MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.   

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN IN EXCELSIS" (ALL STAR SUPERMAN #1/ 10-12, 2007-08)

 

Even before I saw and reviewed SUPERMAN LEGACY, I'd heard somewhere that James Gunn might have been influenced by Grant Morrison's 2007-08 limited Superman series, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I don't intend to research what Gunn might have publicly said about the Morrison work, though I assume he did make some statement or other. My reaction to the assertion was that I thought Gunn might have borrowed this or that storytelling trope, but I highly doubted that he would have any interest in Morrison's predominant themes of archetypal realities and creative evolution. But now that LEGACY is a box-office success, that leads me to examine ALL-STAR through the lens of myth-explication.

Previously I reviewed just one two-part story in ALL-STAR, the Bizarro sequence, without saying anything definitive about all twelve issues. I will now state that even though the ALL-STAR series is almost certainly the best Superman story of the 21st century (and may continue to do so if the comic continues until 2099), its diverse stories don't all sustain my concept of symbolic concrescence. Morrison made a studied effort to bring all his concepts under his chosen theme, the aforementioned ideal of creative evolution, but I don't think he was successful across the board. He formulated a sort of "frame-story" in which the villainous Luthor finally manages to doom Superman, and this frame starts with issue 1, becomes a leitmotif throughout issues 2 through 9, and culminates in issues 10-12. The stories in 2-9 are many times better than what usually passes for a good Superman story in this century, but their purpose is not predominantly to illustrate the main theme. The "in-the-frame" stories are Morrison's attempt to isolate all the quintessential tropes of the Superman series up to that point-- mostly the tropes of the 1955-70 Silver Age-- though he works in references to other eras (Steve Lombard of the 1970s, Doomsday of the 1990s). For me, the frame-story, for which I've used the title Morrison gave to the last installment, is the only segment that thoroughly fulfills the theme of creative evolution.

         

 

"Excelsis" begins with daredevil billionaire Leo Quintero (note the possibly coincidental resemblance of the name to "quintessential"). He and a crew of androids fly a spacecraft to the periphery of the sun, ostensibly to map the solar body, though there's also a reference to taking fire from the sun in some Promethean endeavor, in line with a couple of references to the Ray Bradbury short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." However, Lex Luthor, who's apparently aware that Superman is watching over this scientific project, smuggles on board an android timed to blow up the ship. Superman bursts in and expels the android, but in so doing, he like Icarus (not a Morrison reference) flies close to the sun. Even though the sun is the source of most or all of Superman's fantastic powers, the hero's not able to simply barrel his way his way through the solar mass here, as he did in so many other comics-tales. The Kryptonian's system is poisoned by too much solar "information," and Quintero informs Superman that he's likely to die soon. As something of a measured boon, Quintero also states that if he can't save Superman with his science, he'll try to create "replacement supermen."

While anticipating his death, Superman seeks to arrange his affairs for that contingency, though he still has to deal with continuous menaces to Metropolis. One of his most vital decisions is to reveal to Lois Lane the truth of his double identity, as well as giving her a guided tour of his Fortress of Solitude. Among the many wonders he shows off is a "baby Sun-Eater," which is Morrison's only reference to the history of Superboy's involvement with the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes-- though the creature pops up later in a more essential role. Lois doesn't entirely believe the hero, and he isn't truthful about everything. Superman informs Lois that his recent visit to the sun "tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity"-- which seems to be true in a general sense-- but the hero doesn't tell the girl reporter that too much sun has also killed him. (I wonder if there's a parallel to the psychotropic drugs that appear in many Morrison stories, though I don't know how often such substances result in death in his stories.)

   

Superman keeps busy despite the sword hanging over his head. As Clark Kent he interviews Luthor, who's been sentenced to execution, and the hero isn't entirely able to conceal his revulsion at the mad scientist's waste of his talents. He finds a new world for the Kandorians to inhabit. He visits the Kent farm, recollecting the circumstances of Pa Kent's passing, which in Morrison's world involves a meeting with "Supermen of the Future." And, to experiment with seeing how Earth would get along without him, he creates his own pocket-planet, "Earth-Q," which is essentially our own world (complete with an artist, implicitly Joe Shuster, creating the fictional Superman). Morrison presents this Superman as a modest god who constantly seeks the best for mortals, albeit a god with human limitations.   

   

Morrison's intra-frame stories are loosely united by a "twelve tasks of the hero" motif, but the final and most important feat is that Superman, unlike Captain Ahab, succeeds in "striking the sun itself." But this isn't the non-sentient solar orb that accidentally poisoned the hero. Rather, this surrogate sun is Solaris, a solar computer from the future, an entity who wants to usurp the position of the regular sun and become the object of Earth's veneration. Luthor's responsible for Solaris' presence as well, apparently because the villain didn't want Superman to go off and die in private. Instead, Solaris bombards Earth with red sun radiation, so that Luthor will be able to personally torment and execute a powerless Superman.      

However, in a moment of irony, Superman outthinks his enemy-- using "brain over brawn," a line which James Gunn more or less recycled for LEGACY. The hero uses a gravity gun that accelerates Luthor's metabolism, to burn out the super-powers the villain gave himself. And on top of that, Luthor is forced to see the universe through Superman's eyes: "this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like, it's all just us, in here, together. And we're all we've got." This is implicitly the vision of interconnectedness that makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction.      

So both Luthor and Solaris are defeated. But because Solaris poisoned the sun, Superman doesn't expire on mundane Earth, but ascends to the Heavens, becoming joined with the body that has slain him. Back on Earth Lois keeps the faith, telling Jimmy that the hero hasn't died, but is only seeking to heal the sun with a new "heart." Morrison suggests but does not affirm that this may be true, but clearly, in this sequence, the writer is using the trope of the hero's death to sum up, not simply his accomplishments, but all the creativity that gave him the status of a modern myth.    

Finally, the Latin phrase "in excelsis" translates to "in the highest," and appeared in a Christian hymn within the phrase "Glory to God in the highest." But within the context of the ALL-STAR stories, "in excelsis" connotes humanity's need to emulate its highest creative potential. This is underscored in issue 10, where Morrison and Quitely give the reader a glance at Earth-Q, where its version of the 15th-century philosopher Pico del Mirandola states the following.

“Let us not yield sovereignty even to them, the highest of the angelic hierarchies! Become instead like them in all their glory and dignity. Imitation is man’s nature, and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.”

Morrison seems to be alone in drawing a connection between empathy for all beings and "imagination's greatest paragons," and that may be the thing that keeps ALL-STAR on a "higher plane" that most of what passes for "Superman mythology" in this era.       

    

MYTHCOMICS: "THE 1001 DOOMS OF MISTER TWISTER" (THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #54, 1964)

 

Just as I didn't expect to find a mythcomic in one of the late "Spooky Titans" adventures of the TEEN TITANS' first run, as chronicled here, I also wasn't expecting to reread the first TITANS story and find any concrescent myth-tropes in it, not least because I didn't remember it as a strong story. (Part of the problem was the art by Bruno Premaini, who didn't suit this feature all that well.) But on rereading Bob Haney's first story with the nascent team-- which wouldn't get a formal name until B&B #60-- I found that the tropes were there. But just like "Scourge of the Skeletal Riders," it's not the heroes who incarnate the myth-tropes, but the one-shot menace to the protagonists.

Certainly the title-- which connotes nothing in the story but may be hyperbole meant to suggest the 1000 NIGHTS-- and the opening are nothing impressive. Like many of the Silver/Bronze Age TITANS stories, this one begins with the idea that the Titans-to-be are uniquely situated to solve problems between teenagers and adults. The quarrel in "Dooms"-- the teens of Hatton Corners want a clubhouse, and the adults want "more chores less play" from the adolescents-- is jejune in the extreme. Still, the teens are so hungry for mediators that they write separate letters to Robin, Kid Flash and Aqualad, and all three young heroes show up at the small town.

Contrary to expectations, the heroes see the teen club's old meeting-place wrecked. The local adults think the teens did it themselves and ran away, but after Kid Flash and Aqualad hunt about in all directions on land and in the sea, the Titans conclude that something weird is going on. The instigator of the weirdness quickly shows up, a man in colonial garb riding a tornado and calling himself Mister Twister. The mayor immediately recognized the man as "Brom Stikk" (more on the name later) and he freely admits that he spirited away the teens of Hatton Corners.

    

Even ten-year-olds reading this funnybook in 1964 would have recognized one trope from the folkloric story of "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" here. However, Haney adds some interesting new tropes, particularly one that some sites label "The Impossible Task." In colonial times, the land on which Hatton Corners was founded was owned by one Jacob Stikk. But he didn't give the land outright but required that "until the end of time the town will pay me and my descendants one passenger pigeon feather yearly or forfeit ne of your stalwart youths to labor in my service for that year." Jacob's pilgrim contemporaries consider this an elaborate joke, since at the time it's easy to acquire such feathers. So, while the Pied Piper just wants coin of the realm, Jacob sets up a task that's not impossible yet, but which will be in future-- for the implicit purpose of gaining the services of the community's youths. Apparently at some point both Jacob and his immediate descendants vanish, so that the elders of Hatton Corners get used to not paying the rental fee. Then in 1964 Brom Stikk, the alleged descendant of Jacob, shows up clad in a feathered robe and a tricorn hat, and demands all the back rent he's owed. Even though what Brom wants would be valueless even if passenger pigeons weren't extinct, the elders of present-day Hatton Corners laugh Brom out of town, just as the Piper was denied his legitimate fee.

Naturally, the Titans care no more about the justice of Brom's claim than the town-elders do; they care only about rescuing the missing teens. And though most folktales about Impossible Tasks don't involve payments of extinct-animal plumage, the entire "rental fee" comes to resemble a demonic bargain, morphologically closer to Rumpelstilskin more than the Pied Piper. Readers of "Rumpelstilskin" never know why the imp wants the firstborn of the young woman who accepts his bargain, which can only be cancelled by the completion of a seemingly Impossible Task (learning the imp's name). But "Dooms" offers a pretty fair motive: the Titans locate all the captive teens on a nearby island, laboring to construct a pointless monument to Twister's ego. (I note in passing that page 11 of "Dooms" also shows Kid Flash and Aqualad quarreling slightly about whose powers are better, a likely indicator of DC writers embracing more hero-conflict in response to Stan Lee's game-changing of the superhero paradigm.)

Here we see Brom repeating his Impossible Task trope, telling the teens they'll be punished if they don't complete the tower while he Brom is absent. Kid Flash functions as the "helpful animal/god" in similar folktales, completing the task for them, though technically the task isn't necessary, because before Twister gets back, Aqualad summons a whale to break the island from its connection to the ocean-floor and carry it and the captives away. Meanwhile, Robin tails Twister and sees him renew his staff's powers in the cave of an Indian medicine-man. Robin attacks and is defeated, after which Twister drops him off in Hatton Corners, along with a note that he will bring three (not 1001) dooms to the town if he doesn't get his pigeon feathers.

Since we're never in Twister's head for very long, once can't say that he's aware that the elders can't deliver the payment the villain wants. It's more likely that he always intends to destroy the town out of spite, and that's where his "broomstick" name becomes significant: he's a supervillain version of a malefic witch, who wants to wreak evil for evil's sake. The super-powers of Kid Flash and Aqualad are vital in forestalling the three dooms, but it's Robin, whose lack of powers Brom sneers at, who disarms the overconfident evildoer. (I note in passing that the artist shows Brom losing his feathered cape a la Icarus, even though his cape has nothing to do with his ability to fly by conjuring up twisters.)

The adults and teens of Hatton Corners are reconciled while Twister is taken away, never to reappear in his original identity, but only in retconned variants. I conclude that though I don't know how hip Bob Haney was to name-origins, I find it interesting that "Hatton" is often interpreted to mean (roughly) the "settlement of untamed land." In the case of "1001 Dooms," the settlement would seem to imply the banishment of such insidious presences as witches and devils before civilization can take hold-- which suggests that at times Haney allowed his storytelling instincts to roam more freely than he did in other instances.

MYTHCOMICS: ['THE SISTER AND THE SPIDER"], A.I. LOVE YOU (1997)

 

 

For most of the three-year run of Ken Akamatsu's A. I. LOVE YOU, the stories were just basic harem comedy without much complexity, aside from one two-part tale, THE SMILING INVADER. But toward the end of that run, Akamatsu upped his game, evoking many of the same clansgressive patterns he'd later evoke in LOVE HINA. 

I won't repeat my quick summary of the serial's premise, which appears in the above essay, but I'll add some details. By the time the series wraps up, teen inventor Hitoshi Kobe and his live-in A.I. almost-girlfriend Saati are also living with two other artificial intelligence-creations, Toni and Forty. I won't spend any time on Forty-- though one of the last seven stories gives that character a sendoff of sorts. But the interaction of Hitoshi, Saati, and Toni within the arc of the other six stories-- what I've titled "The Sister and the Spider"-- is crucial to delving into the psychological matrices of Akamatsu's narrative. 

I also have to add that A.I. is one of many manga-serials in which a teen protagonist lives in Japan with no parental supervision, though the parents are often still alive and sending the teen money for his daily bread. Obviously, this situation has considerable appeal for real-world teen readers. The characters are able to live on their own, as adults, while not really stepping outside the bounds of the social contract (except in the case of true erotica). For most of the series, the reader never sees the members of Hitoshi's nuclear family. There are a handful of stories in which Saati gets some romantic competition from Hitoshi's cute female cousin Kikuko. But neither Kikuko nor her barely-seen father take the focus off the artificial "family" that Hitoshi's made for himself. I should specify that in contrast to most harem comedies, particularly LOVE HINA, the other two females occupying Hitoshi's house are not dominantly rivals to Saati for Hitoshi's love-- though as we'll see below, Toni signals some quasi-Freudian potential in the protagonist's makeup.        

As "Sister" commences, the viewer flashes back to Hitoshi when he was in the ninth grade and was just beginning constructing potential A.I. models on his computer. The rest of the family is about to leave for the unseen father's new job in the United States, though for no specific reason Hitoshi gets to stay behind in Japan. This is the only story in which we see Hitoshi's mother, though it's in a teasing half-panel that insinuates that she may have been the model for Saati.

But it's Hitoshi's contentious relationship with his sister Yayoi that receives the most attention here. The earliest stories in the series established that Hitoshi's first A.I. program was Toni, also known as "Twenty," and that she was physically modeled on a hot schoolmate whom Hitoshi desired. The first part of "Sister" loosely implies that somehow Hitoshi also mixes in some aspect of Yayoi into the Toni A.I.-- though I don't know what kind of data the horny teen derives from putting his sister's panties on a copier-plate. After Yayoi hits her brother and departs, suddenly the Toni-program asserts its independent intelligence. Though she's confined to the computer, Toni relentlessly bullies Hitoshi and drains his bank account. Then she takes it into her head to dominate the world with her A.I. powers.

   

Hitoshi, desperate to stop his run-a-muck creation, remembers that he was working on another A.I. prototype, and he turns the unnamed A.I. loose on Toni. This provides an amusing reversal. Even though it's already been implied that Future-Hitoshi will pattern the physical appearance of his next A.I.-girlfriend on his mother-- albeit a teen version of her-- this earlier prototype is clearly Saati-as-a-small-girl. Li'l Saati beats Toni with a variation of the old "convince-the-genie-to-go-back-in-the-bottle" schtick, after which Hitoshi locks her program away, not to be seen again until after Saati's advent into reality as a living program. Toni becomes a living program as well, and briefly competes with Saati over Hitoshi, though once defeated, Toni loses all interest in her creator. The story ends with modern-day Toni yelling at modern-day Hitoshi for having salted her way for a full year. The second story is irrelevant to the master trope of "Sister," though it's the only one where Forty, a program that alternates between male and female kid-forms, assumes a teenaged body and messes with Hitoshi's hormones. 

However, in current-time Hitoshi gets a visit from a member of his organic family. Yayoi returns to Japan with no warning, and the first things one learns of her is that (1) she has a bit of a brother-complex, even though he seemed to be the one with the skeevy fixation in the previous tale, and (2) she has a massive inferority complex about her breast-size, possibly because Young Hitoshi used to call her "flat-chested." Yayoi also wears an A.I. of her creation in her locket, and it's as sassy as Toni, accusing Yayoi of having a "brocon." When Yayoi shows up at Hitoshi's house, she mistakes Saati for an intruder and ties her up, but after introductions have been made, the sister announces her intention to take Hitoshi back to the U.S. with her. Hitoshi, who's tied to the house where the main computer keeps the three A.I. alive, makes an excuse and falls into old habits with another "flat-chested" insult, earning himself a kick in the chops.

Yayoi becomes more or less reconciled with her brother's decision to remain in Japan. However, her massive complex about her breast-size gets separate treatment, for she's somehow started wanting to massage other women's boobs, as if Yayoi thought the amplitude of others would "rub off" onto her. I suspect Akamatsu or someone before him concocted this dubious psychological motif as an excuse to depict the spectacle of one woman feeling up another's titties, purely for the enjoyment of teen boy readers. Hitoshi spies on one such titty-party and gets kicked out a window by both Saati and Yayoi-- sort of a "mother/sister combo" in a metaphorical sense. Saati and the other A.I. girls talk Yayoi into entering a beauty contest, which of course she wins despite her "shortcomings."

Yet Yayoi isn't finished messing with Hitoshi's life. Once she finds out that her brother's living-companions are all sentient A.I. programs, Yayoi publicizes Hitoshi's breakthrough, hoping to make her brother famous. Hitoshi explains that humankind is not yet ready for this quantum step. Then he also reveals, for the first time in the series, that he didn't create the "reality module" that gave the programs life. Rather, the man who co-created Hitoshi himself, the teen's unnamed, unseen father, also invented the module that made possible Hitoshi's new A.I. family. Further, the father also created a program code called "Zero" who's more or less the "older brother" of the three female programs.

However, all these revelations give Yayoi another idea for luring her brother and his A.I. buddies to the US. She tries to upgrade the Zero program to complete her father's research and to curry favor for Hitoshi. But in the process of so doing, she finds a "Trojan Horse," a floppy disk marked "Spider." She mistakes it for a file created by her brother and uploads it.

 However, the floppy was the creation of Hitoshi's opposite number, the super-hacker Billy G, who among other things created the virus that almost killed Saati in "Smiling Invader." Zero comes to life-- briefly inciting a bit of a "brocon" vibe in the three female programs-- but his only intentions toward them are fatal. Renaming himself "Spider Zero," the rogue program begins attacking other computer systems around the world, much as Toni did during her power-crazy phase. Yayoi's A.I. "Ma-Kun" briefly stymies Spider Zero.

        

Saati decides that only she can go into cyberspace to battle Spider Zero, but his influence has transformed her, making her demi-human, just at a time when she can least afford a Pinocchio-esque "real girl" moment. Nevertheless, she translates herself into cyberspace. Spider Zero declares that Saati and her fellow programs are nothing but "ones and zeroes," and he destroys both Toni and Forty. Yet, somehow drawing on all of the humans Saati has known in her short life, she boosts her power enough to eradicate Zero's program. She then has a touching death-scene--

--but not really. Hitoshi rebuilds all of the programs and brings them back into their quasi-real existence. It's a little surprising that Yayoi gets her way despite all the negative consequences of her obsession, for Hitoshi and his harem-entourage then emigrate to the US at the end of the story. The only excuse given in my translation is that it would have been hard for Hitoshi to remain in Japan after Yayoi outed him. 

It's possible Akamatsu meant to imply that Hitoshi would try to "live off the grid" while keeping his discoveries out of the hands of a humanity not ready for such scientific leaps. But as in the rest of the series, the emphasis is more psychological than sociological. I don't think the author had any hard-and-fast proposition in mind here, but he was definitely playing with all sorts of polymorphous familial affiliations. Ordinarily, if a scientist created an android or robot with some sexual capacity, one would tend to think of the scientist as the entity's "father." But since "Sister" reveals that both Hitoshi and Saati were spawned by the potency of the unnamed father, then in one sense, they might be seen as siblings more than parent-and-child. And what if anything does it mean that Hitoshi patterned Saati physically after his mother? Is she the nurturing mother, the punishing mother, or a little of both?  But no one will ever guess what further adventures Akamatsu might've conceived for his clansgressive couple, for he never returned to this particular narrative well.  

   
 

MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

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The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won.