MYTHCOMICS: "PLANET STORY" (MARVEL PREMIERE #61, 1980)

The Bronze Age of Comics-- which I would peg as the period from 1970-1986-- was the last era in which Marvel and DC published a significant number of new characters in their own features but not derived from earlier features. Year 1986 seems like a good cut-off point, given that the profitability of two works then published-- WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- encouraged many creators to quit automatically contributing to "the Big Two."

To be sure, many of these characters proved no more than minor players, and Marvel's Star-Lord-- despite an impressive translation to the cinema in recent years-- couldn't even be said to be one of the sales-failures that remained a fan-favorite for years later, such as Killraven and the Man-Thing.

The base-concept of Star-Lord was essentially "Green Lantern without the Green Lantern Corps." His origin involved an alien giving Earthman Peter Quill cosmic powers, with an eye to creating more space-supermen later. But Quill/Star-Lord was the only one created, and despite his ties to Earth, his few adventures didn't involve his home planet, also in contradistinction to DC's Green Lantern. Given an "element-gun" for self-defense and an intelligent ship named "Ship" for transport, Star-Lord tooled around various galaxies for about a half dozen stories, before disappearing for the remainder of the Bronze Age.

The title "Planet Story" does concern a planet, though it's likely that either writer Doug Moench or artist Tom Sutton also had in mind the famous pulp-magazine PLANET STORIES, which specialized in adventurous space-opera. If so, it's an ironic title, because the script bears less resemblance to space opera than to more involved science fiction meditations on quasi-sentient planets, like Harry Harrison's DEATHWORLD. Moench does not give the planet in his story a name, but for convenience I will call it "the Sharing World."

Star-Lord and "Ship" have no particular agenda, save curiosity, when they happen across the Sharing-World. Their survey indicates that the world is replete with lush vegetation but no "higher fauna." Yet Star-Lord also observes a ruined city, indicating that at some point intelligent beings occupied the planet. Under his own flight-power, Star-Lord leaves his vehicle in orbit and descends. As soon as he does, various phenomena-- a volcano, an earthquake, and a bunch of tentacled plants-- assail the hero. He makes his way to the ruined city but finds no clue to explain the absence of the city's makers, though Star-Lord suspects that the populace may have been exterminated by the hostile environment.

Once Star-Lord leaves the city, again he's attacked by planetary phenomena, such as wind and lightning, but this time, the phenomena are driving him toward a destination. The hero is precipitated into the "organic cavern" of a huge tree, and the entrance seals up when Star-Lord tries to leave. The only thing inside the tree are various honeycombed chambers, which Star-Lord mentally compares to "cadaver-drawers" with no contents. Then he learns that they do have contents: groping plant-tendrils that try to grab him, though he's able to keep his distance from them.

Suddenly, the planet itself communicates with Star-Lord through the medium of dust that arranges itself into holograms (no, there's no explanation of how this could be accomplished). Through these images the Sharing-World informs its guest of its history with its sentient inhabitants, through the vehicle of the giant tree (and possibly other trees elsewhere on the planet).

Long ago, an intelligent race of parrot-headed creatures existed alongside the glories of the sentient planet, living as "noble savages in an alien Garden of Eden" (which is implicitly Star-Lord's interpretation of things). However, the parrot-people, whom the planet calls "the Sharers of Old," begin to dislike the planet's tendency to interact with them through the tree-tendrils. (Moench's script is unclear on some points: at first it sounds like some of the Sharers are killed by having their energies drained by the "vampire tendrils," but later it sounds like a symbiotic relationship that injures no one.)

In any case, the relationship is in later sections deemed as important by the Sharing-World, because intelligent beings, unlike lower animals, can choose whether or not to participate in the sharing-ritual. However, the parrot-people choose to leave this 'garden" and build their own cities. Then they follow the usual course of tool-using sentients, exploiting the planet and giving nothing back. In response the planet begins to die, and finally the Sharers give up and desert the Sharing-World via spaceship.

Then, as soon as Star-Lord has been given a Cook's Tour of the world's history, the feeding-tendrils latch onto him. At this point Moench and Sutton shift the narrative viewpoint to that of the Sharing-World, which describes its quasi-erotic attachment to the long vanished Sharers, and its desire to have Star-Lord take up the same role. The planet's attacks were caused by its eagerness to take on a new "lover," but though the reader learns these facts, but Star-Lord isn't tapped into the planet's ruminations. He breaks free of the tendrils and returns to his orbiting vessel. Once there, he confers with his intelligent ship, wondering if he ought to use the ship's weapons to destroy this menacing world. However, "Ship" talks the hero out of doing so, and the two of them leave-- which proves a final irony, since by that point the Sharing-World wants to die for its lack of loving symbiosis.

(The entire story can be read here.)


Even without Moench's early Eden-reference, one could hardly miss the tale's indebtedness to the Old Testament narrative of Adam and Eve. In said story, God gave the first humans the choice of whether or not to obey God's commandment not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Moench neatly inverts this myth, for here it's a tree, through which the planet manifests its will, that's more or less "feeding" on the inhabitants of the "garden." There's no tempter that moves the parrot-people to leave; they do so of their own volition, and Moench largely implies that their motives are more selfish than self-protective, and they're rejecting their quasi-sexual union with the planet rather than coming to a new knowledge of male-female sexuality. Christian philosophers have opined that humankind's exile from Eden was a "fortunate fall," but in Moench's story, strongly suggestive of ecological ideals like the "Gaea theory," the Fall is unfortunate for both the world and its intelligent denizens.

The element of "choice" is also less metaphysical and more sensual: the planet wants to share only with those who have the power to choose. Tom Sutton's art emphasizes the chaotic curves of natural life as against the hard lines of sentient dwelling-laces, and Star-Lord's brief captivity by the tendrils suggests a sort of human-alien sex along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer's 1953 story THE LOVERS, though Sutton's imagery suggests rape, as does one of Moench's lines:

"...the exit irised shut with a sloppy, wet sound that made me think of ripeness and guilt."

MYTHCOMICS" "THE GAME KEEPER" (GHOSTLY HAUNTS #57, 1978)

In THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS VOL. 3, I remarked that the Golden Age Hawkman story was an example of a story in which there was a simple overthought, that of "good vs. evil," and a underthought consisting of complex symbolic associations. This 1978 story-- reprinted in toto here-- boasts a similar disparity, in which the overthought is a basic "terrible doom befalls new wife," while the underthought is-- more involved.

The title itself is rather puzzling. Wikipedia defines a "gamekeeper" as a person who manages an area of countryside to make sure there is enough game for shooting, or fish for angling and who therefore is implicitly an employee of whoever owns the land. But in the story the only person that the title can apply to is Jan Van Drood, the lord of "Drood Castle," somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains. There's no sense of when the story's events take place, though since there are no signs of modernity, the 19th century is a likely candidate. Viewpoint character Avis is the new bride of Jan Van Drood, who claims that his family has dwelt in the castle for eight centuries. Avis believes that she is Jan's first wife, but a hunchbacked servant, Salic, makes the odd remark that "There is but one mistress here, and she is neither young nor beautiful."

Jan attempts to dismiss Salic's words as meaningless drivel. On the same page, though, Avis, whose name means "bird," learns another fact about Drood Castle: that it seems to be swarming with diverse animals, all calling to each other at night. Avis momentarily romanticizes the sounds as "love," while Jan cynically demurs without explanation. Then Jan warns Avis never to leave the castle at night, even though he himself is in the habit of walking forth at night. This seems to be the only way in which Jan is a "gamekeeper," in that he claims that the local game is "familiar" with his presence because he is a Drood. Then, both of them hear weird sounds, and Salic tells his master "It is she, master." Neither Salic nor Drood explain the source of the sounds, but Drood departs on one of his night-time walks. Apparently on the same night, Avis's curiosity about the mysterious "she" makes her equally curious about a particular castle-room that's always locked.

Naturally, Avis gains entry, but she doesn't get a grand revelation a la the wife of Bluebeard. It's just a painting-gallery, and every painting shows a Drood ancestor posing with various animals.

On the same night that Avis observes the peculiar gallery that she decides to follow Jan when he goes on his nightly walk on the grounds, apparently believing that she's going to see him meet with the mysterious "mistress" of Drood Castle. Avis finds the woods outside the castle thronging with savage beasts-- wolves, snakes, bats, and maybe even a lion or two. The beasts chase Avis, but a caption remarks that they seem to show "an intelligence beyond the ken of mere animals."

The final page then gives the big, if less than pellucid, reveal.

There's no big shock in finding out that Jan is a werewolf, for werewolfism is a standard enough revelation for weird-acting Carpathian noblemen. But Sutton takes things a little further, claiming that the line of the Droods "departed from the mainstream of human development; we never became entirely human. On the nights of the moon, we reject to our animal selves; a race of were-creatures." And then, without further explanation, the "camera" pulls back to clarify that werewolf-Jan is caught in a giant spider-web, and that a giant black widow spider is crawling down, presumably to bite Jan's head off. Avis turns away, not because of her husband's death, but because the Big Spider is a being with whom Avis cannot compete: "Now you know how futile it would be to compete in her world... Now you know how inadequate your love is compared with her timeless passion." (The word "timeless" seems fortuitously chosen, since the spider's species is shown by its marking, resembling that familiar time-piece, the hourglass.)

So what the hell is the Big Spider? By the fragmentary logic of Sutton's story, it must be another Drood, and therefore a relative, though not necessarily a "first wife" after the manner of Bronte's JANE EYRE. Salic has told Avis that the real mistress of the castle is "neither young nor beautiful," so she's implicitly older than Jan. I theorize that Sutton knew a lot of the maternal symbolism that appears in Gothics or Gothic-leaning works like JANE EYRE and REBECCA, even both of these involve "first wives" rather than "mothers." I further theorize that Sutton decided to sucker Charlton Comics into printing a comic-book story, aimed at a kid-audience, in which a married man got his head bitten off his own monstrous mother, in the embodiment of the "devouring female." (To be sure, it's been stated that real black widows don't engage in sexual cannibalism like other spider-species, but the abused arachnid will probably never live down this reputation.)

An interesting side-note: the name "Jan Van Drood" bears a strong resemblance to the titular character of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. Edwin Drood is mysteriously slain, and though Dickens died before he revealed the killer's identity, the author apparently told a friend that the novel was about a nephew being slain by his uncle. The uncle in question, one John Jasper, is a respectable fellow with dark secrets, one of which is his illicit desire for Edwin's betrothed, a woman young enough to be Jasper's daughter. Did Sutton know about the quasi-incestuous content of the Dickens novel, and channel a little part of it into his Bronte-pastiche? I cannot but say, "I think it so."