COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 7

Most support-characters, like most the subordinate villains discussed in Part 5, default to "static alignment" with whoever or whatever is the "Prime" icon of the story. In the vernacular, they continue to dance with whoever brung them. But there are examples of subordinate characters who shift their alignment into a dynamic form.

In contrast to the interlocutor-types discussed in Part 6, here I will discuss the sort of figures usually described as "viewpoint characters." In my essay OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD, I distinguished two narrative approaches to viewpoint characters, who usually (though not always) merge with the viewpoints of the readers:

In place of "ego-oriented," I'll speak of the *endothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests.

In place of "object-oriented," I'll speak of the *exothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.

I'll mostly focus here on exothelic stories, but just for more context, two instructive examples would be Conan Doyle's novel THE LOST WORLD and the 1933 film KING KONG. Both are stories involving intrepid adventurers voyaging to obscure parts of the Earth in order to uncover rare phenomena. But in LOST WORLD, Challenger's merry band of explorers are the focal icons of the story, despite the copious detail author Doyle provides on the phenomena of The Lost World. Therefore, LOST WORLD is endothelic. However, in KING KONG, the phenomenon is Kong, and Kong is the star. The ensemble of explorers-- Carl Denham, Ann Darrow, and Jack Driscoll-- are all vividly sketched, but they're all support-characters in an exothelic film.

Neither Kong, Darrow nor Driscoll made an encore performance in any film from the original KONG production company-- but Carl Denham did, rearing his head for one more official appearance in THE SON OF KONG that same year. While the junior giant ape never assumed the mythic resonance of his theoretical "old man," there's no question that he is the star of this exothelic show. Denham and one or two other crewmembers are the only icons linking the two films, but because they shift their support-duties from one Prime to another, they're my examples of "dynamic alignment" as it relates to support-characters.

A parallel example appeared first in THE MOON POOL, which began in a short story with viewpoint character Walter Godwin, who has a close encounter with an eldritch alien being. Author Abraham Merritt then incorporated this tale into the context of a full novel, in which Godwin and an ensemble of other characters find their way to the hidden city where the bizarre entity, The Shining One, dwells. Despite the heroic activity of some of the explorers-- not including Godwin, who's essentially a "floating eyeball"-- the author emphasizes the exothelic presence of the Shining One. The novel ends much as the short story did, with Godwin excluded from the fantasy-world and consigned to mundane reality.

That, however, doesn't keep Godwin from going on the hunt for more supernormal phenomena, and he comes across a totally different lost world in 1920's THE METAL MONSTER. I frankly don't remember what happens to Godwin at the end of that novel, but MONSTER too is exothelic, focusing upon Norhala, a young human woman who has become the thrall of an inorganic metal-intelligence. So Godwin shifts his alignment from The Shining One to Norhala, who aren't even as interrelated as the two Kongs of Skull Island.

My tentative judgment, then, is that just as I've said that there's a "crossover-vibe" when a villain introduced in one feature makes an appearance in another-- even if that villain's alignment is not static in nature-- there's also a crossover-vibe, albeit minor, in both SON OF KONG and METAL MONSTER,

Wrapping up, I should note that even though THE LOST WORLD is definitely endothelic, I'm not sure all of Doyle's other Professor Challenger stories also qualify, not having read them in some time. It's possible that in some of those, Challenger takes a back seat to whatever phenomenon he's expounding upon. But that's a question for another day.

ADDENDUM: For all Sub characters, they can only generate a crossover vibe once when first "jumping" into another cosmos. Going back to my hoary Cobra-Hyde example, their first encounter with Daredevil, after having been foes of Thor, is a crossover-- but not their second, third, or fourth encounters with Daredevil. The same rule applies to their first appearance in a Captain America feature, and so on. This concept parallels my observation about the transition of subordinate characters into Primes starring in a given feature; only the first appearance counts as a crossover.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6

My formulations on observations re: static and dynamic alignment in Part 5 only discussed villains appearing in serial features in subordinate roles. But the same distinctions apply to all Sub characters, including those that might ordinarily be described as "support-cast" members.

In ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3, I took pains to establish that the 1981 HEAVY METAL anthology-film was a crossover-movie, but not because some of its stories adapted icons from established features, specifically "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." If the film had just introduced each story with some non-diegetic interlocutor figure akin to EC Comics' Crypt Keeper, then there would have been no crossover-elements. But the demonic Loc-Nar, a creation of the movie-script, both tells the stories and participates in them as an icon with agency-- though not more agency than any of the characters with which Loc-Nar interferes. It's possible that the deleted "Neverwhere Land" sequence might have shown Loc-Nar with true agency, since it involved him creating an entire civilization, only to destroy it. But in the existing sequences, Loc-Nar usually just sets events in motion. He causes comical consequences in "Dangerous" and "Sternn," heroic ones in "Harry Canyon," "Den," and "Taarna," and tragic ones in "B-17," but in each story the primary agency is not Loc-Nar but those he influences. Even "B-17," in which Loc-Nar wreaks an unalloyed evil by turning a dead airman crew into killer zombies, the primary agency rests with the animated cadavers, who attack the plane's pilots. One pilot escapes the assault and parachutes down to an island-- where, it would appear, Loc-Nar has also animated the corpses of other slain airmen. The agency here is with the living dead men, for though they have no conscious motives, they arouse revulsion in the viewer out of the conviction that if the dead could come to life, they would seek to slay those still living, for spite if nothing else.

In formal anthologies-- that is, collections of completely separate stories that may have a "guest-host" interlocutor-- the agency of the story's Prime icon or icons appear within the story proper, and if the tale-teller could be deemed any sort of status at all, he would be a Sub rather than a Prime. The only way an interlocutor could become a Prime would be to enter the story proper and assume agency through specific actions. "Horror Beneath the Streets," a 1950 tale in HAUNT OF FEAR #17, posits that the two writers of EC Comics, William Gaines and Al Feldstein, begin discussing the idea of publishing magazines devoted to horror stories. They are then duly ambushed by the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper, and the Vault Keeper, who force the beleaguered authors to give them all contracts to host their own respective titles. Clearly the horror-hosts are the stars of this story, and one could even deem "Streets" a crossover of characters who are usually subordinate icons in other, otherwise-unrelated stories.

However, in another EC story the Old Witch enters a story but just remains another type of Sub. "A Little Stranger," in HAUNT OF FEAR #14, depicts the romance of two Prime characters, vampire Elicia and werewolf Zorgo, whose unholy unison begets the Witch herself, who's only in the story proper for one panel.

Since Part 6 ended up running extra-long with its analyses, I'll save the actual remarks on static and dynamic alignment for Part 7.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5

 For this term-centered post, I'll revise some of the terms I introduced in the COSMIC ALIGNMENT series, starting here, for greater specificity. I'll also limit this post to examples of the cosmoses of nominative serials.

In Part 1, I said:

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future.

This tendency I will now call "default alignment," since serials that maintain a variety of protagonist/antagonist oppositions tend to favor this default. It's a default that exists as soon as a given icon comes into being, though it's only relevant to "crossover-dynamics" when said icon has appeared more than once. 

When, as a result of quantitative or qualitative escalation, the default becomes an entrenched expectation on the part of audiences, I'll term this a "static alignment." The Joker was my example in the cited essay. He may cross swords with Superman or with Batgirl or with Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth, but he will always be thought of as a Batman villain first.

In the same essay, I mentioned two characters who appeared independently as enemies of The Mighty Thor, and then teamed up against the thunder-god: Mister Hyde and The Cobra. I suspect that since that first team-up, editor Stan Lee conceived the notion that even both villains together weren't really a match for the increasingly powerful Thor, so Lee shuttled the felonious duo over to the Daredevil feature. As I discussed in the essay, eventually both characters tended to wander around the Marvel Universe, so that it's debatable if they ended up being aligned with any single icon, or group of icons. In one essay my term for this state of affairs was "floating alignment," but I've abandoned that phrase for "dynamic alignment."

Part 1 also discussed a slightly different situation: that of Jim Starlin's character Thanos. This villain-icon first appeared in an IRON MAN story, and if he had never appeared anywhere else, then the default alignment would have made Thanos an Iron Man antagonist. But from a historical POV, it's evident that Starlin had some plans-- how definite, I do not know-- to use Thanos in some feature he would be able to write and draw continuously. Thus, Thanos became one of the major villains of both Starlin's CAPTAIN MARVEL and WARLOCK serials. This is a somewhat more constricted form of a dynamic alignment, according to my statement that I myself deem Thanos dominantly a Warlock foe these days. Thanos can still float from feature to feature, the same way as does the Hyde-Cobra team, but there's a stronger association with Warlock than with any other feature-- though not strong enough that readers automatically think of Thanos as a "Warlock villain."

Having completed this exercise, I move on to a more complicated rumination on both nominative and innominate icons.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 4

 The second appearance of Yuriko Oyama also does not bring her into direct alignment with the X-MEN cosmos, though in contrast to her DAREDEVIL appearance, this time she at least meets Wolverine face-to-face. But her dramatic arc is secondary to Wolverine's interaction with the character of Heather Hudson.

Once again, I don't choose to reread every story involving Heather or her husband James since Chris Claremont and John Byrne introduced them in the pages of X-MEN in the early 1980s, or the characters of the Canadian supergroup Alpha Flight, who were in essence a project brought into being by James Hudson. Byrne both wrote and drew the first 29 issues of ALPHA FLIGHT when they got their own title, and during that period James, who took up superheroing under the name Vindicator, was killed off. Heather took over theoretical command of the supergroup after James's death, but the next writer on the title, Bill Mantlo, determined that she should become the new Vindicator in order to join her fellow heroes in the field. But because she had no combat training, she sought out the man whom she and James had essentially fostered in his identity as Wolverine: the mystery man Logan. (And I'm sure Mantlo chose this story-path for much the same reason Wolverine was included in DAREDEVIL #196: to stoke a title's sales with the appearance of a popular character.)

I assume, without checking, that Mantlo mainly followed the broad outlines of what Claremont and Byrne had established in the backstory about James and Heather taking in the feral-seeming Logan, but it's my loose impression that Mantlo probably expanded on some details. For instance, Mantlo specifies that James and Heather were on their honeymoon at the time they found Logan, and that James actually leaves his blushing bride alone with the feral man to seek out help. Mantlo's not usually a very mythic writer, but I rather liked him having Heather think that her "Cinderella" story got turned into "Beauty and the Beast." This may also be the first time Wolverine himself witnesses how he was transformed by the Weapon X project, though the uniqueness of that experience was later overwritten by the events of WOLVERINE: ORIGIN.

As for Lady Deathstrike, she's brought in just to give Wolverine and the New Vindicator someone to fight. To this end, Mantlo quickly undoes O'Neil's happy ending for Yuriko Oyama, claiming that her lover Kira, shamed by the slaying of Dark Wind, committed suicide. This essentially caused Yuriko to do a 180-degree turn, so that in effect she became a copy of the father she had resented all her life. She considered that because Wolverine's adamantium skeleton had been created by Dark Wind's research-- even though it was the scientists of the Weapon X project who transformed the hero-- her dead father had a proprietary interest in said skeleton. This lousy motivation is matched by a rather desultory fight between the heroes and the villain's forces, after which the story kind of drops the training idea.

Lady Deathstrike quickly becomes fully aligned with the X-MEN cosmos in UNCANNY X-MEN #205, dated May 1986, which happens to be the same date allotted to the second part of the Mantlo ALPHA FLIGHT story. Given the quickness of the villainess's transformation, the editors may have flown Mantlo's idea of Lady Deathstrike before regular writer Chris Claremont, after which he, or other parties, arranged to remold the character. Thus, with the help of regular X-foe Spiral, Yuriko becomes a killer cyborg who now emulates Wolverine with her own claw-appendages. From then on, I would say that Deathstrike remains in the X-MEN cosmos no matter where else she may have appeared.

And just to bring things back to the cinematic tales, Deathstrike first makes her movie debut in X2, where she's said to be the creation of scientist William Stryker, who also assumes the role of transforming Logan into Wolverine in place of the head of the Weapon X project, one Doctor Thorton. Regrettably, Deathstrike isn't given even as much character in the movie as Mantlo gives her in the ALPHA FLIGHT tale, even though X2 remains the best of the X-films. But all this establishes in my mind that Lady Deathstrike is not in an iconic bond with Stryker or anyone else in the comics, and thus the film's use of Deathstrike and Stryker together makes that movie a charisma-crossover, even disregarding the presence of the script's other villains, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 In the first COSMIC ALIGNMENT essay I cited a few exceptions to my general rule that every time a given Sub-icon appears within the cosmos of a particular Prime icon, that Sub is aligned with that Prime. The most relevant exception was this one:

... in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock.

Probably as a result of seeing DEADPOOL VS WOLVERINE, I gave some thought to the way various X-MEN characters had been mixed and matched with respect to alignment in their media-history, and I settled on illustrating my thoughts with the example of Lady Deathstrike. All of the stories I study herein also count as near-myths in my system.

Strangely, Lady Deathstrike starts as a side-character in a five-part DAREDEVIL story by Denny O'Neil. She isn't even in the first part of that story, but Wolverine is. I haven't troubled to check exactly what the status was re: the origin of Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but O'Neil's story came out in 1983, eight years before Barry Smith produced the "Weapon X" continuity. In DAREDEVIL #196, both Wolverine and Daredevil learn of a plot by Japanese criminals to ship the bedridden hitman Bullseye-- reduced to a paraplegic toward the end of Frank Miller's run on DAREDEVIL-- in order to restore the villain to health by duplicating aspects of the bone-reinforcement operation used on Wolverine. Now, O'Neil had the unenviable task of keeping up the sales of the DAREDEVIL title after Miller's departure, and plainly one of his strategies was to bring back Bullseye. O'Neil had no involvement in the X-titles, so patently he must have got editorial approval to forge a link in the "Wolverine's origin" chain. But though one might think in 1983 Wolverine would be extremely curious about Bullseye's benefactors-- or anyone who had any information on the process of making an adamantium skeleton-- the X-Man quickly loses interest in the case so that the Man Without Fear is free to journey to Japan alone. Incidentally, though O'Neil isn't very good with Wolverine's dialogue, he does seek to play the X-Man's disregard for "playing for keeps" against Daredevil's compunctions against killing.

In Japan Daredevil rescues a young woman, Yuriko Oyama, from her father, the man responsible for seeking to remake Bullseye into his own private assassin. Said father runs his own private island full of mercenaries, and he has assumed the sobriquet "Dark Wind" to indicate his passion for taking Japan back to its warlike past. As an indicator of his monomania, he has inflicted facial scars on all of his adult children, including Yuriko, because he himself suffered scarring in his war years. Yuriko helps Daredevil infiltrate Dark Wind's island, but the two of them are too late to prevent both the operation on Bullseye and his subsequent escape back to America. (Daredevil concludes the sequence by following him back for a confrontation in issue #200.) All the Japanese issues, then, deal with Daredevil getting involved in Yuriko's quarrel with her father. There's a frustrated romantic arc involved as well, just as there was in O'Neil's previous father-daughter meditation, the alliance of Ra's Al Ghul and Talia in Bronze Age BATMAN. Yuriko has fallen in love with one of Dark Wind's retainers, and she wants to free her lover Kira from her father's influence. Her part in the story concludes when she saves Daredevil by stabbing her evil dad from behind.

In all likelihood O'Neil deemed Yuriko a minor support character, and since he concluded issue #199 (poetically entitled "Daughter of a Dark Wind") by giving her a romantic reunion with her lover Kira, he probably would never have revived her in another story. Since Dark Wind scarred Yuriko's late brothers the same way he scarred her, one can't argue a straightforward Oedipal complex-- though it's still mildly significant that Yuriko has to kill her dad to get access to her young lover. Had Yuriko been left alone, she would have remained a subordinate icon with very minor charisma.

But she wasn't left alone, as I'll address in Part 4.