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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

  

ICONS AND IDENTIFICATION

In MY SHORTEST POST YET I sated that what I term "icons" are the parts of narrative through which readers identify with various presences in fictional narrative, and without such identificatory figures, no one would ever invest any thought or feeling into the broad plot-scenarios called "tropes." This assertion brings me back to an elaboration of my "law of identification," which I gave its first full elaboration in the 2011 essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY.                                                                                                                                                                                   Briefly, the essay addressed a speaker's failure to define fictional characters as vessels of identification, choosing to simply deem them "unreal" by a positivist philosophy. I responded by contrasting my law of identification with the "law of identity" attributed to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to wit:                                                           

"Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this: Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."                                                                   

I have sometimes wondered if, before Plato wrote down a sentence or two that Socrates may (or may not) have spoken, these respective philosophers were aware of pre-Socratic traditions, or even religious concepts, that asserted that two unalike things could be the same in some quasi-mystical fashion, and that the later philosophers were reacting against that idea in forming the rudiments of the "law of identity." Be that as it may, art, particularly in the form of literature, was already devoted to forging identification between fictional characters who did not exist and non-fictional readers/audiences who enjoyed at least a temporally fixed existence. In any event, it should be further noted that no individual's identification with a fictional character is completely identical with another reader's identification. It's only the broad process of bringing a character "to life" that is identical in all "real readers." The reader takes his cue from the expectations that the author sets up as to the "reality" of the text. But that reality can fluctuate, as noted in this essay: '"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.' By extension, this means that although in the real world, Old Gene Phillips sustains "the law of identity" with Young Gene Phillips, there is no such law governing Superboy and Superman, or Dick Grayson Robin with Dick Grayson Nightwing. The latter pairings have different end-results for their identificatory processes, even if the overall process remains the same, and so Superman can be "phase shifted" into the different identity of Superboy-- even though anyone reading the stories of either character knows that they are the same character at different age-ranges.         

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

At first Kanigher kept the teen and adult Wonder Women separate, though issue #120 (1961), he found a way to cross over the respective icons by having each of them encounter the same peril, "the Mercurian Menace," but at different times in the Amazon's heroic career. Then in #122 he began to play with time, showing Princess Diana getting de-aged to her younger selves, including not just "Wonder Girl" but also "Wonder Tot."

Then in WW #124 Kanigher introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman and her teenaged self both existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though both icons continued to enjoy independent stories. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. Given that both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were designed to generate their own separate cosmoses, every story with both characters after WW #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, just as much Thor and Iron Man are in every co-starring appearance in THE AVENGERS, which is also a semi-bonded ensemble, but only for those characters whose own features reached a certain level of escalation (as opposed to the earlier example of Giant-Man and the Wasp, explained here).

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CURSE OF THE SUPERBOY MUMMY" (SUPERBOY #123, 1965)

By 1965, many of the Mort Weisinger-edited comics of the SUPERMAN line had gone beyond the fustiness of their Golden Age precursors. If one goes beyond my specific connotations of "mythicity," and speaks only of how each of the titles nurtured its own mythology, then both of the SUPERMAN books, the SUPERGIRL backup, LOIS LANE and JIMMY OLSEN all showed unprecedented inventiveness in creating new characters and concepts, or in causing old ones to interact. (I'm leaving the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature outside these considerations because it sported a very different conceptual format.) But of the features set in the 20th century, SUPERBOY was the least distinguished in sheer creativity. 

I've only read bits and pieces of the late forties/early fifties SUPERBOY, I've found them extremely jejune compared to the SUPERMAN scripts of the same period, even allowing for SUPERBOY's simpler, kid-focused plots. Only one event in the feature's late Golden Age era is still remembered by fans today, the creation of Lana Lang, which as I argued here began as a recapitulation of Lois Lane's character. Then two more "myth-events" followed in the first five years of the Silver Age. First came the introduction of Krypto in 1955. Then in 1960 came one of the feature's few mythic stories, "How Luthor Met Superboy," which debuted the appealing idea that Luthor and Superboy grew up together in Smallville long before they became implacable foes in adulthood. The "retcon" of Luthor was followed other tales which borrowed from the SUPERMAN comic books (or, in one case, from the SUPERMAN comic strip), so that the Boy of Steel began meeting Phantom Zone villains and the like. But even by 1965, his writers showed little sign of evolving any new myth-material original to Superboy's universe-- again, not counting the Legion.

I suspect that the premise of "The Curse of the Superboy Mummy" might have begun from an idea for an arresting cover image-- Lana Lang and Superboy finding archaic doppelgangers of themselves in an Egyptian tomb. Given that idea, writer Leo Dorfman and artist Curt Swan then probably had to "work backward" to find some way to justify the image. But this time Dorfman rooted his makework story in one of the key myths of the Superman cosmos-- the War Between Men and Women.

The three-way relationship of heroic Superboy, admiring Lana Lang, and apparently-timid Clark Kent had of course been borrowed from the SUPERMAN comics, but a few interesting divergences arose. For one thing, Lana became at some point the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, so she could sometimes be tied to arcane or unusual discoveries. 

Now, the cover does not specify the nature of the "curse," but the opening caption does, implying that somehow Lana's presence is going to bring doom to the hero-- even though she doesn't show any of her more annoying traits here or in the issue's other two stories. Nevertheless, when Dorfman takes us back to 3,000 B.C. in Egypt, the writer changes the Smallville setup-- "young girl only thinks the guy she knows is weak"-- to a literal reality. Seth, weakling son of royal magician Ahton, is humiliated when the taunting Neferti demonstrates that even she's stronger than he is. Doting father that Ahton is, he goes for the quick fix, asking Isis for help.

Isis shows Ahton the futuristic feats of Superboy-- proving that even archaic gods are big fans of the Kryptonian franchise-- and Ahton learns how to duplicate Superboy's powers with a magic potion. There is of course no internal reason for Ahton or Seth to duplicate the Superboy costume too, except to make the cover-image work out. But I give Dorfman extra points for coming up with a rationale for the insignia, since the Egyptians didn't have the European letter "S."

During Seth's short super-career, his major accomplishment is really to blow off Neferti when she tries womanly wiles to attract his attention. But Neferti shares the snoopiness of her later doppelganger, so she not only learns Seth's true identity, she even sees images of Superboy and Lana in Ahton's magic oracle-shield.

Then, just as the nosiness of Lois and Lana sometimes put their romantic idol in one kind of peril or another, Neferti has a "Deianeira moment," where she trusts in an unscrupulous adviser to give her a love-charm. The jade scarab she wears to attract Seth kills him, and her as well, when she tries to rescue him from the sea. (The story has an unusual amount of death for a mid-sixties SUPERBOY tale.) 

This half of the story is the most resonant for its use of a trope one might call, "Hero Killed by Woman's Egotism." Astute readers are expected to notice that Lana appropriates the very jade scarab that killed Seth, and so there's no great mystery to those readers when modern-day Superboy begins experiencing non-romantic heartaches when he gets near Lana. The Big Reveal of the next three pages is pretty routine and not worth recapitulating here; those interested in the denouement may read it here. The only mythic element of the modern-day section of the narrative is that, even though Lana isn't intentionally endangering Superboy, the hero's dimestore self-analysis is never actually invalidated. According to the way Lana normatively functions in the SUPERBOY canon, she does at least endanger the hero's peace of mind with her frequent identity-hunting. And if one chooses to amplify the potential feelings of these purely fictional characters, Lana also could incur a lot of resentment by her frequent complaints about Clark Kent's meekness-- though to my knowledge she never went so far as to embarrass Clark in a contest of strength/skill. So if Superboy does harbor secret resentments of his potential girlfriend, it's not because he's swayed by any ancient superstition. He just resents nosy, nagging women.

CURIOSITIES #33: "THAT SURE WAS A BONER I PULLED WITH LANA" (SUPERBOY #13, 1950)

 Much funnier, IMO, than the better known "Joker's boners" meme.

I found this item reviewing the earliest appearances of Lana Lang in the Golden Age SUPERBOY. In her first outing, she's all but a xerox dupe of Lois Lane, and is overtly compared to the lady reporter. In this, her third appearance in the title, she monologues what I assume was the established credo of all the nosy women in the life of the Kryptonian hero: they think that if they can learn his secret ID, they can insinuate themselves into his private life and romance him. However, later in the same story she also makes clear that she wants to boast about her cleverness to all of her friends. Just like a woman!

Of course Superboy punishes the young girl for her pride and snoopiness. But in one sense Clark's more backward than Lana, for the super-Boy Scout doesn't seem the least complimented that this hot young redhead wants to romance him. All he can think about is how she may endanger his status as a superhero-- and I'm not sure if his indifference to romance makes him more mature or more childish. (I know which one DC writers meant to emphasize, but it would be an interesting bit of trivia to figure out the first time Superboy ever, like, noticed the unique appeal of pretty girls.)

ADDENDUM: Though in 1950 Whitney Ellsworth edited both SUPERBOY and the anthology ADVENTURE COMICS, where the Boy of Steel was the lead feature, he didn't bring Lana into the AC continuity until issue #161, dated February 1951. This quasi-introduction went further on portraying Lana as a demi-Lois, to the extent that both Lana and Clark get temporary summer jobs at a Smallville newspaper. Though this Lana still suspects Clark of being Superboy, she's less Superboy-crazy than scoop-crazy. I imagine the editors dropped the idea of "Lana Girl Reporter" pretty quickly.

And surprise, surprise-- I wasn't really expecting to find stirrings of romance between Clark and Lana (albeit with miscolored blonde hair) as early as November 1951. But the ADVENTURE COMICS for that month allows readers the first peek at Clark Kent's fancies turning lightly to-- well, maybe just puppy love.

MYTHCOMICS: "LIFE AND DEATH AND THE END OF TIME" (LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #50, 1988)

ENTROPY:
a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder-- Merriam Webster online.

From the POV of a Silver Age DC enthusiast, John Byrne would be the incarnation of entropy. DC continuity was constructed slowly and erratically during the Silver Age, and was then codified into a regularized cosmos during what I term the Bronze Age. But by 1986, DC continuity was deemed unwieldy in comparison to competitor Marvel Comics. Byrne, who insisted on revising the Superman continuity to exclude Superboy, was one of the key players who degraded the established continuity, though to be sure if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.

Of course, the re-ordering of post-1986 continuity had a drastic effect on the profitable feature LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, which was based on the idea that the 20th-century crusader Superboy periodically traveled to the 30th century to have adventures with a cadre of similarly teenaged heroes, the Legion. For the first few years, writer Paul Levitz compensated by inventing the idea of a "pocket universe" where the Legion's continuity was maintained. Yet, since the company didn't want, contra Byrne, any sort of Superboy flying around, that hero had to be killed-- killed by the same entity who created the pocket universe, the Time-Trapper.

This particular Legion villain had gone through some pre-1986 revisions himself. He was invented as a toss-off villain in the story "Menace of Dream Girl," wherein he prevented the heroes from traveling to the future (providing a contrast to the debuting heroine Dream Girl, who could at least intuit future occurrences). Hamilton's story implies that the Trapper is just another sci-fi mastermind, though a later Levitz story makes him into a member of a super-powerful race, the Controllers. By the time of this 1988 story, though, the Trapper becomes the embodiment of a cosmic principle:

They have called him by a thousand names. He is night. Death. Apocalypse. Eternity. Entropy. Time.

The opening pages of "End" show the solitary robed figure of the Time Trapper in a wasteland far removed from the Legion's era, while the captions inform the reader that "all things have ended here, even those that never began... If logic wars with faith over the nature of the beginning, so too it must over the ending. Logic decrees that all things begun, must end."

To say the least, this was not the typical language of a Levitz LEGION story. The elevated, philosophical tone comes closer to what Levitz sounds like in the 1978 tale "The Summoning." Clearly, whatever Levitz's personal opinion of DC's 1986 revisions, he determined that he could give his readers a good story extrapolated from the editorial mandate that "old guard" Superboy had to die. Levitz couldn't alter that policy, but he could create a situation in which the feature's incarnation of entropy was punished for his crime.

Having established the cosmic background of the villain, Levitz approaches the heroes of the Legion in more basic terms, That said, he interweaves two plotlines that are germane to the attempt of the Legionnaires-- spearheaded by their resident genius Brainiac 5-- to avenge Superboy, The first plotline involves a "friend of the Legion," Rond Vidar, who appears to have come back to life despite having been slain by his villainous father. The second thread relates to another character introduced in two earlier stories: Rugarth, a scientist accidentally transformed into another cosmic being known as "the Infinite Man." Rond's mystery is resolved later in the story, but the Infinite Man poses an interesting moral problem, since he's brain-dead and cannot agree or disagree with the role given him by Brainiac 5.

Both of these subplots, not coincidentally, involve persons who may be able to transcend death, thus setting up the suggestion that the degradation of entropy may not be the final answer to all things, as the prologue supposes.

To make the vengeance-drama more personalized, the entire Legion doesn't voyage into the entropic world to combat the Trapper. Only the four members who witnessed Superboy's death make the journey: Brainiac 5, Duo Damsel, Saturn Girl, and Mon-El (who, incidentally, was conceived as something of a Superboy knock-off). To say that the heroes are overmatched is an understatement. Duo Damsel, who lost one of her natural three bodies in an earlier adventure, loses her last extra body.

And Mon-El, the most powerful of the group, unleashes a lot of power but fails just as hard.

However, the Trapper is given some pause by Rond Vidar, whose mysterious return to life is explained by his mastery of a Green Lantern's power.

Yet in the end, Brainiac 5's plan depends on introducing the incarnation of entropy to his conceptual opposite, The green-skinned genius argues that the theory of entropy is countered by one arguing that "time itself is infinite, folding back on itself in endless cycles-- and each end may simply be a new beginning." The incarnation of this principle is, of course, the Infinity Man.

Naturally, the Legionnaires survive this cataclysm and go on to other adventures, just as the Trapper comes back in new incarnations. Levitz ends the story in circular fashion, repeating some, though not all, of the captions from the prologue, but suggesting that even the Trapper's kingdom of entropy has proven temporary.

This story, while consequential to LEGION fandom, didn't have a lot of impact on comics as a whole, certainly not as much as this week's "near-myth," "The End at Last."  Levitz and Giffen produced a better symbolic discourse in their "End of Time." But as I argued in this essay:

Though I define the quality of mythicity in narrative as that of symbolic complexity, not everyone uses the word "myth" this way. Often when the average person describes Superman or Batman as a "myth," they simply mean that they are extremely popular with many people, as some myths in the archaic world undoubtedly were. However, since not all archaic religious myths had widespread popularity-- some being confined to this or that isolated tribe of "fanboy" worshippers-- it follows that not all literary myths are going to be world-beaters either.

MYTHCOMICS: "HOW LUTHOR MET SUPERBOY" (ADVENTURE COMICS #271, 1960)

Now that a new version of Luthor has made it into film-theaters, it seems appropriate to discuss the first time Superman's arch-villain achieved mythic status.

In some ways it's surprising that the original character caught on so well with 1940s readers of Superman comic, for in his first appearance he seems like just another garden-variety mad scientist, out to conquer the world.

In the second appearance of Luthor-- who had yet to acquire a first name, or even a backstory-- Jerry Siegel gives him one mythic motif: Luthor is a "brain" who perpetually seeks to prove himself the superior of Superman's "brawn." Given that Siegel's first version of Superman, appearing in a prose fanzine, was actually a super-brain with no fabulous physical powers, one might consider this a case of an early version of Superman seeking vengeance on his successor. But this minor motif is as far as Siegel takes it, and it seems to me that the only thing that made Luthor popular with audiences-- enough that he was featured as the main villain in the 1950 ATOM MAN VS. SUPERMAN film-serial-- was that his bald head made him eminently recognizable.

"How Luthor Met Superboy"-- drawn by Al Plastino and written by Jerry Siegel at a time when he had returned to DC Comics as a simple wage-slave-- was an overt attempt to give Superman's most prominent enemy his own myth-- and, as most comics-fans know, it was a myth founded in his lack of head-hair.

The 1960 story-- reprinted in full on this site-- begins with Superboy hearing that a new resident, a teenger, has moved to Smallville. Though the Boy of Steel doesn't typically go around serving as Smallville's welcome-wagon, he shows up at the new boy's farm. At the same a kryptonite meteor crashes to the ground, and Superboy falls victim to its rays. The new boy saves Superboy by pushing the meteor into a nearby lake, after which the young man introduces himself as Lex Luthor, budding boy scientist, and informs the superhero that he Luthor is Superboy's biggest fan-- which was meant to be just as ironic then as when Annie Wilkes spoke similar lines in Stephen King's MISERY.

Grateful for his life, Superboy uses his powers to build the farm-boy-- who's currently living without adult supervision, for reasons loosely explained later-- a brand-new laboratory. Luthor isn't entirely forthcoming about the direction of his experiments, resulting in a clever scene wherein the conflict of the prideful young boy and the somewhat nosy superhero is foreshadowed.

Luthor's attempt to create protoplasmic life may also carry something of a Frankenstein-vibe, though the headless foam-creature seen above never fully comes to life. Luthor is so happy about his breakthrough that he instantly decides to find a new way to reward his super-buddy: by discovering a potion that will immunize Superboy from kryptonite radiation. Since the lab was payback for Luthor saving Superboy's life, one might almost think that on one level Luthor was seeking to use his scientific skills to "one-up" his hero, albeit in a beneficent manner. Luthor's own exultation causes him to start an accidental fire, and Superboy's attempt to save his friend results in a permanent rift between the two:

To be sure, Luthor briefly pretends to set aside his maniacal obsession, but only so that he can taunt Superboy by withholding the kryptonite antidote. "Superboy will regret the day he decided to steal the glory of Luthor," the nascent super-villain rants to himself, which is Siegel elaborating the simple early motif of "brain vs. brawn." Luthor doesn't immediately turn criminal, though, but instead tries to steal from the superhero the regard of the local Smallville residents. Luthor's streak of juvenile carelessness causes the project to turn sour, and Superboy s obliged destroy it.

Luthor tries a second time to ingratiate himself with Superboy's 'worshippers," and he fails again, thus enduring yet more humiliation from an enemy who doesn't regard Luthor as anything but a wayward youth who hasn't received enough parental attention from his "traveling salesman" father. (Nothing whatever is said of Luthor's mother, but one assumes that she's no longer among the living.) Luthor finally crosses the line and tries to kill Superboy, but the young superhero manages to take advantage of the scientist's desire to twist the knife, and save himself.

Still generous to a fault, the Boy of Steel refuses to arrest Luthor for his crime, claiming that Luthor's attempt to take Superboy's life nullifies the scientist's having saved it earlier. This is the only time in the story Superboy shows himself to be something more than a goody-goody, as if he were a juvenile version of a western sheriff, deferring justice from an old friend gone bad.

Many later comics-readers-- and comics-professionals, some of whom worked on later Superman comics-- were affronted by the perceived banality of this motivation; of Luthor becoming a super-villain simply because he lost his hair. In an essay I wrote long ago for AMAZING HEROES, I pointed out that Luthor's baldness was simply an objective correlative for his feeling marginalized and overshadowed by Superboy's prowess. I pointed out that in myths the loss of vitality was sometimes indicated by a character's loss of hair, most famously in the story of Samson, though the Greeks had a not dissimilar character in Nisos, King of Megara. Many later versions of Luthor would minimize the baldness-motif in favor of a Luthor who hated Superman for some other reason, most prominently because of the latter's alien nature.

But regardless of whatever new motive is indicated, that hair-denuded head keeps popping up in every iteration; the 20th-century superhero equivalent of the Fisher King with the Wounded Thigh.