NEAR MYTHS: "THE LEGION OF SUPER-MONSTERS" (ADVENTURE COMICS #309, 1963)

Once more, a quick reiteration of my definition of "near myth:"

..."a near-myth" is a part of a narrative that sustains a mythic kernel of meaning, but does not become unified into a fully-developed "underthought" throughout the narrative. [the latter being the definition of a fully consummate myth]

A quick personal note about this week's "near myth:" although as a sometime Legion fan I was rather hyped to see this story when I read old ad-hype for it, I never found a decently-priced copy of the original issue until recently, nor did I happen to buy the relevant Archives collection with the story. I'm rather glad I waited, because it's the sort of appealing but cheesy story that should be read in its original form.

"Legion of Super-Monsters" loses the cover spot to a much shorter Superboy story. Said tale's only interest is that it speaks to a psychological myth that DC Comics had exploited since the Golden Age and used heavily in the Silver Age: the fear-of-replacement myth. Comics-stories of this ilk usually focused on the starring heroes about to be replaced or marginalized in some manner, and they tend to be fairly one-note.

Closely related to the "replacement myth," though, is the "exclusion myth," in which a starring character finds himself left the odd man out in some desirable group of society.  Indeed, the first story in which the Legion appeared dealt with Superboy being excluded from potential membership.

Superboy's exclusion is naturally overturned by story's end as a Big Misunderstanding. In "Super-Monsters," though, the Legion decides to exclude a candidate, one Jungle King, because he shows a lack of caution in the use of his power to control animals:

Jungle King gets mad and decides to form his own Legion, made of wild alien beasts who are compelled to obey his commands. Taking the alternate cognomen Monster Master, he embarks upon a career of crime, using the fabulous powers of his creatures against society, thus provoking the Legion of Super'Heroes to come after him.

In their initial encounters, the human Legion has no small trouble in dealing with the monster-Legion...

 ..and to make things seemingly worse, one of the members who passed the group's standards, Bouncing Boy, messes up by exposing himself at a critical point. However, he gets to redeem himself in a sense, using strategy to defeat a beast of much greater power.

I said that the replacement myths were usually one-note, and Edmond Hamilton's "exclusion-myth" script isn't much better. Not only are the Legion's standards validated by Bouncing Boy's success, Monster Master is shown to be a hypocrite who makes a snap judgment about one of the beasts that "auditions" for the monster-legion. The villain rejects a "gas creature" because the critter's not impressive enough, but the beast gets pissed about its exclusion and subjects Monster Master to a fatal "gas attack."

Still, though "Super-Monsters" is a little preachy in this regard, it does have some pleasingly bizarre sci-fi monsters, and that makes up for a lot.

MYTHCOMICS: BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT (1985-86)

“There are six things which Jehovah hateth; Yea, seven which are an abomination unto him: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood; A heart that deviseth wicked purposes, Feet that are swift in running to mischief, A false witness that uttereth lies, And he that soweth discord among brethren” (Prov. 6:16-19).

Upon the 1985 release of BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT, publisher WarpGraphics touted the four-issue series as America's first weekly comic book. But in retrospect BLOOD is far more interesting as a crossover of two literary/cuiltural myths born out of the matrix of Victorian society.  Both myths had their origins in the acts of real historical persons. Jack the Ripper, the Victorian serial killer, has never been identified, and even in Victorian times assumed the character of an "urban legend." Bram Stoker's Count Dracula was fiction based on both the vampire folklore of Transylvania and the historical records of Romanian tyrant Vlad Tepes. To be sure, the narrative of BLOOD makes very few references to the story of Vlad, though like most Dracula-tales there are indirect references to the Count's aristocratic heritage, and in one issue co-author Rickey Shanklin contributes a history of the tyrant's historical reign.

BLOOD-- presumably named with the above Proverb in mind-- doesn't feature any sort of epic battle between the vampire and the serial killer, as the cover of #1 depicts. The Ripper, being limited to the sphere of realistic historical studies, has no power capable of opposing a supernatural creature. However, it's the Ripper's narrative that determines the scope of the story, since it must take place in the one year, 1888, during which the killer's "canonical" murders took place. Writers Rickey Shanklin and Mark Wheatley collaborated with penciller Marc Hempel (Wheatley also inked) in bringing the vampire-lord to London in the same year, ostensibly to investigate England as a future stomping-ground, in line with his future visit in the 1897 novel.

Naturally, the authors' version of both the vampire and the killer tend to follow specific cultural models. In this iteration, Jack the Ripper is the syphilitic Duke of Clarence, usually called "Eddy," the oldest grandson of still-reigning Queen Victoria, and he begins killing prostitutes because he picked up a social disease from a lady of the Whitechapel slums. And this Dracula is not at all like Stoker's ruthless predator: during his sojourn he only exsanguinates one victim, a female who may or may not be a lady of the evening. The Shanklin-Wheatley vampire also is made basically sympathetic because he falls in love with a potential victim, and thus seems closest in tone to the 1979 cinema-Dracula played by Frank Langella. 

The authors repeatedly stress the parallel of Dracula and the Ripper due to their role as sexually oriented predators, but arguably one sees more differences than similarities. Both men are aristocrats, but the Count has dignity and compassion, while Eddy Duke of Clarence seems to be little more than the incarnation of a Victorian contempt for women, particularly those who have been forced into "the life" by economic oppression.

Dracula, who accidentally encounters Eddy after the latter's first hooker-murder, is put in a position where he might kill the Ripper before his bloody rampage. The vampire chooses not to do so because he smells that the Duke's blood is "diseased," and thus he makes "allowances" for the maniac's bad manners. This lordly indifference becomes more pronounced later in the story; the vampire is seen watching from a distance as Eddy kills another prostitute. By that time, though, Dracula has met a London woman and fallen in love with her, so that he has sex with her but does not vampirize her. However, it never occurs to him that since she too is a prostitute, she might fall victim to the Ripper-- which indeed she does, as she happens to be Mary Jane Kelly, one of the canonical five Ripper-victims.

Shanklin and Wheatley interpolate a number of secondary plot-lines into the story, usually involving other persons suspected of being the Ripper, such as Dr. William Gull, physician to Queen Victoria, and Montague Druitt, who in this iteration is a teacher who has expertise in vampire mythology and actually witnesses one of Dracula's transformations, thus leading Druitt to the incorrect conclusion that Dracula is the Ripper. But none of the side-stories are of much consequence.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two legends is that when the Ripper kills, he "murders to dissect," leaving nothing but dead meat. Dracula is obviously a killer as well, but he can bring some of his victims back to a semblance of life. Indeed, Mary Jane fantasizes about being Dracula's Transylvanian countess, even as Eddy sees her as nothing but "the queen of whores." The Ripper is an arch-realist; he sees nothing but evil in women, and thus reflects much of the Judeo-Christian ethic of his time. Dracula, however, is not just a shape-changer: in this version the vampire who can't see himself in a mirror automatically "mirrors" the fears or desires of whoever beholds him. When the vampire first comes to England, two sailors see him according to their own prejudices. One sailor thinks the Count looks like a dashingly royal figure, while the other fellow thinks Dracula looks old and corrupt. Oddly, the second sailor characterizes aristocrats as "royalty what comes o' a sister's love of her brother! " I've no idea what the authors meant by this reference, since sibling incest is not a big part of Dracula-mythology-- though it's arguable that since Dracula is centuries older than his victims, there might well be a "daughter-father" vibe about his alliance with Mary Jane Kelly.  

Dominantly BLOOD is all about the clash of sociological narratives: that of the aristocratic seducer versus the corrupt lordling. Shanklin and Wheatley don't provide a lot of vampire mythology here, but there's some metaphysical content in their idea of Dracula's image changing to reflect the beliefs of onlookers.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE TIGER MEN OF MARS" (BUCK ROGERS, 1930)

The years just before the 1930s were crucial for the mainstreaming of the science fiction genre, particularly thanks to the adaptation of Philip Nowlan's 1928 novella ARMAGEDDON 2419 A.D. into the 1929 comic strip BUCK ROGERS. For many years after that, the SF-genre was tarred with the brush of being "that crazy Buck Rogers stuff," but the disparaging comments didn't keep either the genre or the comic strip from growing in popularity.

Nowlan's original novella was definitely a sociological myth-narrative. Not only did it propel a modern-day American "average guy" into the far future-- originally Tony Rogers, who got a name-change in the comic strip-- Rogers encountered a nightmare future, in which American civilization had been flung back to its primitive frontier-origins by the invading airships of Mongolian warlords. Since I haven't re-read the novella for some time, I won't state that the Nowlan novella was one of the best examples of its type, even allowing for its "Yellow Peril" theme. 

Strangely, the first long storyline of the BUCK ROGERS strip was not quite a straight adaptation of the prose story, even though Philip Nowlan was the author of record on the strip. His scripts were paired with the crude but somehow winsome artwork of Dick Calkins, who excelled in creating the ships, guns, and other paraphernalia of the 25th century. Based on the criteria I set forth in my study of the mythcomic LOST IN THE MICROCOSM,  it would be possible for me to deem the first BUCK ROGERS continuity to be a "new" story if it differed sufficiently from the original template. However, the first continuity, in which Buck and his allies manage to forge a "separate peace" with the Mongols, rambles from idea to idea in such a way that it would only qualify as a "near myth." It is interesting, though, that Nowlan renounces the "Asian evil" stereotype for the most part: the Mongolian supreme emperor makes peace with America when he finds out that his subordinates have lied to him, and there's a distinct absence of the usual 'heathen Chinee" dialogue.

The next significant continuity, however, has enough internal consistency to rate as a mythcomic. It helps that the story of "The Tiger Men of Mars" has become one of the better known Buck Rogers stories: Fritz Leiber paid the strip-tale homage in his novel THE WANDERER, and the 1979 teleseries even worked in a "Tiger Man" as a minor character.

The Martians make their first appearance on Earth, abducting a nubile Earthwoman who just happens to be Wilma Deering, Buck's steady girlfriend.

The aliens are then disclosed to be descended from tigers even as humans descended from apes. The strip doesn't dwell on the ramifications of evolution, but it may well be one of the first times the concept showed up in such a pop-fiction artifact.

Buck and his fellow soldiers manage to talk the Tiger-Men into making peace for a while. However, the Martian cat-men have in their company a human Martian, a princess of the "Golden People," who is explained as "a hostage." After the Tiger-Men have had a little time to take the measure of Earthmen and their defenses, they reveal their true colors, and choose to take an Earth-hostage as well. Nothing is ever said about the hostage being used to ensure Earth's good behavior, and indeed Nowlan has the Martians choose a character of little social import: Sally, the younger sister of Wilma Deering. In no time the Tiger-Men are speeding back to Mars in their space-sphere. Buck vows to pursue them, despite the fact that the government doesn't want to invest in constructing a space-fleet. Like the later Jor-El, Buck gets the ball rolling on his own-- albeit with some help from a rich friend. Then Sally somehow gets access to a radio, and reveals to her fellow Earth-people that the Tiger-Men plan an invasion. Suddenly, the local government is very eager to help develop a new spacecraft. powered by the element "inertron" (which name comics-writer Jim Shooter would later appropriate for a very different purpose).

Once the crew (including Buck and Wilma) has been assembled, the inertron craft takes off. Nowlan's script is actually pretty consistent in exploring technological details about distance and the vicissitudes of gravity. A couple of amusing panels are devoted to Buck's attempts to drink coffee in space, since the liquid just flows out of his cup and forms a floating "globule."

There are some episodic developments that don't have much to do with the main plotline, as when Buck and friends come across a derelict spaceship and defrost a native of Jupiter who's been in cryo-sleep for centuries. Eventually the ship makes it to Mars, where Buck and his group learn that the Martian fleet is too formidable for Earth to defeat.

At this point, Nowlan conceives of a cosmological myth which has no real connection to real science, but which nevertheless works as a myth ABOUT science. In short, the Earthmen decide to push one of Mars' moons out of the sky.

The results are pleasingly apocalyptic. The moon Phobos crashes to the surface of Mars, the science-fiction equivalent of having the sky fall down on the heads of the Martians. The emperor of the Tiger-Men quickly sues for peace, and the conflict ends on this note. (Buck has some unrelated adventures on Mars, but they have less to do with the Tiger-Men and more with his romantic travails.) I suppose this technique of "moon-bombing" was the closest one could get to a "doomsday weapon" in 1930, but I'll restrain myself from following the lead of Alan Moore and seeing this story as a revelation of Americans' innate warlike character.

I wish Nowlan had developed the Tiger-Men more: they're Buck's first visually interesting opponents, but the reader learns nothing about their culture beyond their war-mongering nature. Another short episode in "Tiger Men" further validates Darwin by spotlighting a bird-like species that lives on the surface of Earth's moon because it's modified its body to cope with airlessness. 

RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY PT. 3

Repeating my end point from Part 2, I'll assert that in general one cannot have a "monster rally" if one has just one type of monster versus another type of monster. Examples of these would the meeting of "werewolf star" Waldemar Daninsky with assorted vampires in FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, or the encounter of the Big G with one-shot nasty insect Megaguirus in GODZILLA AGAINST MEGAGUIRUS.

A potentially different situation arises even when one is dealing with more than one centric monster of the same nature, as seen in GODZILLA'S REVENGE. Since Godzilla and his "adopted" son Minya share a common biology, they are virtually identical, just like the vampires in BLOODY TERROR. However, this film is still a "monster rally," given that the two allomorphic monsters take on at least three other creatures on Monster Island. This scenario also appears whenever a single non-centric opponent comes up against a multiplicity of centric monsters. The latter case appears in the Toho film immediately preceding REVENGE: DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, wherein most of Toho's monsters take on King Ghidora.

However, a one-on-one "monster rally" is possible if one is dealing with a situation where the two creatures have sustained their own "centric" stories. KING KONG VS. GODZILLA was one of the few Toho films that qualifies for this "honor," while others include FREDDY VS. JASON and ALIENS VS. PREDATORS.

It's also possible to see the narrative structure of the monster rally when there is one "starring monster" allied against several non-centric types. FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR does not qualify, but 1969's ASSIGNMENT TERROR, which pits the wolfman against both a mummy and a doppelganger for the Frankenstein Monster.

It's also possible to see "teams" of monsters opposed to ordinary humans, as in 1943's vampire-and-wolfman team for THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE.

Or conversely, one may reverse this structure. In ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, where the demihero-characters played by the comedians are the centric stars of the show, and the three monsters are their non-centric opponents.

A similar dynamic holds for heroes as well as demiheroes. Marvel superheroes are the stars of the one-shot comic MARVEL MONSTERS: MONSTERS ON THE PROWL, but it's still a "monster rally" because they're pitted against a mess o'monsters who originally had separate story-arcs in old monster-comics.

There are also a number of situations where the story concerns a team of "good monsters' versus a team of not-so-good ones, as seen in the game-turned-cartoon DARKSTALKERS.

However, if you've got one team of monsters for good, you don't need a team for evil to have a monster rally, as witness that salute to 1950s fiends, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS.

All of these examples involve some strong life-or-death conflict. However, there are also various stories which follow the "domestic comedy" pattern. Thus, in one cartoon special, the demiheroic Flintstones meet a monstrous family in THE FLINTSTONES' NEW NEIGHBORS.

And this, of course, was a direct swipe of one of the earliest "domestic monster rallies" in popular fiction, THE ADDAMS FAMILY.

So, in all, I count ten distinct storytelling variations which manage to cross over more than one distinct monster-types-- which is probably the most attention that anyone has ever devoted to this perhaps deservedly arcane subject.

ADDENDUM: I should add that there's one exception to my rule about "fairly distinct characters." This is when the monsters all have the same origin, but they are BASED on originals who were distinct. Thus in the movie SCOOBY DOO 2, a scientific process creates monsters who look like some of the costumed villains who appeared in earlier SCOOBY DOO TV episodes. This also applies to dreams, in which a dreamer simply dreams about a bunch of monsters that have their own existence in the "real life" of the ongoing narrative, or when human agents impersonate a bunch of monsters that were supposedly real at some time-- which itself sounds like a SCOOBY DOO episode.

RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY PT. 2

One reason that I've devoted a fair deal of space to the topic of *centricity,* or any of the other synonyms I've used for it over the years, is that only by knowing the center of the story does one understand the story as a whole. That said, it can be more than a little challenging to determine when a given narrative is dominated by one character, more than one, or even a setting. My 2012 essay ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE is devoted to some of the cases in which more than one entity is "the star of the show"-- which is admittedly a lot less complicated than figuring out which characters are the "focal presences" of multi-story narratives like anthology presentations.

In 2008 I devoted some space here to some of the earliest examples of "monster rallies" and "villain rallies" in popular fiction. The earliest dated use of the term "monster rally" that I've found appears in a 1950 Charles Addams cartoon, but I suspect Addams didn't conceive the term. It sounds like something that would have been cooked up in the 1940s in response to Universal Pictures' release of "monster crossovers," possibly starting with 1943's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN. If "monster rally" does indeed date back to the 1943 film, it indicates that "rally" did not connote unity for the person who coined the phrase, even though the word traces from a French word meaning "to unite." As all horror-fans should know, the film centers upon the two monsters not just meeting, but eventually coming into conflict. The next three Universal crossovers also did not depict the monsters as part of any united front: in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA, they cross paths to some extent but largely don't affect one another's arcs, In ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, the Monster is more or less the thrall of Dracula, and the Wolf Man opposes the vampire's plans, though the lines of battle are not as strongly drawn as they were in the 1943 film.

In my essay THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS I stated that I thought much of the appeal was about the audience taking pleasure in the differences between the respective mythologies of two or more focal presences:

Some Marxist critics will view such character-crossovers as one of many strategies by which the evil Masters of Mass Culture manipulate their audiences. While such explanations may seem to answer all questions as to the motives of the stories' producers, they don't say anything substantive about why the audiences choose to patronize not just works of mass culture in general, but works in which characters or concepts from different storylines happen to intersect. The usual Marxist explanation is that these audiences want nothing more than mindless divertissement. However, the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.  

In a larger sense, though, it's not just the "ground rules" that are in conflict, but the stories of characters with radically different backgrounds, be it She and Allan, or Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. One might say that what is being "rallied" in such crossover-tales is not any sort of "alliance" between the focal characters, but of the "spirit of monstrosity," just as other ensemble-cast films usually rally spirits of romance, heavy drama, slapstick comedy and so on.

Now, as I pointed out earlier, "hero rallies" and what I have termed "demihero rallies" are fairly common. Since both personas are dominantly positive in tone, it's become common to feature crossovers between such characters. The personas of "monsters" and "villains," however, are meant to be negative in tone: both personas primarily exist to be defeated by the forces of life and/or justice.
That said, it's more typical to see "monsters" as central to particular narratives than it is to see "villains" in the same position. The monster is the dark side of the demihero, even as the villain is the dark side of the hero. The genre of horror is largely about exploring the nature of the monster, while any demiheroes tend to play secondary roles. In contrast, in adventure-fiction and its congeners, the villain exists to define the hero. Monsters are thus often centric, while villains are non-centric.

Often, when monsters or villains are made the stars of continuing features, they are made to battle "the menace of the month," just as heroes do. For instance, the cover of the first issue of DC's 1975 feature THE JOKER shows him visually dominating other Bat-villains, though in the story proper he's only engaged with fighting Two-Face over some slight.

Similarly, in the 1940s FRANKENSTEIN series by Dick Briefer, the Monster's first adversary is his creator Frankenstein, whom I view as more "demihero" than "hero." Doctor Frankenstein does not last long as the Monster's main opponent, but before the scientist vanishes from the series, he creates one or two "monsters of the month" to battle his greatest creation.

Now, the presence of two monsters in the Frankenstein story doesn't really constitute a "monster rally" like that of the 1943 Universal film. In that film, both the Monster and the Wolf Man comprise an ensemble, for they are of equal interest to the ideal viewer of the story. Not so the croc-monster in the FRANKENSTEIN comic; he's simply an opponent for the main character. "Villain rallies" in which both villains have been the stars of their own serials-- even if they did not start out that way-- are much rarer, but Two-Face is not the equal of the Joker in the Joker's book. The earliest example of a "villain rally" wherein both evildoers have been featured characters in their own narratives is this 1964 crossover of Walt Disney properties: the comic villains the Phantom Blot and the Beagle Boys, both of whom had enjoyed their own comic books by the time this issue appeared.

Thus, in the third and last part of this essay-series, I've compiled for my own amusement the main ways in which "monster rallies" usually take place. "Villain rallies," which are less common, are pretty much subsumed by the same narrative rules, and so I won't make separate reference to them.

RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY PT. 1

I did a "Demihero Rally" here, and to provide myself with an easy reference for future installments of this planned essay-series, I'm now listing everything I've reviewed, on any of my blogs, that might qualify as a "rally/crossover" of the personas of "monsters." I won't bother with hero-crossovers, they're pretty easy to pinpoint.

For monsters:

THE CENOBITES and THE NIGHTBREED.

All of the UNIVERSAL monster-mashes.

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA

FREDDY VS. JASON.

PUPPET MASTER VS. DEMONIC TOYS

GHIDRAH and MONSTER ZERO, the first of many Toho monster-crossovers.

"THE LOWER BERTH" FROM TALES OF THE CRYPT.

I wouldn't mind adding the personas of villains to the list, but I don't seem to have done anything with crossovers of starring villains., The closest I've come is "centric hero meeets centric villain," here.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DUCHESS OF DENVER," STEVE CANYON (April-Aug 1951)

I touched on the influence of Milton Caniff in my review of FABLE OF VENICE, noting how he made his greatest impact with 1934's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, which he departed in 1946 in order to work on a strip he could own outright, 1947's STEVE CANYON. The latter strip, though popular, never had the massive influence that TERRY had on comics-art. Both strips involved footloose young bravos tooling around various parts of the world, but TERRY seemed to catch a spirit of pure adventure characteristic of the 1930s, while the postwar world of CANYON was considerably more button-down.

Both strips, however, displayed Caniff's genius for creating vibrant female characters.  The best-known character from TERRY, the Dragon Lady, has become a sobriquet for any sort of dominating female, but the original character was a cool, resourceful schemer who could out-think and outmaneuver most men-- though not so much Pat Ryan, the he-man star who escorted young Terry Lee into assorted adventures  At the same time Caniff also utilized other character-types who were not nearly as original. In addition to Ryan's dalliances with the exotic Dragon Lady, he also enjoyed romances with a Sweet Young Thing, name of Normandie Drake, and with a Shady Lady named Burma. a dame who gave every impression that she got around. Caniff continued to use all three types throughout CANYON as well, and in 1951 he came with one of his more interesting psychological myths: "the Duchess of Denver." She may have taken her name from a character in a 1920s "Peter Wimsey" detective novel, but I suspect her real source was Caniff's ambivalent feelings toward the opposite sex.

For Caniff the "Shady Lady" type stands between the Sweet Young Thing and the Dominating Woman (represented in the CANYON strip by a businesswoman with the evocative name of Copper Calhoun.)   The Shady Lady is basically sympathetic despite having some sort of criminal or socially-disreputable past, wandering from place to place and at home nowhere. Often, when the Caniff hero encounters her, he must rescue her from some caddish fellow to whom she's loosely associated. This is how Pat Ryan encounters Burma, whom he must protect from a fiend named Captain Judas.

Because Caniff aimed his strips at family newspapers, the precise relationship of the lady to her ungentlemanly paramours was always left vague, but often one could read between the lines pretty well. Though Caniff's women were often gutsy or clever, the world of TERRY-- and of CANYON-- was pretty much a man’s world. Thus it was a given that even women of independent minds ought to hook up with a man, either for financial or psychological support.

The Duchess of Denver belongs to the Shady Lady type, but with some interesting differences.  Steve Canyon makes one of his frequent jaunts to the Orient on some spy-mission, and a he sees the comely Duchess-- never given any other name-- being auctioned off at a slave-market by a despicable individual named Fungo.   However, after doing his Galahad act, Canyon learns that Fungo and the Duchess are actually married, and that the auction is a scam to fleece customers. Further, the Duchess isn't the usual "weak woman" enslaved to a brutish man. In a reverse of the usual expectations, the Duchess, though not physically prepossessing, is a former circus strongwoman who can beat up most men who give her grief, while Fungo is short and ratty-looking. But because the Duchess has some inexplicable love for the nasty fellow, she simply takes it when he slaps her around.  The relationship is never explored in depth, but Caniff commented on it more directly in STEVE CANYON MAGAZINE #13: “It was a sadism-masochism thing, which I was playing with very gingerly at the time.”   

LIke many earlier Shady Ladies, Duchess is basically good at heart, and is revolted by the criminal activities she must undertake for him-- and yet she remains in erotic bondage to her swinish lover. Finally, she rebels in an indirect manner; after Fungo tries to kill Canyon, the Duchess joins Canyon as they flee the city via ship. In contrast to many modern uses of similar tropes, there is never a cathartic moment in which she gets to whale on her abusive husband to pay him back. When the ship sails, Fungo is still hale and hearty, having lost nothing but a useful pawn in his auction-racket.

Whenever a female character in literature suffers abuse, some critics have been known to go overboard, seeing conspiracies by male creators to degrade womanhood, at least through fictional surrogates.   I’m leery of this kind of “woman-as-eternal-victim” reading, but I can see why someone might read the "Duchess" continuity in this fashion. Even though Duchess is physically stronger than most women, she remains psychologically dependent on a man for her self-validation.   In fact, in one of her few revealing moments, she tells Canyon, “I’m so strong I have to be calm—my mother told me to THINK like a helpless little girl.”   Canyon then asks, “Is that how you were thinking when you married Fungo?” This bit of impertinence earns him a punch in the face from the strongwoman.

I’d like to think, not that Caniff wanted to see a strong woman dominated by an evil man, but that he intuited that the socialization of women in the early 20^th century—the insistence that all women should be “feminine” to the extent of helplessness—put them in a vulnerable psychological position, resulting in a tendency of women to have masochistic tendencies no matter how physically strong she might be. At the same time, one can’t quite overlook that the Duchess never really triumphs over her dominator, but merely escapes him.   She does get to triumph over a more comic antagonist, though. Once Canyon and the Duchess take passage on the ship, they find out that its captain, the humorously named "Curly Kew," is an unscrupulous pirate, who decides to keep the two of them prisoner while trying to romance the Duchess. Duchess fends off Kew several times and subdues him physically twice, making it quite unnecessary for Canyon to perform his usual “knight-in-shining-armor” routine. Amusingly, one of the first story-lines in TERRY AND THE PIRATES dealt with Terry and Ryan being held captive on board a junk owned by the Dragon Lady and her piratical minions, and how Ryan had to keep coming up with ways to keep himself from being seduced by another type of "strong woman."

The shipboard menace comes to an end when Kew is taken prisoner by Communist forces: Canyon and the Duchess, not looking upon the Reds as rescuers, opt to escape the ship in a lifeboat.  During the escape Canyon’s “lady” becomes his “dragon,” for the Duchess catches a chill while the boat is at sea and becomes delirious. A storm arises, increasing the dramatic peril, and the Duchess hallucinates that Canyon is her abusive husband. She belatedly tries to take vengeance for her mistreatment by killing "Fungo," forcing Canyon to endeavor both to restrain her and to keep the boat from being swamped. “If I’m to lose a wrestling bout,” he cracks with a touch of male masochism, “it might as well be to a beautiful dame.”

  However, when push comes to shove-- that is, when she tries to bash him with an oar-- he does defend himself and knock her out.An extreme feminist might say that by so doing he merely reinforces the same male tyranny represented by Fungo, but this is somewhat backward thinking, given that Canyon is never less than the perfect gentleman. Then the storm serves as Caniff’s device to end the continuity. The boat is swamped, hurling both refugees into the ocean. Just in time Canyon is rescued by American military. The Duchess, who never again appears in the strip, is last seen about to sink beneath the ocean-waves.

One can’t entirely escape the feeling that Caniff, in creating the Duchess, spawned a character too powerful to play the damsel in Canyon’s normal knight-errant routine, and that she is written out of the strip as quickly as possible because Caniff could think of nothing else to do with her.   Since the artist doesn’t explicitly show her death, Caniff may have entertained some thought of bringing her back. But in all probability her remarkable physical strength would have made her too freakish to have become a returning figure like the aforementioned Burma. Still, she remains an interesting footnote to any considerations of Caniff as a creator of femmes formidables.