NEAR-MYTHS" "THE TRILLION DOLLAR TROPHIES" (SUPERBOY #221, 1976)

 

This story, one of the last Jim Shooter wrote for The Legion before he became an assistant editor at Marvel, is a curious venture into "quasi-adult" subject matter for both Shooter and for a feature associated with the Superman mythos. That, more than the story's formal qualities, are its foremost features, and the tale garnered a degree of negative response for its appatrent employment of B&D elements.

Short version: the Legion-heroes are the "trophies" of the title. Two criminals, Grimbor and Charma, seek to capture the heroes for purposes of reaping a ransom from the group's rich patron. Charma is in some ways the "dominant" member, for she has the power to dominate any male and make him her subservient slave. However, this same talent evokes titanic rage in any female, even though Charma may not be impinging on anyone's particular mate. Charma thus needs a powerful male protector, so she enslaves the reluctant lock-maker, Grimbor the Chainsman. The duo seem like castoffs from a William Moulton Marston story, though I tend to think they represented a "one-off" idea for Shooter, rather than any syndromic obsession.

          First, while Grimbor takes on Colossal Boy, Charma gets beat on by Shadow Lass.

 

Timber Wolf and Light Lass try to separate their enemies, but as Charma takes another beating from the female Legionnaire, her cries cause both Grimbor and the male Legionnaire to come to Charma's aid, so these heroes are also captured.

Later, when Charma is about to kill off some of the captive heroes, Shrinking Violet, one of the weakest Legionnaires, comes to the rescue. Though Violet is governed by the same compulsion to punch out Charma, the heroine does so with an eye to making the captive males so angry they break their chains and accidentally clobber Grimbor. The story closes on the revelation that at some point Grimbor planned to get back in the driver's seat by making special chains to restrict her domination-power.

It's not a very good story, nor a deep story. But one must admit- it's not a dull story.  

  

MYTHCOMICS: CARNIVORA (1994)

 

Some time back the Italian album-series DRUUNA was recommended to me, and I finally found time to read the series, this time on COMIC ONLINE FREE.COM. 

My first thought is that it would have been easy to read the albums out of order, because creator Paolo Serpieri wasn't especially concerned with inter-album continuity. While keeping in mind that the literary term "picaresque" may have been misused in many instances, the adventures of the titular heroine Druuna would seem to conform to that model. That model focuses on the wanderings of unattached protagonists seeking to make their way in the world, whether by hook or by crook-- often crook, since the genre takes its name from the Spanish word "picaro," meaning a rogue who lives by his (or her) wits. Female protagonists may tend to be somewhat more innocent as they flee the attentions of lustful predators; some can be fairly called rogues, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, while others exist to be repeatedly attacked and abused, like the 1965 parody-character Phoebe Zeitgeist.  Serpieri's Drunna follows the latter model, and like Phoebe she spends an inordinate amount of time being stripped of her clothing and being subjected to numerous indignities-- though unlike Phoebe, Drunna seems to be able to "relax and enjoy it," even though she doesn't seem to be a syndromic masochist.

I found Volume 4, CARNIVORA, to be the volume that most succeeds in assigning a psychological mythicity to Drunna's circumlocutions-- a psychology that I associate with the nightmarish conviction that one can never know where reality begins and dream ends. To the extent that continuity matters, earlier volumes established that Drunna originally occupied a space-faring generation starship, though like most of the ship's occupants, she thought she lived on a regular planet, specifically a city infected by a devastating plague. By the time of CARNIVORA, Drunna has been taken aboard another starship, but everyone aboard this ship is aware that they are descendants of a devastated Earth, and that they are searching for a new planet to colonize. Druuna becomes a chess-pawn to various parties aboard the ship, sometimes being used for sex, sometimes as a means to fight against a tyrannical computer-intelligence. But whatever victories Druuna achieves in earlier volumes are abolished here, in a recursive world where, as the Einstein-looking scientist above says, dreams and reality can become confused.

The POV shifts from the scientist to that of Druuna herself, imagining herself back in the plague-city. She experiences the possible hallucination of being murdered by weird surgeons, then awakes in a bedchamber unharmed, where she meditates on her unexplained pregnancy (which is also apparently an illusion) and on "the perverse pleasure of waiting, that strange obscene desire." A strange man enters the room and abuses her, after which his phantom-like associates gather to cheer him on. 

But then Druuna finds herself back on the starship, awakening from the first of many demonstrable dreams. The ship's computer addresses her, and she learns that Shastar, her deceased lover from the plague-city, has had his consciousness merged with that of the computer. She meets Terry, a female crewperson, who informs her that many of the other inhabitants have been devoured by a carnivorous alien intruder (presumably the "carnivora" of the title). The creature imprisons its victims in membranous webs, but Terry avers that these crewpersons are as good as dead. 

Then Terry's supposed identity goes out the porthole. Two crewpersons appear and shoot her, revealing that she's a "replicant," a copy of the original female created by the invader. Druuna, though not a fighter by nature, kills the monster born from phony-Terry's guts with a weapon, saving the life of one crewman. The other crewperson, the real Terry, regards Druuna as another possible menace. She divests Druuna of her few clothes and chains her up in a room where some of the ship's degraded inhabitants, "the prolets," swarm forth to manhandle the bare-assed heroine.

While Druuna suffers the fate of the perdurable female, the captain of the ship, known as "Will," is seen on his own, meditating on the oppressiveness of  the universe. Druuna, or a replicant thereof, joins him. He has sex with false-Druuna a couple of times, but it doesn't do anything to lessen his mordant musings on the relativity of time. Awakening from post-coital sleep, he finds Druuna missing. Will wanders about looking for her, has a dialogue with an unnamed crewman imprisoned in the alien's webbing, and then finds fake Druuna-- and also fake Will, a replicant of himself. 

Meanwhile, real Druuna seems to awake, no longer tied up as she was before. However, this awakening is yet another engineered dream, as she converses with a hologram of dead lover Shastar. The hologram gives Druuna such helpful information as "Beyond this wall the universe is reflected upside down and time is inverted." Shastar tells Druuna to communicate the ship's peril to the crew, since the captain's been destroyed by the alien beasts. Then she awakes for real (or as real as things get here), though she finds that her assailants have apparently left her unbound and the door to the chamber open. She finds another crewman dead, while not far away, Terry encounters the false Druuna.

Perhaps because more crewpeople have died, Terry doesn't go off half-cocked this time, but this only permits Fake Druuna to accuse Real Druuna of being the alien copy. After tricking Terry into shooting Druuna, albeit non-fatally, the replicant summons one of its beastly allies to overpower Terry, who takes her own life so as to avoid becoming a hors d'oeuvre.

The ship's doctor finds the wounded Druuna and barricades the two of them in the computer-room. The doc pulls a sheet over Druuna's head, since she's apparently died, while outside the replicants order him to let them in, for they are true life and he is only "death and negation." Doc blows up the ship, but his consciousness is propelled into his own past. Then he somehow fast-forwards to a period before the ship ventured near the aliens' domain, and he talks the captain into reversing course. Druuna is alive again, but the doc can't help wondering if he actually succeeded, or if everyone he's encountered might be a fiendish copy of the real Earthpeople.

If TWELVE MONKEYS hadn't come out one year later than CARNIVORA, I would have said that this story was something of a cross between that mind-bending time-travel flick and 1982's THE THING. Druuna's sexcapades play a somewhat less direct role in the narrative here in comparison to other installments. However, it did occur to me that the recursive nature of dreams and illusions throughout CARNIVORA might be profitably compared to the ecstatic (and repetitive) nature of human sexuality, which also have, however briefly, the effect of abolishing the participants' consciousness of commonplace reality. In the end, though the reader can go on to witness more adventures of the picaresque heroine, those narratives also continue to de-center both Druuna and her world so that the idea of a shared reality seems as illusory as the dream of Chaung Tzu.

MYTHCOMICS: “THAT SERIOUS GUY IS A CRIMINAL?” LOVE HINA (2002)

I’ve discoursed several times on Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, summarizing its series concept here and condensing its joined themes of female sadism and male masochism in CROSSING THE LAWLINES5, thusly:

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

While keeping in mind that this sort of wacky, semi-eroticized violence is not identical with syndromic sadism, the question arises: since Ken Akamatsu himself is (I will presume) a biological male, does his idea of masculinity start and end with the vision of the male as a hopeless goof?

 

My answer is, “almost.” Keitaro Urashima begins the LOVE HINA series as a klutzy twenty-something who’s failed his college entrance exams three times. When he gets the job of managing an all-female dormitory owned by his aunt Haruka, he becomes the proverbial “rooster in the hen house”—though only if the rooster was crossed with a punching-bag, since Keitaro is forever blundering into compromising situations with the girls and then getting clobbered by them.

 

Further, Keitaro is almost the only male character in the whole 14-volume series. The only other masculine character is thirty-something Seta, who roams the world doing archaeological digs and who occasionally teaches a course at Tokyo U, the college to which Keitaro has repeatedly applied. In addition to these admirable aspects, Seta is trained in kung fu and occasionally has friendly bouts with “kendo girl” Motoko. He also tutored Keitaro’s principal love interest Naru, who had a strong crush on Seta in previous years. Yet Seta is unaware of Naru’s crush and often proves just as maladroit as Keitaro, so that he never really presents Keitaro with any real competition for the love of Naru or any other of Keitaro's other potential hookups. In the story considered here, the self-questioning “That Serious Guy is a Criminal?,” Seta does not appear, but his daughter Sara does. Sara joins the other dorm-residents in constantly belaboring Keitaro, though she’s only a “bitch-in-training” being that she’s about ten years old and not actually involved in the erotic aspects of the situation (which was probably a distinct relief to most readers).

 

 As the story commences, Naru and the other girls are enjoying a hot springs bath. Naru cautions their visitor Mutsumi that while residing at the inn she may get peeped at by the “beast” Keitaro. Naru sees Keitato approach the bath and prepares, with a look of predatory anticipation, to slug him when he trespasses once again. 

But Keitaro passes by the women's bath, goes back to his room and immerses himself in studies for his next entrance exam. Sarah and the equally mischievous Kaolla break into his room to gratuitously whale on him with blunt objects. To their surprise, Keitaro dodges their attacks without even seeming to notice their presence, because he’s so completely focused on his studies. When he does notice the girls’ presence, he remarks, with complete innocence, “Don’t you normally run in and try to jump-kick me?”

 

Soon all the girls observe that Keitaro is so focused that he isn’t making klutzy blunders anymore, nor giving them any reason to clout him. Akamatsu never makes any direct reference here to philosophical or religious precepts, but surely the artist means for his audience to understand that Keitaro has unintentionally tapped into a unique mental state, possibly one in line with the Taoist idea of “doing without doing.”

 

 

Kitsune takes up the challenge to femininity, declaring, “I’m going to use my feminine wiles to magically change Keitaro back into the pervert he deserves to be.” Clad in revealing clothes, Kitsune waltzes into Keitaro’s room during his studies. Yet he’s so focused he doesn’t notice her at first, much less getting flustered by her lady parts. If anything, Kitsune becomes attracted by Keitaro’s new aura of male reserve, and Motoko chimes in with similar sentiments. “It’s good to see him so focused and not tempted by the lure of the female.” Kaolla and Sarah want Keitaro to go back to his dipstick persona, so that they can continue to rag on him. Gentle Shinobu, the next-oldest, is the only one who doesn’t want to abuse Keitaro, but she too wants him to go back to “normal,” apparently because he seems too inaccessible in his quasi-Zen state of mind.

 

Naru is the last to behold the new Keitaro, and though she somewhat appreciates his focused attitude, she’s offended that he no longer reacts when she flashes him some tit or leg. The nubile eighteen-year-old even starts worrying that she’s losing her sex appeal.

 

At the conclusion Keitaro himself re-asserts the status quo. He bursts in on the girls while they’re bathing and explains to near-naked Naru that he’s finally solved an involved problem he’s been working on for days. However, once he solves the problem, his Taoist reserve disappears, his normal personality returns, and he becomes flustered by seeing all the girls in their birthday suits (except, happily, Sarah, who’s wearing a onesy). It’s certainly another of Akamatsu’s humorous jibes that at first the girls all ignore Keitaro’s trespass because they think he’s in his “serious guy” mode, but that, once he reacts to their charms, he again becomes a “criminal,” and thus fair game for a beating.

 

Keitaro never again gets into “Zen master” mode, but there are other stories in which he shows signs of maturation, and these signs of masculnity inevitably prove attractive to the age-appropriate girls of the dormitory. Thus Akamatsu does imply that women still like the image, if not the reality, of “men who take charge”—though in this comic universe, strength principally signifies durability, as in being able to endure any abuse doled out by the “gentler sex.”

MYTHCOMICS: "GRAVE REHEARSAL" (STRANGE FANTASY #7, 1953)

One problematic if minor aspect of the 1953 horror-tale “Grave Rehearsal” is the meaning of the title “Grave Rehearsal.” The phrase sounds like it’s meant to be a pun, but if so it’s an obscure one. Sometimes one encounters the phrase “grave reversal” in a context to denote reversals in the business world, but it's not the sort of commonplace construction that appeals to punsters. If the title is not a pun, the title would seem to be describing something about the story. The splash panel teases the reader with an event seen later in the story: a feminine dominatrix-type ordering a middle-aged man to be hurled into a grave full of mud. Possibly the unknown author of the story conceived of this scene as a “rehearsal” for the villain’s later, more murderous assault upon the protagonist. Further, given that psychological pontifications infused American culture throughout the 1950s, there's a slim possibility that  the author had heard some theory about the psychological appeal of mud-baths: that they allowed the participant to relax as if he were "rehearsing" his original sojourn in his mother's womb-- or even that the bath's relaxing effects presaged the ultimate relaxation of the grave.

“Rehearsal” also interests me in being a tale where it takes a little work to figure out who is the narrative’s centric presence. The dominant pattern in horror-stories is to place the emphasis upon the narrative’s most monstrous figure, while any lesser heroes—or demiheroes, to use my preferred term for victim-types—are subordinate presences. Thus Dracula is usually the star of any story he appears in, while Jonathan Harker, not so much. There are famous characters whom I would regard more as demiheroes than as monsters, such as Victor Frankenstein. But “Grave Rehearsal,” while nowhere near as famous as these luminaries, does maintain an interesting narrative tension between the story’s monster, the lovely Madam Satin, and its foolhardy worm-who-turns, B.S. Fitts.

Even before we meet the capriciously named Mister Fitts, the opening caption informs readers that Fitts is an “egomaniacal yellow tabloid publisher,” and that he’s about take one crucial step that takes him from “journalistic mud-slinging” to “health resort mud bathing.” This step only takes place, though, because Fiits is given to throwing fits, as is seen in the first three panels in the story. He castigates an assistant for daring to run “decent news stories” instead of sensational fodder to attract Fitts’ desired readers—whom he significantly calls “swine.” Then Fitts promptly has a heart attack.

Though the publisher accepts his doctor’s verdict that he Fitts must learn how to relax, he has no idea how to proceed. Then he gets a providential package from a health institute in the country of “Transvania.” A letter enjoins Fiits to find relaxation in smearing the muddy contents of the package  upon his face—and Fiits, also prone to fits of irrational enthusiasm, does so. He’s so pleased by the results that in no time he’s in Transvania, meeting Madame Satin as she conducts him to her resort.

The next day, the good Madame enters Fiits’ room with two helpers and that iconic weapon of the domme, a riding-crop.  The helpers strip the enraged publisher of most of his clothes, transport him to a graveyard, and fling him into a grave filled with mud. To his surprise, Fiits, though intimated by the Madame, finds that he experiences “heavenly ecstasy” as a result of wallowing in mud (as one caption tells us) “like a contented hog.” Madame Satin informs Fitts that the mud has marvelous curative properties, but she chooses not to share the secret with the world (thus making her the obverse of Fiits, who reveals every secret he uncovers to a sensation-hunting public). She claims to live solely off endowments by wealthy clients. Fitts, possibly desperate to protect his newfound lease on pleasurable life, makes Satin his sole life insurance beneficiary.

The impulsive publisher then suffers donation-remorse, but it’s too late. Satin’s real agenda is to murder him by burying Fitts alive, as she’s done with her previous beneficiaries. (Apparently in Tranvania, the police don’t ask too many questions about multiple vanished businessmen.) However, Fitts gets the last laugh, sort of. Once he dies, he becomes a ghost, able to see all the other unfortunate specters haunting the graveyard. Fitts then galvanizes the other ghosts by appealing to their sense of injustice, and together they muster the power to capture Madame Satin and sentence her to her own premature burial. For the final touch, back in America the late Mister Fiits invisibly looks on as his journalistic subordinates receive the full story of his demise and vengeance. The final words of one reporter: “Trust B.S. to file a sensational yarn, even after death.”

A few commentaries on this odd story have viewed the mud-baths as scatological in nature:  that what the publisher really wants to wallow in is shit. Given that the character’s initials  quite probably connotes “bullshit,” this is a logical conclusion, though it doesn’t take in everything interesting about “Rehearsal.”

What makes “Grave Rehearsal” a mythic story is the way in which it opposes two modes of existence, which, after Jung, I’ll call “the extroverted” and “the introverted.” In the first few pages of the story, Fitts is an extroverted type, in that he is an unscrupulous exploiter concerned only with making money through “mud-slinging” to readers he considers “swine.” Extreme extroversion, however, puts his life at risk, at which point Madame Satin inexplicably seeks him out. Given the speedy effects of the mud-sample, apparently the soil of Transvania really has some magical properties (not unlike the virtue the Original Vampirefound in his “native earth"), and Madame Satin knows in advance what over-active businessmen really need. She turns Fitts from a subordinator to a “sub,” calling forth his inner masochist, even though his syndrome goes no further than his embracing a sort of womb-like “ecstasy.”  Significantly, Fitts belatedly tries to jump off the sub-train by realizing he’s given away a little too much, though by that time it’s too late for him to keep his life. Contrary to her appearance, Madame Satin is even more of an exploiter than Fiits, being willing to kill multiple victims in order that she can live the good life. Yet once he’s dead, Fitts expresses his alpha-male power much as he did in life: stirring up resentments in the other spirits just as he used to stir up his customers’ desire for titillation—and he even makes his own death into grist for the sensation mill. It’s because of this belated act of extroversive will, overcoming his own desire to return to the womb, that makes Fitts, rather than his exotic murderess, the star of this particular mythcomic.

NEAR MYTHS: "MAYO CHIKI" (2010)

I've wondered on occasion if it would be possible to find much mythic material in the genre of teen humor comics. At present I haven't come across much of interest in American teen comics, but I must admit that the Japanese show a genius for infusing wacky adolescent antics with weird psychological touches.

One psychological aspect of the 2010 manga MAYO CHIKI led me to consider whether or not at least a portion of the finished story might qualify as a "mythcomic." However, MAYO CHIKI did not begin as a comic book, but as a series of light novels, which in turn were adapted to both manga and anime. Since from the first I've focused on mythcomics only if they were original to the comics-medium, MAYO CHIKI does not qualify. The novel series as a whole may comprise a literary myth, but the manga does not generate that myth, but only transmits the myth from the prose works, though some details may have changed in the translation. 

There's no reason, though, that I can't treat the manga as a "near myth," with the stipulation that it's derived from a primary source.

In some ways, MAYO CHIKI is a typical enough Japanese teen comic. It begins with a male character who is, at least on the surface of things, "average," and then creates a situation in which he's pursued by a small harem of pretty girls. 

However, in the case of MAYO's POV character, Jirou Sakimachi, he's got a biological peculiarity. He was raised by a mother who was a pro wrestler, and who, for no clear reason, constantly used Jirou as a "sandbag" (by which the translation means a "practice dummy.") In addition, his younger sister Kureha is also a wrestler, and has doled out the same punishing treatments to Jirou since she became old enough to wrestle. As a result of all this punishment, Jirou bleeds from the nose whenever he even comes into sustained contact with a female.

For some thirty years at least, it's been a well-traveled trope in Japanese culture to depict male sexual excitation in the form of nosebleeds. However, going by the dialogue in the second manga-opus, Jirou supposedly does so as an avoidance technique. "If you made bloodshed," another  character suggests to Jirou, "they'd stop hitting you, isn't it like that?" This may not be the whole truth, but the authors clearly meant it to be part of Jirou's makeup. In addition, it provides the girls in his harem with an excuse to "cure" him of his reticence toward women, while they can feel confident that he's not likely to become an aggressor. 

Further complicating the romantic drama is that the girl Jirou likes the most, Subaru Konoe, can't be seen publicly as a girl. For assorted reasons Subaru, in order to serve as butler to the heiress of a rich family, has to pretend to be male. For the bulk of the series, there are endless misunderstandings about the relationship between Jirou and Subaru, most of them revolving around the idea of "boys' love" (a particular fascination for high-school girls, it seems). In fact, Jirou's sister Kureha-- who lives with him, even though their mother is conveniently out-of-country for the whole story-- is one of the students who enthuses most about her brother being united with the supposedly male Subaru.

"The portion" I mentioned in paragraph two is the last few installments of MAYO CHIKI's conclusion. Jirou proposes to Subaru, but she has a widowed father, Nagare, who seems to hate Jirou on general principles. Nagare won't allow any marriage unless Jirou fights him, and he's a much better fighter than Jirou. The young man is forced to ask his sister Kureha to wrestle him again-- by this time, Jirou's mostly mastered his bleeding-problem-- and of course, Kureha clobbers him just as she did in the earlier practice sessions. However, though Jirou doesn't win the fight with Nagare, the younger man scores enough points that his future father-in-law has to concede him some respect, paving the way for a future wedding. To be sure, though, the authors manage to contrive a method by which Jirou doesn't entirely have to give up his "harem" in all respects.

In section 36, though, the authors choose to give Nagare a strange connection to Jirou that goes beyond the standard trope of the "heavy father." Jirou asks the older man why he hates him, and Nagare replies that Jirou reminds him of his younger self. Nagare then finds out Jirou's surname, which he's somehow avoiding learning in 36 volumes, and makes the odd revelation that he was a boyfriend to Jirou's wrestler-mother. This gives Nagare another reason to resent Jirou, because he's the child of the man who beat out Nagare for the favors of Jirou's mother. Yet it ends up meaning a little more than that.

While Nagare is in no way physically related to Jirou, the revelation that the former was at least a potential love-interest to Jirou's mother makes Nagare a "symbolic father." He thus takes the place of Jirou's deceased real father who is referenced even less than Jirou's mother. And if Nagare is Jirou's symbolic father, then Nagare's daughter is also Jirou's symbolic sister.

Though Japanese manga-works are awash with replete with numerous narratives of sibling-incest, it's not overtly suggested that Jirou has ever had a sexual response to the younger sister with whom he lives, or, for that matter, to his absent mother. He's also not an overt masochist, as he's never shown enjoying the violence Kureha wreaks upon him. But Subaru the symbolic sister may be seen as a displacement for Kureha the real sister, and possibly for the mother as well.

One cannot really interrogate the interior feelings of a fictional character, who has no depth. But one can inquire into the ways that the living authors encode certain patterns in the characters. One thing that *may* have been going on in the authors' skulls was that though they claimed that Jirou's nose-bleeding served as an avoidance-technique, they arranged things so it's not impossible to read it normatvely, as an indicator of sexual stimulation. That would mean that Jirou may have undergone some sexual stimulation through his contact with his family-members, and that this, and any masochistic stimulation, was so unwanted that it manifested in spontaneous nose-bleeds from any and all sustained contacts with females. The nose-bleeds don't stop until Jirou is united with a female whom he doesn't consider a familial transgression. And yet-- because she's a "symbolic sister"-- first seen trying to beat up Jirou when he accidentally sees her in her underwear-- one may argue that Jirou is still fulfilling the familiar pattern of sibling-incest, albeit only on a symbolic level.

In conclusion, MAYO CHIKI, even if it doesn't possess the full density of a mythcomic, seems far richer than anything one finds in the teen humor titles of America. Whether one considers that a boon or a deficit will depend on one's definition of "innocent entertainment."

HOW TO HANDLE A TOXIC MALE

I already trashed DICK GRAYSON VS. TOXIC MASCULINITY in this essay,  but thought I ought to examine this particular absurdity in greater depth:

Even as Dick aged out of the Robin role, these elements remained: youth, feminization, subtextual queerness and campiness, passivity in romantic relationships. 

Author Plummer is by no means unusual in pursuing the idea that male characters can be "feminized" by being threatened (he calls Robin a "damsel in distress"), by being inferior to a stronger woman (Robin's relationship to super-powered girlfriend Starfire), or even by being killed. I'm not sure when this trope became popular, but I would assume it grew with the proliferation of "queer studies." While I myself have devoted no small amount of time to analyzing the overlaps between the fictional phenomena of sex and of violence, devotees of queer studies play a one-sided game. They don't mind seeing the image of masculinity torn down, but what happens when feminine characters are subjected to humiliation, violence, and death? Are any of these characters "feminized," or are they just--

WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS????

Since Kraft-Ebing codified the phenomena of sadism and masochism in the late 1800s, it's been impossible to doubt that certain men and women have mentally translated violence-- whether real or imagined-- into sexual stimulation. What modern ideologues want, however, is not a careful consideration of the ways both men and women think and feel. They want to find ways to ennoble marginalized women by placing them outside the bounds of violence, while degrading that horror of horrors, the straight white male, by "feminizing" him.

Those titans of tedium, Gershom Legman and Frederic Wertham, represent early attitudes of the "Freudian Marxist" to the threat of the macho male, whose epitome was that of the costumed superhero. Even though organized fascism had been defeated on the stage of world affairs by the time both men wrote their respective screeds, both men evinced extreme fear that Neo-Nazis lurked behind every fictional depiction of violence. Yet the closest that either one came to suggesting a feminized male appears in Legman's LOVE AND DEATH. The author suggested that in comic strips like BLONDIE and THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS, "father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated, and degraded daily." However, I don't think he was suggesting that this was a way of "queering" the paternal targets of this degradation. It was simply a means of allowing female and juvenile readers of the strips to indulge in fantasies of hostility. It's a limited rebellion, though, since Legman specifies that paternal authority will remain despite these escapist notions-- which just shows that he didn't read BLONDIE very carefully. While "the Captain," the main male antagonist of "the Kids," usually re-asserted his power by paddling the Kids' butts, Dagwood is rarely if ever able to reclaim any dignity, especially not against his quietly domineering wife.

Finally, I find it odd that Plummer is arguing that queerness should be associated with passivity.
I think most gays would find that rather offensive, not to mention impractical, as it would force them all to be "bottoms with no tops."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DUCHESS OF DENVER," STEVE CANYON (April-Aug 1951)

I touched on the influence of Milton Caniff in my review of FABLE OF VENICE, noting how he made his greatest impact with 1934's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, which he departed in 1946 in order to work on a strip he could own outright, 1947's STEVE CANYON. The latter strip, though popular, never had the massive influence that TERRY had on comics-art. Both strips involved footloose young bravos tooling around various parts of the world, but TERRY seemed to catch a spirit of pure adventure characteristic of the 1930s, while the postwar world of CANYON was considerably more button-down.

Both strips, however, displayed Caniff's genius for creating vibrant female characters.  The best-known character from TERRY, the Dragon Lady, has become a sobriquet for any sort of dominating female, but the original character was a cool, resourceful schemer who could out-think and outmaneuver most men-- though not so much Pat Ryan, the he-man star who escorted young Terry Lee into assorted adventures  At the same time Caniff also utilized other character-types who were not nearly as original. In addition to Ryan's dalliances with the exotic Dragon Lady, he also enjoyed romances with a Sweet Young Thing, name of Normandie Drake, and with a Shady Lady named Burma. a dame who gave every impression that she got around. Caniff continued to use all three types throughout CANYON as well, and in 1951 he came with one of his more interesting psychological myths: "the Duchess of Denver." She may have taken her name from a character in a 1920s "Peter Wimsey" detective novel, but I suspect her real source was Caniff's ambivalent feelings toward the opposite sex.

For Caniff the "Shady Lady" type stands between the Sweet Young Thing and the Dominating Woman (represented in the CANYON strip by a businesswoman with the evocative name of Copper Calhoun.)   The Shady Lady is basically sympathetic despite having some sort of criminal or socially-disreputable past, wandering from place to place and at home nowhere. Often, when the Caniff hero encounters her, he must rescue her from some caddish fellow to whom she's loosely associated. This is how Pat Ryan encounters Burma, whom he must protect from a fiend named Captain Judas.

Because Caniff aimed his strips at family newspapers, the precise relationship of the lady to her ungentlemanly paramours was always left vague, but often one could read between the lines pretty well. Though Caniff's women were often gutsy or clever, the world of TERRY-- and of CANYON-- was pretty much a man’s world. Thus it was a given that even women of independent minds ought to hook up with a man, either for financial or psychological support.

The Duchess of Denver belongs to the Shady Lady type, but with some interesting differences.  Steve Canyon makes one of his frequent jaunts to the Orient on some spy-mission, and a he sees the comely Duchess-- never given any other name-- being auctioned off at a slave-market by a despicable individual named Fungo.   However, after doing his Galahad act, Canyon learns that Fungo and the Duchess are actually married, and that the auction is a scam to fleece customers. Further, the Duchess isn't the usual "weak woman" enslaved to a brutish man. In a reverse of the usual expectations, the Duchess, though not physically prepossessing, is a former circus strongwoman who can beat up most men who give her grief, while Fungo is short and ratty-looking. But because the Duchess has some inexplicable love for the nasty fellow, she simply takes it when he slaps her around.  The relationship is never explored in depth, but Caniff commented on it more directly in STEVE CANYON MAGAZINE #13: “It was a sadism-masochism thing, which I was playing with very gingerly at the time.”   

LIke many earlier Shady Ladies, Duchess is basically good at heart, and is revolted by the criminal activities she must undertake for him-- and yet she remains in erotic bondage to her swinish lover. Finally, she rebels in an indirect manner; after Fungo tries to kill Canyon, the Duchess joins Canyon as they flee the city via ship. In contrast to many modern uses of similar tropes, there is never a cathartic moment in which she gets to whale on her abusive husband to pay him back. When the ship sails, Fungo is still hale and hearty, having lost nothing but a useful pawn in his auction-racket.

Whenever a female character in literature suffers abuse, some critics have been known to go overboard, seeing conspiracies by male creators to degrade womanhood, at least through fictional surrogates.   I’m leery of this kind of “woman-as-eternal-victim” reading, but I can see why someone might read the "Duchess" continuity in this fashion. Even though Duchess is physically stronger than most women, she remains psychologically dependent on a man for her self-validation.   In fact, in one of her few revealing moments, she tells Canyon, “I’m so strong I have to be calm—my mother told me to THINK like a helpless little girl.”   Canyon then asks, “Is that how you were thinking when you married Fungo?” This bit of impertinence earns him a punch in the face from the strongwoman.

I’d like to think, not that Caniff wanted to see a strong woman dominated by an evil man, but that he intuited that the socialization of women in the early 20^th century—the insistence that all women should be “feminine” to the extent of helplessness—put them in a vulnerable psychological position, resulting in a tendency of women to have masochistic tendencies no matter how physically strong she might be. At the same time, one can’t quite overlook that the Duchess never really triumphs over her dominator, but merely escapes him.   She does get to triumph over a more comic antagonist, though. Once Canyon and the Duchess take passage on the ship, they find out that its captain, the humorously named "Curly Kew," is an unscrupulous pirate, who decides to keep the two of them prisoner while trying to romance the Duchess. Duchess fends off Kew several times and subdues him physically twice, making it quite unnecessary for Canyon to perform his usual “knight-in-shining-armor” routine. Amusingly, one of the first story-lines in TERRY AND THE PIRATES dealt with Terry and Ryan being held captive on board a junk owned by the Dragon Lady and her piratical minions, and how Ryan had to keep coming up with ways to keep himself from being seduced by another type of "strong woman."

The shipboard menace comes to an end when Kew is taken prisoner by Communist forces: Canyon and the Duchess, not looking upon the Reds as rescuers, opt to escape the ship in a lifeboat.  During the escape Canyon’s “lady” becomes his “dragon,” for the Duchess catches a chill while the boat is at sea and becomes delirious. A storm arises, increasing the dramatic peril, and the Duchess hallucinates that Canyon is her abusive husband. She belatedly tries to take vengeance for her mistreatment by killing "Fungo," forcing Canyon to endeavor both to restrain her and to keep the boat from being swamped. “If I’m to lose a wrestling bout,” he cracks with a touch of male masochism, “it might as well be to a beautiful dame.”

  However, when push comes to shove-- that is, when she tries to bash him with an oar-- he does defend himself and knock her out.An extreme feminist might say that by so doing he merely reinforces the same male tyranny represented by Fungo, but this is somewhat backward thinking, given that Canyon is never less than the perfect gentleman. Then the storm serves as Caniff’s device to end the continuity. The boat is swamped, hurling both refugees into the ocean. Just in time Canyon is rescued by American military. The Duchess, who never again appears in the strip, is last seen about to sink beneath the ocean-waves.

One can’t entirely escape the feeling that Caniff, in creating the Duchess, spawned a character too powerful to play the damsel in Canyon’s normal knight-errant routine, and that she is written out of the strip as quickly as possible because Caniff could think of nothing else to do with her.   Since the artist doesn’t explicitly show her death, Caniff may have entertained some thought of bringing her back. But in all probability her remarkable physical strength would have made her too freakish to have become a returning figure like the aforementioned Burma. Still, she remains an interesting footnote to any considerations of Caniff as a creator of femmes formidables.

MYTHCOMICS: LOVE IN HELL (2011-13)

In this mythcomics essay I hypothesized that Japanese popular culture's enthusiasm for the incest-kink (in fiction only, I specified) might have stemmed from the role played by an incestuous couple in their mythology. I stated clearly that this was an hypothesis that no one can prove one way or another. In the same spirit I advance the idea that the culture's similar enthusiasm for the interlinked concepts of sadism and masochism might have partial roots in another aspect of their mythology: the Japanese concept of hell.

Some mythological hells, like that of Sumeria, are merely dull places where shades drift about without passion or feeling, but the Greeks, the medieval Christians, and the Japanese exert great inventiveness in devising tortures for the souls of the dead, who must pay for the misdeeds of their mortal lives.

Reiji Suzumaru's series LOVE IN HELL is in many ways a predictable seinen (adolescent boys') manga. There's not as much fighting as in the more adventure-oriented stories, but there's lots of violence, and strong sexual content, though no actual on-panel copulation. Some of the stories of this episodic 18-part series (collected and released by Seven Seas Entertainment) play with extremely familiar seinen tropes, such as a schtick in which the protagonist and his buddy play peeping-tom inside a women's bath. That said, Suzumaru comes up with one wrinkle on infernal torments that strikes me as wholly original.

Protagonist Rintaro is a Japanese guy in his late twenties who's kicked around most of his life doing very little of anything, and who kicks the bucket in a spectacularly stupid manner. When he dies, he's surprised to find that he's been sentenced to hell, since he's not aware of having done anything particularly evil. He also finds out that as a "sinner," he's been assigned to a particular demon charged with meting out his punishments: a deceptively gentle female demon named Koyori, who looks like a 17-year-old Japanese girl, except for having a pair of horns and being dressed in black fetish-wear.

Rintaro soon learns that hell isn't run in quite the same way as depicted in traditional tales. For one thing, though he doesn't remember what sin he committed, and though Koyori won't reveal his sin to him, he learns that hell has many levels, and that he and other souls are minor sinners, allowed to inhabit a somewhat desolate city and pursue daily routines that approximate their mortal lives. On the lowest level, "the Abyss," the truly abominable sinners, like rapists and murderers, endure extreme suffering closer to the traditional torments of hell.

Here appears the seemingly original notion: the sinners in the hell-city are obliged to participate in the city's economy because they still experience bodily needs like hunger and the need for shelter, even though they're not literally alive. Koyori informs Rintaro that the base currency of hell is pain: that a sinner can amass infernal money the more he volunteers for suffering. This clearly runs counter to the traditional idea that demons just continually torment sinners for the fun of it. Still, the story-concept jibes roughly with a Buddhist notion that souls guilty of lesser sins may be able to expiate their sins and thus graduate to heaven, rather than simply staying in perdition forever, as in the dominant Christian version. In addition, the idea of paying for your food and shelter with pain might seem to many wage-slaves like a faithful reproduction of the real dynamic of the workplace.

Rintaro does encounter a sinner who's been able to amass a fortune in hell-currency because he's a masochist who loves pain, but the protagonist himself doesn't take to the idea of having his flesh cut off or having to sit in baths of boiling lava. Koyori, though she is in many ways a standard manga "cute girl," is fully able to administer punishments to Rintaro, like bashing his head in with a spiked bat, but for her part she usually carries out her duties in a businesslike manner. Thus just as Rintaro shows no real masochistic traits, Koyori is neither an outright sadist nor one of the "innocent sadists" scattered throughout manga, who somehow manage to cause another character pain without even consciously trying to do so.

It will come as no surprise that Rintaro and his infernal punisher form a "love connection," and it may be that Suzumaru wanted to avoid characterizing that affection with the familiar "sadist/masochist" psychological myth. But the de-emphasis of S&M agrees with the Buddhist ideal of atonement. At one point in the narrative, Rintaro thinks that he can make money in hell by doing "odd jobs" in the city, but he learns to his dismay that hell's rules won't allow the lesser sinners to keep jobs indefintely. Their only real "job" in hell is to suffer, to pay for their sins. The illusions of life in a human city are just there to get the sinners acclimatized, but the sinners are supposed to suffer in order to graduate to a higher level, assuming that they're capable of that transformation.

At another point in the narrative, Rintaro meets a demon who's something of a wimp about torturing sinners, and who almost seems to embody the idea of forgiveness. This demon's badass sister disagrees with her brother's gentler sentiments:

Hell isn't about people changing their ways. It's about being punished-- and paying for your sins.

In other words, this is a rejection of the "inner transformation" concepts of religion: one can only pay one's way out of hell with physical sacrifice. Without giving away the story's ending, I can say that Rintaro does have to risk his soul-existence in order to win clemency, The conclusion also involves Rintaro recollecting the particular life-sin that landed him in hell, and how he chooses to atone for the sin in a more personal, less cosmic manner.

The one false note is that although Rintaro's sacrifice involves the romantic feelings he and Koyori clearly share, the wrap-it-up-quickly denouement neglects to tell the interested reader the status of the demon-sinner relationship at story's end. Perhaps Suzumaru wanted to keep the "will-they/won't they" schtick going indefinitely, much as manga-fans saw when Rumiko Takahashi concluded her two signature works URUSEI YATSURA and RANNA 1/2.

ADDENDUM 2-23-2023: I recently learned that Suzumaru initiated a new LOVE IN HELL manga focused on new characters, but with both Koyori and Rintaro playing support-types. Their possible romance is still only in the speculative phase.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 5

I'll probably wind up my essays on clansgression for the time being with this entry. There are a number of other subtle ramifications of the theory, but by next week I plan to work on some new angles regarding the NUM theory and the concept of freedom.

In THE CLANSGRESSION FORMULATION I mentioned in passing that violence as much as sex could function, under the proper circumstances, to provide the reader with "the sense of being "caught up" in the experience of having boundaries broken in an explosive, irresistible state of being." Yet I have not explored the element of violence in respect to clansgression, for all of my examples have primarily focused on clansgressive sexual interactions: OEDIPUS, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE MOONSTONE, and GONE WITH THE WIND.  Given that my essay LEAD US INTO TRANSGRESSION details the ways in which the two kinetic elements can either remain separate or become melded into "impure states," the element of violence requires some exploration.

Now, as Bataille has observed, violence is essentially any activity that disrupts the workaday world, and for that reason he viewed sexuality as an aspect of violence, with which statement I do not agree. One of the most significant differences is that violence is not surrounded with nearly as many arbitrary codes as sex is, though there are some. In Part 4 I wrote:

The principle of transgression, however, stems from both the diegetic world of the narrative's characters, as created by the author, and the extra-diegetic world of the audience.

Where violence is coded into a very simple form of transgression-- Criminal A threatens Victim B with violence but is thrashed by Hero C-- there's not a lot of distinction between what the characters think about a fictive act of violence and what the audience thinks about it.  But in the "impure states," violence does become almost as complicated a matter as sex.

The two impure states as defined in the TRANSGRESSION essay were "erotic violence" and "violent sex." Although these are frequently confused, they can be best distinguished by close reading of the motive imputed to the one who commits the violence, to wit: is the agent of violence more concerned with injuring or with screwing?

Of the examples used thus far, only one of the four utilizes either of the impure states, and this is GONE WITH THE WIND. In PART 2 of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I observed that Scarlett O'Hara's deeds earned her opprobrium from both various characters in the novel and from at least some readers:

Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children. 

It seems obvious to me that generations of female readers did not take Mitchell's novel to their bosoms because they thought that it advocated spousal rape, or rape of any kind, as a general policy, though some modern ideologues have expressed such opinions. The only way that these female readers can possibly forgive Rhett's action-- or even take vicarious pleasure in it-- is if they are convinced that Rhett's motivation is honest passion, not violence. Violence certainly does shade into the rape-scene: Rhett is clearly trying to humble her, but not to cause her injury as such, even though prior to the rape he openly fantasizes about crushing her skull like an eggshell. And as I noted, Mitchell herself is implicated in the fantasy of rape, or else it would be impossible for her to portray Scarlett in post-coital bliss-- a bliss that implicitly goes beyond whatever functional, baby-making sex the couple has had before.

For a contrasting representation of "erotic violence," where the intent to injure is paramount, I turn to the novel that I cited here as an ideal example of the "bizarre crimes" trope: the Marquis de Sade's JULIETTE. Sade's violence, of course, is always aimed at inspiring erotic satisfaction through violence, but one particular scene relates, unlike the Mitchell scene, to both transgression and clansgression. Juliette, an orphan raised in a convent, escapes the world of righteous morality and becomes a happy convert to the philosophy of torment expounded by a male mentor. There follow many somewhat rote descriptions of Juliette and her fellow sadists getting off on pain and death, but only one strikes me as noteworthy. Late in the novel, orphan Juliette meets M. Bernal, her birth-father. She determines to transgress against all laws of parental respect by killing him, but first she seduces him. Then, having shown that Bernal is a massive hypocrite by society's lights, she binds him, verbally torments him, and then shoots her father through the head. To his credit as the father of a Sadean woman, M. Bernal doesn't beg for his life before he dies.  Although sex certainly figures into this episode, clearly Juliette's intent is always to injure, not to screw.


These two examples are reasonably clear-cut, but others can be confused by the question, "Is violence being used in place of sex?" In SHOOTING THE SHIRT I pointed out how often Japanese comedy-manga made use of the trope in which irate females clobbered the guys they secretly liked when said guys stepped over, or appeared to step over, some lawline. I observed:

the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male.

Often these comic versions of Juliette don't admit that violence stokes their engines. Rumiko Takahashi makes frequent use of this trope throughout URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, and INU-YASHA, but as far as I can tell through translations, the female protagonists never express any reaction beyond feminine pissed-offed-ness-- an oddly demure reticence from an author who includes so much sex and violence in her work. Takahashi only touched such overt Sadean territory once to my knowledge, in a comic short story about a modern married couple who displayed a peculiar fetish for having violent fights in their home-- but though comic sexual stimulation is suggested, the principal emphasis is on the neighbors giving the couple hell for their disruptive ways.

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

If, as I tend to believe, Akamatsu's sado-masochistic representations explain much about the popularity of this trope, then into which "impure state" do they fall? Since intent to injure is the predominant factor, they belong principally to the domain of "erotic violence." However, unlike Juliette's unlucky papa, these victims of female violence always survive their ordeals, so they may eventually have actual sex-- although, like Akamatsu's Keitaro, even "getting the girl" in the end may turn into "getting it in the end," so to speak.