moving through a festival in Greenwich Village. (The season is later said to be winter, though no one in the story dresses like it's a New York winter.) The festival's only purpose in the story is to illustrate that Melissa finds herself uncomfortable around all the celebratory rituals, and Douglas underscores her antipathy by stating that he wants her to visit Xanadu's shop so that she can forget her role as a physicist at New York University. Douglas also mentions here and two other times that he's an artist, but his profession plays no role in the story, unless it's to contrast "art" with "science."

Xanadu welcomes the lovers and does a Tarot reading, though she's apparently already learned their names from her cards. While most of the Tarot readings in the Xanadu stories eschew specifics, Conway does mention that Melissa's significator is "the Queen of Rods," but does not enlarge upon the symbolism. Xanadu tells Melissa to "leave your pursuit of science" and "find renewal in life," though without further explanation. Melissa assumes that Douglas set up the reading to scare her out of her association with a university-sponsored "Doorway Project." 

As Douglas unburdens himself to Xanadu, it turns out his opposition to Melissa's scientific obsession isn't concerned purely with her psychological balance. The Doorway Project is the creation of a senior scientist, Hampton Hill, and Douglas suspects that Hill is seducing Melissa, "not emotionally, but intellectually." Douglas even goes so far as to claim that his older competition is not just a "father-figure," but the embodiment of Melissa's desire that life should "logical, orderly, sane-- and Hampton Hill was sanity personified." Douglas worries that Melissa's blowup means that she'll fall fully under Hill's control, but Xanadu assures the young fellow that the cards indicate he still has a role to play. 

That very evening, Melissa meets Hill at the university as they plan to initiate Project Doorway, an attempt to use a computer-matrix to open a doorway into another dimension. No practical purpose is cited for this endeavor; Hill merely hopes to "unlock ancient mysteries," though he mentions that the university doesn't fully approve of the experiment, believing that he is "tampering with forces beyond our knowledge." It may not be coincidence that the man professing this Frankensteinian ambition apparently was born in or lived in Geneva, which is the Swiss locale with which Mary Shelley's mad scientist was most associated. Anyway, for a moment Hill lets a bit of animal passion steal past his facade of utter sanity as he tries to kiss Melissa before they activate the doorway. Melissa avoids the intimacy, which may suggest that though she's found a father-figure in Hill, she's not obsessed enough to desire symbolic incest. Yet the Doorway Project is the symbolic child of their joined intellects, for as they activate the machine Conway states that the device "hums into life, struggling to awareness like some dark, mythological giant."

If the giant metaphor means anything, it aligns best with the idea of the Greek Titans who sought to overthrow heaven. This aligns in turn with the nature of the dimension opened up by the Mann-Hill brain-child, for Conway calls the otherworld "the depths of Hell," i.e., the domain of rebellious angels. Douglas's jealousy saves Hill and Melissa from their folly, for he hears them screaming at the sights they behold, breaks into the lab and wrecks the machine. The dimension-door closes, but something has changed. Melissa refuses to discuss what happened with the device, and demands that Douglas take her out to eat at an expensive restaurant, where Melissa discards her normal abstemious diet and chows down. 

As Douglas later tells Xanadu, at first he liked the change in her attitude, because Melissa became more affectionate. However, when the two attended a party, Melissa left with a complete stranger. Unable to reach her, Douglas checked the university lab, and tells Xanadu (without going into detail) that Melissa was there, but wearing "the same outfit she'd worn the night before." Melissa then  underscored the previous night's infidelity (sort of a "walk-of-no-shame") by kissing Hill-- only to shove him away and start bashing the Doorway computer. Hill then had the raving woman institutionalized at Bellevue, after which Douglas ended up at Xanadu's door. Madame Xanadu tells Douglas that Melissa's problems are now metaphysical rather than psychological: that she's possessed by a demon that has unleashed her emotions not for love, as Douglas wanted, but for pure self-indulgence. (Poor Hampton Hill: he gets rejected both by the real young woman and by the demon in her flesh.)

At Bellevue Douglas and Xanadu convince the attending physician to let them attempt an exorcism, which of course the super-rational Hill opposes. Xanadu requires Douglas to read the exorcism, apparently so that he can lure out the demon the way Father Karras did in that other possession-story, by offering up his own soul. However, when the demon does emerge, Xanadu traps it in one of her jars. Melissa is freed of the possession but ironically, Mister "Sanity Personified" suffers a nervous breakdown from beholding the demon he unleashed-- implicitly his punishment for poaching on a younger dude's territory.

Conway's story is not especially religious, for all that it clearly trades on the trope of "seeking forbidden knowledge trespasses against the natural order of God." Unlike many such stories, this one is stage-managed by a woman who implicitly knows more about "ancient mysteries" than Hampton Hill could even imagine, so one might state that profane science is incapable of plumbing such mysteries. Melissa and Hill are both too "sane" to imagine that their endeavor can invoke the demons of Hell, and these demons can be seen as being just as much the spawn of irresponsible science as the Frankenstein Monster or the atom bomb. Hill, who desires Melissa, tries to make her his "mind-mate" through their collaboration, and Melissa, for whatever reasons, wants an older man in her life that doesn't disturb her reason with the allure of youth and life, as Douglas does. Both are guilty of over-reaching the limits of what reason can accomplish, but only Hill pays the price, while Melissa gets some measure of integration, which *may* be the meaning that Conway had in mind with his mention of the Queen of Rods card.

I don't normally think of Conway as being a good coiner of names, but he does pretty well with "Melissa Mann." The young woman wants to put aside the chaos of life for pure reason, the sort of reason that is often thought the masculine domain. In Greek "melissa" means "honeybee," and while honeybees normally follow the egg-laying queen of the hive, this Melissa follows a type of "man" she considers neutered from the threat of sexuality. The other two names suggest some less concentrated symbolism. One definition of "holt" is an animal's den, while "Douglas" in Gaelic means "dark stream," so these connotations of natural phenomena may cohere with Douglas' attempts to persuade Melissa to be more spontaneous and natural. A "hill" is also a natural feature, but the name "Hampton" connotes the inhabitant of a settled community, such as one built upon a hill. So together these two names could signify human rather than animal habitation, and the faculty of reason humans use to separate themselves from the beasts. In any case Douglas doesn't have to sacrifice his life and goes on to enjoy a "natural" existence with Melissa, but his rival's power of reason is forfeit. As for Melissa, the implication is that she's reached a balance, neither too emotionally reserved nor too emotionally indulgent. 

So, in conclusion, Conway wasn't immune to the allure of myth after all.

But-- sigh-- now I have to find something for Tony Isabella...

NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD PRO

 By odd coincidence, just as I decided to devote a little attention to the oeuvre of Gerry Conway, I became aware that back in May of this year he'd been fulminating against manga, as covered by this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay. The substance of Conway's rant is that he wishes Japanese manga would be taken to task for "rampant sexism and misogyny."

Some respondents to the piece were quick to point out that Conway was a hypocrite, given that he had a hand in creating one of DC Comics' most outstanding (ha ha) sexy heroines, Power Girl. 

There's a pinch of truth in this riposte, but on the whole, I tend to think that Conway only barely sexualized Power Girl in the few "Justice Society" stories for which he was responsible. I suppose she basically fits with the "titillation" category I suggested here, but the stories are just basic superhero fare, so for the most part any later hyper-sexuality attributed to Power Girl in later years is really not Conway's fault. Further, though I have not read all of Conway's work, I would tend to state that in all of the considerable number of  stories that I have read, Conway tended to "work clean." Some of his collaborative artists-- particularly Wally Wood, the co-creator of Power Girl and her boob-window-- had a strong effect on how some of Conway's stories turned out. Further, if I were to compare Conway to another mainstream work-horse like Doug Moench, my verdict would be that Moench works a lot more sexuality into even theoretically G-rated material than Conway ever did. 

But even if one agrees that Conway tended to work clean, does that in any way validate his opinion of the Japanese manga industry, beyond the level of a statement of personal taste? Any regular reader of this blog will know that my own taste allows for quite a lot of transgressive material in my reading, so clearly my answer is likely to be "no," even IF Conway had mounted an articulate campaign against sexy manga. His tweets against "sexism and misogyny" as cited in the above essay provide no examples of the things he found offensive, and in a follow-up tweet, cited here, Conway merely conflates all manga sexism with the fetishization of underage girls.

Another riposte against Conway is that, even though at one point he largely left the comics field for the greener fields of television, he's filled with envy of the way that manga has eclipsed American comics-work in terms of American purchases. This is certainly very possible, though in theory one would not be wrong in pointing a particular publisher's sins despite the success of that publisher's wares. But Conway's tweets don't even come up to the level of Frederic Wertham's fulminations, which were often misleading and poorly sourced at the best of times.

In contrast, even though I have similar disagreements with Tony Isabella for a more recent tweet on comic-book sexuality, at least his rant is more focused. This month he was apparently filled with high dudgeon because DC Comics still makes use of the character Deathstroke, whom Isabella claims to be guilty of "child molestation." This article on BIC speculates that Isabella's ire may have raised because DC is due to debut a new mini-series, "Deathstroke Inc"-- which would be the first time the popular villain would enjoy his own series since his nineties feature.

I personally have little investment in the character, beyond recognizing that he has generally proven to be an effective villain in other characters' features, though considerably less so as a headliner. His claim to fame in the "offensive sexualization" sweepstakes is clearly his dalliance with the underaged psycho-villain Terra in NEW TEEN TITANS.

I thought the original sequence was nothing special. During their lauded NEW TEEN TITANS gig, creators Marv Wolfman and George Perez had put forth a number of stories in which Evil Older People attempt to take advantage of Pretty Younger People, whether in a non-sexual sense (Batman constantly bullying Robin) or in other sexual scenarios (the Greek god Zeus attempting to seduce Wonder Girl). It's my opinion that when Wolfman and Perez depicted, somewhat obliquely, a relationship between forty-year-old Deathstroke and fifteen-year-old Terra, the creators were just flogging a new version of a clansgression-trope they'd been using to good effect. I don't remember that in the day the storyline became a huge controversy, but in any case, it's now become enough of a hot button issue that some DC raconteurs even rewrote the story to elide the offensive material. 

Isabella's rant, though more focused, is not any better articulated than Conway's. Even though Wolfman and Conway presented Terra as both violent and demented, current politically correct fans have tried to eradicate any sense that she might be responsible for her own actions. The relationship, whatever it was, must be entirely the fault of the older man. To be sure, Isabella himself does not demand that the character should cease to exist, the way Conway would apparently like to see all manga scourged of their transgressive content; Isabella seemingly just wants to make sure Deathstroke doesn't star in any new series. Surprisingly, Isabella doesn't make an issue, as does Conway, of a deleterious effect on young readers, though I would not be surprised to find that to be one of his considerations.

The thing that both of these "old pros" have in common is the notion that comics in general ought to be held to the standard of the mainstream industry for which they have worked. Unlike a lot of the Journalistas of decades past, I personally can appreciate the need for a "G-rated" mainstream, and I've not been especially sanguine about the virtues of underground comics and their "let it all hang out" aesthhetic. But as far as I'm concerned, the genie got out of the bottle as soon as the American comics-medium became inevitably focused upon older readers. Some of these readers may yearn for the simple G-rated comics of their youth. But sex sells as much to them as to anyone else, and if current comics have any advantage over current Hollywood, it would be that the former can still occasionally do good stories (as well as bad) with transgressive sexual subject matter-- which I may define a little more extensively in a future essay.

NULL-MYTHS: ["A HOUSE NAMED DEATH"] (SUB-MARINER #41-42, 1971)

 As I've mentioned from time to time, I don't generally do "null-myth" reviews just for ordinary junky comics. A comics-story has to be particularly bad to earn such a review, and not just in terms of having bad verisimilitude, but bad mythicity/artifice as well. Even given these self-imposed strictures, I find it amazing that I haven't managed to savage more than one of the many works of Gerry Conway up till now. 

In the early seventies I turned 15, and I very nearly hated every comic with Conway's name on it. In retrospect, I would give him his due by saying that unlike a lot of other pros who turned out tons of undistinguished formula-work, Conway did seem to have a genius for co-creating characters with great potential-- the Punisher, the Man-Thing, Killraven-- though usually that potential was realized not by Conway but by some later raconteur. I despised most of his famed run on SPIDER-MAN, and the best that I can say of it is that he was no longer trying to be "artsy" on the title, as he was in some of his early scripts for DAREDEVIL and THE SUB-MARINER.

I take the title "A House Named Death" from the cover-copy of the second story in this SUB-MARINER two-parter. At the time of this tale, the feature was clearly losing steam, and the editors sought to give Prince Namor a new cachet by killing off his beloved (4-5 years before Gwen Stacy in SPIDER-MAN) and sending the hero off on various peripatetic adventures. "House" essentially sticks the Atlantean prince in a sci-fi Gothic. One night, the prince is flying along, minding his own business, when some guy on the ground zaps Namor so that he falls. The mysterious guy is joined by an aged woman, and they skulk off into the darkness.

Namor wakes up on the cobblestones of a nearby small American town. where he's immediately succored by Lucille, an attractive young brunette. He apparently recovers enough that she can lead him to shelter, given that she couldn't carry him by herself-- and as it happens, Lucille's dwelling place is the house of her aunt, first given the peculiar name "Aunt Serr." Namor is weak from both his injuries and his lack of exposure to water, though no one in Conway's story, including Namor, ever thinks about his getting access to some H2O. After Lucille gives Sub-Mariner a little set-up on his circumstances, he passes out again-- and wakes up chained in a room by Aunt Serr, whom the reader recognizes as the old lady from before. Auntie relates some of her personal tragedies to Namor, about her birthing a "devil spawned monster" due to radiation exposure, and she seems to be contemplating some "unformed" master plan and thinking about using Namor to help her. The prince breaks loose but gets zapped again by Auntie's son, who is now revealed to have the body of a humanoid-shaped slab of rock.

After some more fights and histrionics, Auntie shows Namor the mechanism she'd used to cement her hold on the locals, which she has also used to transform them into a bunch of multiform monsters, though we don't find this out until Part 2. At the end of Part 1, Auntie reveals that she's used her machine on her niece, causing Lucille to transform into a hot energy-girl, whom Auntie wants to be the bride of her monstrous son. Lucille, who in this form is totally under Auntie's mental control, zaps Namor for the cliffhanger ending. 

Possibly Auntie and her rockhead son think Namor's dead, for Part 2 begins with him recovering in the wilderness, where the villains desposited him. Conway tosses in an oddball erudite reference to the Spartan custom of abandoning deformed infants in the wild, yet he can't find time to note that the rain falling upon Namor's form, courtesy of artist George Tuska, must be restoring the prince's strength. Sub-Mariner wanders into town, and, after another gratuitous fight-scene, meets the town's residents, whom have all been made into monsters by the woman who wants her freakish son to have a town of freaks to cohabit with (though there's no indication that "Rock" ever does so). Soon Namor meets the rest of the townfolk, who bear Aunt Serr no good will for their fate.

The only thing Namor learns from the freak-people is that they claim that Aunt Serr has no niece, which may mean that none of them have ever laid eyes on Lucille (despite the fact that she was first seen traipsing around their town in her human-looking form). Namor can't comprehend this mystery, so he makes a frontal assault on Auntie's house again, and once more gets knocked for a loop by Lucille's powers.

 For anyone who may've come in late to the story, Auntie soliloquizes once more about her plans to mate Lucille with her son, and she makes a loose implication that she may have created Lucille from some artificial process, as she threatens the energy-girl: "Do as I say, you silly fool-- lest I return you to the dissipator." Possibly Conway meant to imply that this was the same device by which Aunt Serr transformed normal humans into monsters, though if so then the "dissipator" must be one of the more all-purpose multi-tasking machines ever depicted in Marvel Comics. Namor recovers just as Big Rock Serr comes in, and as they fight again, the townspeople sneak into Auntie's lab and blow everything up. Lucille, still for some strange reason more attracted to Namor's biceps than to Big Rock's literal "boulder shoulders," finally turns on Aunt Serr, blasting the old lady and then using her power to send Sub-Mariner careening out of the house, saving him from being consumed in the conflagration.

The one amusing thing I noticed on this reading of the "House" tale is that Aunt Serr's name is almost certainly meant to be a pun on the word "answer." But like everything else in the story, this wordplay is inconsummate since even the reader who "gets it" can have no strong idea what it references. Aunt Serr may believe that her mad course is the only "answer" to her dilemma, and Conway gives her a few lines in which she waxes Nietzchean: "No man is free... Only by succumbing to the will of the universe-- of those greater than themselves-- can they find true freedom." But it's a clumsy moral at best.

The verisimilitude blunders throughout the story are considerable, but those affecting the mythicity are far worse. Conway might have penned the story of a woman who felt her personal creativity cursed by the uncaring fates, and who decides to mutate all the "norms" in order to make them share her misery. The subplot about "how do you handle the problem of Lucille's origin" goes absolutely nowhere, and Conway further undercuts his own narrative by working in a bunch of irrelevant ongoing subplots, one of which is meant to cross-promote events transpiring in Conway's continuity for DAREDEVIL. In the annals of out-of-control stories in the medium of comics, "A House Named Death" deserves some sort of retroactive Golden Raspberry at least.

NULL-MYTHS: "THE EGO-PRIME SAGA" (THOR #201-203)

Since I just wrote a really long exegesis on the Mangog saga in THOR #154-157, I'm not going to spend a helluva lot of time on this null-myth selection, one of the many craptacular pseudo-epics that appeared in the pages of THOR after both Jack Kirby and Stan Lee departed the feature.

In keeping with my criteria for null-myths, though, my only reason for pointing to the mostly forgotten "Ego Prime saga" is to show how a good idea can go wrong in terms of its symbolic content.

The tale of Ego-Prime technically begins before #201, for it's a "B-story" that starts in issue #198 as  a counterpoint to the main tale--one of many unimaginative takes on Ragnarok that followed the first, and arguably best, version by Lee and Kirby. In the B-story, Odin sends two Asgardian goddesses-- Hildegarde and Thor's gal-pal Sif-- to a planet called Blackworld. He doesn't exactly tell them what they're supposed to be looking for there, but eventually Sif and Hildegarde find out that the whole world is going through a rapid course of evolution from one phase of Earth-history to another. That is to say, one minute the goddesses are seeing a culture of knights in armor, and in the next, it becomes the culture of America in the 1920s. Though writer Gerry Conway had published some prose SF and supposedly knew the genre well, this is the sort of "magical SF" that makes juvenile Superman-stories of the Golden Age seem like Isaac Asimov by comparison.

Eventually the goddesses find out that the person responsible for the weird accelerated progress is an old friend: Tana Nile, one of the aliens called "Colonizers" who had appeared during the Lee-Kirby tenure. Tana Nile, under orders to find more habitable planets for her people, got the idea to travel to the surface of another Lee-Kirby creation, "Ego the Living Planet." Sans any scientific data or investigation, Tana slices off a chunk of Ego's "skin," takes it to Blackworld, and implants it in the planet's soil. Though the word "terraforming" is never used, apparently this was Tana Nile's intention. Because Conway didn't care to make her actions internally consistent, the alien does absolutely nothing to curb the effects of the planetary chunk, which takes on its own intelligence and a gigantic form that she dubs "Ego-Prime."

Then, just as Thor has returned to Earth, the creature for some reason teleports itself, the goddesses and their allies to the real Earth, since Ego-Prime plans to create a sentient "bioverse" and for some reason can't do it from Blackworld. There follows a lot of standard Marvel fight-scenes while Ego-Prime unleashes various menaces (mutated humans, giant ants) on the Asgardians.

So far, all of this is merely routine bad comics, taking innovative concepts introduced by better creators and dumbing them down. But while all the chaos is going on, the new A-story now gets a B-story, as Odin sends other agents to Earth to seek out mortals who share some mysterious common factor that Conway never bothers to expain. Then, just as Ego-Prime is about to destroy the world, Odin reaches down from Asgard and somehow transforms the giant into energy that he infuses into the three humans-- who then become three young gods. Odin sends the young gods off into some remote heaven to serve some obscure purpose that does not come to fruition for many years, when Roy Thomas enlisted Conway's "God Squad" (as some clever fan dubbed them) to play a role in his multi-issue "Eternals" plotline.

Lee and Kirby's "Mangog saga" is rife with dozens of inconsistencies and authorial manipulations, true. But as I hope I demonstrated, there's a genuine creative urge underlying all the faults of the Lee-Kirby epic-- while Conway's faux-epic is just a junk-pile composed of used furniture.