CURIOSITIES #34: 'THE KILLER SHARK" (BLACKHAWK #50, 1952)

I found most of the DC BLACKHAWK comics of the 1960s easy to acquire without much expense, and never thought they were anything but slightly entertaining formula-fare. I don't imagine I knew anything about the Blackhawks' earlier incarnation under Quality Comics until sometime in the seventies, which was both the era when DC began reprinting some of those adventures, and when I obtained a copy of the two volumes of Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS. 

Even without knowing anything about Early Blackhawk, I could tell that DC's version was dependent on the same sort of menaces I saw in other Silver Age titles: lots of space-aliens and costumed super-villains. Not many in either category ever made return appearances, but the one exception was a costumed fellow named Killer Shark. Once or twice, I remember wondering if DC kept giving this character exposure because he'd been a familiar face at Quality.

I never made any deliberate attempt to find out, not even by consulting online resources. But I found out, by accident, that Quality Blackhawk did have just one encounter with a version of Killer Shark. Artist Reed Crandall's design for the villain-- shark-fin cowl, goggles, and sharp teeth-- was pretty much followed by DC later. However, Quality only used the character once as far as I can tell, killing him at story's end-- probably because that Killer Shark was a literal killer, inviting a certain rough justice.

I'm not minded to search out DC's first usage of the character, but I think that, aside from costume modifications, he stayed much the same throughout the Silver Age: a sea-raider who kept coming up with gimmicks to confound the heroic aviators. The above scene is from BLACKHAWK #170 (1962), and involves Lady Blackhawk getting turned into a mermaid for some reason. 

It's likely that Killer Shark is the only villain DC transplanted from Quality, and the DC editors probably brought him back into use only because the original series did not use costumed villains very often, and it was easier to rework an earlier character than make a new one. Though no versions of Killer Shark rate as great villains, he has some distinction for another transformation: he brainwashed Lady Blackhawk into becoming his mate, Queen Killer Shark, which gave Blackhawk and his partners more than a little aggravation. And these are probably the only sixties BLACKHAWK stories that have any dramatic oompf.

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 2

I recently did a quick scan-read of DC's hoary BOB HOPE title just to take stock of the writer's use of Classic Monster characters to goose up the aging franchise. During that same period there appears a superhero whom I don't believe even the most desperate raconteur ever bothered to revive: "Super-Hip." In the character's mundane identity he was a priggish intellectual who frequently got bullied, and one day his resentments transformed him into a Magical Guy who could go and beat up his oppressors. There's nothing noteworthy about Super-Hip except that he could transform into anything, and this was an interesting coincidence because a year after Super-Hip's creation, his creator Arnold Drake got an assignment to script comics' first important shapeshifting hero, Plastic Man.

A second coincidence: on the Classic Horror Film Board I just happened to get into a convo about the exigencies of how DC Comics got ahold of several Quality heroes. I said in part:

DOLL MAN ceased publication in 1953, three years before Quality Comics closed its doors. We know that DC made some sort of deal to purchase Quality properties, but fans can be only sure about three of them. DC continued publishing two Quality titles right away, BLACKHAWK and GI COMBAT. Almost ten years later a rival comics publisher attempted to use the name "Plastic Man" in his faux "CAPTAIN MARVEL" title, and the story goes that this galvanized DC Legal to check things and realize, Hey we own the rights to Plastic Man! 

To be sure, another company had tried publishing Plastic Man in 1963, and some sources say DC shut it down. But if they knew they owned PM back then, why were they in such a rush to exert their ownership in 1966? Why not back in 1963? So DC quickly worked Plas into a May 1966 issue of DIAL H FOR HERO-- dated a month after the publication of CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 by Myron Fass-- and then launched its own Plas series in late 1966.

After that, DC made no more attempts to do any new projects with Quality characters, but they begin reprinting a few strips of BLACKHAWK, THE RAY and DOLL MAN in their reprint books, which was  a tacit assertion of ownership. Finally they explicitly laid claim to six Quality characters by featuring them in a 1973 JLA story and then spinning them off into their own title, THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS. So from then on DC had maintained, when asked about the matter, that they own all Quality characters.

But do they? Naturally no one but DC Legal is privy to whatever deal the company made with Quality. They've revived a handful of other Quality characters for features, but not Doll Man. If the language of the 1956 contract doesn't explicitly say, "DC now owns Doll Man," would the company be able to sue the Full Moon moviemakers?

Of course, their claim may be fully veracious, and they've just never gone to war over the DOLLMAN property because they think it's small change-- which it kind of is.

Oh, and the Eisner estate never owned DOLL MAN at all, any more than other features he co-created for Quality's comics line. Aside from THE SPIRIT, Eisner apparently kept copyright on nothing but a couple of co-features in THE SPIRIT SECTION, like "Lady Luck" and "Mister Mystic," since a few of these saw reprint in a Will Eisner magazine in, I believe, the eighties.

And later:

Though I like the idea of DC just forgetting they owned Plastic Man, it's also possible that someone highly placed at DC discouraged any ideas of reviving Plas when they bought him in the fifties. The hero probably wasn't even selling all that well in his last years, and to enjoy good sales Plas required an art approach inimical to the sort of clean, simple representations DC preferred. Blackhawk was easier; DC just dumped all the political stuff and made the Hawks into guys who battled lots of aliens and costumed villains. By 1960, the year Elongated Man showed up, DC was probably more consumed with the potential of tapping the glories of their earlier years, rather than exploiting things another company originated. 

I can well believe that if anyone even remembered the Plastic Man purchase they didn't inform John Broome, but that was all to the good IMO. Plastic Man didn't belong in The Flash's straight-arrow world, for all that the original Cole adventures weren't just rollicking comedy all the time. I may be one of the few people who liked Arnold Drake's PLASTIC MAN, and I kind of regret not mentioning that opinion to Drake when I talked to him a little at a Comicon in the early 2000s.

And so all that made me a little more interested in what exactly Arnold Drake did in the Silver Age PLASTIC MAN, for which purpose I revived the title of a 2010 essay, RAPT IN PLASTIC, because it was too good a title not to use again.

Part 3 to follow.

MYTHCOMICS: ["DAUGHTER OF SATAN"] (FEATURE COMICS #61, 1942)

 

Quality Comics' DOLL MAN was one of the Golden Age's most long-lived features, lasting from almost the beginning of the Age to 1956, when the publishing company dissolved. The premise was simple: scientist Darrel Dane discovers a method by which he can shrink himself to a height of six inches, at which height he possesses his normal-sized strength as well as somehow being able to manifest a colorful costume. (Gil Kane, being an admirer of the Quality feature, explicitly based various aspects of the Silver Age Atom on the doll-sized crimefighter.) The story I'll examine is given an extremely dull title in GCD, so this time I'll choose a phrase from the opening caption of the splash page. That phrase proves relevant because in the course of the story it become problematic as to who the real "daughter of Satan" is. 

Following the splash, which has a "Tom Thumb" feel as Doll Man is seen riding a frog into a fetid swamp full of death-symbols, the story's apparent villain, Yvette deMortier, makes her first appearance. (The story's unknown writer presumably did not know that in French "mortier" means "mortar;" he probably just wanted to play upon "mort," the French word for "dead.") Yvette, a "renowned physicist," gives a demonstration of a new device to a hall full of other scientists, including Doctor Roberts, father of Darrel Dane's girlfriend Martha. The scientists are refreshingly unprejudiced against a lady scientist, who's rather uncharacteristic of scientists in comic books, but it probably helps that Yvette is gorgeous. However, Yvette's ray-device turns all the scientists into babbling goofballs, after which Yvette has her henchmen write down all the secrets falling from their "loose lips." Doctor Roberts wanders home, where Darrel jokes that he's "gone on a geometric spree with the lovely DeMortire." Darrel and Martha soon learn that the other scientists have lost their reasoning minds, but since Yvette was not among them, Darrel investigates her in his Doll Man persona. 

The hero finds clues (including an unidentified dead man) that will lead him to a swamp referenced as a "weird setting of silence, mystery, and death." The reader sees the villainess in repose, but though at first she gloats over the power she'll gain from all the secrets she's gleaned, she becomes angry when one of her subordinates tries to profess his love to her. She curses men as "the scourge of civilization" and compares herself to "the cold, bright lady moon." At that very time, Doll Man ventures into the swamp, observing that it's more a place of death than usual, since its mistress has poisoned the waters. The hero finds his way to Yvette's sanctum, and happens to enter through a skylight with a telescope, and so he becomes a small but intrusive male presence in Yvette's lunar domain.

In addition, Doll Man has brought along one of the clues he found: a locket holding the pictures of both Yvette and some unknown young man, and when Yvette sees the latter photo, she calls out the name "Stephan." She faints, and into the room comes the true "daughter of Satan," Yvette's unnamed sister. Artist Reed Crandall clearly gives the standard countenance of an aged medieval witch (and with what horn-headed gentleman did witches consort, hmm?) Madame DeMortier shoots at Doll Man while ranting about having killed "the memory of Stephan." Doll Man trips the witch up, but she just happens to have a can of rubber cement lying around in this private observatory, and manages to catch the diminutive crusader therein.

Doll Man rather easily escapes the cement, while the old woman, revealed to be Yvette's sister, drags Yvette into a room containing a printing press. (It's vaguely suggested that Yvette's henchmen are turning all the purloined science-secrets into pamphlets, though I have no idea how that would aid anyone in conquering the world.) Doll Man luckily happens to be nearby when Yvette's unnamed, would-be lover conveniently mentions that, contrary to the sister's rants, he knows Stephan died while fighting tse-tse disease in Africa and that the sister deceived Yvette to better manipulate Yvette;s scientific reputation. Doll Man and Henchman Guy work together so that Older DeMortier's hair gets caught in a printing press. It's a little hard to believe, in a more or less "realistic" superhero yarn, that her head gets crushed thereby, but she's not seen on the final page at all.

So with the witch at least symbolically dead, Yvette can renounce her flirtation with super-villainy (no trial needed, clearly). She not only restores the memories of the scientists, she somehow drains the poison from the swamp, thus trying up almost all the loose ends. (I've no idea as to the identity of the dead man on page three, though I would assume the true "daughter of Satan" killed him.) Then Yvette is united with her new love and ends her not very justified "hatred of men," while Martha conceives a new animosity for the wandering nature of the male gaze.

Though as a straight story "Daughter" is a mess, there is a clear development of Yvette as a femme fatale, associated with quasi-negative feminine symbols like the swamp and the moon, and she's shown "draining" men of their intelligence-- which most femmes fatales bring about using sex, not memory-rays. Then for the sake of a happy ending-- not always a hallmark of DOLL MAN stories-- all of the negativity is channeled upon Madame DeMortier, a witch-like monster of ugliness and envy and thus the true avatar of Death. I also like the way Doll Man performs the archetypal crusade of the male hero, penetrating the morass of the swamp in order to bring a little male light into the lunar darkness. Given that most DOLL MAN stories are very simple fare, the extra layer of mythicity here shows the raconteurs stepping up their game for the sake of evoking some entertaining folktale motifs.

ADDENDUM: In the above review I jumped to the conclusion that the author of the story made up the name "Mortier," but it is a real French surname. I would still hazard that the writer chose that name because it sounds like the French word for death.

MYTHCOMICS: '["THE AMAZON QUEEN OF FEMALIA"] (SMASH COMICS #76, 1948)

 

Most Golden Age comics stories achieve high mythicity in an erratic fashion. All raconteurs, well or poorly educated, were required to turn out a high volume of material in order to make a living. Thus, even though the writer of WONDER WOMAN had attended Harvard, and though he'd constructed one of the more elaborate superhero concepts of the period, he didn't necessarily turn out more myth-stories than did raconteurs who never got past high school. All comics-creators had to generate ideas very quickly, and only on rare occasions did any of them bring all the symbolic elements together to create something like a discourse, intentionally or not.

Golden Age mythcomics about the topic of sexuality are even rarer, given the audience associations-- though it should be said that most media of the period weren't much more complex on that subject. There were plenty of narratives about "the war of the sexes," and a fair number dealt with fictional versions of the Greek Amazons. But often such Amazonian societies were conjured up just to banish the demonic forces they suggested. Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1924 novel TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN doesn't deal per se with an Amazon society, but does introduce a savage tribe in which the women are physically larger than the men. Tarzan influences the males to take control and return women to a subordinate position.

Various comics-creators used societies of strong women for analogous reasons, as did Jack Cole in a couple of PLASTIC MAN stories. Cole also created the character under discussion here, though by 1948 his only contribution to the feature was that raconteurs like Alex Kotzky-- the creator to whom I assign this story-- sometimes sought to draw like Cole.

The character Midnight was essentially what Will Eisner's SPIRIT would have been, had Eisner concentrated only on adventure with lots of goofy comedic content. Midnight is a guy in street clothes who dons a domino mask and uses a few gimmicks to fight crime. However, his support-cast is designed to be dominantly humorous. First, Midnight gained a sidekick, name of Gabby, who was a literal "monkey-boy:" a simian endowed with the ability to talk (not, as some references have claimed, a little Black kid). Then an aptly named mad scientist, Doc Wackey, joined the entourage. Later additions included a baby polar bear (apparently just a pet) and a bumbling detective, Sniffer. All of them are on display in the splash page above, decked out in feminine harem garments and dancing before the titular "amazon queen."

The story unwinds quickly, with a lot of use of coincidence. (I tend to think no comics-people loved overheard conversations more than did the Quality Comics crew.) Midnight, in his regular ID as a radio host, lets "the illustrious Professor Zogar" lecture Middle America about the archaic custom of matriarchal rule. The three sidekicks and their pet go for a walk, during which Doc is particularly voluble, claiming that "the dame doesn't live who can push me around." Quick as a bunny, two Amazonian females in archaic bikinis seize him, clobber his friends, and drag Doc off to their land of Femalia, under the belief that Doc is their long absent king.

Heroic Midnight then interviews Zogar about the society of Amazons in Femalia, and drags the reluctant scientist along for the ride when he and his crew mount a rescue mission. However, if any juvenile readers were expecting these brave males to put the matriarchy back in its place, those expectations get dashed when a single woman floors Midnight with an uppercut.

The captives are dragged through a city full of huge women and shrimpy men, not a little reminiscent of one of Al Capp's "Sadie Hawkins" celebrations. Queen Menna (seen in the splash with a big stogie in her mouth) sits her throne besides her crowned king Doc Wackey. Menna is just as convinced as her servants that Doc is her long lost husband, and she takes no backtalk from uppity males.

Midnight does manage to escape the palace with Doc, and as the group rushes back to the plane the hero makes a half-hearted effort to inspire the local males to rebellion. Then comes the "big reveal" that probably didn't fool all that many kid-readers in the day. Menna calls out to the man she thinks is her consort Ragoz, and Zogar (spell it backwards) responds with a beaten-down "Yes, dear." This prompts Midnight to make the amazing correlation that the expert on matriarchal societies is actually the guy who escaped Femalia, and this in turn causes Menna to admit that yes, this other shrimpy guy is her real hubby. She lets the Americans leave-- and heroic Midnight is only too glad to leave Zogar in the lurch so that he and his friends can return to the land where women aren't quite so dominant.

It would be silly to think that Kotzky sought to say anything profound here by leaving a gynocracy in charge of their own domain, as was *sometimes* the case when Marston wrote analogous stories. Kotzky's main purpose was probably the same as in any other MIDNIGHT story: to come up with a wild tale diverting enough to get kids to part with their coins. Nor can one place any deeper complexion on the kinky sounding dialogue in the next to last panel:

MENNA: Go easy on him, indeed! Well, perhaps I will, AFTER I've given him a daily beating for about three months!

ZOGAR: You are very kind to let me off so lightly, your majesty!

Actually, it might be a light sentence, if Zogar was away from Femalia for the years it would require for him to become an "illustrious professor." And he would've gotten away from the modern Amazons, if he'd just kept his mouth shut about them! Not that I'm claiming this fictional character had anything like an actual psychology, but his creator might have appreciated the irony that Zogar's big mouth led him back to the subservient fate he'd escaped-- and it's by no means certain that he's not okay with it.

I also don't want to make too much of the final exchange between the heroes as they run back to the U.S., tails between their legs, but I'll note it to wrap up.

GABBY: Poor Zogar! What a life he must lead!

DOC: Are you TELLING me or ASKING me?

It's an interesting exchange only because Doc has been in the custody of the Femaliens for what one must assume is only a few hours. Certainly he doesn't have the chance to get initiated into Femalian society, whatever that might entail. So why was he wondering if Gabby was "asking" him about the "life" Zogar now leads, the "life" Doc would've been forced to lead had his buddies abandoned him like they abandoned Zogar? Doc only had time to learn the same lesson the others did: that when men lose the advantage of sexual dimorphism, they can be easily changed from "men" into "mice."

ADDENDUM: The only element that moves "Queen" into the domain of the marvelous is Gabby the Talking Monkey.

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #4

 I lost interest in my crossover project on OUROBOROS DREAMS some time back, but though this one isn't great, it is one of the most peculiar.

In FEATURE COMICS #81 (1944)-- a comic whose headliner was the long-lived but nearly forgotten Doll Man-- a humorous character named Blimpy got himself shrunk to doll-size. So he calls Doll Man about his predicament, and the hero refuses to help because it would break "union rules."

On a totally unrelated subject, here's a late fifties cover from Simon and Kirby's THE FLY:

It's a pretty cool cover, unless one stops to wonder why a superhero who can fly is bothering to swing at the villains on a rope.

MYTHCOMICS: "TONDELEYO" (MILITARY COMICS #14, 1942)

In Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS, the author records a statement from Golden Age comics-writer Bill Woolfolk, in which Woolfolk admits having ripped off the story of the 1942 film WHITE CARGO (reviewed here) for the story "Tondeleyo." If Steranko correctly quoted the former comics-writer-- and Steranko's quotes are problematic, since he didn't cite sources-- then Woolfolk didn't really remember the story he'd written, since the only thing the Blackhawk-tale takes from the movie is the name and alluring appearance of the title character.

The 1942 movie is an entirely naturalistic story of a white trader who "goes native" in Africa when he succumbs to a dark vixen's charms. The Tondeleyo of comics is also a temptress, but it's implied-- without any outright verification-- that she may the incarnation of some metaphysical evil. Since her nature and even her final fate remain ambiguous, the adventure falls into the sphere of the uncanny, as determined by the trope I term "phantasmal figurations," similar to the films reviewed here.

For one thing, even though the splash suggests an alliance between the sarong-clad woman and the Master of Evil, Tondeleyo plays no favorites in the game between the Allies and the Axis. The first page depicts the unexplained suicide of a famed German flyer, Oberst, and the only clue left behind is a white rose, identical to one Tondeleyo wears in her hair.

As for Blackhawk, he's first seen issuing a challenge to a whole German compound, tossing around Nazis as he invites them to come for a dogfight above Blackhawk Island. The hero gets away with ridiculous ease, while the Nazis plot to attack in force, rather than in an honorable equal combat.

When Blackhawk gets back to his refuge, though, he finds a surprise: a sarong-clad young woman, Tondeleyo, has showed up on the island. Her beauty has such an effect on Blackhawk and his subordinates (except, as will be seen later, the comic-relief Chop-Chop) that they agree to let her intrude upon their all-male ranks. The heroes aren't portrayed as eager to prey on a beautiful woman, for they barely if at all make any passes at the mystery girl. Possibly the writer meant to imply that their initial motive is chivalry to a helpless woman. Then the news comes that their aerial challenge will be met. The pilots are all glad to meet the foe, but Tondeleyo suddenly begins to exert her insidious will upon the oldest member of the Blackhawks, Hendrickson. While the others go out to meet the foe, Hendrickson loses the will to fight, makes a lame excuse, and remains behind.

An air battle ensues, complete with some comedic action from the Chinese mascot. The victorious heroes return to their HQ, and Blackhawk arrives just in time to keep Hendrickson from killing himself-- the same way Oberst did, out of fear that he'd turned into a coward.

Blackhawk then interacts with Tondeleyo, who turns on her full charms. He almost kisses her-- which is the closest the story comes to anything overtly sexual-- but is interrupted. In the "days that follow," Tondeleyo slowly saps the fighting-spirit of all the pilots. In WHITE CARGO, it's clear that the victim of the vixen's charms has been physically seduced by her, but this story portrays more a seduction of the spirit, since it seems unlikely that this Tondeleyo has actually slept with any of the Blackhawks. Chop-Chop seems immune, but it's not clear whether or not she troubled to turn her charms his way.

Finally, when another German air-attack approaches, only Blackhawk is able to summon the gumption to get into a plane and meet the enemy. His plane crashes into one of the German crafts, and the other heroes, enraged by his apparent death, are mobilized to charge into their planes and handily defeat the enemy.

Blackhawk, however, has not died-- though the story doesn't trouble to explain just how he survived a mid-air crash. He's evidently sussed out, on some dim psychological level, that Tondeleyo is the seed of his men's ennervation, even though there's no attempt to portray her as a literal spirit, demon, etc. In a last act of quasi-chivalry, Blackhawk prevents Chop-Chop from killing the native girl. However, as she flees male wrath, she's apparently killed by one of the crashing German planes, very indirectly avenging her murder of Oberst. The story ends with Blackhawk musing, "She was evil-- who can say when evil really dies?" Earlier Blackhawk intuits some deeper aspect of her nature-- as witness his unusual idea that he's met her somewhere before-- so he's apparently realized that she was either a spirit or a mortal possessed by such a spirit. In any case Woolfolk's story gains considerable symbolic amplitude by refusing to put a name to her nature, and thus transcends the narrow racism of WHITE CARGO.

The entire story, with all of the meticulous Reed Crandall art, can be read here.

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PT. 2

In Part 1 I grappled with the problem of establishing "standards" for Golden Age comics, even with the knowledge that most of them were produced without formal standards in mind. Many creators simply cranked out features as quickly as they could, of course. And even artists and writers who showed conscious care in their work-- Reed Crandall and Fred Guardineer for the first, William Woolkfolk and Bill Finger for the second-- may have been primarily motivated by creating a reputation for being able to produce quality work so as to earn sustained employment.

Yet even with this in mind, I still disagree with the tendency of the bloody comic book elitists to value only the Golden Age work that simply suggests greater sophistication; i.e., the sophistication found in "good literature." This leads to a tendency to lionize, say, PLASTIC MAN, as a sophisticated satire-- which it is not-- and to ignore talents who were formally Jack Cole's equal, but simply didn't come up with a famous character like Plastic Man.

Using Jung's "four functions" as a guide, it's possible to validate Golden Age comics along any of the axes Jung provides: sensation, feeling, thinking, or intuition. Comic book elitists are usually impressed only by works that show evidence of rational activity: hence their general enthusiasm for EC comics, which is strong in both the thinking and feeling departments. In Part 1 I mentioned in passing two Golden Age stories that I found noteworthy from a historical crossover-standpoint: an AIRBOY issue from Hillman and a DAREDEVIL story from Lev-Gleason. No reader could accuse either story of being heavy in terms of thinking or feeling, but both are extremely strong in producing sensational effects. However, though they both boast some interesting myth-motifs, neither one would quite come up to my personal standards for a really complex symbolic discourse, unlike this recent Golden Age selection.

Even with the most pluralistic will in the world, it's likely that one could find within the corpus of Golden Age comics a cornucopia of works that emphasize either the didactic, dramatic or mythopoeic potentialities. So if I were to attempt a list of "the hundred best Golden Age comics," and wanted to keep faith with my system of four potentialities, I'd probably have to list 25 comics that provided the best sensations, the best thoughts, and so on-- much as I did back in 2009, when I decided to list a series of "best movies derived from comics," but wanted to arrange it in line with Frye's theory of the four mythoi, the better to test out that particular line of thought.

However, the fact that I might have search pretty hard through the Golden Age for examples of good symbolic discourse-- far more than I would in the Silver Age-- suggests to me a reigning principle about the priorities of comics-readers in that period-- and perhaps those of all readers of popular fiction in general-- more on which in Part 3.

On a side-note: I'm tempted to mention the high quality of Quality's early BLACKHAWK title to the fellow doing the survey of important Golden Age comics. I will predict here that if I do so, the fellow will either be non-committal on the subject of that Quality title, since so few elitists have investigated it, or disdainful for some non-aesthetic reason-- like, say, because the Blackhawks' uniforms are reminiscent of certain Nazi outfits.

MYTHCOMICS: "KARLOVNA UNDERWORLD" (BLACKHAWK #14, 1946)

Years ago I named the above story-- a shortened form for the untitled tale's first line, "Karlovna Had a True Underworld"-- in my 2008 post AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY. I've often thought about expanding on those brief remarks: 'Another weirdo racial myth about a modern-day country being subverted from beneath by a horde of dusky "dragon dwarves." This one was reprinted in the original edition of Les Daniels' COMIX.' There's no surviving record of the story's writer, but the artist has been pegged as Bill Ward, and any attributions I make in this essay will be treat Ward as the author, purely for narrative convenience.

Quality's Blackhawks were seven daredevil, freedom-loving pilots who roamed the world fighting evil-- though in the early days their comedy-relief Chinese member Chop-Chop wasn't consistently depicted as being able to pilot a plane. They principally battled the forces of the Axis during their genesis during World War Two, and after the war's conclusion they continued to battle any evil that seemed to threaten what they generally called "the democracies."

In this story, the Blackhawks are summoned to Karlovna-- an East European country that sounds like it took its name from a certain horror-film actor--  when a policeman colleague of Blackhawk's has been murdered, along with two other supporters of democratic rule. To keep Blackhawk from straining his brain with mundane detective work, one of the assassins-- a dark-skinned dwarf-- shows up on the scene, tried to knife the policeman's pretty blonde daughter Vereen, and then kills himself to escape interrogation.

While Vereen takes Blackhawk to confer on the problem with a respected banker-friend, one Rambin, the other Blackhawks stumble upon a whole race of dwarf-people, who live in the sewers beneath the city. The little people, later called "dragon dwarves," capture all of the Blackhawks except Hendrickson, who summons Blackhawk. At the same time Blackhawk and Hendrickson investigate the sewers in seatch of their comrades, the banker Rambin lures Vereen to the same location-- which should be enough for even the least skilled mystery-solver to figure out his role in the story.

Vereen and Rambin are captured without a fight, while Blackhawk and Hendrickson are overpowered. The dwarves are now accompanied by their two leaders: a fellow named Grotesko (whom Andre calls "ze biggest dwarf in all ze world") and a costumed woman named the Dragon Queen, The leaders explain to their captive audience that the dwarves "once owned Karlovna, until the weak civilized people took it from them! For generations, these rightful owners of the land have hidden underground, venturing forth only at night!" Thanks to the influence of the Dragon Queen-- who is secretly partnered with Rambin the banker-- the dwarves are using terrorist tactics to frighten the populace into submission.

With their usual aplomb, the heroes break out of their prison in double-quick time, and the dwarves scatter. Blackhawk, being the leader, figures out the conspiracy and accuses both Rambin and his female assistant Wilna, who is of course the real face behind the Dragon Queen. Rambin reveals that he was using the "stupid underground dwarves" to block his country's alliance with the democracies, since such an alliance would cost him money. He has no loyalty toward the "wild claims" of the dragon dwarves, but tries to use them in a last-ditch battle with the heroes. When that gambit fails, Rambin tries to put the blame on Wilna, She kills him and then herself, and the Blackhawks fly off, ready for their next foray against tyranny.

What makes Ward's story more mythic than many similar tales is its emphasis on symbols of what the Greeks called "the chthonic," defined by Dictionary.com as being:

"of or relating to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth."

Any beings, mortal or spiritual, that dwell beneath the ground can't help but be associated with the bodies and spirits of the dead as well. Snakes are one example of living animals that frequently take on chthonic associations, as do dragons, who take their name from the Greek word for snake. Thus, when Ward styles his little people "dragon dwarves," he's combining two figures that share chthonic properties, given the fact that folkloric dwarves, unlike real little people, are often pictured as living beneath the earth.

In the Celtic tradition dwarves have come to be viewed as one of the many divisions of "faerie," meaning, in essence, any supernatural creature that's less than a god yet more than a mortal. The medieval, psuedo-historical myths of Ireland describe successions of mortal peoples who come to settle Ireland-- Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha-- only to be crowded out by new arrivals. The psuedo-histories, rather than simply saying that the earlier tribes were wiped out, often picture them as retiring to underground "barrows" and similar retreats.

I'm not imputing to Ward or any collaborator a great knowledge of Celtic tradition, but most persons of the period were aware of the basic notion of tribal displacement. The story, by inserting a "giant dwarf' named Grotesko, also suggests some authorial familiarity with the Nordic tradition of opposing the light-skinned Aesir with two principal foes: "giants" and "dwarves." Grotesko's name is transparently a pun on the word "grotesque," but the origins of this word take us further down into the chthonic as well, since "grotesque" evolves from the Italian word for "cave."  European art critics labeled certain Roman artworks "grotesque" because the artworks reminded the critics of art that appeared in grotto-like settings, and the word later came to connote anything bizarre and unsettling.
Finally, as anyone well read in Robert E Howard knows, some European tales suggest the idea of "dark precursors" that inhabited parts of Europe before being ousted by light-skinned invaders.

Clearly, even though Karlovna is a phony-baloney country, Ward wanted to draw on the nightmarish implications of a "normal" (i.e. white and civilized) country with a "dark underbelly." At the same time, it should be noted that the dragon dwarves' claims to being the original inhabitants of the land aren't validated-- Vereen, for instance, doesn't suddenly start talking about dwarf-legends even when she sees the dead body of her attacker. So although Ward's story might suggest a degree of civilized guilt about the marginalization of an earlier people, the story as written leaves open the possibility that the dwarves' claims are deluded; an attempt to rewrite history to their own advantage.

A writer living in the era right after WWII probably wasn't deeply concerned with the actual existence of "dark little people" in European prehistory. But as figures of the chthonic, the dragon dwarves may symbolize the forces of irrationality that continually threaten to overwhelm the rational rule of democracy-- so that even though the dwarves are dark and stunted, they may well symbolize the Nazi veneration of the irrational, for all that the Nazis venerated idols of blonde Aryan health.

A final complication is that there are no indications as to how the all-male dwarves have perpetuated themselves over the years, since no female dwarves are in evidence. One can easily imagine them stealing women to act as breeders, but again, one would think that their doing so would give them a folkloric presence in Karlovna-- and, as I said, the story's only reliable Karlovnan doesn't have the first idea as to who or what the dwarves may be. Since they venerate a Dragon Queen who is actually a light-skinned, normal-sized woman, I tend to wonder if the most appropriate reading might not be one in which the Queen is actually a queen of hell, whose progeny are these hideously deformed creatures, as seen in Milton's memorable description of Hell's queen Sin:

These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth 
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.


NOTE: The entire story can be read on this site.