MYTHCOMICS: ["THE END OF MISTY MAGIC LAND"], TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2 (2006)

NOTE: There is no particular title to the "Little Margie" story appearing in TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2; I have imposed one for clarity's sake. 

The complicated background of this story merits enumeration. (1) Alan Moore collaborated with J.H. Williams III on the series PROMETHEA for Moore's imprint America's Best Comics. The title character is a multi-faceted entity from "The Immateria," a land of pure imagination, and thus Promethea has existed in various independent fictional incarnations. (2) In one such incarnation, the heroine is a tutelary figure in a comic strip, "Little Margie in Misty Magic Land," where Promethea guides the little girl Margie through a host of fantasy-realms, the two women accompanied only by a comedy-relief "China boy." (3) "Margie" was Moore's pastiche on Windsor McCay's 1905 comic strip, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," whose installments were full Sunday page comics with no individual titles-- which is why there were no titles when Alan Moore and Eric Shanower created a full "Nemo" pastiche for AMERICA'S BEST COMICS SPECIAL #1 (2001), and no titles for this second and last pastiche from TOMORROW STORIES, executed by Shanower and Moore's colleague Steve ("no relation") Moore. 

Alan Moore's pastiche was pleasant but not particularly well organized. Since Steve Moore probably scripted his tale knowing that the days for America's Best were numbered, he provided a final "Little Margie" story that effectively concludes not only the character's series but also her childhood.

It's a common enough trope that as humans grow older they began to lose the imaginative freedom of their juvenile years, and Steve Moore (henceforth the only "Moore" I'll reference) practically broadcasts this theme on the first page of "End." (He also shows himself the equal of Promethea's creator in coming up with torturous puns, like the above "Prophetta Doom.")

Once Margie, her guide Promethea and comic-relief Chinky have received suggestions of a danger to Misty Magic Land, they seek to learn the danger's source. It does not take long for them to receive the first intimation from a clockwise individual named Thomas Tick-Tock, who discerns that Margie herself may be the problem, since she is a mortal who does not belong to the magical world, yet has not aged in nineteen years. "Perhaps I have not aged because I did not want to," muses Margie, "but should I have wanted to?" Promethea tries to lighten Margie's mood by taking her to the Chuckling Orchard, but Margie remains morose. 

The girls have better luck in the Menagerie of Moods-- but only briefly, for after some brief cheer, Margie falls into first depression, and then conceives race hatred for Chinky (encouraged by a mood-creature in a red Ku Klux Klan robe). 

Then Promethea moves to a deeper theme, though not one with much resonance for childhood: showing Margie how lack of emotional control results in the Horror of War. Margie flees the spectres of war, and it's at this point that Chinky diverges from Margie's of him, renouncing his role as "funny foreigner" and returning to his own realm, a fantasy-China realm.

The exit of the male presence in Margie's world leads her to a fairground, where she enjoys her first kiss with what looks to be Little Nemo himself. She quarrels with Promethea, acting as if the goddess is a controlling mother, and with that, Margie begins to age as she would in the real world, growing out of Misty Magic Land. So the danger to the dream-realm has always been Margie's attunement to it, and this is the last of the author's "Margie" stories, because, as she tells her own little girl, she's lost her connection to her juvenile self, and no longer has any stories to tell.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

MYTHCOMICS: "LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE" (1907)

In Part 3 of THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, I discussed in some detail the circumstances under which I would currently rate gag comic strips as having or not having symbolic complexity. One of my examples was Winsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND, in part because I'd listed that strip in my 2008 ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY. As LONG AND SHORT should clarify, I've changed my mind on this matter. My current view is because most if not all FIEND-strips are no more than short gags, that structure keeps it from demonstrating true plurisignativity.

But thus the queston arises: what about McCay's subsequent and more famous strip, LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND-- an admitted classic, though I didn't mention it in my 2008 LIBRARY.  Since NEMO unlike FIEND did allow for story-arcs, that means it had the capacity for mythic complication, whether or not it took advantage of that capacity.

Though I admire LITTLE NEMO in terms of its artistic accomplishment, it's never been a favorite of mine. I esteem it more than a lot of its comic-strip contemporaries, but the repetitive structure never grabbed me, dealing as it does with a child-protagonist who wanders through assorted dream-world wonders until he wakes to prosaic reality. Thus I don't have a lot of NEMO stuff in my collection. However, I do have Dover's 1976 album, LITTLE NEMO AND THE PALACE OF ICE AND FURTHER ADVENTURES. Fortuitously enough, the "Palace of Ice" adventure does meet my criteria for a "mythcomic."

This story-arc lasts eight installments, which appeared initially as full-page strips. As I've established, brevity in itself doesn't absolutely prevent a comic from displaying mythicity; it just stacks the odds against it.

Dover begins their reprint with nine-year-old Nemo and his female friend, the daughter of King Morpheus, about to be admitted to the ice-bound palace of Jack Frost. However,Nemo and the Princess are pursued by another recurring character, the troublemaking Flip, son of the dawn-god. Though he's visually reminiscent of Negro stereotypes of the period, one source says that Flip is supposed to be an "ill-tempered Irishman."

Not only does Flip intrude upon Nemo and the Princess' visit to the palace, in the first strip he has a malign witch pursuing him, presumably a carry-over from a prevous continuity. Fortunately, the guards of the palace grounds bar the witch, and so she plays no real part in the arc. Flip himself becomes the source of conflict in the arc, which seems to have been the role he played throughout the strip. Nemo and Flip become companions in many adventures, though in this arc Nemo seems diffident toward Flip's presence-- probably because Nemo wants to see Jack Frost and his icy wonders, while Flip keeps disrupting things. He constantly demands to have his whims satisfied by threatening to summon his sun-god uncle to vaporize Jack Frost's world.

Though it's a short sequence, "Palace of Ice" does an exemplary job of potraying a world in which one sees an array of fantastic sights associated with cold phenomena. It is of course a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole, from which all the winds of the world originate. Every episode necessarily ends with Nemo's dreamland-journey being interrupted by some accident, be it one of Flip's antics or something native to Jack Frost's realm, like a snowball-fight by brainless snow-people.

The big meeting with Jack Frost is also a visual wonder, though actually nothing much happens as a consequence of the ice-ruler greeting Nemo and the Princess.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that Flip isn't present in Jack Frost's courtroom, and this turns out to be a set-up for the arc's resolution. Flip, almost always seen with a cigar in his mouth, resents being told that he can't smoke in the throne room. He disappears, and two strips later, he shows up with a series of ice-trucks in his wake. The truck-drivers then proceed to dismantle Jack Frost's fabulous ice-palace, breaking it up into square ice-blocks of the type used in household ice-boxes prior to the refinement of artificial refrigeration.  It's not explicitly stated that Flip summoned the trucks, and in one dialogue-balloon he claims that Jack Frost's people are forced to allow their palace's destruction "'cause they need the money, I guess"-- though given that Flip has been repeatedly threatening to destroy the realm, he seems more than a little implicated.

The decimation of the ice palace might tie into sociological myths on the evils of consumption, in which the beautiful art-objects of a declining aristocracy are broken up and turned into raw material for the use of the average consumer. He need not have been a Marxist to think of this; after all, he himself was creating beautiful art that was being used to sell periodical newspapers. In addition, the breakup of the palace mirrors the dominant narrative trope of LITTLE NEMO: that all the beautiful conjurings of the artist's pen are doomed to be dispelled by "cold" reality.

Another sociological motif would be the fact that while Nemo generally seems demure and respectful to everyone he meets, whether or not they are in positions of authority, his "shadow" Flip is irreverent and a frequent troublemaker.As others before me have suggested, Flip may be the "shadow" of Nemo's conscious mind, always more interested in strutting his own stuff than in anything else.

Since I have a deep interest in the history of fantasy literature, I suppose NEMO also leaves me less than enthusiastic because its type of fantasy depends entirely upon the vagaries of dream-- not unlike Carroll's Alice books, which may have influenced McCay somewhat. Five years before NEMO, L. Frank Baum created Oz, which some deem to be the first fantasy-cosmos created by an American author. Unlike Slumberland, Oz was supposed to be a real place with its own rules and culture-- though it's a further irony that the best-known cinematic adaptation of Baum chose to banish to the same gates of dream that contained Slumberland.