MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a "family," as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean anything if a creator doesn't have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families. 

FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn't the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles. Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee's penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby's passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever "origin story" fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

In juvenile sci-fi comics, "hunting" doesn't connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females' function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn't challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.

 Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same "nest," often depicting Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "siblings." Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the "den mother" gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as "female vs. male" agency a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott's run on the FF title-- from issues #1-46 (2018-2022) -- has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called "The Reckoning War."

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into "War" that one has to track down in other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott's FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There's some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott's main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are "the Reckoning," and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift."

Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can't equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The "fake death" sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge-- in other words, endless "hunting"-- holds peril for the "nest" of the family.    

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed's chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF's family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.        

    

MYTHCOMICS: ["KIKYO'S LIGHTS"] INU-YASHA (200?)

 This analysis of this long arc (18 chapters) is thematically tied to the one I arbitrarily titled KAGOME'S HEART, so reading that essay before this one is recommended. Chapter 17 of this arc is entitled "The Lights," and since none of the individual titles summed up what I wanted for an umbrella-designation, I'm using the overall title, KIKYO'S LIGHTS. Although the manga ran for roughly another two years, it's in this arc that Rumiko Takahashi brought to a close the romantic triangle between the undead priestess Kikyo, the living mortal girl Kagome, and the half-demon who loves them both.

In HEART, Naraku the demon-human hybrid launches a complicated plan to both eliminate his own human side's reluctance to kill Kikyo-- whom he once loved, and who has the power to exorcise him-- and to utilize Kagome's hostility to the priestess as a psychic (and psychological) weapon. Naraku's failure to do so in HEART merely moves him to a new elaboration of the same gambit. Takahashi also introduces, previous to LIGHTS, a subplot in which the heroic monk Miroku is poisoned in such a way that, though his life is saved (by Kikyo), he's in danger of imminent death whenever he utilizes his wind-tunnel power-- so naturally, throughout the arc he keeps being put in a corner, usually in defense of his beloved fighting-mate Sango. Also, the wolf-demon Koga, Inu-Yasha's rival for Kagome's affections, joins the demon-fighting team.

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As the arc begins, Naraku possesses most of the shard of the Shikon Jewel. However, Kikyo has the power to banish the evil influence of the jewel, which would exorcise Naraku's evil as well. To compromise the undead priestess' power, he entraps her in near-invisible webs of mystic silk, webs that will also reach out to enfold Kagome and Inu-Yasha.

Kikyo attempts to get Kagome to purify her of Naraku's corruption by shooting the priestess with her own magic bow. Unfortunately, Kagome still holds a deep resentment of Kikyo's involvement with Inu-Yasha, and the mortal girl's divided heart causes the bow to break, so that it's useless. Kagome, Koga, Shippo, Sango and Miroku travel to a shrine atop Mount Azusa, where they can seek a new bow for the purification ritual. Inu-Yasha guards Kikyo, and in a separate subplot, Kohaku, brother of Sango, flees the agents of Naraku, seeking to capture him for the Shikon shards in his body.

     

  However, Kagome is separated from her freinds and taken into the shrine, which tests her to see if she's truly capable of the ritual. An illusion of Kikyo appears to Kagome while she hangs off a cliff, bearing the magic bow, though it seems incredibly heavy in her hand. The spirit taunts Kagome for her human failings. However, Kagome defeats the spirit's logic with her own: asserting her absolute conviction in the reality of the love between her and Inu-Yasha, which even his old love for Kikyo cannot sunder. As a result of Kagome's defiance, she gains control of the bow and is expelled from the shrine. Significantly, Inu-Yasha arrives on the scene in time to succor her.

 

 However, Kikyo is present at Azusa as well, and Naraku appears to sweep her up, taunting her with the nearness of her extirpation. Koga, who like Kohaku possesses Shikon shards in his body, assails Naraku, and Kikyo hopes she can use Koga's shards to purify the evildoer. Inu-Yasha and Kagome arrive, and while the half-demon battles Naraku, Kagome starts to purify Kikyo's wounds. But Kikyo tells her to hold off, and Kagome sees a vision of the Jewel inside Naraku's body. however, the Jewel then disappears, so that when Koga assaults Naraku again, he has no hope of exorcising the demon. 

   Kagome then realizes that Naraku transported the Jewel into Kikyo's body. The intrepid girl is able to shoot Kikyo and give her enough power to exorcise the Jewel, but Naraku withdraws the gem before the ritual can be completed, and he flies off, the Jewel still partly corrupted.

 

But Kikyo, who already died once before, has reached the end of her second life. She and Inu-Yasha say their farewells to one another, while the other heroes think about what she's meant to them. Her artificial body dissolves into a congeries of lights. allowing her the ability to say farewell to all of her noble allies.

In the final chapter of the arc, Koga has been stripped of the shards that gave him special powers, so he resolves to leave the group and return to his people. He shows his respect for his rival by irritating the hell out of the mourning Inu-Yasha, the better to snap him out of his funk, and he even loosely approves of Kagome's romantic choice. The chapter then winds up with the beginning of a new arc concerning Inu-Yasha's half-brother Sesshomaru. He, like Kohaku, has been kept out of the main action, and he accidentally-on-purpose becomes Kohaku's new protector in the wake of Kikyo's passing. I have not yet finished the entirety of the opus. Still, I'm guessing from this narrative's tone that for Takahashi this was the definitive end of Kikyo's story, which should make for a more complete arc for both Kagome and Inu-Yasha at the epic's final conclusion.   

        

MYTHCOMICS: "ANIMAL CRACKERS" (ARCHIE GIANT SERIES #196, 1972)

 

I didn't have too much luck this month looking for my annual "Xmythcomic" until I just randomly decided to look through some online Archie Giants. I don't usually expect much if any mythicity in Archie stories, having said here that "I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures." Still, since I have found myth-stuff in other teen humor comics, so I thought an Archie mythcomic a mild possibility. I just wouldn't have thought it would be a Christmas comic.

It's also from Al Hartley, an ARCHIE artist who became a born-again Christian in the late 1960s. Supposedly he got into his religious crusade so much that his editors had to tell him to tamp it down. I'd seen a few stories into which Hartley worked Christian polemics, but I wasn't sure if he had the artistic ability to emphasize vision over dogma. Yet I was slightly impressed by a 1972 "near myth" in which Hartley tried to communicate a sacral attitude toward nature and American history.

"Animal Crackers" was printed the same year as the "Bus Fuss" story, and it draws upon a few aspects of Christian faith that I suppose a Christian might not consider "mythic" (except maybe for Jordan Peterson). There's a slight irony that the story is introduced by the character of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The character debuted in 1962 but only became part of the Archieverse seven years later, first by dint of getting an animated cartoon in 1969 and then graduating to her own title in 1971. This led to Sabrina getting a "giant" collection of stories like this one, though "Crackers" only gives her two panels of a "half-frame" story. Clad in a Santa-outfit, she gives the reader a quickie intro to the idea that animals also celebrate Christmas, and then promptly does a fast fade.  

So here begins the main conceit: it's the regular Archie characters, as animals. Archie, though not exactly a commanding presence in the comics, gets to be the Lion because he's the King of the Archie Universe. Jughead is a kangaroo who envies a pelican for his food storage capacity but doesn't appreciate being able to use his pouch for Xmas presents-- though this really doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the story.

So in quick succession most of the Archie characters get their beasts on: Moose the Gorilla, Reggie the Tiger (because the tiger is the lion's "rival"), Big Ethel the Giraffe, Dilton the Owl, and Veronica the Peacock. Strangely, Hartley leaves out any iteration of Veronica's rival Betty. Maybe it was a bit of conceptual strain to animal-ize any other females, since he doesn't draw Veronica as a female critter, but as a humanoid with a peacock-tail and bird-feet. But aside from some minor sex-jokes-- Big Ethel turns off all the boys while Veronica only has to "flutter her tail" to mesmerize the males-- nobody's doing much of anything, good or bad. So is Dilton going to excoriate the gamboling beast-people for not going to church?

  Yes-- and no. Lion Archie defends whatever games they've all supposedly been playing at the "Christmas party," because "Christmas is a sort of make-believe time." This ought to sound logical to most readers, juvenile and otherwise: isn't Xmas a festive time, to gambol about with friends and family?

However, Dilton does have a point beyond being a spoilsport. In the remaining two pages of the story, he sketches out a time before Christmas, when animals-- and, by extension, the humans they represent-- were ruled by "the law of the jungle." People ruled by that law fought all the time, governed only by the "survival of the fittest." (Not much love for Darwin here...) However, though without explicitly mentioning the birth of Christ, Dilton states that Christmas was responsible for introducing the current state of all creatures, able to appreciate one another despite any differences that might divide them. I hypothesize, though, that since Hartley's editors didn't want him proselytizing in the Archieverse, the artist chose not to invoke "the Prince of Peace" as such. Instead, he employed a cognate principle: that of Isaiah 11:6, in which "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" (as opposed to the popular "lion and lamb" misquote). And though I'm agnostic (albeit with a Christian background), I have to appreciate the skillful way Hartley managed to communicate his feelings on the millennial nature of his faith with Aesopian version of the Archie cast and a fusion of the Christmas holiday with the vision of Isaiah.

I have to admit, though, that I still haven't found a myth-tale for those immortal kids of Riverdale in their own personas. But if I never find one, this is an adequate substitute.                 

MYTHCOMICS: ["KAGOME'S HEART"] INU-YASHA (200?)

 I won't devote any time in this essay to detailing the basic setup of Rumiko Takahashi's INU-YASHA serial. I outlined those basics in both of the other essays on this property: THE BLACK PEARL and SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION. Further, the long arc I've chosen to label as "KAGOME'S HEART" commences only a handful of installments after TRANSFORMATION, so the INU-YASHA status quo remains largely the same, at least in terms of who's chasing who and the stakes of the seesaw battles of good and evil. 

In my analysis of TRANSFORMATION, I noted that it was made up of two long arcs-- each labeled according to one of the story-titles (according to the Viz translated editions), "The Third Demon" and "Secret of the Transformation." These two had in common Inu-Yasha's progress toward mastery of the magical sword Tetsusaiga, though they were interrupted by three other story-arcs only tangentially related to that theme. I simply chose to use the title of the concluding arc as an umbrella-title for both.

An additional complication is that the story translated "Kagome's Heart" is one of the installments present in the intervening arc "Kikyo's Crisis," in which, to repeat myself, concerns how "Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha's feelings for his former lover," i.e., the dead priestess Kikyo, restored to a semblance of life by magic. Takahashi does not devote a lot of space to this "Crisis" arc, for she chose to let the emotions invoked in "Heart" simmer for quite some time, coming to a boil a little while after Inu-Yasha passed one trial by fire, only to face another with regard to the human girl he loves. Below are three illustrative pages from the "Heart" story:

The culmination of the "Crisis" arc is that Kagome tries to resign herself to Inu-Yasha's divided heart, obliging him to love both a living woman and a dead one. HEART-the-long-arc then comes back to this psychological conflict and combines it with the five heroes' efforts to destroy their nemesis Naraku and to gather together all of the shards of the Shikon Jewel. The group's sometimes allies-- Sesshomaru, the wolf-demon Koga, and Kikyo-- also have reasons for pursuing Naraku, though predictably enough Kikyo's entrance will unleash emotions that Kagome has tried to tamp down. As the arc begins, however, the five heroes only know that Naraku has somehow secreted himself so that they cannot find him, either to kill him or to take possession of his stolen Shikon shards. Their only clue seems to lead them to the legendary Mount Hakurei, alleged to have been the dwelling-place by a great monk, Hakushin. But Hakurei is so pervaded with spiritual energy that both Inu-Yasha and Shippo are adversely affected when they come close. So how can the evil Naraku be concealed therein?    

In addition, it's quite evident that Naraku has been busy, for seven dead mortal mercenaries have been restored (via Shikon shards) to undead status, implicitly to run interference for Naraku. Though Takahashi devotes a lot of space to Inu-Yasha's group battling the seven revenants-- each of whom has a deadly specialty-- I'll pass over them quickly, since the warriors are just there to keep up the needed level of spectacle for a shonen series. The revenant who has the most personality is the perverted Jyakotsu, who forms a homoerotic desire for Inu-Yasha, a desire that will only be satisfied when he cuts off the dog-demon's head. However, arguably the dog-demon really gets curbed by Kagome.

For some readers, it might be easy to mistake this scene for just another of Takahashi's many "irate-female-clobbers-insensitive-male" schticks. But there's a deeper dynamic here. In the short tale "Heart," Kagome confesses that she'll try to put aside her negative feelings toward her competition just to remain in Inu-Yasha's presence. But the rash hero wants to be held blameless for any pain he causes her, and that's what unleashes Kagome's ire. She's a woman in love who wants her loved one to be true only to her, and when he reacts to her sublimated resentments as if she had found fault with him, she uses her "sit command" power to punish him.     

 

 Takahashi eventually parallels Kagome's attempts at self-sacrifice with those of the Buddhist monk Hakushin. Once Kikyo manages to access Mount Hakurei, she meets Hakushin, who sought to become a "living Buddha" in order to help others after death. However, self-doubt infected the monk's resolve, and later Naraku suborned him, persuading him to let Naraku stay within the holy mountain. But Kikyo is able to assuage the monk's weakness, so that he's able to find peace.   

However, though the spiritual shield around Hakurai dissolved, Naraku accomplishes his purpose there: splitting off a part of himself, a sort of demon-baby. The baby, later named Hakudoshi, then seeks to take control of Kagome in order to utilize her ability to sense Shikon shards. The evil infant at first can't find darkness within the young girl's heart, until Kagome's negative feelings toward Kikyo come forth. However, even though Kagome feels resentment that Inu-Yasha left her side to search for a missing Kikyo, she successfully resists the demon-baby's spell with her love for Inu-Yasha, moments before he arrives on the scene. 

The spawn of Naraku escapes the hero's retribution, and once he's alone with Kagome, Inu-Yasha swears to never again leave Kagome for Kikyo. However, she realistically judges him to be incapable of deserting his former love-- who of course has further appearances to make in the ongoing series-- but the heroine manages to negate her natural irritation with her complete conviction in her own love. 

The INU-YASHA series takes place in a fantasy-version of Sengoku Japan, where Shinto gods and demons (or fictional versions thereof) intermingle with Buddhist monks seeking to transcend the physical world. I suspect that Takahashi's primary interest was the conflicts of the human heart. This is why, though she's respectful to Buddhist precepts, the artist is more concerned with Hakushin's failure than with his ascension to nirvana. But this is the core of her art, for in the words of G.K. Chesterton, Takahashi is, first and foremost, a poet who's in love with the finite, rather than a philosopher, whose abiding love is the infinite.