NULL-MYTHS: TRASHMAN LIVES (1997)

I became re-acquainted with this old Gary Groth quote when I re-read my early essay POMO AND PLURALISM:

academic lintheads and popcult apologists display their usual confusion of values by mistaking something of social interest for something of artistic significance

Not long after, in my ceaseless quest to the Heart of the Collective Myth-Conscious, I happened to reread Fantagraphics' 1997 collection of what I assume to be all of the extant TRASHMAN stories of the late underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez. I had read the collection years ago, and frankly didn't remember much about it, aside from the mildly enjoyable woodcut-like art-style and a lot of maundering Marxist politics.

But, upon re-reading the collection with an eye to seeing anything of symbolic depth-- wow, talk about something that has no "artistic significance" and is only relevant for "social interest!"

The TRASHMAN stories are little more than "men's adventure fiction" comics given a smattering of Marxist rhetoric about opposing oppression. Trashman, a revolutionary with a big gun and some inconsistent super-powers, fights the good fight against a vague assortment of bad guys who are supposed to represent the American political hierarchy. The first stories came out in 1968 and predicted a total social breakdown in the latter half of the 20th century, which allowed Trashman to motor around to different enclaves of tyranny and kick a lot of ass.

All of which would be fine, except that Trashman's adventures lack even the rudimentary imagination of the lesser kids' comics of the time. Trashman's opponents are largely faceless bureaucrats, whom readers of the 1960s and 1970s would see as representatives of "The Man." But Rodriguez shows no awareness of why these villains perpetrate their evil deeds-- including a little cannibalism-- except insofar as they are villains. Frankly, Mickey Spillane invested even his dime-a-dozen killers with more conviction.

There are brief touches of insight. In one story, two of Trashman's rebel-colleagues continuously insult each other in racial terms, but by story's end it's obvious that both of them are just using race to rag on each other, in typical "guy" fashion. In another tale, even more "socially significant" though no more "artistic," Trashman and another colleague are taken prisoner by a gang of female rebels: "Nasty Elaine and her She-Devils." This was at least not your typical guy-on-guy battle, though I've the impression that men's adventure mags frequently featured heroes getting captured by modern-day Amazons and the like.

It's a shame, because the minimalist design of Trashman bears some comparison with that of Gould's Dick Tracy, and it would have been interesting to see Gould's conservatism inverted by a charismatic "hero of the masses." But there's no flash in this trash, man.

HEROES AREN'T HARDBODIES TO FIND

Backing up a little: though I've stated that there out to be a "unity of action" between a work's overthought and underthought, that doesn't mean that the two have to agree in all respects. Given that they spring, respectively, from the didactic and from the mythopoeic potentialities of the creative mind, it would hard to imagine such perfect agreement.

After all, I established in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS  that certain stories could be "underthought-dominated stories," my example being the "Origin of Metamorpho." In that story the symbolic discourse is very complex and the didactic discourse is very simple, which is entirely the reverse of the POGO sequence discussed in that essay. Since it's my project to suss out complex mythicity wherever I find it, whether accompanied by a strong didactic theme or not, I make no bones about including both (1) works that are "underthought-dominated" and (2) works where the two thoughts are equally strong: for instance, Morrison's FLEX MENTALLO.

An "overthought-dominated" work will align itself with the sphere of "thematic realism" as I've examined it in many earlier essays, while an "underthought-dominated" work will align more with the sphere of "thematic escapism." In works like MENTALLO, though, the artist has a foot in both worlds, so that the two potentialities interact to a greater extent, as I stated in Part 2 of THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE:

I have maintained, however, that the relationship between "realistic works" and "escapist works" is closer to that of conjoined siblings, dependent on one another for life.  

The course of said interaction, though, doesn't always run smooth. Note my comment in the FLEX MENTALLO review:

Wally observes that the Golden Age of superheroes was “pretty simple,” boiling down to the “Charles Atlas hard body homoerotic wish-fulfillment.”  (I disagree, but this one interpretation doesn’t undermine the general strength of Morrison’s theme.) Wally then observes that the Silver Age changed the paradigm. “Strange transformations, multiple realities, dreams, hoaxes… it was like the hard body began to turn soft...” I could carp that this description mostly applies to the line of Superman comics supervised by Mort Weisinger, with a little Julie Schwartz on the side, but it’s still a stimulating reading.

Now, Morrison has stated in interviews that sometimes he comes up with bizarre fantasies through a process akin to free association. However, there's nothing "free" about this association: it's a familiar opinion in a number of film studies I've encountered, and I feel reasonably sure that Morrison encountered some comparable opinions in his own reading. The notion of the hardbody as a homoerotic fantasy appears in Wertham's SEDUCTION, and it seems to come up almost any time a film-studies prof chooses to analyze any sort of action or adventure film. Case in point: here's a review-except describing Neal King's 1999 HEROES IN HARD TIMES, from this site:

"King's analysis remains valuable for the contribution it makes in taking seriously an oft derided and dismissed form of popular culture that speaks directly to issues of masculinity…. This book will be a useful resource for those interested in understanding how images of hyper-masculinity--the "hard man"--represent both the excess and the ordinary parts of masculinity in cinema. King's methodology is helpful in reading media texts, and his provocative interpretations of these films--particularly his readings of homosocial sadomasochism--will likely generate much discussion." 

Unlike the majority of the film-critics, Morrison isn't explicitly trying to put his heroes on the psychiatrist's couch so that he can find out what terrible traumas caused them to overcompensate by becoming superheroes. Unlike many if not all of the academic critics, Morrison doesn't seem to be indulging in a "nyah-nyah, you think you're manly when you're really GAY" sort of ressentiment. Still, Morrison is in the business of shocking his audience, so whether or not he really believes that Golden Age heroes were homoerotic wish fantasies, the appearance of such a statement in the voice of his viewpoint character suggests that it may hold at least a provisional truth for Morrison-- though to be sure, the character making the statement is a superhero fan who is not, in any obvious way, gay.

So here we have the overthought and the underthought, while definitely bound together by the narrative's unity of action, coming down on opposite sides of Adler's compensation theory. Underthought is saying that superheroes are a part of the collective unconscious, and that lines them up with the idea of "positive compensation," which benefits the organism. Overthought is saying that superheroes at least begin as homoerotic fantasies of "hard men," which seems to align with "negative compensation"-- although apparently the same fantasies can become soft and thus "feminized"-- which *might* be a type of positive compensation in Morrison's world.

The entire homosocial/homoerotic reading of adventure-fiction, of course, might be just as rooted in "negative compensation" as Dirty Harry's massive magnum or Clark Kent's blue undergarments: critics may like to feel like they've one-upped the hardbody. But in so doing, they overlook a basic principle of adventure-fiction: that characters, male and female alike, may simply get harder because the body gets harder when you exercise properly, eat all the right foods, and punch a super-villain in the mush twice a day.

MYTHCOMICS: THE GEEK #1 ("CORRUPTION OF THE INNOCENT," 1993)

Two notes to start. First, I’ve used the cover-title “Corruption of the Innocent”to denote the story of GEEK #1, because the title on the credits-page inside, “Homelands of the Dolls” is markedly inferior and not representative of the mythcomic’s theme. Second, when speaking of authorship I choose to  emphasize Rachel Pollack since the narrative seems more typical of her creative tendencies than those of artist Michael Allred—though of course I have no personal knowledge as to who contributed what precise elements.

Neither the original BROTHER POWER comic nor Neil Gaiman’s mini-revival of the character were that notable, mythically or otherwise. Thus it’s a small miracle that “Corruption”—apparently never intended to be anything but a one-shot—is as good as it is. And given that Pollack emphasized transgender concerns in her DOOM PATROL work, I think it likely that she originated the core symbolism of this work.

As noted in my review of SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, writer Neil Gaiman simply tosses out the notion of “doll elementals” without any elaborations. In essence, he was reinventing Joe Simon’s Brother Power along the same lines that Alan Moore reinvented the Wein-Wrightson Swamp Thing: giving a character with a minimal origin-story a connection to deeper mystical forces. In the case of Swamp Thing, these forces became a part of the firmament of the DC Universe. It’s probably just as well that the “doll world” of Gaiman never became a regular feature of that universe, but it works quite well as a one-off concept, sort of DC’s version of the “Isle of Misfit Toys.”

Here as in certain other reviews in this series, the plot proves secondary to a series of symbolic encounters between the main character and his opponents. In this case, the naive living dummy Brother Power endures a series of ordeals by his chief enemy, Doctor Abuse. Brother Power, as in his earlier appearances, possesses a set of bizarre powers but has no aggressive will and usually seeks to flee rather than fight. In a manner analogous to the way Power’s old hippie-friends sought to run the dummy for president, Doctor Abuse stage-manages the dummy to become (a) a literal carnival-geek, (b) a corrupt businessman versed in junk bonds and insider trading, and (c) a modern member of the American Nazi Party. Invariably someone addresses Power as a “geek,” which enrages him, though not enough to incite him to real violence. In most of these situations, Simon’s original epithet  “freak” might have been more appropriate, though there’s something to be said for seeing a DC Comics character enact the traditional act of the carnival-geek: that of biting off a chicken’s head.

Though Brother Power has the general appearance of a man, only Doctor Abuse possesses the will to aggression so dominantly associated with the male of the species. In fact, good and evil here are fairly well divided in terms of gender, for on the opposing side battling for Power’s soul is his sole female friend, Cindy. Though she was an idealistic hippie twenty years previous, in the intervening years Cindy became a prostitute, wise in the ways of exploitative males. At the same time, she participates in a women’s goddess-worship ritual designed to sanctify her femininity, with a group that goes by the ironic name “PMS” (for “Pack Menstrual Savages.”) She’s also aware that Doctor Abuse has been stalking her for some time, though when the villain’s plot is revealed, it appears that he’s been keeping watch on her purely for the purpose of using her against Brother Power—which isn’t possible until the Geek returns to Earth.

Pollack expands on Gaiman’s sketch of a “doll elemental world” by picturing a cosmos in which various manikin-like beings exist, most of which look like commercial creations: a Barbie, an action-figure, a trio of chocolate animals. In one panel, however, Pollack and Allred include what looks like a shamanistic painting, which by itself suggests a deeper symbolism: that of seeing dolls as magical representations of human beings.

Pollack’s scenario never comes back to the shaman, but she includes a fascinating leitmotif throughout the narrative: that of dolls being hung from trees and set on fire. Pollack does not explain the motif but it may be a reference to European “poppet magic,” in which witches cast spells upon dolls meant to be represent human subjects, and then completed the magic by hanging the poppets from tree-branches and setting the dolls on fire. It’s a motif in no way beholden to anything in either Gaiman’s “Brother Power” revival or in the companion tale “Shaggy God Stories,” though Gaiman does make reference to two famous figures, Odin and Christ, who hung aloft, respectively on a tree and on a tree-like structure.

Another possible influence is that Pollack, in addition to emulating the general scheme of the Alan Moore Parliament-of-Trees Project, may have borrowed the Eden-myth of "two trees" from Gaiman's "Shaggy God Stories," though with substantial alterations if so. The narratives asserts the “doll world” is centered upon a “tree of innocence.” In some long-gone era the tree “fell asleep” and inadvertently spawned a shadow-version of itself, a “tree of corruption.” This setup resembles a number of archaic myths that pair up a spirit of goodness with a dark sibling. But the idea that the “tree of innocence” creates dolls as vessels of purity and innocence is as close to being original as any mythic idea can be. In any case, once this cosmic scenario has been spun, the reader finally learns the villain’s plot. Doctor Abuse has been flinging temptations into Brother Power’s path in order to use him for an act of sympathetic magic, aimed at destroying the Tree of Innocence.

Despite the dummy’s general passivity, he does manage a good trick in the end, hoaxing the evildoer and calling upon the power of femininity to overthrow an evil that seems dominantly masculine. The story ends with a happy if quixotic ending. After Abuse has been deceived and perhaps defeated, Cindy is finally re-united with her life-size doll-man. The story ends with the image of her embracing the limp Brother Power as she exclaims, “I’m your friend forever!” There’s a minor mythic motif here as well, in that even today little girls are better known than little boys for bonding with dolls. It might be argued that Pollack’s Cindy embracing a world of “innocence” that shields her from the “corruption” implicit in adult sexuality. Happily, Pollack does not overplay the allegorical possibilities of the story, and so the short saga of Brother Power the Geek comes to an emotionally satisfying conclusion, which as of this writing no later writers have mucked up.

ONE NULL, ONE NEAR: SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 (1989)

            

Since Neil Gaiman was never the regular writer on the SWAMP THING title, it may be that his stories for 1989’s SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 were just fill-in works, or possibly audition-tales. Though I’ve labeled one story a “null-myth” and the other a “near myth,” both languish under the long shadow of Alan Moore’s tenure on the feature.

“Brothers” is the null-myth here: a good idea that never quite works, despite Neil Gaiman’s considerable talents. The living dummy known as Brother Power the Geek has remained out in space for roughly twenty years, only to suddenly crash to Earth. Brother Power not only survives, he has no understanding that any time has passed, and still speaks in hippie-talk. He has apparently gained a new power, though, in that he can now assemble new bodies for himself out of random junk, and expand said bodies to giant-size, so that he becomes an unwitting peril to the citizens of Tampa, Florida.

The “monster-menacing-city” structure of the story is strongly indebted to a two-part Alan Moore story in SWAMP THING #52-53, and Gaiman more or less admits the indebtedness by having two of Swamp Thing’s support-characters called in to consult on the matter of "The Flower-Child That Time Forgot." Swamp Thing himself is not present in either of the annual’s stories, due to events in the regular title. Still, Gaiman picks up on the character’s basic concept—at least as it was re-imagined by Moore, that of making the muck-monster into a plant-elemental—and declares that Brother Power was created by a process analogous to the one that created Swamp Thing. Abby Arcane, the Swamp Thing’s wife, receives an oracle that says Brother Power is “a doll god—a puppet elemental—like others before it.”

Gaiman does not choose to say more than this, however, and so the idea of what a “puppet elemental” might be is dropped. (Was Pinocchio one of the “Parliament of Puppets?”) Eventually the problem is solved when the other support-character, belated hippie Chester, gets Brother Power’s attention, talks with him a little, and then sends him on his way. Given that most of Gaiman’s observations on the generation of the Flower People are trite, it may be that the story’s main point was to bring Joe Simon’s most peculiar creation out of mothballs—though Gaiman does a decent job with his characterizations of Chester and Abby.

“Shaggy God Stories” might sound like a myth-nerd’s dream, though the tale fails to be more than the sum of its parts. The story focuses upon a character whom Moore adapted early in his run: Jason Woodrue, a super-villain so obsessed with plants that he mutated himself into a plant-human hybrid. Woodrue, more than a little crazy, wanders into the domain of the Parliament of Trees, the largely immobile plant-elementals who preceded Swamp Thing. For most of the tale, Woodrue meditates on the many ways in which trees and other plants have been intertwined with the lives of holy men and deities. He seeks out the Parliament, rambling about gods and trees, and finally reveals that, “I want to be a god too.” The representative of the Parliament gives Woodrue no satisfaction, though he gives the former super-villain a warning about a future danger. The deranged plant-man pays no attention and wanders away, and the story ends on the suggestion of a future menace, which eventually manifests in the Doug Wheeler SWAMP THING run.

Still, limited as the story’s scope is, it does toss out a few good myth-kernels, particularly at the opening, when Woodrue mediates on the “two trees” of the Bible’s Eden narrative. I find it particularly interesting that Gaiman has Woodrue harp on the existence of the “two trees” at the story’s  opening, because “two trees” also figure in the next and last major appearance (as of this writing) of Brother Power, the Geek.   

ADDENDA: On this forum a poster shared a part of a Gaiman interview from an online source that no longer seems extant. In the spirit of knowledge I share Gaiman's statement on the Annual here:

"I was going to bring [Woodrue] back as a villain. He was getting back to being Woodrue, the Rue of the Wood, and probably on a much bigger scale, a much nastier scale. It would have been fun, but again it didn't happen.
I probably would have brought back Black Orchid in there. I don't know, because as I said, it never got that far. Rick still had a few issues. I talked to Rick, we sort of co-plotted Rick's last few episodes, which never saw print."

SIMON SESSION

     

As I’m going to be devoting some essays to a Joe Simon creation—though not in a review per se—I decided to devote some space to Simon's career.

In this essay I argued that it’s hard to assess the authorship of anything Jack Kirby “wrote” in his two long-term collaborations with, respectively, Joe Simon and Stan Lee. But at least with Kirby, he was solely responsible for both art and script on a assortment of later works, and a critic can examine said works to garner some idea of Kirby’s creative tendencies. And though Lee never drew any of his comics-work, one can also gain some idea of his creative propensities from those works in which the artists largely followed his scripts without much personal input.

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I confess that I’ve no personal acquaintance with Simon’s work on SICK MAGAZINE in the 1960s—and I’ve the impression that few fans from the period paid close attention to what seemed like just another MAD imitator. The most one can say is that it must have had something going for it to have lasted as long as it did.

Considerably less successful was the superhero line Simon engineered for Harvey Comics in the mid-1960s. Most if not all of the features edited, and sometimes written, by Simon have a tedious, gimmicky quality to them. Some fans have speculated that the line only came out because someone at Harvey knew about ABC-TV’s impending adaptation of the Batman franchise. Most of the Harvey superheroes have a constipated 1950s look to them, and even the most formulaic of Jack Kirby’s DC work, during the actual 1950s, looks good by comparison.

Discounting the last collaboration of Simon and Kirby on DC’s 1970s SANDMAN title—which indirectly gave birth to the franchise associated with Neil Gaiman—only the two-issue wonder BROTHER POWER—THE GEEK seems to have earned a modest following in fandom.

I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.” Moreover, the covers of the two issues were both unusually dark and suggestive of horrific interiors. In actuality, the interior art, drawn by Simon’s SICK collaborator Al Bare, reflected more in the way of antic humor than of ghastly grue.

To this date, I have not read the second BROTHER POWER issue, and don’t have the first one close to hand. I recall a few interesting mythopoeic touches in the first issue, though. One is the protagonist’s origin. He—or rather, it-- starts out as a tailor’s dummy. A bolt of lightning brings the dummy to life in the tradition of the cinematic creation of the Frankenstein Monster, and upon gaining sentience the dummy acts much like the movie-monster: perpetually baffled by the customs and contrivances of humankind. The now-living dummy is adopted by a handful of lovably goofy hippies, who give him clothes and face-painting to make him one of them.

They also give him a name with a certain mythic resonance: Brother Power. Simon was certainly exposed to the catchphrase most often associated with hippie culture: that of “flower power.” The idea was slightly oxymoronic in that the hippies knew that flowers had no power as such: that they could only seduce people away from the paths of militancy and violence by inculcating a love of beauty and fellowship. Simon may have concocted the name “Brother Power” out of a partial understanding of this ideal, for the hippie-hero—never a superhero in the accepted sense of the word—tended to use his ill-defined powers mostly in a defensive manner.

Finally, in his initial outing Brother Power is called a “geek” by someone or other; hence the additional name in the comic book’s title. Originally Simon had wanted the character to be addressed as a “freak,” because he apparently realized that this was an early instance of insult-reclamation. Squares called hippies “freaks,” and the hippies reclaimed the epithet to connote their ingroup’s specialness, as seen in Gilbert Shelton’s FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS. The story goes that DC was afraid that the word “freak” would suggest the drug-culture to readers, even though drugs are not even referenced in the initial issue. Thus Simon was obliged to substitute the sound-alike “geek,” simply because it too could be used as a term of opprobrium. 

Simon completed a third issue of the comic book before the DC hierarchy shut the magazine down, but that issue remains inaccessible to most fans. The second issue ended with Brother Power being trapped inside a space-rocket and launched away from Earth by Ronald Reagan himself, who at the time had become a conservative icon during his stint as the governor of California.  

 And that is the point from which Neil Gaiman started, when he briefly brought the Geek back into the hallowed halls of DC.

THE LINE BETWEEN '"FAIR' AND "GOOD" PART II

In Part 1 I proposed that the narrative element that most made the difference between works of "fair mythicity" and "good mythicity" was that the latter sustained more of a "unity of action," so for Part 2, I decided to provide some examples based largely upon the work of one artist, Jack Kirby, either by himself or in collaborations.

To this date one of my preferred examples for an inconsummate null-myth is the debut tale of the Jack Kirby/Dave Wood collaboration, "The Sorcerer's Box" from 1957's SHOWCASE #6. I won't repeat the arguments presented here as to why the Kirby/Wood story proved inconsummate, but here's the closest I found to a "theme statement" for the story, which in turn would have provided it with any unity of action:

....the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers.  But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job.  Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so?  This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story doesn't succeed in evoking even that simple a theme statement, though as I pointed out in the essay, Kirby had probably completed more unitary works prior to his CHALLENGERS outings.

Now, I did not label this THOR story a "near-myth" when I examined it in COMBAT PLAY PT. 2, but it does attain a clearer theme statement than the CHALLENGERS story, even though the Lee/Kirby collaboration is no more truly didactic in its main purpose.

What does keep #152 from being just another big battle-tale, though, is that Thor and Ulik are arranged to represent philosophical postures. Thor, son of Odin and scion of Asgard, is heir to a philosophy of noblesse oblige, while Ulik describes himself as "lowly-born-- with naught to lose-- and a world to gain."

Though the sociological myth here is much clearer and more deeply resonant, though, it's still just what I've called a "myth-kernel" in the midst of a "very rambling arc" that involved, not just Thor and Ulik, but also Balder, the Norn Queen, Loki, and various other Asgardian personnel, all with arcs that don't complement one another. So it's a near-myth possessed of only "fair" mythicity. It's sort of like a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement, while the CHALLENGERS story is disorganized all the way through.

Sociological myth once more takes the fore in another Lee/Kirby collaboration, this one from a few years previous to the Thor tale. The FANTASTIC FOUR tale titled "The Red Ghost" is included as one of my mythcomics,which should suggest to readers that I give it at least some level of good mythicity. My current line of thought about the necessity of a "unity of action" within the story, which in turn supports the creators' symbolic discourse, is borne out by my observations about the balance between what could have been flat elements in a purely didactic argument:

...in contrast to other, less complex allegories-- whether from Marvel Comics or elsewhere-- Lee and Kirby devote an inordinate amount of effort to contrast the exemplary behavior of the four American heroes versus the selfish and controlling behavior of Ivan Kragoff.  This elevates the argument beyond merely "good democracy vs. evil Communism," for it speaks to what is good in humankind generally as well as to what is evil in humankind generally.  I note, just for one possible example, a scene in which Reed announces his plan to fly to the moon alone.  His comrades set him straight with a little horseplay, which nevertheless underscores that though Reed Richards leads the group, he does so with "the consent of the governed."

At the same time, I'm moved to ask whether or not this "unity of action" can also apply to longer works. I find that one of Kirby's solo achievements, the original NEW GODS epic, resonates with Aristotle's pronouncement that Homer had managed to provide unity to THE ILIAD by focusing upon "the anger of Achilles," no matter how many other separate war-related plot-lines might have spun off from that.

Kirby's abbreviated epic, reviewed here, garnered some complaints for having gone in too many directions at once, but despite some admitted flaws, the artist does always keep a unity of action in the NEW GODS comic proper. Whatever particular plot Kirby might have followed in a given issue, the concern of the title was always about the relationship of heroic Orion to his devious father Darkseid-- a relationship that Orion only suspects at the start, and which reaches a thematic culmination in the 1984 graphic novel THE HUNGER DOGS.

I concluded Part 1 with this hypothesis:

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

I think at least the two examples of "good" mythicity in this essay demonstrate that the mythopoeic underthought does intersect with the more didactic overthought: that the former supports the latter but that neither is defined by the other.

MYTHCOMICS: FLEX MENTALLO (1996)

To repeat my criteria from POMO AND PLURALISM, I’m judging works as “modernist” or “post-modernist” based on the author’s attitude toward the nature of the universe on which the work is modeled. A modernist work starts with the proposition that the fictional world depicted is modeled on a single “realistic” world that can be largely explained by science and rationality. A post-modern work states or implies the possibility of a multiplicity of worlds in the story, which may imply a similar statement about the reader’s real world, if only in metaphorical terms. Alan Moore’s MIRACLEMAN stands as an example of the first type, reading various superhero tropes, mostly from franchises like “Superman” and the Golden Age “Captain Marvel,”as pointless escapes from a unitary, mundane realty.

Though the Internet is rife with various descriptions of a personal feud between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, there’s no reason to assume that Morrison’s commentary on superhero tropes, either in FLEX MENTALLO or elsewhere, is necessarily a response to Moore’s treatment of them.  That said, MENTALLO also gives a great deal of emphasis to tropes associated with Superman and Captain Marvel, as well as those of The Question, Steve Ditko’s most philosophically representative creation, whom Alan Moore parodied in WATCHMEN as “Rorshach.”

The character Flex Mentallo first appeared as a fully formed concept in issue #42 of Morrison’s DOOM PATROL. This was also an endorsement of the relativity of reality, in that Flex was a character created in an amateur comic book by a kid named Wally Sage. Sage’s latent psychic powers brought Flex to life in the “real world”—or at least, as real as the Earth of DC Comics could get. 

Flex was also “unreal” in that he was modeled on the once prevalent ‘Charles Atlas” bodybuilding ads that appeared in commercial comics for many decades. Yet instead of depending on physical strength as did the character in the ads, Flex’s power was to project waves of energy from his unified “bodymind.” Nowhere in the DOOM PATROL or in this mini-series does Flex actually hit anyone in the old-fashioned way. Morrison didn't even stress any continuity between the miniseries and Flex’s previous appearances. Flex seems to exist in a world that barely has any superheroes left, which means that it can’t be DC-Earth. He does seem to share the same world as his now-adult creator Wally Sage. The two of them never meet, though they both encounter some of the same supporting characters.

The plot of FLEX MENTALLO isn’t intended to be especially coherent, so I won’t spend time summarizing it. The story more or less begins with the musclebound protagonist looking for one of his long-vanished crime-fighter colleagues, the Fact (who is in part Morrison’s take on The Question). Flex wanders through his unnamed city, having mystifying encounters with the remnants of the native superhero world, or with super-people who seem to be emigrants of some disintegrating cosmos.

Counterpointing Flex Mentallo’s peripatetic quest are the largely verbal divagations of Wally Sage. He spends most of the mini-series talking on the phone with an unseen volunteer for a crisis hotline—said crisis being that the reality-hating Wally has taken pills in an attempt to commit suicide. True, Wally is so addled that he’s not sure whether he took barbiturates or M&Ms. In many respects he seems to be the epitome of the escapist superhero fan with his head up his ass, for all he can talk about is his juvenile love of superheroes:

“…when you think about it, they’re like archetypal… they come right up from the depths, those things—how can they that stuff’s stupid?”

The imputation that superheroes are juvenile escapism is the place where most elitist critiques of the genre both start and stop. But even though Wally’s pretty messed up, Morrison implies that the character's desire for visionary experience allows him to tap into a deeper level of reality. Wally has suppressed memories that initially seem to be recollections of sexual abuse, but turn out to be a childhood encounter with “the Legion of Legions,” who are some of those emigrant superheroes mentioned earlier, trying to manifest in a nearly superhero-less world.

There’s also one more subplot: Flex has an ally on the police force, name of Harry, and for some reason Harry enlists the help of an imprisoned super-villain to investigate the threat of world destruction. The villain’s name, The Hoaxer, is a patent reference to The Riddler, making him the only major reference to DC’s Bat-mythology.

Although Morrison’s main project is to demonstrate the reality of the superhero world, if only in archetypal terms, he doesn’t neglect to picture the limitations of ordinary reality. He devotes several pages to an unnamed junkie/ male prostitute who desires transcendence so badly that he takes a drug designed to make him feel like a superhero, but he dies in the attempt. Flex tries to save him by resorting to a magic word written on a piece of paper, but finds that he’s lost the paper. 

This absurdist subversion of a standard “life-saving” trope is also another standard trope of elitist critiques. Nevertheless, Wally survives while the “last boy on Earth” (as the junkie calls himself) perishes, even though Wally clearly knows his way around a pharmacy as well. It's possibly meaningful that Wally's insights go beyond his own personal welfare, as when he conceives that the emigrant superheroes “live in a factory where ideas are made.” Further, Wally’s visions are oriented not only on himself but upon humanity as a whole, saying of superheroes, “We can be them.”

To be sure, Morrison’s vision of what superheroes mean doesn’t resemble that of most critics, even though at one point Wally declares, “Frederic Wertham was fucking right!” Clearly Morrison isn’t thinking about sexual superheroes in the same way Wertham did: as seductive power-fantasies devised to seduce innocent children. Sexual realization is part of Morrison’s program of visionary fulfillment.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the author’s validation of the Silver Age of Comics, which is, as many fans know, the comics-age Morrison experienced as a young fan. Wally observes that the Golden Age of superheroes was “pretty simple,” boiling down to the “Charles Atlas hard body homoerotic wish-fulfillment.”  (I disagree, but this one interpretation doesn’t undermine the general strength of Morrison’s theme.) Wally then observes that the Silver Age changed the paradigm. “Strange transformations, multiple realities, dreams, hoaxes… it was like the hard body began to turn soft...” I could carp that this description mostly applies to the line of Superman comics supervised by Mort Weisinger, with a little Julie Schwartz on the side, but it’s still a stimulating reading.

The miniseries concludes on the implication that the emigrant superheroes will indeed break through to Wally’s fallen reality. I’m not quite prepared to term this a Jungian katabasis, given that I think Morrison is at best a dilettante Jungian. Nevertheless, when he has Wally speak of a “synchro-interaction with readers” of this “ultra-post-futurist comic,” I’d like to think that he, as much as Jung, is trying to show the favorable aspects of understanding more worlds than just the one in front of one’s nose every day.