COUPLE MORE QUICKIE REVIEWS

Like this group of quickie reviews I did in May, there's nothing about these items that firmly aligns them, in terms of symbolic discourse, as either near-myths or null-myths, which distinction of course matters only to me.

The Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. KICK ASS is, to my surprise, a decent read, compared to the awfulness of works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN. It had a few decent jokes and it presented its ultraviolence competently, even though the choreography pales next to the collaboration of Romita Jr and that other guy named Miller on DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR.

I suspect that even though a lot of Millar's concepts are paper-thin BS like WANTED, he took a little more care when he sought to represent the supposed fantasy of all superhero geeks. The geeks will accept some parody, but how much? Yet how can Millar do parody and still keep using the tropes that make his story work? How can the author put across the notion that amateur superhero Kick Ass, rescued from a burning building by firemen, doesn't just get his mask pulled off by the first fireman to lay hands on him? And will the geeks accept the parody of an ordinary guy who almost gets massacred playing superhero, as long as he's counterpointed by a "real-life" superhero who's a total badass, i.e. Hit-Girl?

Again, I'm not recounting the pretty simple story here. But the biggest laugh I got was the ad slug on the back of the THB for KICK ASS: "the greatest superhero comic of all time." Maybe somewhere in the low nine-hundreds out of a thousand.

Finally, while it's true that there are a lot of superhero stories that are as basic, simple and unadorned as KICK ASS-- which I think Millar truly believes to be representative of the real genre in comics if not in all media-- it's the more complex versions of the genre that have kept me invested for more than fifty years.

I've even less to say about the 2004 TPB JSA: THE LIBERTY FILES. It's another "realistic" Elseworlds effort, and the gimmick by writer Dan Jolley and writer-artist Tony Harris is that back in WWII the various heroes of the Justice Society-- including a non-canonical Batman-- operate primarily as covert government agents in mufti, unveiling their superheroic long underwear only when fighting super-powered Axis agents. Because FILES is two separate stories jammed together, they don't play off one another very well. Harris does pretty but static photorealistic art and Jolley produces wordy Alan Moore naturalistic dialogue, but with less eccentricity. No better or worse than most Elseworlds stories.

NEAR MYTHS: BLACK ADAM/JSA BLACK REIGN (2004)

Though I'd already seen the 2022 movie BLACK ADAM without having read this JSA compilation, I decided I would give the TPB a read in order to determine whether or not the film's writers for the movie had borrowed any important plot or character points. The short answer is that, if one subtracts all the over-complicated subplots provided in the Geoff Jones-Rags Morales graphic novel, there is a rough similarity of the main plotlines. 

In REIGN, Black Adam somehow assembles a small coterie of super-powered aides with which he overthrows the local dictatorship of his native land. (Note: in the comics-character's original appearance in 1945, he was an Egyptian of an archaic era, but at some point in his DC revival he was reworked as an archaic native from a fictional DC country named Kandahq.) Though the character had been reworked in other ways when DC took over the Fawcett library of characters, I imagine that in 2004 Johns probably was not bound by any previous iterations, and so Adam's conquest of Kandahq here may be the "first" time he ever did so in Johns' version. Adam's ruthless conquest of the country suggests that he may planning the conquest of other neighboring nations. To prevent that contingency, about a dozen well-known Justice Society heroes descend upon Kandahq and have an involved battle with Adam's forces. In the end, enough chaos erupts that Adam pledges to the JSA that he will remain within his own borders unless attacked.

In the film, Adam is newly revived by a band of Kandahq freedom fighters seeking to oust a vaguely defined occupying force. Logically enough, Adam does not attempt to collect any allies, given that as a possessor of the "Shazam lightning" he's almost unstoppable. Adam doesn't take any immediate action to take over the country of his descendants, but four members of the JSA descend upon Kandahq on the theory that Adam's very existence is a threat to cosmic order. In contrast to the graphic novel, the JSA heroes and Black Adam are forced to work together against a common menace. 

I won't expatiate on the film further here, since I'll review it separately. BLACK REIGN is a very ordinary superhero punch-em-up, and I say that as a critic who believes that fight scenes can have a lot of extra-ordinary significance. For my taste at least there are far too many subplots, with the result that no single plot stands out, though since some of the issues appeared in the HAWKMAN title, there's a strong emphasis on the contentions between Adam and the Winged Wonder, just as one sees in the movie. The closest thing to a myth captured in REIGN is not sociological, as it is in the film. Johns' script emphasizes psychological trauma about the loss of loved ones and roads not taken, but the only scene that has any resonance takes place when Adam demonstrates to his uncertain ally "Atom Smasher" the fruits of their violence: the preservation of innocents.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE

 In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5 I formulated three types of ensemble features. One is the Exclusive Ensemble, in which all members of the team are original with the feature, which means that this type by itself does not sustain any qualities of a crossover-narrative. The other two, however, will display such qualities. albeit in differing configurations. 

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. DC Comics' Justice Society of America in its original run was devoted entirely to characters who all had their own features independent of the team. Because the Inclusive Ensemble is meant to cross over all these independent characters on a regular basis, all episodes of such features are crossover-stories.

The Semi-Inclusive Ensemble must include at least one icon that earned either stature or charisma in another feature before joining the team, while all the rest of the ensemble's members may be new icons. Marvel's feature The Avengers started out using the Inclusive template, in that the charter members-- Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Giant-Man, and the Wasp-- had all enjoyed the stature of featured heroes, and so all of these Avengers-stories are crossover-tales, as are those which added Captain America to the mix. However, AVENGERS #16 changed the template to that of the Semi-Inclusive when the new lineup consisted of one Prime with strong stature, Captain America, and three that had only been charismatic Subs within the universes of other featured heroes. Since Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch only accrued stature once they'd been in one AVENGERS story, the first appearance *alone* was a charisma-crossover. From then on, they all possessed "collective stature" due to their continued membership in the team, and the more they appeared in the team, by the principle of escalation they progressed from being Charisma Dominant Primes to Stature Dominant Primes. Captain America remained a Stature Dominant Prime with the individual form of stature, and so stories which included him and the three former Charisma-Dominant types remained crossovers, but once the star-spangled sentinel departed, there was no crossover-mojo arising merely from the association of the three who possessed the collective form of stature.

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. 

However, any time that such a team-- with only one or two members possessed of high stature-- harbored a temporary guest-star, such as Thor or Iron Man, this too would be a crossover of the "guest star" variety.

More to come. 

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 4

The third and fourth categories deal with narrative presences who are dominantly known for being Subs, which means that they may possess charisma but have rarely or never possessed stature in any iteration. 

Since charisma is judged with regard to the ways in which audiences have received various presences, HIGH CHARISMA crossovers are usually seen in situations where two or more Subs, both of whom have earned considerable approbation from audiences, interact. In the last section I mentioned that the Joker has almost always been a Sub, and since his existence as a Sub largely places him within the cosmos of Batman's adventures, this status gives him no stature.

However, his charismatic qualities may be boosted when he comes into contact with other Bat-villains with similar pedigrees-- though this may depend upon when the interaction takes place. When the Joker first crosses paths with the Catwoman-- one of the first villain-crossovers in comics-- neither has made more than one appearance apiece. It could be argued that at the time this story appeared, neither one had accrued all that much charisma-- and so a better example of high charisma might be the first-time meeting of Joker and Penguin, from 1944:

By the same principle, teams of villains, often meant to parallel those of the featured heroes, also display the same charismatic crossover, as long as some of the members have appeared more than once, as we see with the Injustice Society.

In theory, one might also have a charismatic crossover just from crossing over other types of Subs-- a League of Sidekicks, perhaps, including Snapper Carr, Pieface Kalmaku, and Rick Jones.

Moving away from this type of High Charisma crossover, I want to return to the matter of "crypto-continuity" introduced in Part II, I asserted that "King Kong II," though not technically in continuity with "King Kong I," borrows enough motifs from the original that the later character may be seen as  what I term a "weak template deviation." 

However, there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.

For instance, the 19th-century outlaw Billy the Kid has a certain documented history, even if there's much about the real-life William Bonney (or whatever his real name was) that moderns will never know. But the cowboy-hero of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA borrows nothing from the historical personage but the name, I would tend to view this totally fictionalized Billy is the main character of the 1966 film, while Dracula, despite having originated as a Prime character in the 1897 Stoker novel, has been demoted to a Sub, Yet the film's Billy has no more stature than would any cowboy-character who'd had never appeared before. The effect of the title is to suggest that the titular characters intermingle their respective charismas, though only one of the two possesses any stature, albeit minor.

Even more problematic are characters who lack anything more than a circumstantial history. While Dracula is a fictional character whose depiction may change as any author pleases to change him, Jack the Ripper was at least one real person in real history-- but because he was never identified, he becomes in a narrative sense even more insubstantial than the vampire count. In this 1985 mini-series, reviewed here, Dracula and Jack the Ripper do indeed enjoy a crossover. But because the Ripper is different in every iteration, whereas the Count is comparatively stable, I don't think they possess comparable stature-- though they both do possess high charisma, which stems from the investment audiences have in their respective forms of monstrousness.

NEAR MYTHS: JSA THE GOLDEN AGE (1993-94)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

GOLDEN AGE, written by James Robinson and penciled by Paul Smith, is an Elseworlds take on some of the many latter-day interpretations of the Justice Society heroes, crossbred with an assortment of characters who had nothing to do with the Society or, sometimes, even with DC Comics (such as Captain Triumph from Quality Comics, whose company's heroes were belatedly acquired by the Superman people). 

I reread GOLDEN for the first time in many years, in part because I was so pleased with the second season of STARGIRL, on which teleseries Robinson serves as producer and occasional writer. STARGIRL is much like GOLDEN in being a virtual love letter to the Justice Society, directed to all other such fans. Yet STARGIRL has a crucial advantage in that it's all about legacy characters who inherit the mantles of the WWII crusaders. In contrast, GOLDEN is set in the America of the postwar 1940s, which in the real world would herald the cancellation of all but a smattering of DC's costumed heroes. Since the Golden Age characters were not revived, but were instead temporarily replaced by the legacy figures of the Silver Age, Robinson was obliged to follow the established game-plan followed by such earlier writers as Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz, who set up the notion that in the DC-cosmos the various luminaries simply retired for about ten years until they got back into action-- occasionally in the Silver Age, and then with greater frequency in the Bronze.

In addition, GOLDEN could not help but take considerable influence from the fan-culture of the eighties and nineties, when comics-makers began playing to the adult readers with "grim and gritty" versions of established heroes, as per the usual suspects of WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Robinson's version of the Justice Society is not as boldly transgressive as either of these, as the peoject includes little in the way of sexuality and was only slightly more violent than the average issue of NEW TEEN TITANS. The most interesting thing about GOLDEN is that for all of the characters involved, they become divorced from the trauma-free lives they led as costumed crusaders, where the most emotional conflict came down to not being able to marry their lovers due to fighting crime. In the opening scenes of GOLDEN, Robinson is explicit about the way the conclusion of the war signals "the end of innocence."

I don't find Robinson's concept of innocence very persuasive: for the most part, it comes down to all the main characters having really bad days in one way or another.  Many of the plot-points were established by earlier writers: Hourman is now addicted to the drug that makes him super-strong, while Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle, two heroes who became romantic in an 1980s continuity, divorce. The death of innocence is also signaled on the social level: the atom bomb has changed the nature of national conflict, and competition from Russia makes average Americans eager to condemn anyone suspected of ties to Communism. (It's possibly a mark of Robinson's extreme liberalism that he brings up both of these topics but never remembers that Russia became a major competitor in part through the act of stealing the American plans for The Bomb.) It's not precisely that Robinson ever sings any sad songs for the USSR, but it is interesting that the main villain turns out to be the embodiment of allegedly-Right-leaning fascism: a recrudescent Nazi.

GOLDEN's basic plot-pattern probably owes something to WATCHMEN, insofar as various heroes pursue separate life-courses, all of which, in one way or another, end up dovetailing. The obscure DC character "Mister America" is the uniting factor: whereas many other heroes were unable to go to war for complicated reasons, this super-athlete was able to fight the Nazis behind enemy lines. Under his regular name "Tex Thompson," the former mystery-man returns to the U.S., rises to great political power, and begins a new project to create an invincible superhero as a bulwark against the threat of Russia. Since anti-Communism led to bad things like the Red Scare, no one will be surprised that Thompson turns out to be a traitor in patriot's clothing-- as well as a recrudescent super-villain.

The main plot is never much more than an excuse for the various scenes of regret and recriminations, which, to be sure, are kept to a minimum in comparison to the predominant Marvel soap-opera emotive style. The most persuasive plot-thread involves Liberty Belle's re-marriage to another hero, Tarantula, who just happens to resemble her former hubby Johnny Quick. Others are badly underdeveloped. The Golden Age Robotman becomes a stone killer for no explicit reason, and the aforementioned Captain Triumph only appears in his civilian identity, rejecting (with questionable judgment) his superhero nature and losing his life in combat with the evildoers. A subplot involves an amnesiac hero, Manhunter, who eventually fills in a lot of the blank spaces for the heroes (and the readers) about what really happened to Thompson overseas and the nature of his pet superman. Paul Smith, never one of the best delineators of superhero action, is out of his depth with the numerous battle-scenes, but he does a better than average job keeping the faces and their emotional reactions distinct from one another.

GOLDEN is at best diverting, but I certainly wouldn't rank it as one of the better homages to the Golden Age of American superheroes-. Indeed, some of Robinson's issues of STARMAN come much closer to that mark. To wrap up, I'll note that, despite the many characters in the four-issue tale, GOLDEN is yet another example, like CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, where the dramatic personae divide into a "very significant" superordinate ensemble and a "not so important" subordinate ensemble. 

SUPERORDINATE-- Johnny Quick, Liberty Belle, Manhunter, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hourman, Starman

SUBORDINATE-- Tarantula, Bob Daley aka "Fatman," Hawkman, Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt, Captain Triumph, Miss America (another Quality character BTW), and the Tigress. Three characters with heroic pasts-- Tex Thompson, Dan the Dyna-Mite and Robotman-- are essentially retconned into villainous presences. There are also a huge number of cameos in the final section, including the 1950s stalwart Captain Comet and a large sampling of more Quality protagonists, such as Plastic Man, Doll Man, the Jester, Phantom Lady and the Red Bee.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3

                             
The last comics-item I rated as an inconsummate null-myth was 1965’s “THE HAUNTED ISLAND” (CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43). It’s without question a story whose constituent parts don’t cohere into a pleasing whole, but it also illustrates my new distinction regarding concrescence, in that its parts don’t even relate to one another within the narrative.



For purposes of comparison with other narratives, I’ll identify ISLAND’s master thread as being that of “hero must confront evil counterpart.” To be sure, the story probably came about for extrinsic reasons of stoking the feature’s sales, in that editor Murray Boltinoff probably made the decision to give the heroes new uniforms, and assigned Bill Finger to come up with a rationale in story-form. Finger’s oddball solution was to have the “Challs” (as they were informally called) kidnapped by five mutated scientists, all of whom considered that they lived “on borrowed time”as did the quartet of adventurers. I mentioned that the imagery of ISLAND is all over the place, best exemplified by a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster in a Beatle wig (the haircut even gets an explicit comment from one of the heroes). Yet even more damaging to the story as a whole is that the mutants initially want the heroes to subject themselves to mutation willingly—meaning that they’ll no longer be the heroic figures that the mutants found appealing. When the Challs decline, the mutants threaten to put them in suspended animation like the rest of their collection—though both scenarios would seem to render the idea of giving the heroes new costumes nugatory. Thus ISLAND demonstrates both a state of inconsummation and a poor level of mythopoeic concrescence.

To remain focused on the “evil counterpart” thread, a more effective example is 1969’s “AND SO MY WORLD ENDS” (JLA #71). Like the Challengers story, this one focuses upon an ensemble of heroes, though one among them, the Manhunter of Mars, receives “special guest star” billing. J’onn J’onzz convinces the heroes of Earth to follow him to Mars to prevent a Martian threat to Earth, but even the Martian doesn’t know that a civil war between Mars’ two races has decimated both sides, leaving only handsfuls of survivors on both sides. Green Martian J’onn meets his White Martian opposite number in battle, and though J’onn prevails, the victory is pyrrhic, since his civlization is all but perished. This is an entirely consummate story insofar as it gives the reader a feeling of completeness and satisfaction, even if it may incorporate one or two lapses in logic. But the master-thread of “hero’s evil counterpart” is only adequately explored, though a subordinate thread about the futility of war provides ample support, giving WORLD a fair level of mythopoeic concrescence.

   Finally, the 1947 story “THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD” provides an example of both consummate status and a high level of concrescence. In my review I wrote:

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.
Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

I won’t repeat the various reasons I stated for validating the mythopoeic discourse of INJUSTICE, though, like the other two stories analyzed here, the tale’s not free of flaws and is not one of the more“sophisticated” even within the superhero genre. But it provides a good example of a story notable for just one strong master-thread, and nearly no subordinate threads in the mythopoeic vein.

COMICS HISTORY, STILL SECRET

I suppose I'm late to dinner on this one, given that Robert Kirkman's SECRET HISTORY OF THE COMICS showed up in 2017. I probably heard about the AMC series but just didn't get round to it, but I've now seen all six, roughly hour-long episodes.

The six episodes are replete with a lot of information, sometimes from creators involved in a given era's products, sometimes from their descendants, and sometimes from celebrities who simply want to voice an opinion (Famke Janssen, Michelle Rodriguez). A lot of this information is fairly common knowledge in fan circles, so calling it "secret" is a stretch. To the non-fan community, all this info is not so much "secret" as "obscure," but I surmise that THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF COMICS would prove a non-starter.

I found three of the six-- dealing respectively with Superman, Milestone and Image-- to be efficient but unremarkable, while one dealing with the image of New York City in comics before and after the 9-11 event to be somewhat overblown and a little too uncritical of the Christopher Nolan Bat-films. The other two documentary episodes, though, were much more interesting, albeit for different reasons.

Episode One, "The Mighty Misfits Who Made Marvel," proved fascinating in that it was a thoroughly even-handed treatment of the creative/business relationships of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  Frankly, a lot of fan-critics could learn how to produce a balanced argument from this episode. Having been a fan/critic for over forty years, I thought I knew pretty much all the publicly available info about those relationships.  

But "Misfits" surprised me, by excerpting actual dialogue from a 1986 radio call-in program, wherein Stan Lee spoke at length with Jack Kirby about both their differences and their undeniable creative harmony. This section alone makes the whole Kirkman documentary-series worth watching.

However, with every bit of good, there's a little bit of bad, and that's what we get with the much more ideologically skewed "Truth About Wonder Woman." There are some decent tidbits of info here, though not much one could not find in the same-year biofilm PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN, which can't be termed a documentary record in any case.

But like many other commentators, many of the so-called "comics historians" in this segment can't resist scoring ideological points. After a quick-and-dirty survey as to how William Moulton Marston got "in" with DC Comics and originated the successful franchise of Wonder Woman, the segment then makes claims that DC was getting a lot of criticism about the bondage elements in the WONDER WOMAN comics, without really saying much about the nature of the criticism itself. Since the majority culture of the 1940s paid nearly no attention to comic books, I would assume that the documentary is talking about irate letters from parents, since even Doctor Wertham wasn't critiquing comics in the very early forties. A little more specificity in this department would've been preferable. 

The outside criticism, according to the documentary, caused publisher Max Gaines to attempt to rein in Marston. This did happen, according to some of DC memos that have survived today. But "Truth" doesn't elucidate how much control Marston had over the franchise, due to the unique contract he had negotiated with the company. Rather, according to the voice-over of narrator Keri Russell (who also voiced Wonder Woman in a direct-to-DVD production), Max Gaines tried to vitiate Marston's control of the character but putting Wonder Woman in the Justice Society. 

The documentary conveniently leaps over the fact that a short 9-page introduction of Wonder Woman, by regular creators Marston and Harry Peter, had appeared separately from the main Justice Society story in ALL-STAR COMICS #8 (late 1941). Interestingly, this short debut, meant to function as a lead-in to the release of the Amazon's regular berth in SENSATION COMICS (January 1942), takes place in the same month as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Clearly, this "advance sample" was taken in the spirit of publicizing Marston's creation.

When Wonder Woman made a literal appearance in a Justice Society story, it took place in ALL-STAR COMICS #11, released the following summer. The adventure shows all of the featured members of the JSA, plus "honorary member" Wonder Woman, engaged in battling Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater. This, according to the documentary, was part of Gaines' insidious plan to wrest control of the Amazon from Marston, because Wonder Woman's segment was scripted by JSA regular Gardner Fox. "Historian" Tim Hanley says:

In one of [Wonder Woman's] early appearances as part of the Justice Society, writer Gardner Fox doesn't quite know what to do with her, so he decides to make her the secretary of the team. All the other male heroes go out to save the day, and she stays behind to keep the notes.

As it happens, Wonder Woman, though she is a "honorary member" due to the convoluted rules of the JSA (which was primarily about promoting characters without their own title), gets just as much action as any male hero in "The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan." Wonder Woman gets to beat up a lot of Nipponese soldiers, and is justly celebrated by American soldiers.

The changeover came next issue, ALL-STAR #12, in which Wonder Woman takes the secretarial role for the first time, with little explanation.

However, given that the use of Wonder Woman in the feature was under the control of the feature's editor, not the writer, Hanley is clearly wrong to blame this development on Fox. There is also no reason to think that Gaines, who did have such control (though he probably would've executed his will through Sheldon Mayer), was trying to seize control. I think it's more likely that Marston objected to having Wonder Woman written by someone else, even though he was already writing the characters in her title feature, as well as in SENSATION COMICS and COMIC CAVALCADE. It's more likely that Gaines, who could not have altered Marston's binding contract, was simply trying to use the Amazon's appeal to help boost the sales of his title.

ALL-STAR COMICS #13, however, took a departure from this "secretary" status, when all of the then-active heroes, including Wonder Woman, were booby-trapped by Nazi spies, who sent all of them soaring into space, where they would presumably be doomed. Instead, all of the heroes had separate adventures on exotic planets, after which they returned to Earth and kicked ass on the fifth columnists.

Roy Thomas's TwoMorrows publication, ALL-STAR COMPANION, examined all of the Justice Society issues in detail, and devoted a sidebar to Wonder Woman's role in issue #13. The sidebar chronicles how regular writer Fox wrote an adventure for Wonder Woman on the planet Venus. Marston wasn't pleased by the script, and wanted the chance to rewrite the story. Gaines apparently okayed the rewrite, thus leading to the only Marston-Peter collaboration to appear in ALL-STAR.

The story, in which the Amazon helps winged female Venusians overcome brutal male invaders, is enjoyable if a bit on the typical side. The existence of this second and last WONDER WOMAN solo JSA-adventure is also not mentioned in "Truth," and so there is no consideration that maybe a harried editor like Max Gaines may have imposed the "secretary solution" simply because he was tired of fighting with Marston over stories. Did this solution appear in issue #12 as an implied warning to Marston, who may have complained too much over the Amazon's depiction in #11? I offer this as speculation only, but if it bears any resemblance to the historical truth-- which is really a genuine "secret" by this time-- then it would seem that Marston ignored the "warning," kept up the complaints, and so had to watch his character relegated to "guest appearances" in the JSA. I would further assume that there was nothing in Marston's contract that prevented such guest appearances, and thus from one standpoint Wonder Woman's secretary status came about simply to "punish" an upstart author, not to reduce her importance as a feminist icon.

Oddly, the documentary's over-ideological interpretation of Max Gaines and Gardner Fox is entirely at odds with its treatment of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as "messy" human beings, who should not be judged in terms of being heroes or villains. Perhaps the somewhat polarizing nature of Marston's WONDER WOMAN mythology invites such over-political readings.

INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE AMPLITUDE PT. 2

In my first essay on this subject, written three years ago, I pointed out the way a given group of characters might accue mythic amplitude even though said mythicity inhered only in the character's membership in the group, my first example being the Injustice Society of the World. Then I cited another example, the portrayal of the X-Men in the graphic novel GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, and noted that all of the mutant heroes had a collective form of amplitude even though individually they were less than distinctive.

This week's mythcomic, "A Dream of Monsters," follows the latter pattern. Four of the six heroes-- Quantum Queen, Elvar, Dartalon, and Aviax-- have no mythic identities individually, but only collectively, insofar as they are part of Clonus's brood of mutated "children." Re-Animage has a little more individual mythicity, simply because his creators had to devote some cosmological thought to the process by which his body regenerates. The mental mistress Psyche, however, plays a more central role in the tale insofar as she is "the good mother" against Velissa's "bad mother," though even so, "Monsters" seems to be much more about the Frankensteinian story of Clonus-Prime, his wife Velissa, and the Hatchlings. Later stories in the short-lived WANDERERS series made some attempts to give the heroes some myth-status, as when Aviax, a fellow who can turn into various types of birds, fights an evil scheme that involves the extermination of birds, but all of these stories failed to imbue the sketchy characters with any symbolic stature.

In THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD, the starring heroes of the Justice Society don't have much mythicity compared to the villain-group. In the earlier tale A CURE FOR THE WORLD, the Society-members have more mythicity, but only in the collective sense. None of the heroes' particular skills or potentialities are emphasized, bur rather, all of them are made into vessels for the story's message regarding the liberating effects of democracy. If the same story had been told with six different DC heroes, it probably would have read about the same.

It is, however, not impossible for a narrative to sustain both individual and collective myth-amplitude, at least better than "Dream of Monsters" does. In THE JUSTICE LEAGUE'S IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE, five League-members are transported to an alien world by a group of judgmental beings named "the Impossibles."  The Impossibles remove the powers of Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and J'onn J'onzz simply because all five received their abilities without working to earn them. The powerless heroes are then obligated to defend the cosmic judges against a group of predacious aliens. During the battle, most of the heroes find that the removal of their powers turns out to be a Good Thing, because it either removes their weaknesses or prevents them from having their former powers turned against them. (For instance, Aquaman is attacked by mental waves from a brain-creature, but he realizes, somehow, that the waves could've slain him had he still had his telepathic powers.) So collectively, all the members share the amplitude of "earning what was not earned," but since the script exploits each of their individual myth-identities, each hero also has an individual myth-amplitude.

ADDENDA: Since, going by Google, I seem to be alone in appreciating JLA #59, I'll add that although Gardner Fox works into the story the weaknesses of Superman and J'onn J'onzz readily enough, he couldn't really do this with the other three. The Flash has no specific vulnerabilities, Aquaman's weakness of needing immersion in water only takes place after a full hour, and Fox probably didn't even know that the Amazon, as written by her creator, lost her strength (sometimes) if a man chained her-- or welded her bracelets together-- or whatever Marston wanted to write at the time. That's probably just as well, as we spared a scene in which Wonder Woman had to say, "The Crystal Man welded my bracelets together, but since I don't have my Amazon strength, I-- uh-- well, I'm still chained up!" (Oddly, the story does give Wonder Woman a psychological block, which is slightly appropriate, just because her creator was of the psychological profession.)

NULL-MYTHS: "VAMPIRES OF THE VOID" (ALL-STAR COMICS #26, 1945)

For this week's mythcomic, I selected the second of two "Bug-Eyed Bandit" stories scripted for the Silver Age ATOM comic by Gardner Fox. In the essay I stated that I didn't rate the first "Bug-Eyed" story to be a mythcomic, but I suppose that had I examined it in depth I would have rated it a "near myth."

Over twenty years previous, Fox scripted "Vampires of the Void," in which the Justice Society contended with "metal men" from space. Apparently these aliens were not robots but had evolved as entities with a penchant for nourishing themselves by eating solid metals. Each of the segments of the story sends an individual Justice Society hero up against a small cadre of metal men, all intent upon eating up whatever metals they find. None of the heroes can beat the aliens in one-on-one confrontations, but in each segment, a given group of aliens become obsessed with consuming just one metallic element, be it copper, gold, silver, etc. Once the aliens have filled themselves with Earth-metals-- Fox calls the process "imbibition"-- the heroes are able to defeat each separate group of metal men by exploiting some weakness inherent in the Earth-metal.

For instance, Hawkman fights robots who have "imbibed" silver, so he charges them with electricity, so that he can short-circuit them.

Doctor Mid-Nite, perhaps as a contrast to his status as a healing physician, gives his group of opponents "lead poisoning." 

And the Atom exposes a bunch of iron-eating metalloids to oxygen, causing them to rust themselves to death.

Now, I mentioned in this week's ATOM-analysis that I didn't consider the first "Bug-Eyed Bandit" story by Fox to incarnate a cosmological myth even though the author inserted a bunch of factoids about insect life at the beginning. In "Void," Fox has at least spread out his factoids, so that they're are a functioning part of the story.

But do they function as cosmological myths? I would still that they still do not, more because of presentation than content. Every single episode in the story is practically a duplicate of every other, except for the supposed humor of the "Johnny Thunder" segment. Thus none of the "epistemological patterns" possible for a juvenile superhero story about metallic elements really develop. I would also say that this story fails in terms of "underthinking the underthought."

In contrast, I did validate Robert Kanigher's 1967 "Plastic Perils" METAL MEN story as a mythcomic. Despite all of the indications that Kanigher was far from serious in his attitude toward the story, he did a little more than simply research the properties of a bunch of plastics. He gave a little thought as to how to exploit those properties in terms of their potential in a fantasy-combat situation, and so each of the heroes' encounters with this or that form of plastic carried a quality of active, rather than passive, imagination. 

MYTHCOMICS: "A CURE FOR THE WORLD" (ALL-STAR COMICS #22, 1944)

Just as I've occasionally expressed disappointment that Jerry Siegel's earliest SUPERMAN stories were underwhelming even for pulp-action fodder, I'm usually just as underwhelmed with Gardner Fox's stories for the Justice Society, even though by 1944 Fox had already produced a fair quantity of mythically interesting Batman and Hawkman stories.

"A Cure for the World" appeared on stands about a year before the end of World War Two, but does not, unlike a lot of wartime stories, concentrate on anti-Axis propaganda. It is a "message" story, though it provides a fascinating example of a story in which its subconscious *underthought* is somewhat out of sync with its conscious *overthought.* The latter, the overt message of the story, is the quest for understanding between individuals and groups of different backgrounds. However, the former, the underthought, emphasizes a slightly different theme: that understanding comes about better when the apparent alien offers some good or service useful to the greater culture.

The adventure begins as Doctor Mid-Nite sees a young boy being whaled on by two other boys. When the hero breaks things up, he's told that the one kid doesn't attend the same church as the other two, and they wanted to assert that their allegiance to their church made them better. (No difference between the creeds is mentioned: such explicitness would probably have been against DC company policy at the time.) Mid-Nite reminds the bullies what their country is supposed to be fighting for.

However, Mid-Nite is troubled enough by the incident to take the unnamed victim to visit the other members of the Justice Society. He seems to want his fellow heroes to explain-- to him as well as to the kid-- how persecution, a "crime of humanity," can still exist today. The other heroes don't seem to have any answers, and Starman particularly finds the conundrum "hopeless."

Then an ethereal winged woman, looking much like the Blue Fairy in 1940's PINOCCHIO, appears in the group's meeting-room. She offers the heroes the chance to travel back to critical points in history, so that they can see how, as Johnny Thunder puts it, "folks would learn to like each other." The winged woman agrees with this overt statement of the story's purpose, though the actual experiences of the heroes doesn't exactly bear this moral out. The woman tells the heroes that although they will keep all their costumes and powers, they will forget who they were in the 20th century, so that they'll have to dope out the problems of tolerance as if they were real inhabitants of these past worlds.

So with this setup in mind, a reader would be justified in expecting some bromide in which all of the heroes would encounter alienated people who would just want to live ordinary lives like everyone else, if only people would "like" them. However, that's not precisely what the various segments of the story illustrate.

Hawkman rather fittingly finds himself in the "early Stone Age, when man was a hunter and a fighter, and looked on anything different from himself as something to kill immediately, lest it kill him first." Compared to other bromide-stories of the period, this is a pretty bold formulation, to assert that xenophobia is rooted in the centuries-old desire to protect oneself from "nature red in tooth and claw." Hawkman believes himself to be a caveman named Ga, and after fighting off some unruly Stone Agers, he's invited to their community. There "Ga" meets "Tow," the prototype of all future nerds, and of comic-artists as well. Because Tow is "thin and weak," he tends to stay home with "the women and children" while the bigger men are out hunting. As a result he uses his leisure time to become the world's first artist, painting the image of a mastodon he's seen on a cave-wall. However, since the other members of his tribe have never seen a mastodon as Tow has, they think he's made some real monster that can kill them. Hawkman saves the youth and flies him away, at which point they observe that a real throng of mastodons is about to stampede over the cave-community. Tow and Hawkman return to warn the people, and once again, Hawkman has to punch out a bigoted caveman to make everyone listen. The cavepeople clear out and avoid the stampede, after which the group begins valuing the proto-artist's ability to capture nature in his images, and Hawkman's visit ends.

Note: the "Tow" adventure is an example of an individual being persecuted for being different, not for his membership in an alien group. This trope will show up again.

Part Two focuses upon Starman, who finds himself incarnated in the body of Theodoratus, a noble slave-owner/military commander in Athens in the opening years of the Persian War. Although in real life Athens used slaves more than any other Hellenic nation-state, Starman's modern consciousness apparently impinges upon the Athenian commander, for he instantly tries to convince his fellows that "slaves are men, even as you and I." (Note: all of the slaves depicted are white despite supposedly coming from "Africa," which presumably means that they are captives from Greek-dominated areas of North Africa.) When the first assaults of the Persians cause the Greeks to retreat, Starman and his trained slaves usurp the position of Leonidas at Thermopylae. True, at one point Starman is able to repel the invaders with his gravity rod:

But the hero's real weapon is shame: the noble actions of the slave-soldiers, whom Athenians deem animals, force the Spartan king Leonidas to return and assume his historical (and doomed) role at Thermopylae. Starman vanishes, having insured that Greece, the cradle of democracy, will begin emancipating its slaves, now that they're proven their manliness and worth to the greater culture.

The next segment also deals with the liberation of an underclass, as comedy-relief hero Johnny Thunder visits medieval England. Unlike Starman, who gets to become an aristocrat, Johnny joins the mass of English serfs whom the local lords tyrannize. Plucky Johnny seeks out the local lord and wins him over by becoming his jester (albeit with a lot of help from Johnny's magical Thunderbolt-genie). Having found an "in," Johnny claims that serfs can defend the country as well as knights can, and he proves his point with a lance, albeit very comically (and with more help from Thunderbolt).

The Atom actually may meld with his own ancestor in 17th-century America, since "Nathaniel Pratt" bears the same surname as the hero. This time it's another individual who's being persecuted, an old woman unfairly accused of being a witch in the town of Salem. Perhaps because of Salem's notoriety, this is the only story in which the hero doesn't manage to convince anyone of the individual's rightness, that she's only an old woman who knows some home-grown medical tricks. But he does get to beat up a lot of Puritans.

Doctor Mid-Nite journeys to an even more tempestuous crucible of future democracy, Revolutionary France. becoming another theoretical ancestor, a "Doctor DeNider." Although Mid-Nite agrees with the basic principles of the Revolution and its overthrow of crowned heads, he succors a French noble who rendered aid to the rebels but has now been stigmatized for his aristocratic birth.

The Spectre, for his part, appears in the last story, in which he appears in 19th-century America at the time of Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat. The hero-- who, unlike most of the others, doesn't attempt to cover up his bizarre appearance-- comes to the aid of a fictional inventor, Stephen Hare, against thugs who think he's either (as Spectre says below) crazy or a threat to the status quo.

This one ends on a peculiar anti-climax, in that after the hero beats off the hoods, he introduces Hare to Robert Fulton, though apparently for no reason but to give Hare the courage to persist.

Oddly, during this final story Spectre thinks to himself as to "how futile force is," because he can't make the people of this time accept Hare, any more than Atom can make the witch-haters accept the old woman. But the real purpose of the heroes' temporal battles with intolerance, successful or not, is to make readers invest themselves in the heroes's symbolic struggles. The story ends as they affirm the American principles of tolerance to a crowd of "boys and girls" who are patently their target audience.

The fairy-woman, incidentally, reveals that she is "the Conscience of Man," and it's of slight interest that said conscience is supposed to be female, given that all of the other heroes are men (except Wonder Woman, exiled to the status of secretary thanks to ongoing battles between her creator and the DC editors). Still, all of the villains are men as well, so that's something.

The common thread of all of the time-voyages is that the objects of persecution, whether individuals or groups, are outsiders who can show their greater-than-average worth to those who discriminate against them. This illustrates a point I extrapolated from Frank Fukuyama in this essay:

In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward.  In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

So what is the "cure for the world?" Oddly, it seems to be the recognition not simply of the "commonality" of people who all want to be "liked," but of the ability of special persons or groups to excel in some way, to come up with inventions that no one else has, or to perform well in battle. I doubt that Fox conceived this theme consciously, but it may be that, since the story appeared during wartime, it's possible that someone didn't care for the implicit criticism of failings in America and some of its current allies. Two issues later, in ALL-STAR #24, the Conscience of Man appears for the second and last time, so that the heroes of that story can illustrate the evils of Germany's martial spirit. Perhaps Fox himself thought he might be misunderstood, and wanted to make clear that whatever sins the incipient democracies had committed, those of Germany were far, far worse.

MORE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE

In January and February 2016 I wrote three AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE essays, starting here, on the subject of using this term to gauge the different elaborations of the combinatory mode. In the first essay, I mentioned that even though the Justice Leaguers were the stars of the Gardner Fox story "Secret of the Sinister Sorcerers," they were also merely functional presences within the story, and that the greatest "amplitude of associations" (a.k.a., "super-functionality") belonged to the three villains of the story.

Now, at the same time, I must specify that this amplitude remains on the level of what I've called "the underthought," since this level of authorial concentrations deals with what Frye called "the progression of images and metaphors," presumably without any prior intellectual arrangement. The "overthought," in contrast, is what I (though not Frye) have called the author's "predetermined complexes of ideas."

With this determination of symbolic discourse in the JUSTICE LEAGUE story in mind, I started re-considering the role of the villains in a much earlier story, "Injustice Society of the World."  This tale of the Justice League's predecessors, the Justice Society, was scripted by Robert Kanigher, though Kanigher substantially built upon the Justice Society mythos largely created by Gardner Fox.

In my analysis, I wrote:

Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.
Kanigher, though, seems to understand the potential appeal of a group that expouses an ethic of evil opposed to that of the heroes' belief in good.

In essence, the Kanigher story follows the same opposition in terms of the mere functionality of the heroes and the super-functionality of the villains. And yet, Kanigher's approach lacks the sheer combinatory delight that Fox appears to take in all the beings of "Magic-Land." The "complex of ideas" in "Injustice Society" may not be all that "complex" compared to the more high-minded artcomics. Still, the basic concept seems to proceed from a straightforward idea; that of turning the goody-goody ethics of the established Justice Society adventures on its head, by devices like showing robots impersonating representatives of law and order, or having the Justice Society undergo a faux trial for their "crimes against crime."

And yet, like a lot of Kanigher's work, the writer doesn't seem to elaborate his characters in a symbolic sense. Kanigher produced dozens, perhaps hundreds, of stories for DC Comics over a period of roughly thirty years. The 1966 tale "Beware of Poison Ivy" proves one exception to this tendency, but usually Kanigher doesn't lavish as much sheer symbol-happy imagination upon his characters as does Gardner Fox. Kanigher favors almost schematic arrangements of his plots and the characters caught up in them, and thus I think most though not all of his stories follow the process of "the overthought" rather than that of "the underthought." As a result, even the individual villains in the Injustice Society story leave something to be desired in the mythicity department; they only take on mythic status through their association. This also stands in contradistinction to Fox's creativity in giving each of his "Sinister Sorcerers" a distinct mythic persona.

On a side-note: I would say that O'Donoghue's PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST also elaborates its symbolic discourse through an overthought-process: everything in it is predetermined by O'Donoghue's scathing opinions on "damsel in distress" fiction. There's a rough parallel, too, in the menaces that dog Phoebe's track: they only have mythic status in the sense that they're a concatenation of stock horrors familiar through pop-fictional usage. Phoebe herself is something of an incarnation of what Nietzsche called "negative will," in that she exists just to be tormented, and thus I would tend to see her also as possessing less amplitude than her tormentors, even though she too is "the star of the show."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD" (ALL-STAR COMICS #37, 1947)

Most Justice Society stories fail to take advantage of their own epic potential. Perhaps it's because of the quasi-anthology structure of the series, which in early years stuck close to the short-story format that had proven so profitable for DC Comics. The adventures tended to follow either "strong continuity" or "weak continuity" patterns. In the latter, the heroes had some non-physical conundrum to solve-- say, the problem of juvenile delinquency-- and in the process of seeming to solve the problem, the heroes would involve themselves in the affairs of ordinary people. In the former type, the heroes had to achieve a particular physical goal, usually to frustrate the goals of particular villains. However, in its early days the Justice Society, being a concatenation of separate features, didn't precisely distinguish itself in the creation of new villains. Three exceptions introduced within the feature proper were the mad scientist Brain Wave (issue #15), the time-traveling evildoer Degaton (issue #35), and the Wizard (issue #34, Fox's last script for the title). In 1947, though, Robert Kanigher and various artists brought into being the memorable Injustice Society of America, composed of the three previously named villains, one Flash villain (The Thinker), and two villains from Green Lantern (Vandal Savage and the Gambler).

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.

Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

Kanigher, though, seems to understand the potential appeal of a group that expouses an ethic of evil opposed to that of the heroes' belief in good. Note the way he begins the story by having a radio celebrity, an avowed admirer of the Justice Society, turn on them suddenly.

The attacker is just a robot created by the villains, who have also launched a widespread assault on the U.S. on two fronts: (1) having robots infiltrate important governmental positions, and (2) turning loose huge hordes of crooks from prisons. The Injustice Society has done this not just for the purpose of conquering America, but also in order to lure their old foes into assorted traps.

For a refreshing change-- the villains very nearly manage to do everything they set out to do. These aren't bumbling stooges, but experienced fighters who have already taken the measure of the heroes and know many of their weaknesses. There are a few reversals: the Atom, instead of being trapped by his designated foe, infiltrates the evildoers' HQ and manages to kick a little butt. Yet he's taken down by the very villain assigned to defeat him-- the Gambler, if you're curious. In Green Lantern's conflict with the Brain Wave, the hero appears to die-- and while his "death" probably didn't fool too many of the older readers, it's true that without his sudden return-from-death at the story's end, the rest of the heroes would have been toast.

There's even a moment where the captured heroes think that they've won free of their prison, and charge forth to fight their foes-- only to arrive in a phony courtroom, where the Thinker presides as judge and the rest of the Injusticers are the jury. The villains cow the heroes with a ray-weapon and hold a trial, condemning the justice-lovers for having opposed crime and evil-- until of course Green Lantern shows up and saves everyone's hash.

To be sure, many of Fox's stories had antic moments, in which the staid superheroes found themselves plunged into nonsensical situations slightly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll. Indeed, in Fox's last story, the Wizard is introduced as a master black magician who doesn't believe that the heroes really have good aims: he thinks they're pretending to be heroes to launch some profitable scam. But Fox didn't generally maintain the Carrollian sense of anarchic logic, and Kanigher does, at least more than previous stories had.

Even though Kanigher gives his devils their due by emphasizing their pure ethic of evil, his depictions aren't perfect. The Wizard is the logical leader, but there's no indication that he controls magic powers, and Degaton, who forgot all of his attempts at being a super-villain at the end of ALL-STAR #35, is simply back in the villain game with no explanation, and with no reference to his time-travel specialty. (Perhaps the Degaton who joined the Society came from some future time-frame?) Brain Wave and Vandal Savage are treated somewhat like lackeys, but Kanigher does at least have some knowledge of the other two fiends, for he correctly portrays the Thinker as a crafty planner and the Gambler as a showman (using throwing-knives, he pins the Atom's clothes to a nearby wall, carnival-style).

While not as sophisticated as many of the stories I've analyzed as mythcomics, I hold that this is one of the few times a Golden Age comics-author really allowed himself to "sympathize with the devils," even if said devils had to be returned to the hoosegow in the end-- with the Wizard given a particularly humbling, and rather corny, comeuppance.