NULL-MYTHS: "THE TERRIBLE TINKERER" (SPIDER-MAN #2)

Although the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN corpus remains one of the most respected superhero serials in the comics medium, the feature's creators were men who could lose their way like any other mortal beings. Spider-Man's first four appearances-- the intro tale in AMAZING FANTASY #15, the two stories in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1, and "Duel to the Death with the Vulture" in ASM #2-- are all remarkable for their wit and intelligence in transforming the then-staid conception of the superhero-- all the more remarkable, given that the creators probably believed that their only audience were kids under 12, Not every story in the Lee-Ditko corpus was superb, but even in the merely adequate stories, it's easy to imagine the two comics-creators taking a fierce professional joy in working out the brave new world of their unique take on the superhero.

Except once; in the second Spider-Man story to appear in ASM #2. It's not just that "the Terrible Tinkerer" is a blah story, though it is. It's also not just that it feels like some idea Lee and Ditko might've planned for one of their penny-ante "weird tales," and which they turned into a Spider-Man story in order to meet a deadline. It's that the story seems to invert the mythic concept of Spider-Man. This series-concept includes not just the hero, but all of the "mythology" that accrued about him-- developed in a steady and logical manner during the first four appearances-- and although Peter Parker does appear in the "Tinkerer" story, he seems less like himself and more like another alter-ego with an alliterative name: Billy Batson. Given that issue #2 was the last time that the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN title featured two short stories-- and that the Spider-Man concept was steadily developed from then on in "full-length" stoies-- the "Tinkerer" tale seems a strange hiccup indeed; almost a failure of nerve.

The tale opens on Parker in his science class, getting dumped on by his classmates for his devotion to the sciences. (Regular character Flash Thompson is among the mockers, but has not yet taken on a developed character, while his girlfriend Liz hasn't even acquired a first name yet.) This sequence. with the noble hero being ridiculed by his ignoble peers, is the only part of the story that doesn't feel like it belongs in a simpler superhero story along the model of the Fawcett Captain Marvel.

Parker's teacher introduces him to the city's foremost "electronics expert," Doctor Cobbwell, who has apparently come to the high school to look for a free assistant. Parker immediately volunteers, and it's not clear if it's he's being paid with money or just the honor of working for the esteemed scientist. Cobbwell has Parker run an errand for him, that of picking up a radio from an electronics repair store. While in the store, Parker's "spider sense" is triggered by the shop and its strange old owner, who calls himself "the Tinkerer." Parker leaves without divining what caused him to feel sensations of danger, but the reader sees that in the Tinkerer's basement, he's conspiring to place special monitoring devices in the radios he works on-- all to serve the world-conquering plans of a gang of green space-aliens.

Just as I said in my critique of this JIMMY OLSEN story, I'm not criticizing "Terrible Tinkerer" for putting forth an outlandish idea; that of a small-time radio-repairman acting as a spy for an alien invasion. Rather, I'm criticizing the story because it doesn't enhance the mythic themes that had been articulated in the previous four adventures. The issue of Parker's conflicts with his peers, which would continue to resonate in future adventures, is barely touched upon here, much less the "conflicts of money and fame" that I elucidated in my earlier meditations on Spider-Man.

There's no great suspense to the story, either. When Parker's hyper-senses allow him to detect the monitoring-device in Cobbwell's radio, he goes back to the radio-ship, as Spider-Man. He falls afoul of the Tinkerer and his alien allies, is captured, and then escapes a death-trap. The aliens flee the planet in their space-ship, while the Tinkerer escapes the hero, leaving behind a human face-mask that suggests that he too was an alien.

I remarked that there's almost nothing in this story that couldn't have happened to the Fawcett Captain Marvel-- who was, prior to the conception of Spider-Man, one of the most famous "teen heroes" in comic books, even if only the Captain's alter-ego was a teen boy. As this blogpost shows in great detail, the archetype of Captain Marvel had an incidental influence upon Spider-Man's creation, for Captain Marvel was the model for a superhero named the "Silver Spider"-- a concept which did not sell to any publisher, but whose basic concept was recycled twice: first into Archie Comics' THE FLY, and later, into SPIDER-MAN.

The DIAL B FOR BLOG post mentions that when Steve Ditko saw some of the pages of Jack Kirby's first-- and presumably unfinished-- SPIDER-MAN story, the adventure showed the Kirby Spider-Man-- who transformed with the help of a magic ring, just like Archie's FLY-- in the process of getting involved with an old scientist performing some experiment. Did Ditko take what he remembered of the uncompleted story, and transform into the "Tinkerer" tale? This might explain why the story seems to be so little like any other Lee-Ditko spider-story before or after it.

Fortunately, though this story may represent a slight "failure of nerve" in that it revolves back to an earlier superhero-model-- a model which SPIDER-MAN parodies-- the back-step did not hinder the progress of the Spider-Man mythos. (Happily, though later raconteurs chose to bring the Tinkerer out of mothballs, he never became a major player in that mythos, and would in my opinion be better off being forgotten.)

MYTHCOMICS: AMAZING FANTASY #15/ SPIDER-MAN #1-2 (1962-63)

(Note: I wrote the original version of this essay years ago, and have updated it for this series.)   

The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud are no longer central to the practive of modern psychological treatment. Yet in literary criticism, it’s nearly impossible to speak of the psychosexual concepts underlying fictional characters wthout addressing Freud, if only to refute him.   The early Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN is an ambivalent example in this case, conforming to Freudian patterns in some respects but not in others.

The centerpiece of Freudian theory is the concept that the son’s dawning sexual desires become centered on the mother and inculcate in him a murderous jealousy of the father. Freud named this concatenation of love and resentment after Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX, not because the play depicts such a relationship but because (Freud believed) Oedipus unknowingly performed the actions that such a jealous son would like to perform: killing his father and marrying his mother.   Freud also claimed that this wish-fulfillment pattern could be displaced in devious ways, such as the son’s displacing his animosity onto some third party.  Freud asserts that this occurs in HAMLET, where Hamlet’s uncle kills Hamlet’s father and sleeps with Hamlet’s mother, thus incurring Hamlet’s anger because these are supposedly things Hamlet wants to do. 

In broad outline the early adventures of SPIDER-MAN conform to the displacement angle of Freud's theory, particularly in the classic origin tale in AMAZING FANTASY.  High school student Peter Parker is valued by his teachers and by his elderly surrogate parents, Aunt May and Uncle Ben for being a “clean-cut, hard-working honor student.” 

But the accomplishments of a "professional wallflower" count for nothing in the eyes of Parker's fellow students, particularly the female ones.  Parker is embittered by his ill-treatment-- not unlike protagonists of many standalone horror-stories on which creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko collaborated prior to SPIDER-MAN. He dramatically swears that “someday they’ll be sorry!—sorry that they laughed at me!”  In horror-stories, embittered protagonists usually sought to take revenge by appealing to supernatural forces.  If the horror-protagonist devoted himself entirely to an unjust revenge, the narrative often levied upon him some terribly ironic punishment.  If the protagonist came to his senses at the eleventh hour, he might be pulled back from the abyss with a new-found sense of guilt and responsibility. 

Parker never makes any literal pact with the devil for supernatural powers. But from the point in the origin-story where he desires to make his peers “sorry,” the narrative evolves as if he had done so.  His preoccupation with science leads him to a radiation exhibition, and, as most comics-fans know, an irradiated spider bites Parker and infuses the teen with spider-powers. Though he's initially bewildered as to what to do with these powers, he gets the idea of testing them against an opponent in the wrestling-ring. This is the story's first meaningful mention of Parker's desire for money, as opposed to sexual favors. His success in the bout brings Parker into contact with a promoter, and so Parker adopts the identity of Spider-Man not to pursue a destiny of selfless heroism, but to enrich himself and his surrogate parents. He declines to act the part of a good citizen by helping a policeman catch an unarmed robber, explaining to the frustrated cop that, "From now on, I just look out for Number One-- that means me!" A few panels later at his dwelling-place, one of Parker's thought-balloons makes clear that he will protect his aunt and uncle as well: "I'll see to it they're always happy, but the rest of the world can go hang for all I care."

But fate will demand its ironic pound of flesh. Because Parker ignores his societal obligations in the pursuit of filthy lucre, his Uncle Ben dies at the hand of the same burglar whom Parker allowed to escape days earlier.  While the protagonist of an episodic horror-tale would simply be humbled by the experience of being hauled back from the hellmouth, Parker must assume a never-ending responsibility as payback for having “murdered” his uncle through neglect. For Parker, the costume of the superhero often becomes a hair-shirt, though not surprisingly, subsequent stories manage to find many ways for Spider-Man to have fun being a superhero, to say nothing of occasionally being able to humiliate old enemies.  From then on both the triumphs and tribulations of being a superhero become so merged that one cannot say if Parker's fate is punishment or reward.

A doctrinaire Freudian reading of the origin-story might end up accusing Parker of having murdered his uncle through an "act of omission" in order to be closer to his surrogate mother, Aunt May.  And this might be a reasonable suspicion if Parker’s aunt were given any aura of sexuality.  Instead, Aunt May is always an icon of aged, sexless virtue.  Rather than being a source of sexual temptation, she becomes the objective correlative of Parker’s implacable new sense of responsibility. Further, though she's in a position of relative authority over him, she functions in the series more like a child whose health and peace of mind Parker worries over.  So a doctrinaire Freudian reading does not apply, particularly since Parker's sexual needs are still turned outward, toward women more or less his own age. One might make something of the fact that the character's first major girlfriend is a little older than he is: Betty Brant is a working woman, roughly of college-age, when she starts dating the high-schooler. Few stories treat the Betty character as significantly older than Parker, though. So despite the occasional reference to her age-- in one story, her rival Liz Allan makes Betty feel "a hundred years old" simply by addressing Betty as "Miss Brant"-- she doesn't work as a mother-substitute any better than does Aunt May.

However, Uncle Ben does continue to throw his shadow over Spider-Man's destiny, in a manner analogous to both Laius in the Sophocles play and Hamlet's father in Shakespeare. But Hamlet, according to Freud, is plagued not only with desire for the forbidden mother but also with a new "older male rival," in the form of his uncle Claudius. SPIDER-MAN #1 not only features the hero's debut in his own title, but also appearance of a "bad father" in the hero's life.  There’s no causal relationship between the death of Uncle Ben and the “birth” of newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, but from issue #1 on, Jameson becomes a second shadow in the hero's life. Whereas the spectre of Uncle Ben continues to chastise Parker for his sin of omission, Jameson comes at the hero from the other direction: publicly castigating the figure of Spider-Man, deeming the hero a vigilante who "takes the law into his own hands" and accusing him of being a bad role model for children. (It's not hard to imagine that aspects of the comics-critic Frederic Wertham found their way into the figure of Jameson the irresponsible pundit.)  Further, it's clear from Jameson"s first appearance in issue #1's lead story that the publisher's real grievance is that the real heroism of his own son, astronaut John Jameson, may be overshadowed by the superhero’s deeds. 

Usually supporting characters in superhero comics-features were one-dimensional in their opposition or their advocacy of the hero's goals, but Jameson was something of a breakthrough: a character who "knew himself but slenderly." By the end of this story Spider-Man saves the life of John Jameson during his space-capsule's malfunction. Despite this, the publisher regards the hero as a menace, accusing him of causing the malfunction. Because Lee and Ditko did not choose to keep the character of John Jameson as a regular-- though the astronaut did return much later, after Ditko's departure from the feature-- Jonah Jameson's motivation was soon re-interpreted as the jealousy of an older, essentially selfish man for the courage and fearlessness of a young hero.

So if there is an Oedipal conflict in the early SPIDER-MAN of Lee and Ditko, it might be glossed less by Freud than by Leslie Fiedler’s remarks about the father/son conflict of DON JUAN: that “[Don Juan’s] legend projects the naked encounter of father and son (the women mere occasions), of the alienated individual and the society he defies.” By these terms SPIDER-MAN might be an even more “naked” encounter, insofar as there are no women at all standing between Parker and Jameson. It's true that since Betty Brant works as a secretary at Jameson’s newspaper, she could have taken on the connotations of a "daughter-figure" to a "heavy father," which would conform not only to DON JUAN but also to ARCHIE comics. But no such relationship develops: Jameson does not care whether or not Parker dates his secretary. 

The Parker-Jameson relationship is defined by the conflicts of money and fame.  Jameson has some degree of public prominence because of his wealth, and uses his position to suppress the superhero’s growing popularity with the public.  But Spider-Man’s selfless actions in themselves don't put any money in Parker's bank account. Though Parker frets over money all through SPIDER-MAN #1, only in the first tale of SPIDER-MAN #2 does he find a way of making heroics pay, without neglecting the mantle of responsibility. He elects to start using his powers to go around town taking photographs that no ordinary journalist could get-- in particular, photos of a new super-criminal, the Vulture. In fact, nowhere in "Duel to the Death with the Vulture" does Parker assert that he plans to round up the super-crook for the benefit of the law. When some classmate tosses Parker a copy of a magazine Jameson publishes, this gives the hero the idea of photographing the Vulture-- and when the flying villain next appears, all Spider-Man does is to follow him, snapping pictures. The Vulture tries to kill his pesky shadow, fails, and on their next encounter Spidey beats him and delivers the Vulture to the cops-- although not before the hero gets more pictures to sell to the new "parental authority" in his life.

From then on, this becomes the new status quo: to make money Parker must continue selling photos to an older man who hates Parker's alter ego, while Jameson, who hates Spider-Man, must continue feeding the fame of "the menace" or face losing the interest of the paper-buying public. (One later tale even asserts that the paper's newsstand sales go down whenever Jameson writes another of his many anti-Spider-Man editorials.) For the young hero, there's no final duel with the older authority. The alienated individual simply goes on jousting against the older man and the conservative society he represents-- on and on, world without end.

   

NULL-MYTHS: "THE WEDDING OF JIMMY OLSEN" (1957)

I settled on this story as a "opposite version" of the theme presented in "Superman's Super-Courtship," It's not exactly a well-known story even among fans of the Weisinger "Superman universe" titles, though it did rate a mention in Tony Isabella's "1000 COMIC BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ."

This story, credited to Otto Binder and Curt Swan by GCD, is one of three such tales in JIMMY OLSEN #21, It was published over four years previous to "Courtship," with which it shares a theme common to Weisinger's editorial aegis: the theme of "improbable romance." However, while the later story has some interesting psychological ramifications, "Wedding" is just a routine rendering of a situation that was old back in the days of Greek New Comedy.

Here the improbable romance comes about because of a "Basic Misunderstanding." For years, Jimmy Olsen has worked alongside Lois Lane without a hint of romantic interest between them. Then, because Lois begins showing interest in Jimmy-- she's researching him for a proposed feature article-- he immediately thinks she's smitten with him. This by itself could lead to some mildly promising comic silliness. Naturally, Jimmy has to believe himself to be a "romeo" capable of swaying a mature woman from her "best beau," Jimmy's own buddy Superman. He tries to discourage Lois by doing things that make him look like a "cad," but these forgettable antics backfire so that she thinks better of him,  But in order to justify the hype of the cover, Jimmy has to decide-- improbably, even for this silly schtick-- that the only thing a man of honor can do is to marry a woman so smitten.

In keeping with standard practice, Lois doesn't inform Jimmy of his grievlous error, but pretends to become engaged to him, with the idea of finding some way to let him down easily. She even confers with Superman, who agrees to help extricate her from these comic difficulties. The excuse Lois finds to reject Jimmy without bruising his ego isn't particularly memorable, and the only thing that makes this story inconsummate is its indeterminate treatment of Jimmy's psychological makeup. Though his age isn't stressed, obviously he's in his late teens, and is certainly old enough to have dated. Yet Binder portrays him as if he has the mentality of a small boy-child, who presumes that the only response to a mature woman's lovelorn sentiments is to marry her. There's a slightly amusing moment in which Jimmy pictures himself carrying Lois over the threshhold for their honeymoon; Jimmy looks not a little panicked at the proposition, as if he can't imagine any advantages in bedding Lois; the next panel, appropriately enough, shows him suffering as Lois leaves him to babysit their numerous children.

Since the relationship of Superman and his "pal" is an avuncular one, this concept might have been mythically interesting if Jimmy had been somewhat intrigued with the idea of making it with the girlfriend of his "big brother / uncle / father-figure." But as written, it's a pretty pale product.

ADDENDA: As a matter of critical process I want to specify that I'm not simply critiquing this story's presentation of Jimmy Olsen in terms of the character's verisimilitude. If it were simply a matter of the character acting atypically in different sections of the same story, that would be simply a failure of the dramatic potentiality, which deals with the interactions of conscious personalities. What I'm critiquing is the degree to which Olsen's character is put into a mythopoeic situation-- that of transgressing on the sexual hunting-grounds of a friend / father-figure-- and then fails to follow through on that mythic potential. The story is also a good example of the principle of a non-incestuous "clansgression."

A "NULL-MYTH" PREFACE

Before I print the first of my series of "null-myths," I want to ramble on a bit about the contrasts between "mythicity" and its alleged opposite.

I first suggested the use of "null-myth" in this essay. With this term I wanted to introduce a term that would be more elastic than "false myth," a term which Ursula LeGuin made up out of whole cloth and little logic, and applied rather high-handedly to the character of Superman. As a hardcore comics-reader-- something I'm sure LeGuin never was-- I was aware that there had been many super-stories that had strong mythicity (defined elsewhere as "the symbolic complexity comparable to that of archaic myth")--

--as well as many more than did not possess more than mythic potential. Such stories would be "null-mythic" because whatever potential they had was not fulfilled.

About three years later, I got around to reading Philip Wheelwright's book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. In a handful of essays, such as this one,  I asserted a basic similitude-- though not identity-- between my concepts and Wheelwright's continuum of language-forms, primarily described as "steno-language," in which linguistic representations are largely denotative and have only the simplest connotations, and "poeto-language," in which there is theoretically no limit to the connotative associations of the representations. In ONLY AN ARCHETYPE CAN BEAT ANOTHER ARCHETYPE PART 1  I made the similitude between my system and that of Wheelwright explicit:

It's my contention, then, that stereotypes are static representations in tune with Wheelwright's "steno-language," while true archetypes are dynamic representations in tune with his concept of "poeto-language."

Thus, Superman as a concept may have high or low mythicity in any given iteration. All fictional characters and "focal presences" have this potential, though it's fair to observe that some characters have so few "high-mythic" moments that one can easily designate them as "null-myths" in a statistical sense. Thus, Ebony of THE SPIRIT-- whom I mentioned in ONLY AN ARCHETYPE-- has this potential as much as Superman. But since the potential is only infrequently (if ever) realized with Ebony, one can speak of him as a "null-myth" as well as a stereotype. It should be noted that Ebony is not a stereotype because many modern readers don't like what he represents, while the contemporaneous readers of THE SPIRIT found him unobjectionable. It is the lack of symbolic complexity that makes a character stereotypical, not his or her political correctness.

I didn't stick with the term "null-myth" very long, but in 2011 I conceived this essay as a way of working Susanne Langer's concept of an "unconsummated symbol" into my system, where it occupied the position of "praxis of language" alongside the Wheelwright "theory of language." I wrote:

In earlier essays I've spoken in symbolic discourse in terms of *mythicity,* through which concept it's possible to detect differing degrees of symbolic complexity within a range of literary works.  This remains the cornerstone of my theory, but Langer's terms are useful for determining the processes behind the articulation of complexity. In this essay I formulated the term "null-myth" for a given element in a narrative that did not happen to be complex in a particular iteration, with the explicit statement that no such element was beyond a high-mythic transformation elsewhere. In yet another essay I conjoined my Frye-influenced theories of symbolic complexity with those of Philip Wheelwright, who employed the terms *plurisignative* and *monosignative* for differing levels of symbolic expression.

And finally, of late I've been adapting both "consummate" and "inconsummate" as terms to be applied to the discrete potentialities of a given work, with the idea that such terms might be more precise than the more frequent "doesn't suck" and "sucks." The four "null-myths" that I've retroactively identified here are all inconsummate with regard to the mythopoeic potentiality, but this says nothing about any other potentiality for entertainment. The two Jack Kirby works cited-- BLACK PANTHER 1-2 and the "Challengers" story in SHOWCASE #6-- display Jack Kirby's mastery of comic-book kineticism. In this same kinetic sense the "faux Captain-Marvelisms" of MAGICMAN don't come close to touching Kirby's work even at its weakest, but in the right frame of mind it might be enjoyed on that level too. Only Mark Millar's work is one I consider "practically inconsummate in every way."

Thus, when I present my examples of "inconsummate comics," I would reiterate that I'm only assessing them in terms of their mythopoetic potentiality. I've often enjoyed various comics for any of the other three reasons-- didactic, dramatic, and kinetic-- and it may be that some, or all, of the examples I choose may be strong in these departments.

BE BRIGHT OR BE DUMB

In future I may taper off on my assaults against HOODED UTILITARIAN after finishing ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW.  But though I didn't bother informing NB of my response to his essay BE WHITE OR EXPLODE, I did waste a little time the other week trying to wring out of Berlatsky a more precise definition of a word he tosses around too freely: "parody." In my series essays entitled THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, starting here, I noted that NB painted a very one-sided picture of comics-fans' desire for serious heroes, as against the quasi-satirical elements of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. Not surprisingly, NB wasn't willing to admit any failing in his analysis-- a recalcitrance common both to ultraconservatives and ultraliberals, as I noted in STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY. Thus as usual the only thing produced by the "discussion" was a few definitions of my own that I choose to reproduce here. It also sparks some considerations on the question of my influence by Jung, something that NB chose to bring up for no stated and/or logical reason, but I'll deal with these in a separate essay.

I opened with:

Re: “superhero parodies”– there has to be a difference between a thoroughgoing superhero parody and a regular superhero story with its fair share of humor. There may never a way to break it down beyond “I know it when I see it, but otherwise, if you say Fawcett’s Captain Marvel is a parody because it had ludicrous elements, then the same criterion applies to various Superman and Batman stories– particularly the Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite stories.

NB apparently couldn't get that I was saying he was being too general in identifying items like the Fawcett CAPTAIN MARVEL as parody, because he simply repeated his statement that parody was central to the genre:

There are some genres where a parody does mean you’re not really in the genre any more, or where parodies at least aren’t quite so central to the genre. But superhero parodies are really dead center in the superhero genre, and always have been. 

When I repeated that it wasn't enough to have humorous elements in a story to make it a parody, which I said was also the case with PLASTIC MAN, NB tried to find a way to make the non-humorous elements of the superhero genre subordinate to those that he finds humorous and/or parodic:

Superhero stories are about empowered individuals, often. And then they’re often also about parodying the idea of empowerment, and making fun of the idea that silly guys in tights can save the world. 

I was glad to see him admit this agenda, even if he wanted to promote it as sober fact:

I suspected you were favoring a definition that was short-hand for “anything that seems to contradict narratives of empowerment,” so thanks for confirming it. I for one don’t think that Superman’s machismo is nullified in any significant way as long as he keeps booting Mxyzptlk back to the imp-dimension, but I assume your mileage varies.
Here’s the problem with such a broad definition of parody: it doesn’t sufficiently take into account the fact that “the other side” can do parodies with the opposite meaning. THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS contains a parody of a touchy-feely psychologist, who is rendered ludicrous through the lens of Frank Miller’s endorsement of Bat-machismo. I would hope that you’d consider this parody, even though it has nothing to do with satirizing heroic empowerment.
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NB had to admit that the sequence in TDKR is parodic, but chose to believe that Miller's ode to heroic empowerment was still a self-parody. Tautology, thy name is Berlatsky!

Skipping across most of the rest of the back-and-forth, I will end with my own remarks regarding NB's political agenda, to which he did not respond and which he claimed not to have read:

When I first posted, I knew that we would not agree on the subject of humor, but I thought you should at least acknowledge that not all humorous elements are “elements of parody.” That’s still the way you’ve chosen to define parody, though, because you’re not concerned with the intrinsic meaning of the word, but with some extrinsic, politicized interpretation of the word. As per your Sedgewickean argument in “Comics in the Closet,” you’re content to interpret all humorous elements as weapons in your campaign to strike down the hated “serious superhero.” This project doesn’t have anything to do with making superheroes more “complex,” as you claimed earlier. it has to do with promoting your own distinctly limited vision of what superheroes ought to be. 

The most bizarre aspect of the exchange, however, was that though I didn't bring up anything about the analytic psychology of Carl Jung, NB kept insisting that not validating his faulty definition of parody was tantamount to being-- a Jungian?  At least this time he was a little more correct than when he condemned me for being an exclusive devotee of Joseph Campbell, as I recounted in BATTLING THE ELEMENTS. I do draw upon Jung more often than Campbell, because I think Campbell was not as organized a thinker-- though of course he's Immanuel Kant in comparison to Noah of the Many Wandering Thoughts.

Contrary to NB, there's nothing about Jung or Jungianism that contravenes the spirit of humor. What NB is seeking to defend is his specific notion, probably derived from Eve Sedgewick, that "the idea of empowerment" is unstable and incoherent. Jung makes assorted references to male empowerment in his writings, but it would hardly be correct to deem him a monolithic defender of standard sex-roles. I demonstrated the exact opposite in my analysis of his "anima/animus" terminology in the essay WHAT WOMEN WILL PART 3.  Like Gary Groth before him, NB wants a "devil" to scapegoat, and his devil happens to be "male empowerment." Jung, being one of the foremost exponents of psychological pluralism, is not opposed to humor, but he is opposed to the idea that some archetypes are good and others are bad. Thus, though we can only guess what Jung would've made of American superheroes, there's no way that he would have validated NB's ideological reasons for touting the Adam West Batman over, say, that of Frank Miller.

Superheroes profit from good humor, as much as any genre. But to centralize the element of humor-- or whatever one likes to call it-- is more nonsensical than anything in a Mxyzptlk story.

ADDENDA: I should note that if I've been influenced by any authors who validate the archetype of the "serious hero"-- be he "super" or otherwise-- it's not from either Jung or Campbell, who only address the concept infrequently. Frye is probably most responsible for giving me the logic for that validation, though Fiedler and Paglia have provided interesting viewpoints on the topic.

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN'S SUPER-COURTSHIP" (1962)

For this first entry in my new series of “mythcomics,” I select an example of what I term “clansgression.” Readers of this blog may recall that this formulation takes in not only the phenomenon of literal incest, but all the sociocultural associations that have arrayed themselves around the phenomenon.

The story “Superman’s Super-Courtship” appeared in the June 1962 issue of ACTION COMICS, issue 289, by Siegel and Mooney, and edited by Mort Weisinger. This story was one of many during Weisinger’s tenure in which characters in the “Superman universe” sought to manipulate romantic alliances, either to the benefit of themselves or of some other person. “Courtship” wasn’t even the first time Supergirl attempted to play matchmaker for her older cousin Superman, but the story has garnered a little more Net-attention for its psychological content, as one can see here. The dominant reading for this story has been to focus on one panel seen herein, arguing that it provides what is currently called *squick * via the thirty-something Superman’s profession of lust for his teenaged cousin.


I won’t entirely disavow this interpretation. The story was written, drawn, and edited by men, and Mort Weisinger in particular isn’t known as a great bastion of feminist sensitivity. Nevetheless, “Courtship” is a Supergirl story, ostensibly aimed at juvenile girl readers, so the conscious intent of the story’s raconteurs was to play to the egos of girls, as the raconteurs perceived them. Thus the story might be better titled “Supergirl’s Super-Courtship,” since her decision to play matchmaker for her cousin is one that reinforces her own ego, more than doing anything for Superman.


Supergirl, in her secret ID as Linda Lee, sees a sad romantic film that makes her decide that since the Man of Steel can’t make up his mind about either Lois Lane or Lana Lang, he must need a new inamorata, one chosen by the Girl of Steel. Superman seems curiously compliant as he cooperates with her shenanigans, rather than undermining her efforts to “teach her a lesson;” this might serve as more evidence that the creators’ primary motivation was to validate Supergirl’s ego.


Supergirl tries three times to set up her cousin, and the first two matchmaking sessions are played for comedy. Even though Supergirl thinks to herself that her cousin doesn’t think one can change the past through time-travel—a repeated “rule” in the Superman-universe—the superheroine tries to do just that, after reasoning that her noble cousin deserves the most beautiful woman ever—none other than Helen of Troy. Technically, it’s Helen before she was either stolen by Trojans or married to the Greek king Menelaus; Supergirl arranges to have her cousin show up while dozens of suitors are courting Helen. Not only are no sparks struck from Superman’s meeting with Helen, the Greek princess gets royally pissed off at the super-duo’s intrusion. Helen is particularly miffed that Supergirl’s talents put Helen in the shade—which, psychologically speaking, is where a quasi-mother figure like Helen of Troy belongs.

Supergirl’s second attempt is firmly rooted in the Superman cosmos, drawing upon the superhero-team the Legionnaires, a group of teens dwelling in Earth’s 30^th century. Supergirl takes it into her head that one of the superheroines in this group might be a match for Superman—though not as a teen heroine, of course. Supergirl draws her compliant cousin to a party in an era when where some if not all Legionnaires have grown to adulthood. Yet, while Supergirl researches Helen’s social matrix to get the lay of the princess’ land, the Girl of Steel doesn’t bother to find out first whether or not her second choice—Saturn Woman, known as Saturn Girl in her teen incarnation-- is married or not. This incident may have been a shout-out to Legion readers, who would have known that the character of Saturn Girl had a regular beau—to whom she would inevitably be married in adult life, given the expectations of the reading-audience.

When the two Kryptonians return to their own era, it’s then that Supergirl confesses her matchmaking scheme to her cousin. Throughout most of the story the reader isn’t privy to Superman’s thoughts; he’s only defended his intention not to marry as one of being dedicated to his superhero career. At this point he soothes his cousin’s bruised ego by telling her that he would only marry “someone super and lovable like… you!!” The “super” part of the equation refers back to a frequent trope in other stories: that Superman will not marry an un-super woman since she might be killed by his enemies. The “lovable” part of the equation might express some latent sexual feelings on his part. Altternately, it meant mean that he’s figured out that she’s playing Cupid to exorcise her own libidinous demons, and that he’s letting her down easily, with a not entirely germane discussion about how Kryptonian cousins cannot intermarry. In an extrinsic sense, editor Weisinger may have wanted this speech included, if he had received fannish suggestions about seeing the super-cousins married—though this is only speculation.


However, Superman’s attempt to end the conversation spurs Supergirl to new heights: since he’s said he would marry someone like her, she uses his “super computer machine” to find that there exists another superwoman—identical to Supergirl except for being an adult—on the planet Staryl.



Superman again complies with his cousin’s request; he seeks out Staryl and makes the acquaintance of superwoman Luma Lynai. In one of the hero’s very few thought-balloons, he thinks, “Can I find a girl [on Staryl] as wonderful as Supergirl?”—indicating at the very least that he isn’t blind to his cousin’s attractiveness, teenager or not. Sure enough, in the space of one panel Superman meets and woos Luma Lynai (who wears a costume not unlike Supergirl’s, though Luma chooses hot pants rather than a skirt). Superman invites Luma to visit Earth so that they can be wed if she likes it there—a whirlwind courtship, indeed! But Earth’s yellow sun strips Luma of her super-powers, which was the main thing that pulled her ahead in the race against Lois and Lana. As Luma tearfully returns to her own world, Superman seems only mildly disappointed at his loss of possible connubial bliss. For Supergirl’s part, she’s also tearful for having meddled in her cousin’s love-life. At the story’s close, she’s momentarily tempted to try the matchmaker game once more, but ends the story with the firm resolve not to do so. Yet arguably her adventure served its ego-boosting purpose: without indulging in literal incest, Supergirl “makes love” (in the juvenile sense) to her cousin through an adult doppelganger, and shows that, except for that pesky Kryptonian law, she might have been the best match of them all.        

1001 COMIC-BOOK NIGHTS: A RESOURCE

I labeled a number of posts with the tag "1001 myths," even if those posts didn't contain actual myth-analyses. By so doing I ended up making more work for myself, since my current project requires a numerical list of said analyses. In addition, there are many posts in which I did myth-analyses not originally labeled as "1001 myths. If, in retrospect, any of these fit my current criteria, they will be added to the list after the fact.

I'll pursue the same logic with regard to listing my "inconsummate myths," in that I'll look at earlier analyses of comics that failed the "mythicity test." At one point I conceived, but did not make much use of, the term "null-myths," coined with reference to mathematics' "null sets." All of the analyses that deal with works that utilized something with mythic potential but failed to "consummate" said potential

Here's the original twenty-six:

1. ACTION COMICS #1-2, first appearance of Superman.

2. BLONDIE #150.

3. CEREBUS #298-300.

4. THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

5. ELFQUEST 1-20.

6. FANTASTIC FOUR #8.

7. GREEN LANTERN #16.

8. "Judgment Day," HEAVY METAL (1981).

9. INCREDIBLE HULK #1.

10. JAR OF FOOLS.

11. KAMANDI #30.

12. LADY SNOWBLOOD.

13. "Mickey Rodent," MAD #19.

14. NEW MUTANTS #62.

15. "The Lamb, Resurrected," ONE POUND GOSPEL.

16. "Woozy Winks Detective Agency," POLICE COMICS #20.

17. QUESTION #17.

18. RED SONJA #1.

19. "The Curse," THE SPIRIT.

20. "Lower Berth," TALES FROM THE CRYPT #33.

21. "A Good Catch," URUSEI YATSURA.

22. VOID INDIGO 1-2.

23.WONDER WOMAN #1

24. XENOZOIC TALES #8.

25. YUMMY FUR 1-18

26. ZATANNA 1-4..


And here are the new inductees:

27. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #59.

28. "The Enchantress and the Executioner," JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #103.

29. INCREDIBLE HULK #142.

30. VISION OF ESCAFLOWNE 1-8.

31. "The Sea Circe from Space," THE JAGUAR #3.

32. CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.


Now here's the "null-myths," which may or may not ever reach 1001:

1. BLACK PANTHER #1 (Kirby), in part 1 and part 2

2. "The Secret of the Sorcerer's Box," SHOWCASE #6.

3. THE MAGICMAN ARCHIVES.

4. WANTED.


Only 969 to go...