ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

ICONIC BONDING PT. 3

 In ICONIC BONDING PT. 1 I formulated three types of bonded ensembles using the Dick Grayson Robin as an example of a character who had participated in all three, to wit:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

In all of these examples, Robin is a superordinate icon, as are the majority of fictional heroes. In contrast, most fictional villains function as subordinate icons. So when villains appear in ensembles, they usually do not possess the quality of stature, only charisma. But this charisma-action also manifests in line with the three models seen above.

"Unbonded ensembles" would be any sort of short-term teams, or teamups that prove loose at best over time. For instance, there have been many gatherings of Bat-villains in the Bat-verse, ranging from RESURRECTION NIGHT to HUSH. No reader expects these peripatetic assemblages to have any durative value. The same applies to teamups that may last a few issues before dissolving, such as the alliance of Daredevil's foes the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. However, in the above cases the charisma-crossover action depends on the fact that the villains have been previously established. So when both the Enforcers and their boss the Big Man first appear in SPIDER-MAN #10, they had no crossover-charisma because they had no previous iterations. Further, their ensemble expires with that issue, for the Big Man never returns. When the Enforcers make their second appearance, which is also the first appearance of the Green Goblin, the "familiarity" of the Enforcers sustains a "proto-crossover" with the "novelty" of the Goblin, but only because the Goblin himself will go on to future appearances.

"Semi-bonded ensembles" are those that have some impressive duration, even when the icons aren't joined at the hip. I've written a couple of times about how Stan Lee took two THOR villains who no longer fit that feature, the Cobra and Mister Hyde, and made them a semi-regular team. However, even in the period when the two malcontents were most often allied, one would occasionally appeared independently of the other, or in alliance with some other super-fiend. In the 1980s Cobra severed his alliance with Hyde and his short-lived 1970s group of serpent-themed villains, the Serpent Squad, became reworked by later hands into the Serpent Society. I can't speak about Cobra's status in current Marvel comics, but up until the end of the 20th century he became much more prominent as the member of the Society than he was as a solo player, or as the partner to Mister Hyde.

"Bonded ensembles" are those in which the durative value is even more noteworthy, and may involve qualitative escalation as well as the quantitative kind. The Enchantress and the Executioner appeared together in their first appearance, and tended to appear together more often than not, with a slightly different angle: that the Executioner desired Enchantress as a bed-partner. There's a hint that this finally came to pass in a 1970 AVENGERS story, and future stories built on that development. None of the THOR stories in which Enchantress and Executioner are the only villains are charisma-crossovers, any more than Batman and Robin are stature-crossovers when they're the only heroes in a given story. And if the renegade Asgardians appear together in a non-aligned feature like THE HULK, it's not any more a charisma-crossover than Greenskin squaring off against a single non-aligned villain like Maximus the Mad.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there, any more than Sergeant Rock being separate from the grunts under his command. An exception was the Apokolips-Lord's brief role as the organizer of the first "Secret Society of Super Villains." But even there, the charisma-crossover would be between (a) Darkseid and any minions, such as the pictured Kalibak, and (b) the Secret Society as a whole, which functions as a semi-inclusive team. 

Heroes and villains may be the only two of the four personas that regularly appear in all these configurations. Even I, the author of said personas, will probably not bother trying to suss out if my models to apply to the other two, the "monster" and the "demihero."

 

QUICK CROSSOVER CORRECTION

 In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I wrote:

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

At the time I wrote these words in 2021, I hadn't yet formulated the linked terms of "novelty and familiarity," first seen in slightly different form in 2022's THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Once I had made this formulation, the description of Qualitative Escalation became strained. Yes, Ivanhoe became a "cultural touchstone" despite the fact that in his original medium he enjoyed only one story, and possibly would have become just as "escalated" had Scott not included the subplot of Ivanhoe's crossover with Robin Hood. But if I truly restricted Qualitative Escalation only to famous works, then it would be impossible for me to term the minor Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS in the ranks of crossovers, because its hero only enjoys one appearance but never becomes a touchstone of any kind.

So I will revise the exclusionary terms of my criteria for Qualitative Escalation. I was seeking in that criteria to come up with a form of "durability" to parallel that of the Quantitative type. But an icon's assumption of the stature of superordination, whether that icon appears just once or not, is de facto a Qualitative Escalation in comparison to all the subordinate icons within the text. So Tan Hadron, though never able to match Ivanhoe in any other way, does possess the same superordinate status.

This does not apply, however, to "back-door pilots," episodes of regular serials (usually but not always television shows) which attempt to launch new serials. A few such pilots may take over almost the whole run-time of a given episode, so that the pilot-characters can amass more time onscreen than the regular serial-icons. Nevertheless, such pilot episodes are still under the aegis of the ongoing serial's main characters, and if said episodes do not generate even one independent monad, and are not adapted from previous narratives, then the characters have no crossover-mana whatever. One comic-book example of this practice are the three issues of Marvel's INVADERS, in which Roy Thomas created the "Kid Commandos" team in order to hustle the sidekick characters out of the title. In this essay I expressed the notion that I might regard that team as an "adjunct" to the regular superordinate icons, but I now reject that line of thought to be consistent with my statements on other forms of "pilots" that go nowhere.

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3

 At the end of 2020's EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2, I wrote:

The same dynamic also applies to those serials that often or always focus upon “guest stars”who never again appear in the series. Early installments of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT are structured like almost every other adventure-hero feature, in which the Spirit helps good people and vanquishes bad people. However, even in the earliest years Eisner sometimes devoted stories to one-shot characters who seemed to take center stage, in that their triumphs or tragedies received the most attention. However, the Spirit was still the thread holding all of those one-shot characters together, and so he retained the greatest stature, even in stories like THE CURSE, in which the hero barely appears. As discussed in HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE, the only exception to this centricity formulation appears in certain anthology titles. When a continuing character merely appears as an interlocutor—Jorkens in Arthur C. Clarke’s TALES OF THE WHITE HART, or the many “horror hosts” in comic-book titles—then whatever focal presence inspires the most conviction in each story possesses the greatest stature-vector, though not necessarily the greater charisma-vector.

But, it's occurred to me from time to time, what if the interlocutor telling the stories is also a part of them, as the Spirit always has potential agency in the anthology-stories in his series? 

My conception of "agency" came up at the end of last year, with GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1, where I defined the term thusly:

..."agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

The relevance of such comparison to the current question goes like this: if the Spirit can have dominant agency even in all of his stories, even those where he does next to nothing, then why would the same NOT be true of icons who appear in all the stories within a self-contained anthology?

In the above essay, the reason I split agency into both "narrative" and "significant" values was because it's more than evident that central characters may have no agency at all within the diegesis of their stories, but may have it in an extra-diegetic sense. My example was Willy Loman of Miller's play DEATH OF A SALESMAN, who has no power within his story to change his circumstances, but has agency insofar as his fate manifests the primary concerns of the author's will. Similarly, though the serial character of The Spirit may not have much narrative agency in all of his stories, he has significant agency as the source of the authorial ethos that ties together all the characters in his world.

So, when an interlocutor-like character participates within the diegesis of a story, one must ask if the author's will is most fully expressed in this icon's actions and outcome. 

The 1981 HEAVY METAL presents viewers with a frame-story in which a glowing green sphere, billed in credits as "Loc-Nar," accosts a young girl, whose father he has just killed, and tells her stories about the many ways Loc-Nar has spread, or tried to spread, evil throughout the universe. 

In one of the narrated stories-- which the listening girl views, as if Loc-Nar were a crystal ball-- Loc-Nar has only a minor effect, encouraging a robot to go sex-mad in "So Beautiful, So Dangerous."

In two stories, "B-17" and "Captain Sternn," Loc-Nar wreaks capricious changes on human beings, reviving dead pilots as zombies in "B-17" and mutating a not-quite-innocent individual in "Sternn." 

In the story "Harry Canyon" Loc -Nar, pretending to be a priceless artifact, leads two subordinate characters to their doom. However, the centric character is never even aware of Loc-Nar's power, and fortune so favors him that he makes a pile of money off the weaknesses of those who seek to profit from the artifact.

In the other two stories, "Den" and "Taarna," Loc-Nar's influence takes different shapes. The entity does not directly seek to tempt the heroic Den, but other characters present Den with the possibility of using Loc-Nar to rule his new world, and Den nobly refuses.

 In "Taarna" Loc-Nar seeks to dominate an entire future-world. Some denizens of that world summon the heroine Taarna to oppose Loc-Nar's forces, and after several battles, Taarna makes a direct assault upon Loc-Nar. The entity makes its only direct attempt at temptation, offering Taarna rulership, but the warrior-woman destroys Loc-Nar-- which, through some unfathomable resonance, causes the interlocutor Loc-Nar in the frame-story to perish as well. The movie ends upon a triumphant note, even though of the six stories, Loc-Nar succeeding in promulgating evil in three narratives, but did not wholly succeed in the other three. 

In essence, the same paradigm applies to Loc-Nar that applied to Willy Loman. Loc-Nar has considerable narrative agency, but the point of the author(s) is to show that his agency can be defeated, and so in each story the centric icon is whatever entity the Loc-Nar impinges upon. Therefore he does not have significant agency across all six stories, as the Spirit does in all of his tales.

However, some of the characters appeared in other comics-stories before their adaptation in HEAVY METAL, and of course Loc-Nar, as conceived by the movie's authors, did not appear in the stories of "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." Therefore, since these are "familiarity icons" being "crossed over" with the "novelty-icon" of Loc-Nar, HEAVY METAL qualifies as a crossover-film.

(Note: the name Loc-Nar comes from one of the "Den" comics-stories but there's no connection between that name and the movie's icon. Additionally, though Wiki says that "Harry Canyon" and "Taarna" are derived from two separate Moebius stories, neither qualifies as an adaptation.)

PUPPETS GOTTA DO THE LIMBO ROCK

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when [the authors] failed to find a suitable existing puppet.-- Flann O'Brien, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, 1939. 

I didn't get much out of O'Brien's metatextual novel, which concerns, in very loose fashion, an author who apparently starts hanging out with his characters. But the above passage is interesting partly because it resonates with the rise of postmodern fiction as a reaction against the predominant realism of literary modernism. For the most part modernist authors maintain a strict distance between the domain of the "real" world of the author/creator and the "unreal" world of the author's creations.

O'Brien wasn't saying anything all that original in 1939. In the years before the rise of copyright law, an author like Shakespeare could swipe characters and plotlines from pretty much anywhere. And even after copyright became the law of the land, authors like Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs worked Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into their stories, arguably using the rubric of parody to get away with a little literary larceny. In 1916, psychologist Carl Jung began writing the first of many essays on a concept he'd eventually name "the collective unconscious," which may the closest human culture ever came to imagining a "limbo" in which all fictional and legendary characters might exist, if only as symbolic patterns. Authors as diverse as Philip Jose Farmer and Alan Moore have entertained themselves and others by imagining wonderlands in which a panoply of independently created literary characters rub shoulders with one another.

I'm sure that when O'Brien wrote the lines above, he knew good and well most authors would not want to make their copyrighted works open to public plundering, not least because popular characters can be an author's meal ticket. O'Brien was probably just spoofing the modernist idea of "originality" by claiming that writers should just take whatever they needed from other writers, rather than just making pale copies of characters they admired. 

The quote is also apposite in a small way to my own theory of literary emulation as laid forth in last August's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2. For most of human history, oral literature was created by mostly unknown authors picking up and transmitting traditional stories about familiar figures of history and folklore. This is the pattern I call "icon emulation," in which icons like Heracles or King Arthur might have any number of new adventures appended to their histories. At the same time, sometimes later authors did not emulate a particular icon, but a set of tropes associated with that icon. Supposing, for instance, that, as Wikipedia suggests, the Greek tale of Rhodopis is the earliest extant "Cinderella story." Later authors did not, so far as we know, keep the name "Rhodopis." Instead they utilized "trope emulation," borrowing tropes from the generating first story and reworking the Rhodopis persona to take on whatever name or background would best please a particular audience, including the name and background of the medieval Cinderella of Europe. Ironically, for exigent reasons the late name of Cinderella came to subsume all versions before and after her official creation.

Whether or not O'Brien was being funny about claiming that all of literature should become a "collective commons" as needed, in a real sense, this is how literature really functions. There's nothing new under the sun, except for the way an old wine looks when displayed in a new bottle.

DOMINANT PRIMES AND SUBS

In the CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS series I set down four configurations with respect to stature and charisma that could applied to individual crossover narratives. However, I made frequent references to judging stature and charisma with respect to the cumulative histories of a given icon, particularly in Part 3, where I dealt in part with how stature accrues in "rotating team" serial features. Now, to better distinguish between these individual and cumulative assessments, I've extrapolated four complementary configurations designed to be applied only to cumulative assessments.

Given that one cited example of a problematic stature-character was Batman's foe The Joker, I decided to use that character and one from Part 1, Fu Manchu, as exemplars of the four configurations.

FU MANCHU was, from his first conception, a STATURE DOMINANT PRIME. The prose book series from author Sax Rohmer may have been told from the perspectives of the devil-doctor's enemies, but even when the Chinese mastermind was offstage, he was always the star of the story. Most though not all adaptations of the character to film or television followed the same pattern.

Yet one of Fu's most enduring incarnations in pop culture was in the Marvel comic book MASTER OF KUNG FU, which starred the villain's heroic son Shang-Chi. I stipulated that though Fu became a subordinate icon in this series, such was the degree of his stature that it was not diminished by his becoming a Sub. Thus within the sphere of that series, as well as a handful of other Marvel Comics appearances, Fu Manchu was a STATURE DOMINANT SUB.

The Joker evolved in a roughly opposite manner. He swiftly became the most-often used villain in Batman's rogues' gallery, but in all of these multifarious appearances, he remained a CHARISMA DOMINANT SUB.

I confess I'm not conversant with many of the Bat-books from the 21st century on, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there have been assorted Joker-focused narratives over the years. But I'm acquainted only with the nine-issue JOKER comic series of the 1970s, which did little to counter the Clown Prince's Sub reputation. In those issues, Joker would be a CHARISMA DOMINANT PRIME. I might even extend the logic of this proposition to the 2019 JOKER movie, except that it's arguable that the script suggests the possibility that Arthur Fleck may not be the canonical clown who becomes the bane of Gotham City and the Wayne Who Will Be Bats.

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD PT. 2

(Note: in writing this sequel to my one essay on the topic of novelty and recognizability, I've decided to replace the latter term with the term "familiarity." Accordingly I've altered the tag to reflect the change, but not the text of the first essay. I will try to replace the unwanted term in any other essays written since the first one, though.)

My meditations on the linked concepts of novelty and familiarity, beginning here, lead me to correct one of my earlier statements: that all crossovers are interactions of two or more familiar icons, with or without subordinate icons of their respective "universes." 

One of my main examples from Part 1 contradicts this: Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE. Whether the individual reader experiences Scott's story in its original prose form or in some adaptation within some other medium, Ivanhoe and all the subordinate figures in his orbit (which, as I said earlier, may even include historical figures like Richard the Lion-Hearted) comprise their own universe. And since that universe never appeared anywhere before, and since Scott wrote no sequels, the novel is forever characterized by novelty. The only elements of IVANHOE that possess familiarity are those relating to the universe of Robin Hood, and thus IVANHOE is a crossover between one "novel" universe and one "familiar" universe. Further, as mentioned in the CONVOCATION series, this stand-alone novel became such a major literary event that its universe possesses a high level of stature of the Qualitative kind, which means that despite only appearing once Ivanhoe is the same exalted company as those icons more dependent on Quantitative Escalation, such as Batman and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Books of Pellucidar.

(Parenthetically I will note that other authors created serial versions of the Ivanhoe universe-- a 1958 TV show starring Roger Moore, and a 2000-2002 teleseries with lots of XENA-style action. But, while it's possible for adaptations to outstrip their source material in terms of stature, neither of these shows did so.)

So IVANHOE is a crossover meeting of two icons, one characterized by "eternal novelty" and the other by "eternal familiarity." It qualifies as a High-Stature Crossover because the two icon-universes interact in a significant way, even though the stature of one results only from Qualitative Escalation, while the stature of the other arises from both Qualitative and Quantitative forms.

The 1972 BLACULA provides a comparable example of the intersection of a novelty-icon and a familiarity-icon, but in a mode of lower stature. Though Robin Hood and his Merry Men are subordinate icons within the story of Ivanhoe, they are important to the narrative, which affects the stature of the crossover. Dracula, despite having a Qualitative Stature as great as that of Robin Hood, exists in the 1972 film only to spawn Blacula and to bestow on him a familiar if somewhat risible cognomen. From that point on, Blacula is only slightly dependent on the mythos of Dracula, for the whole project of the film is to re-interpret that mythos in keeping with seventies cultural concepts, such as "Black Pride." Blacula, unlike Ivanhoe, has one more installment in his universe, but two entries in a series do not confer much Quantitative Escalation. Blacula has a certain degree of Qualitative Escalation, but not enough to raise the level of this crossover above a low position. 

Proto-crossovers within a serial context offer a slightly different view of novelty, in that the novelty of a newly introduced character can suggest an aura of "future familiarity." AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #14 is from the get-go a hero-crossover for the presence of starring hero Spider-Man and his admittedly fractious "guest star" The Hulk. But I've also argued that it's a villain-crossover between The Enforcers, who were familiar from one previous appearance in the title, and The Green Goblin, who made his debut here. Yet though the Goblin can only possess formal "novelty" at this point in his career, it's clear from the narrative that the authors intended for him to become a regular opponent of the hero. But The Goblin only possesses a "future familiarity" because later readers know how significant he proved to be within the Spider-mythos.

But authorial intent only counts when the intent is made manifest. A 1942 Batman story introduced a new Bat-foe, a thief named Mister Baffle (clearly modeled on the prose character Raffles). The story ended with the villain's escape and the suggestion that he might come again, though he never did, so the suggestion of his re-appearance counts for nothing in the Escalation game. In contrast, the villain Deadshot, appearing just once in 1950, was also characterized only by pure novelty. But thanks to his mid-70s reworking, he became not only a regular Bat-foe but one who was involved in a "static crossover" series, THE SUICIDE SQUAD-- though almost all of the characters had been, like Deadshot, subordinate icons within the universes of various heroes.

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD

Though there are ways in which my new categories, "novelty" and "recognizability," apply to stand-alone works (henceforth called "monads"). the categories are intended mostly to describe the dynamics of old stuff and new stuff in a serial format.

I.A. Richards, summing up his definition of all mental activity as "sorting," imagines the response of a single-celled organism to a stimulus and recognizing it as something encountered before.

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Such a sorting, of course, is only possible if the organism can distinguish between things it has or has not encountered before. I think Richards is correct in his intuition, though with the caveat that the amoeba can't conceptualize anything about the things it finds familiar or unfamiliar.

Serial franchises depend on a constant "new and old" dynamic. The majority of serials focus on a particular character or ensemble of characters. (I have addressed the concept of non-character icons here.) Even if no other elements are repeated within the serial, the main character(s) provide the reader with "recognizability." In adventure-oriented serials, "novelty" is most often supplied by the hero's opponents, though after a time they too may take on a strong aura of recognizability.

To be sure, serials with a domestic tone may focus not upon opponents but upon foils. The comic strip BLONDIE stars the duo of Blondie and Dagwood, and most of their conflicts with other characters stem from stock figures in the subordinate ensemble: the neighbors, Dagwood's boss, the mailman. New characters may appear-- for instance, Dagwood constantly faces an onslaught of annoying salesmen who importune the house-holder with aggressive sales techniques-- but usually these characters have no names and never make a second appearance as such.

Crossovers exist to extend the "cosmos" of a given icon by relating it to the "cosmos" of another icon. Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE is one of the first such crossovers. The entirely fictional main character encounters a few historical characters, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, but they are not crossovers because they are aligned with the cosmos of Ivanhoe. However, Scott also works the mythology of Robin Hood into the narrative, and Robin Hood even in 1819 was a highly recognizable figure with his own "cosmos." Since IVANHOE is a novel without sequels, everything aligned to the knight's mythology-- the hero himself, his romantic interests, and his enemies-- are all "novel" compared to the mythos of Robin Hood, at least from the viewpoint of most readers.

In serial narratives, it's more often the case that the author seeks to promote two separate fictional universes by having them intersect. Often this means the encounter of two characters-- She and Allan Quatermain, Daredevil and Spider-Man-- though it can also mean a crossover of a character and an established physical environment. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE does include David Innes, one of the heroes of the "Earth's Core" series, but Innes barely appears in the story, and the greater focus is upon Tarzan's encounter with the savage world of Pellucidar.

Now, while the author of such a work knows that the intersecting icons may both be recognizable to some readers, the base idea is to interest those readers to whom one of the icons is "novel," the better to convert that audience. Usually, within the diegesis of the story, the first meeting of two icons is marked by novelty, just as it is in real experience, though afterward the icons are generally familiar with one another, and within the diegesis they become recognizable, even if their next interaction may provide some elements of novelty.

Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover.