RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 4

Drake's next collaborator on the PLASTIC MAN title was the not overly exciting Win Mortimer, though to be sure he had his moments. And since the writer had already launched the feature with no hero's origin, for issue #2 he gave his readers three tastes in one.

First there are four pages in which Drake once more sets up Plas' main support-characters Gordon Trueblood and Micheline DeLute, and his main villain Doctor Dome, who makes another attempt on the contorting champion's life.

After the attempt flops, Dome's daughter Lynx commiserates with him. Then Dome gets a brilliant idea: go back in time and kill Plas when he's a child. He doesn't actually know who Plas was, so he decides to have his daughter wheedle the info out of the three persons rumored to know the hero's true nature. So he splits her in three so she can glean info from all three witnesses in jig-time. (The decision to make one of Lynx's incarnations a full-grown woman dressed like a little girl is, uh, rather odd.)

I doubt any 1967 readers were surprised to learn that this was going to be a "Blind Men and the Elephant" schtick, where three different people narrate origins for Plastic Man, none of which are true. First, the police chief tells Lynx One that he once met a crook named "Eel" who helped the chief capture a crook named "The Spider." During the fracas, the supposed crook got transformed into a stretchable superhero.

Then Micheline's nawsty mothah tells Lynx Two that an undercover cop posing as a gypsy fiddler helped her against a reincarnation of WII propaganda, The Japanese Beetle. Again, weird chemicals are at the root of the transformation.

Then Gordon tells Lynx Three that as a small child he encountered a guy who rescued Gordon's scout troop from a felon named The Frog, who seems to have popped out of one of DC's funny animal books. Another chemical catalyst is the source of the change, this time involving contaminated yogurt (!)

Drake doesn't really come up with any sterling lines this time out, and then the whole things winds down with the dopey revelation that Dome actually was afraid that Plas was going to downgrade his villain status-- which the hero does. All told, a pretty lousy sophomore effort after the interesting first issue. (And why is Lynx still wearing the kiddie-outfit after finishing her assignment?)

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 3

So when I started collecting comics in the mid-sixties, I knew nothing about Plastic Man's history. Aside from the old comics, which I did not encounter, the only other item I might have seen would have Mad Magazine's parody, "Plastic Sam," but I probably did not see the paperback reprint of that tale until I'd already become acquainted with DC Comics first Silver Age adaptation of the former Quality property. There were references to the Golden Age version in DC's title. But even when Woozy Winks made a guest appearance, that didn't really give me a sense of what made Golden Age readers respond to the concept. Only the scattered reprints of the seventies gave me a degree of insight.

So, in a sense, the PLASTIC MAN written by Arnold Drake and drawn by three different DC regulars was "my" Plastic Man. I knew it wasn't anything great, but it was mildly entertaining, so I liked it. So, even though I know that the Drake PLAS is not excellent in any department, I'm devoting a post to each of its ten issues.

Issue #1 is the only one to be drawn by Gil Kane, who seemed to be emulating Will Elder's MAD contributions more than the example of Jack Cole. The three individuals with whom he shares space on the cover are, from right to left, (1) a one-shot foe named Professor X, (2) the manic Doctor Dome, whose name spoofs you-know-who, and (3) Lynx, the Doctor's curvaceous daughter.

After Drake's script devotes a couple of pages to Plas doing something heroic, the readers meet his associate, Gordon Trueblood. Whereas Cole partnered his straight-arrow shapeshifter with the reprobate Woozy Winks, Drake makes the straight-arrow the sidekick and the hero a guy whose heroic qualities are leavened by a goofy sense of humor.

Meanwhile Plas's recurring foe (appearing here for the first time) enlists his associate Professor X to make a major assault on Plastic Man with a series of super weapons.

Plas repels X's first attack, but the villain escapes. Then the reader learns that unlike the Cole Plas, who lived a nearly monastic existence (strange, given his creator's penchant for girlie cartoons), this ductile do-gooder has a regular girlfriend, jet-setting Micheline DeLute III. Their discussion of the word "gauche" is one of Drake's cuter bits of verbal humor.

After assorted hijinks, Professor X makes a second assault with a second super weapon. However, Dome's daughter deals herself in, and she actually comes closer to knocking off the hero than the main villains.

Plas survives and again faces off against Professor X. The evil scientist unleashes his third super-weapon, but of course the hero defeats his foe, and the adventure ends with Plas jauntily referring to all of the people who'd like to destroy him, both villains and simple dipsticks. 

In the first RAPT IN PLASTIC essay, I called Cole's hero "Sadean," albeit with some qualifications. Drake's Plastic Man has no real grotesquerie in his background, but Lynx's last line merits some attention. At first glance, one might assume she's one among hundreds of similar temptresses, always attracted to the manly hero even when she's forced to plot his death. Yet, while most shady ladies become too besotted with the hero's charms to really turn the hero into worm food, Lynx's dialogue establishes that (a) she's genuinely turned on by Plas, and (b) she takes an erotic pleasure at the prospect of killing him. Hence Lynx's final line "I'll beat him to death with my eyelashes" is really quite good in capturing the Sadean equivalence of love and death. (And that's without my even referencing the villainess's penchant for cracking a whip every once in a while.) The line, though, is just another vaudeville-style joke, so its Sadean potential is pretty much wasted. 

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 2

I recently did a quick scan-read of DC's hoary BOB HOPE title just to take stock of the writer's use of Classic Monster characters to goose up the aging franchise. During that same period there appears a superhero whom I don't believe even the most desperate raconteur ever bothered to revive: "Super-Hip." In the character's mundane identity he was a priggish intellectual who frequently got bullied, and one day his resentments transformed him into a Magical Guy who could go and beat up his oppressors. There's nothing noteworthy about Super-Hip except that he could transform into anything, and this was an interesting coincidence because a year after Super-Hip's creation, his creator Arnold Drake got an assignment to script comics' first important shapeshifting hero, Plastic Man.

A second coincidence: on the Classic Horror Film Board I just happened to get into a convo about the exigencies of how DC Comics got ahold of several Quality heroes. I said in part:

DOLL MAN ceased publication in 1953, three years before Quality Comics closed its doors. We know that DC made some sort of deal to purchase Quality properties, but fans can be only sure about three of them. DC continued publishing two Quality titles right away, BLACKHAWK and GI COMBAT. Almost ten years later a rival comics publisher attempted to use the name "Plastic Man" in his faux "CAPTAIN MARVEL" title, and the story goes that this galvanized DC Legal to check things and realize, Hey we own the rights to Plastic Man! 

To be sure, another company had tried publishing Plastic Man in 1963, and some sources say DC shut it down. But if they knew they owned PM back then, why were they in such a rush to exert their ownership in 1966? Why not back in 1963? So DC quickly worked Plas into a May 1966 issue of DIAL H FOR HERO-- dated a month after the publication of CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 by Myron Fass-- and then launched its own Plas series in late 1966.

After that, DC made no more attempts to do any new projects with Quality characters, but they begin reprinting a few strips of BLACKHAWK, THE RAY and DOLL MAN in their reprint books, which was  a tacit assertion of ownership. Finally they explicitly laid claim to six Quality characters by featuring them in a 1973 JLA story and then spinning them off into their own title, THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS. So from then on DC had maintained, when asked about the matter, that they own all Quality characters.

But do they? Naturally no one but DC Legal is privy to whatever deal the company made with Quality. They've revived a handful of other Quality characters for features, but not Doll Man. If the language of the 1956 contract doesn't explicitly say, "DC now owns Doll Man," would the company be able to sue the Full Moon moviemakers?

Of course, their claim may be fully veracious, and they've just never gone to war over the DOLLMAN property because they think it's small change-- which it kind of is.

Oh, and the Eisner estate never owned DOLL MAN at all, any more than other features he co-created for Quality's comics line. Aside from THE SPIRIT, Eisner apparently kept copyright on nothing but a couple of co-features in THE SPIRIT SECTION, like "Lady Luck" and "Mister Mystic," since a few of these saw reprint in a Will Eisner magazine in, I believe, the eighties.

And later:

Though I like the idea of DC just forgetting they owned Plastic Man, it's also possible that someone highly placed at DC discouraged any ideas of reviving Plas when they bought him in the fifties. The hero probably wasn't even selling all that well in his last years, and to enjoy good sales Plas required an art approach inimical to the sort of clean, simple representations DC preferred. Blackhawk was easier; DC just dumped all the political stuff and made the Hawks into guys who battled lots of aliens and costumed villains. By 1960, the year Elongated Man showed up, DC was probably more consumed with the potential of tapping the glories of their earlier years, rather than exploiting things another company originated. 

I can well believe that if anyone even remembered the Plastic Man purchase they didn't inform John Broome, but that was all to the good IMO. Plastic Man didn't belong in The Flash's straight-arrow world, for all that the original Cole adventures weren't just rollicking comedy all the time. I may be one of the few people who liked Arnold Drake's PLASTIC MAN, and I kind of regret not mentioning that opinion to Drake when I talked to him a little at a Comicon in the early 2000s.

And so all that made me a little more interested in what exactly Arnold Drake did in the Silver Age PLASTIC MAN, for which purpose I revived the title of a 2010 essay, RAPT IN PLASTIC, because it was too good a title not to use again.

Part 3 to follow.

THE READING RHEUM: THE STEALER OF SOULS (1967)

 

The earliest stories of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone appeared during the years 1961-62 in a British magazine, SCIENCE FANTASY, and five of those stories were reprinted in an American paperback in 1967 under the title THE STEALER OF SOULS. 

By 1967 I had become a Fantasy-Zombie of the First Order, having splurged my disposable income into both superhero comics and science fiction paperbacks. I don't remember seeing any of the sword-and-sorcery books of the time, though I'm sure was aware of the comparable "science fantasy" books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I bought almost exclusively SF because that's what I found on the secondhand shelves, including an obscure Moorcock title, THE FIRECLOWN. (I may have bought that one because the figure on the cover reminded me of The Joker.)

But by the early seventies I became much more invested in the magical fantasy genre, partly because of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, designed to piggyback on the success of Tolkien, and partly because of Marvel's 1970 adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. And two years into that epochal period, Roy Thomas collaborated with Michael Moorcock on a two-part story in CONAN #14-15, in which Howard's burly barbarian crossed paths, and swords, with Moorcock's spindly albino. Not long after, I purchased a fair number of Moorcock's Elric books, as well as his related fantasies.

Though I greatly liked the Elric I'd first seen in CONAN, I'm not sure I was ever quite as enthralled by the original prose version. The original set of short stories and novellas concluded with the hero's death by his own cursed blade, and after that, for the remainder of Moorcock's life he kept returning to the character to write prequels and interstitial stories about the doomed swordsman. Obviously, countless fans became invested enough in Elric to sort out all the stories in their proper time-frames, but I can't say that I was ever moved to  do so. I think I enjoyed the stories I did read well enough, but few of them really stood out. Similarly, I find now that the five stories in STEALER are at best uneven, and even the best ones don't grab me the way Elric did guest-starring with Conan.

"The Dreaming City"-- a title Moorcock later used for a prequel book-- describes how Elric begins his spiral into darkness. He's the king of the empire of Melnibone, which is peopled by a race of humanoids who are somehow not related to actual humans, a younger race that shares the same planet with them. Melnibone once ruled the world with an effete sort of cruelty, but their empire has fallen into decline. Elric starts his first story as a dethroned monarch, cast out from the capital city Imryrr by the usurper Yyrkoon. Complicating Elric's situation is that he's in love with Cymoril, sister of said usurper, and that Yyrkoon has consigned Cymoril to a mystic sleep. Elric makes alliances with human generals to mount an attack on Imryrr, but before the attack begins, Elric infiltrates the city alone, as if a part of him wants to play Douglas Fairbanks and spirit the damsel away. Yet Yyrkoon's defenses are too good, and Elric must resort to betraying his own people to human beings. And it's all for nothing, because during the hero's duel with his enemy, his beloved is slain as well.

The story is effective melodrama, but reading it this time out, I found it a little too stage-managed. Not does Elric betray his people and lose his lover, he and the humans are later attacked by avengers from the sacked city-- and sure enough, Elric betrays his human allies for his own survival. And not only is he mystically bound to a sword that eats the souls of those it slays, he calls upon dark gods to empower him by promising them "blood and souls." I can understand why an author writing in the 1960s might want to get away from the simon-pure archetype of many fantasy-heroes, But Moorcock saddles his hero with so much adversity that all the hero's torments begin to feel contrived. Elric is a lot like Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. No matter what good he tries to do, it always turns out badly, and most of his life is spent wallowing in misery while being unable to save anyone.

The second story, "While the Gods Laugh," is the only other one I would rate with high mythicity. Elric, roving from place to place, is hired as a bodyguard by a beautiful woman, Sharilla, who wants to find a magical book owned by the dead gods of their world. Elric agrees to the mission, stating that he wants to know if there exists any divine forgiveness for a sinner such as he. On the way to collect the book, the two are joined by a sardonic fellow named Moonglum, who in many stories will become Elric's sidekick, providing a degree of humor impossible for the gloomy albino. I'll skip past the various perils the trio encounter, though it's worth mentioning that Elric and Sharilla sleep together on the way. The denouement is almost identical to that of "City," in that Elric feels utterly alienated at being unable to discover some "surcease of sorrow." The solipsistic hero will win no prizes for the way he ignores Sharilla's possible feelings for him, though she sees his lack of reciprocation and remains silent.

The other three stories are more like standard sword-and-sorcery perils, with various incidents of moping and grousing. In "Stealer of Souls," Elric accepts a commission from avaricious merchants seeking to destroy a noble enemy, but only because the latter is in league with a wizard with whom Elric shares an enmity. All of the characters are depressingly paper-thin here. In "Kings of Darkness," Elric and Moonglum accept the job of escorting beauteous Queen Zarozina to her kingdom, but the trio gets waylaid in another realm, whose rulers struggle with sibling rivalry and a "curse of the undead." In "The Flame Bringers," Elric's totally gotten over the loss of Cymoril and is shacked up with Zarozina, but her kingdom is threatened by a barbarian tribe with command over an enslaved wizard and his fire demons.

The lesser stories are about on the level of your average D&D scenario. Given Moorcock's reputation, I'm rather depressed to see so few characters with even enough depth for good melodrama. Though Robert E Howard wrote his share of bad stories, even the crummy tales show a passion for vivid if simple characterizations. Moorcock's attitude toward heroic fiction seems like that of Alan Moore. Both creators became emotionally invested in heroic characters in their younger years, but later became intellectually embarrassed by the bad repute of adventure-fiction. Thus both wrote many tales in which traditional heroic figures were downgraded in some way, whether for satire or in the name of a vague "anti-heroism." While admitting Moorcock's breakthrough achievement, I feel like he never tapped the full potential of his own concept, and thus I'm not sure I'll read any more soul-stealing stories in the near future. 

THE READING RHEUM: "THE UNNAMEABLE" (1923/1925)

I've heard various HPL stories described as being "his most Poe-like." Though it's true that Poe is probably HPL's greatest influence, Poe had many aspects to his work, so it makes a difference as to what aspect one thinks HPL was imitating.

"The Unnameable" is HPL emulating Poe's penchant for oddball philosophical pieces disguised as fiction. I've argued elsewhere that Poe's "Morella" is the author's take on the Aristotelian "A is A" argument, in that the narrator's daughter suffers when he first addresses his daughter by her mother's name. 

"The Unnameable" is a hard-to-follow colloquy between two characters, Carter and Manton, that takes place near an abandoned house. Conveniently enough, their argument is settled when they are attacked by an unnameable something or other, though for a change, both potential victims survive. There are no "Mythos" associations in this brief tale-- I for one don't consider this "Carter" in any way related to the "Randolph Carter" who appears in a few Mythos-stories-- and I imagine that the two movie "adaptations" had to make up anything resembling a conventional story.

TUTELARY SPIRITS

In DOWNGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE, I discussed the dynamics of the BEWITCHED teleseries. I stated that even though the characters of Samantha and Darrin were the superordinate icons of the ongoing narrative, the subordinate character of Endora was the one most often used to generate stories, often by her desire to "teach Darrin a lesson," whether her reasoning was good or bad.

Though on this blog I've mostly discussed accomodation narratives featuring romantic ensembles, another frequently seen trope is that of two characters linked by some tutelary activity. These may be entirely distanced from anything resembling romantic pairing, as seen in both GOOD WILL HUNTING and the more recent HOLDOVERS, where the give-and-take relationship of a teacher and a student makes them both superordinate characters. Another variation appears in the 1956 TEA AND SYMPATHY play-adaptation. In this story, an older woman, not a teacher but connected to a school through her husband, perceives a young man's confusion about his sexuality and dispels his fears by initiating him into manhood. Somewhat related are narratives focusing upon a psychologist and his patient, such as Peter Schaffer's EQUUS, wherein the former must play detective to comprehend the latter's malady, and in so doing experiences some insight about himself.

So, after all those examples of highbrow theater and cinema, my main illustration of a tutleary superordinate ensemble in this essay will be-- the completely lowbrow hijinks of Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO.

Though Darrin Stevens never learns any lessons, Tom Hastings of MOTHER desperately wants to find out what's causing him to freeze up when he tried to have marital relations with his newlywed bride. But I wondered, "Is that enough to make him the main character?" He's a mystery to be solved, but his neglected wife certainly does not function in the narrative as the Samantha to his Darrin. Rather, only psychotherapist Marilyn Richards can unlock the secrets of Ted's impotence and its goofy association with Mother Goose imagery.

Now, whereas both EQUUS and TEA AND SYMPATHY seek to produce reasonable, rational propositions about human behavior, all of MOTHER's propositions are, to use an earlier phrase, "informal." Writer Harris wasn't concerned with probability: he wanted a smarmy sex-comedy. So the script has Marilyn's sexy professional woman, whom I term a "mother-imago," ends up liberating Ted from a subconsciously prohibition accidentally laid upon him during his childhood by his real mother. Toward the end of the movie, Marilyn kinda-sorta makes an erotic move on Ted, justifying the move as "therapy." But long before any such move has been made, Ted has a fairytale-dream-- the second in the story-- wherein he imagines Marilyn as the Evil Queen in "Snow White," who seeks to keep Snow, "played" by Ted's wife, from uniting with Kirk's Prince Charming. 

At the climax, when Marilyn has managed to call forth the nature of Ted's prohibition from his buried memories. she discourages Ted from seeking out his wife, claiming that he ought to use her as a test-case for his restored virility. Then the script has Marilyn change her mind for no good reason and fend Ted off, probably because Harris guessed that his target audience wouldn't like seeing the male lead cheat on his loving wife. So even though Marilyn and Ted don't end up in bed together, they provide a fascinating example of a tutelary ensemble with a strange mother-and-son dynamic, though it stops short of a TEA AND SYMPATHY resolution.

NEAR-MYTHS: ACTION COMICS #1-18 (2011-2013)

Back in 2011 I read a few issues of the "New 52" revision of Superman's myth in ACTION COMICS, executed by writer Grant Morrison and artist Rags Morales. However, despite my general respect for Morrison's contribution to DC Comics generally and to the Superman myth specifically (particularly in his strongest ALL-STAR SUPERMAN story). I didn't keep reading. Now I've read all eighteen collected issues, which includes some non-Morrison backup strips as well.

Morrison's self-described writing-pattern of using free association has provided a valuable counterpoint to the prevalent Marvel Comics trope of "heroes with soap opera problems." However, the downside of free association is that at times Morrison's scripts can become overly scattershot, losing the coherence that appears in his better works. Even ALL STAR SUPERMAN, which did a fine job of updating the appeal of Silver Age Superman comics, resorted to the old chestnut of "the hero's impending death" to provide a tenuous unity between the diverse stories. Morrison's ACTION run, however, doesn't manage to be anything but a bunch of loosely contiguous stories-- though once again, the writer works in a possible "hero's death" here as well.

SUPERMAN AND THE MEN OF STEEL proves the best of the three collections, for all that there really aren't more than two such "men," the Metropolis Marvel and his fellow crusader Steel. There are a bunch of robots unleashed by Brainiac, but they obviously aren't "men" as such.

The early issues were promoted at the time as giving an alternate take on Superman as patterned on certain early Golden Age stories by Jerry Siegel. I've heard some fans lament that these "social justice" stories didn't become the main focus of the developing SUPERMAN corpus. Of course, with a hero as powerful as this one, a certain monotony would have set in, since there would have been no challenge to Superman regularly duking it out with wife-beaters and dangerous drivers (to name a couple of Siegel's targets during his social-justice phase). Golden Age Superman tales thus became dominated mostly by tricks-- villains trying to trick the Man of Steel, or vice versa. But I'm sure Morrison knew that modern readers wouldn't accept that alternative, and so the social-justice stories soon default to spectacular action-scenes between super-beings. Morales does a nice if not exceptional job of rendering the hero's first encounters with the super-weapons of Lex Luthor and the robot hordes of Brainiac. The first plotline is reasonably coherent but toward the end of the collection Morrison spins out a fevered crossover of Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes that makes little sense.

The second collection, subtitled BULLETPROOF, is even more chaotic. There's a boring sequence in which the hero meets an updated version of the fifties DC hero Captain Comet, and the return of a minor Siegel creation, Lois Lane's grade-school niece Susie Tompkins. Slightly better is one in which a wife-beater whom Superman punishes in Volume One becomes the new Kryptonite Man.

The final collection, AT THE END OF DAYS, goes off the rails with a lot of stuff about Superman's impending death-- supposedly his second death after his fate at the hands of Doomsday-- but it comes to little. Morrison challenges Superman with a small coterie of new villains-- the revised K-Man, Nimrod the Hunter, The Evolver-- and also squeezes in a few whose identities he doesn't bother to delineate. The Legion gets involved in some of this folderol as well. The strongest trope involves a plot about Superman facing off, not against his pest-enemy Mister Mxyzptlk, but a more deadly enemy of Mxyzptlk's. (To be sure, this character appears throughout the run in the guise of a strange little man who offers Faustian bargains to various characters.) One of the oddest things about this sequence is that Morrison takes pains to resurrect one of the hero's most obscure foes, Ferlin Nxyly, whom he apparently wanted to work into his Mxyzptlk cosmology because of the name similarity. But this revival, like the Captain Comet one, seems forced and sterile-- not something I normally find in even the lesser Morrison works.