NULL-MYTHS: PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL VOL. 1 (2018)

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the nineties. I've enjoyed odd issues in the same way that I've enjoy Chuck Norris films: lots of extravagant action with not much plot or characterization. Nevertheless, the Punisher has gone through many permutations, and so it's possible that he might take on mythic stature in one tale or another.

I picked up a library copy collecting PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL from the 2010s. I had some vague memory of having heard that this one was one of the better Punisher titles, though now that I've read the collection, I feel sure that I must've heard some compliments for an earlier incarnation of the title. All of the stories in this collection, authored by Matt Fraction, are lightweight in the extreme. I've read little or none of the work for which Fraction became popular in the 2010s, but his other work must have more content than this garbage. 

The eighties was a time in which many comics professionals, particularly those from Merrie Old England, began producing "grim and gritty" versions of superhero features aimed at the dominantly older DM comics-audience. Yet all of these pros had been raised on the G-rated comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and many of them sang the praises of the comics' "age of innocence." Grant Morrison did a story of an aging superhero in some issue of ANIMAL MAN, Neil Gaiman did a Riddler story, and Alan Moore wept crocodile tears for lost innocence with the Kool Aid Man.

A reader could read any of these and get the gist of Fraction's work on the first twelve issues of WAR JOURNAL. Of course, Moore, Morrison and Gaiman all showed numerous times that they could do much more than self-conscious parody. But that's all there is to Fraction's Punisher.

Here's Frank Castle deciding that he just won't put up with the silliness of the Silver Age, by blowing away the Stilt Man's junk.

Later, at the supervillain's wake, a bunch of classic and not-so-classic villains, mostly from the Silver Age, get together and talk about the Good Old Days as if it was all a big game, and didn't involve them trying to murder the heroes who interfered with them.

(On a side-note: even though these old villains used G-rated violence, G-rated violence can still kill a person! One of the main virtues of SPIDER MAN HOMECOMING was the bracing scene in which the movie's version of the Vulture shows just how dangerous a flying villain can be to a non-flying crusader.)

There's not much more to these twelve issues than the dubious pleasure of seeing a "realistic" hero blow away all these colorful fantasy-figures. Fraction has no psychological insight, even of a deconstructive kind, into either the Punisher, his allies (an obscure seventies villain, Rampage, gets recast into the role of the main hero's weapons maker), or any of the villains. It's all pseudo-Moore sardonicism with none of Moore's skill with satire. It's as if Fraction read Moore and the other "adult pulp" writers of the eighties and thought that their pretensions to realism were the only things worth imitating. 

Oh, and I don't know if Fraction started this, but now the vigilante hero has a deep and abiding regard for Captain America for some reason-- apparently because Cap beat up Frank Castle during some army training maneuvers? These issues take place around the time that Steve Rogers was temporarily killed off, so there's an arc of stories dealing with how a new, white-nationalist version of the Hate-Monger tries to usurp Captain America's uniform. Fraction is just as incompetent in dealing with "real problems" like racism as he is in playing games within Marvel's immense fantasy-cosmos.

Next to self-important tripe like this, even throwaway trash-tales of Castle shooting up a bunch of drug-dealers are preferable by far.

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN HATER" (SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE #6, 1972)

 i've not usually had a very high opinion of the DC Comics horror anthologies of the late sixties and early scventies, though they did serve as the crucible for the company's rebirth of horror in the 1980s. However, since I have an abiding interest in Gothic fiction, I decided to read through the whole run of a title initially devoted to Gothic romance, SINISTER HOUSE OF SECRET LOVE. Wikipedia claims that DC sought to emulate the craze for DARK SHADOWS, though there might also be some influence from the Gothic paperbacks of the period. In any case, SECRET LOVE changed its name to SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE with issue #5, where the company burned off its last horror-romance tale. Then for the remainder of its run it was just another horror-anthology, complete with a female horror-host named Eve (later worked into the SWAMP THING cosmos). 

The only mythcomic I discerned from the title's eighteen total issues was "The Man Hater" by Robert Kanigher and Bill Draut, and it's like the majority of anthologized horror-stories of the period, focused mostly on the notion of "the biter bit." However, Kanigher gets a little more into sexual mythology than the rest of SINISTER's contributors-- which might be said to make the story more "Gothic" than all the other offerings.

The story first shows us the central character Valla, in the act of offing her first husband, a big game hunter, by the unlikely method of dropping his stuffed rhino-head on him and thus impaling the unfortunate fellow. The next page reveals that Valla became a "black widow" murderess because she formed an Electra-style fixation on her father-- and when her father failed to return her affection, she killed him by rigging the brakes of his car-- skills she obtained while trying to emulate the father's interest in cars, by learning the "masculine" skill needed to work on automobiles.

Kanigher doesn't dive too deeply into Freudian waters, but it's pretty clear that Valla suffers from a repetition-compulsion: she likes the feeling of having killed her nasty dad, and she seeks to re-experience the emotional thrill by marrying rich older man and killing them, ostensibly for their inheritances (she calls one of these two husbands a "dirty old man" as she murders him). She claims that her first husband called her "princess," which Valla may or may not have instigated: either way, it sounds not unlike the sort of pet-name that a father might use for his daughter. "Man-hating" mania aside, Valla does maintain a strong relationship with one older male: a Hindu whom she addresses only as "Guru." 

Kanigher wastes no time explicating Valla's relationship with Guru, and for the most part he exists just to set up the "biter bit" finish. At most one might hazard that Valla hangs out with the old fellow because he's too old to seem threatening and because he feeds her ego by telling her that she used to be a real princess in ancient India. 

However, Valla's murder-lust makes her impatient for more victims,. and the police become aware of the unusual rapidity of her three mates' deaths. So they pursue Valla, who flees to her guru for help, as if he was indeed some all-powerful father-figure. The guru seems OK with helping Valla escape the long arm of the law, and he works a reincarnation-magic that sends the man-hater back in time, so that her soul will inhabit the body of that archaic princess mentioned earlier. (What happens to Valla's body? Who knows?)

Now, even though Guru has no hostile intentions toward Valla, he's patently Kanigher's means of doling out poetic justice to the murderess. And many writers would have simply placed the princess in some terrible but unimaginative situation-- being imprisoned for the rest of her life, or being sick with a plague. But Kanigher works things so as to avenge the men who were deceived with female deceptiveness, by having her wake to find herself about to die by the Hindu custom of suttee, wherein the wife is burned alongside the body of her deceased husband. Thus patriarchy has its fit revenge, as a girl desirous of being a princess found out that in India at least, to be a princess was to be little more than an appendage to the fate of a hated man-- even when the man himself was already dead.

THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH

 The first time I encountered the following quote online, I didn't think it sounded much like Aristotle, even speaking as someone who's not an expert on the philosopher:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

And sure enough, it turned out that an accurate version of the quote from the NICOMACHEAN ETHICS reads:

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

The first quote apparently comes from an early mistranslation of the ETHICS. Possibly the translator was misled by the passage dealing with the relative nature of "precision" that one can discern regarding a given subject. (For instance, the chemical composition of a particular compound can be determined with far more accuracy than the nature of a process such evolution, which can't be broken down and analyzed in the same manner.) The mistranslation seems to be an endorsement of relativity for its own sake.

Now, I believe that in philosophy one can only entertain thoughts up to a certain point before accepting or rejecting them. However, in literature, "thoughts" are not truths, but rather "half-truths" as I argued here.  "The poet never affirmeth," said Sir Philip Sidney, which I interpret as meaning that the nature of "poetry" (i.e., literature) is one that changes depending on the viewpoints of both its authors and its audiences. Art is primarily meant to be an activity of "play," no matter how often it's used to perform "work." 

Now, even though the fake Aristotle quote doesn't apply to his philosophy, it does hew a little closer to one of his pronouncements in the POETICS, where the philosopher states that the act of poetry is mimesis or imitation, and that the poet must imitate one of three categories of phenomena: 

things as they are, things as they are said or thought to be or things as they ought to be

In Renaissance times mimesis became equated with verisimilitude, with imitating "things as they are," and thus the term passed into literary history with a meaning that endorsed a form of real-world fidelity that Aristotle would never have endorsed. Whatever the philosopher preferred to read or watch on stage, he explained that the range of imitation had to extend beyond the observable world, even though presumably Aristotle would have desired some "degree of precision" even when dealing with the hypothetical, with "things as they ought to be."

In my earlier essay I emphasized the idea of "half-truths" as a form of "weak proposition," meaning that the author may be as unserious about what his narrative proposes as the audience is in entertaining the notion. Of course, some authors and some audiences can become very serious about how much a given proposition represents reality, but it can even be difficult for an author and his audience to remain on the same page. For instance, take the well-known phrase, "Hell is other people" from Sartre's play NO EXIT. Sartre himself argued that he didn't mean to give the line the connotation that most listeners got from it. Yet the listeners are not necessarily wrong in the way that Aristotle's translator was wrong. 

One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ICEBOUND MAIDENS" (WONDER WOMAN #13, 1945)

 One of the most intriguing images in the entirety of William Marston's WONDER WOMAN canon appears on page eight of "The Icebound Maidens." The Amazon, having voyaged to Paradise Island to counsel young Amazons in facing their challenges with willpower, is assigned to do the same for "the daughters of Venus." Prior to this tale, Marston had built four stories around the planet Venus, inhabited by beautiful winged girls who, like the Earth-Amazons, worshipped love and beauty in the incarnation of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. "Maidens" is the final Marston story using the Venus-women, and this time the writer merges this myth-trope with that of an icon of Judeo-Christian belief, that of the Garden of Eden. In the Old Testament, God commands that Eden is off limits to mortals once Adam and Eve are expelled, appointing one or more cherubim to stand guard with a "flaming sword." In an audacious image, Marston's Aphrodite is seen commanding a hand with a flaming sword-- presumably a denizen of Heaven, not exactly on speaking terms with pagan goddesses-- to propel the entire Garden of Eden to a subterranean domain beneath the ice of Earth's South Pole.

To be sure, Marston has no interest in engaging in involved cross-comparisons between Greek and Jewish myth. He wanted a broad contrast between Eden, a land of life, and the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, a land of death. Aphrodite transforms one Venus girl into an Earth-female (which effectively means clipping her wings) and sends her to live in Eden, renamed "Eveland" to stress its new status as a "land of women." Providentially, the girl's name is Eve, so even if the First Man is gone from Eden, an avatar of the First Woman is still allowed to rule therein. And as the Hebrew God gave Eve to Adam for company, Aphrodite gives the second Eve a "spirit daughter" with the odd cognomen of "Eve Lectress" (a labored pun on the Greek name "Electra," more on which later). Somehow, possibly through parthenogenesis, dozens of other maidens join Queen Eve and Eve Lectress in the subterranean garden. 

But though the Eveland girls have left men out of their hortus conclusus, the ruthless male element asserts itself. Though one might expect that Eden has all the pleasures that the Venus-girls could want, Eve Lectress is lured into Bitterland, the "dark ice caves" where dwell the brutish Seal Men. Periodically the Seal Men, who cannot stand strong light, capture Eveland girls and make them work in their gardens. These gardens require blinding light to nurture the males' favorite delicacy, "pomoranges," and so the Seal Men want the maidens to toil on their behalf, even though eventually even the Eden-girls will lose their sight with these labors. The title "Icebound Maidens" refers to the fact that the cold-hearted villains literally keep a supply of replacement girls on ice for future use.

Wonder Woman ventures into the domain of the Seal Men and frees all of their prisoners, but somehow conveniently forgets about looking for Eve Lectress, nor does Queen Eve mention not having recovered her daughter. As the heroine journeys back to man's world, she finds she has a stowaway on her invisible jet: a young Eveland girl who claims her name is "Nema." The origin of this Marston-name is fairly obscure: it doesn't seem to scan well whether one compares it to "Nemea," the Greek valley from which the Nemean Lion hailed, or to the Hebrew word "amen," which is what "nema" spells backwards. Whatever the name's meaning, Nema is Eve Lectress, running away from home because she's guilty of her transgressions-- though Marston doesn't explicitly condemn her for seeking out Bitterland for unstated (maybe sexual?) reasons. 

Wonder Woman allows "Nema" to mingle with the Holliday Girls, so evidently she doesn't figure out the girl's true identity. But after a few days someone from Eveland rings up the Amazon on her mental radio, summoning Wonder Woman back to the garden. The heroine takes along all of the Holliday Girls and Nema, who still doesn't reveal her true nature to anyone. It seems that because Eve Lectress is missing, Queen Eve, acting the part of the Greek fertility-goddess Demeter, goes looking for her in the unfertile domain of Bitterland. The queen is almost executed by King Rigor (like "rigor mortis?"), the nasty lord of the Seal Men, but the Amazon rescues Eve and all other prisoners once again.

By Part Three of "Maidens" Princess Diana must have started  to feel like a bouncing ball, for a little later she'/s again forced to return to the South Pole. This time, however, it's her own ingenuity that provides the excuse. Diana has invented a "telepathograph" which has potential value to spy on the thoughts of foreign agents. (I don't know if Marston plotted the story before or after the surrender of Germany in May 1945, but it probably wasn't before the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in July; in any event, this segment contains no explicit reference to the WWII conflict.) In any event, the new spy-device can only be tested at the South Pole, so the Amazing Amazon takes Steve Trevor to test the device.

The subject of the telepathograph gets abruptly dropped after it functions much like the mental radio, alerting WW to the fact that those Eveland girls are in cold water again. The heroine meets with Nema, who still hasn't come clean to her mother, and they go in quest for King Rigor's new captives. Steve follows, but he's caught and sentenced to work in the blinding light of the pomorange gardens. Around the same time, Wonder Woman and Nema are captured, and for some reason King Rigor is the only one who figures out that Nema is Eve Lectress with a dye-job. Rigor tries to blackmail Queen Eve into sending him a steady tribute of girls for servitude by threatening to flood the fertile garden with the destructive waters of male potency (or something like that). 

Wonder Woman escapes imprisonment and runs a scam on the otherwise clever king. When the monarch attempts to sacrifice several de-thawed maidens to the Seal Men's effigy, a fire-mouthed "walrus god," the Amazon substitutes statues for the sacrifices, and then fools Rigor into thinking she can revive the slain girls from death. This road-company Lord Hades capitulates and signs a treaty with Queen Eve, and the latter generously claims that the women of Eveland will still supply the Seal Men with their precious "pomoranges," though nothing is said about what the women will get in exchange.

Despite the references to the Eden trope in the early pages of the narrative, clearly the Demeter-Persephone myth was central in Marston's mind. While Eve Lectress has nothing in common with the most famous owner of the "Electra" name-- the daughter of Agamemnon who gave her name to the "Electra complex"-- but Marston may have known that an Oceanid named Electra was supposed to be one of Persephone's companions before she was abducted by Hades. Queen Eve never quite duplicates Demeter's feat of laying waste to the Earth while she searches for her lost daughter. Possibly this was because "Bitterland" stands in for the image of the Earth made infertile? To be sure Marston's handling of Eve Lectress's motivations is clumsy in the extreme, and I tend to believe that Marston was dancing around the possibility of Eve the Second having a fling with one of the Seal Men. Though Rigor is a standard homely monarch, he has a fairly handsome son, Prince Pagli, though Pagli and Eve II are never seen together. ("Pagli" seems derived from the name of the Italian opera Pagliacci, which means "clowns"-- and if there's any symbolism there, it went past me.) The "pomoranges" are visually modeled on ordinary oranges, which flourish in the very light that the Seal Men despise-- but symbolically, these made-up fruits are more strongly linked to the Greek fertility symbol of the pomegranate. In the Persephone myth, the daughter of Demeter makes the mistake of eating pomegranate seeds in the underworld, which means that she must return periodically to the world of Death-- during which time Demeter causes the mortal world of living things to undergo the "rigors" of winter. 

In closing I'll note that Marston's assistant Joye Murchison recapitulated many of these Persephone-elements in the 1946 story "In Pluto's Kingdom." This time, however, Pluto-Hades abducts women not to make them labor in harsh light until they go blind, but to serve as sources of light to Pluto's dark kingdom.

INHUMAN DESIRES

 In a recent post on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO Rip devoted a few posts to Marvel's Inhumans features and noted, "The Inhumans always proved to be a hard sell for a self-titled ongoing series."

I had made a similar observation in my review of the 1998-99 INHUMANS graphic novel by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee:

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

 

Now, to pull at these threads somewhat, I should not that a "viable group dynamic" is not a guarantee for success. The Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970) gave rise to a larger number of adventure-teams than had been typical for the Golden Age. One of the few teams that had endured from the early 1940s until the mid-fifties was Quality Comics' BLACKHAWK, and this was the only feature that DC Comics continued, starting in 1956, after allegedly purchasing all of the properties owned by Quality once that company dissolved. It may be no coincidence that Jack Kirhy and Dave Wood initiated another team of uniformed crusaders the very next year, resulting in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which endured throughout the remainder of the Silver Age. Then within the next three-four years DC and Marvel respectively debuted JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and FANTASTIC FOUR, which both enjoyed more long-lasting success than any team that debuted in the Golden Age. JUSTICE LEAGUE survived even though it did not originally boast any sort of "group dynamic," while the FF practically defined said dynamic. Both BLACKHAWK and CHALLENGERS, which were "old school" in terms of interpersonal drama, were gone by the early seventies. At least one of Marvel's team-books with the new emphasis on drama, THE AVENGERS, prospered. However, a good group dynamic didn't save X-MEN, which concluded its first run in 1970, even though it was resurrected to spectacular success in 1975. And of course a number of solo Silver Age characters from both Marvel and DC also pooped out by the early seventies, notably THE SILVER SURFER, which had received just as much promotion in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR as had THE INHUMANS.

All that said, the thing that currently interests me most about the Inhumans is that Jack Kirby designed them at a point where Marvel was doing very well with most of its line, even if Kirby himself felt that he was getting the short end of the stick in a business sense. Some fan-sources assert that Marvel had some notion of launching THE INHUMANS as a full series sometime in the mid-sixties, but that this plan was dropped, so that the characters didn't get their own berth until debuting as a "co-feature" in 1970's AMAZING ADVENTURES. I tend to believe that Kirby thought the characters up without much input from Lee when the group appeared in 1965 (not counting the solo appearance of the character Medusa, who had appeared sans origin a year or so earlier). But the fact that Kirby didn't seem to have imagine any raison d'etre for these characters suggests to me that in his own work he didn't focus on interpersonal drama to the degree that Stan did. Kirby certainly knew how to evoke drama and pathos, and he probably contributed his fair share of such moments in FANTASTIC FOUR. Nevertheless, I think he did it largely because that's what his editor Lee wanted, not because the continuing "heroes with problems" was his creative preference. Indeed, most if not all of the "team-books" that Kirby did after ending his collaboration with Lee hearkened back to the "old school approach" of the Golden Age. Whether Kirby did the Boy Commandos or the Forever People, a Newsboy Legion for the forties or for the seventies, the team-members were mostly "a swell bunch of guys," which phrase was once applied to the Justice Society of the forties.

To be sure, Kirby's Inhumans, whether in the pages of the FF or in their own feature (a few of which Kirby wrote and drew), were more dour than brimming with bonhomie. But I'm not sure that anyone who followed Kirby's act with these characters ever managed to give them more complex or evocative characterizations-- even though, as noted above, Jenkins and Lee did a better than average job.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE HORRIBLE HOUSE" (ADVENTURES INTO TERROR #29, 1954)

 Probably no trope has been as heavily used in horror comics than that of "the biter bit," where some nasty or even merely unpleasant person meets some terrible comeuppance at the hands of some monstrous entity. Most of these stories depend on a fairly simple turnabout, but this 1954 horror-tale from pre-Marvel Atlas has an extra level of complexity to it.

Unlike many such stories, there is no interest in the psychological outlook of the main character, known only as Mister Belding. The unknown author of the story, who may have been the attributed artist Al Eadeh, presents Belding as a man terrified, like many real people of the 1950s, of an impending nuclear holocaust. Belding is also revealed to be a misanthrope, who states on the second page that "I hate people! I've lived alone all my life." There's no authorial interest in how he got that way; only in his colossal ego: "If anybody survives an atom bomb attack, it should be me!" 

When he has a house built far from the cities that will be the logical targets for A-bombs, his builders give him two related warnings. One builder claims that he'll "go crazy with loneliness," but Belding claims to be immune to any need for human companionship. Another builder warns that the remote area is swampy and that it won't bear a proper foundation-- which alone ought to signal to Belding that there's a logical reason why no else lives in the area. But Belding is obsessed both with being alone and isolated from the atom bombs, so he has the house built anyway.

Unfortunately, one night Belding receives a visit from neighbors he didn't know he had. It seems that at some point someone constructed a cemetery on the swampy land, but the graves all sank into the earth and were apparently forgotten by everyone. 

The "gotcha" then transpires, as Belding's house collapses not from nuclear assault but from the instability of the marsh lands, and Belding's refuge becomes just another of the sunken graves. As an added insult to the injury of suffocating to death, Belding's conversation with the specters suggests that he won't just die and lose all his earthly goods, he'll have to put up with the company of other repulsive dead people like himself for eternity-- a hellish fate for a would-be hermit. (Though one might argue that the spectres may be things that Belding is simply imagining as he dies, which would make the tale uncanny in its phenomenality, the story would lose much of its horror if Belding wasn't about to be tormented throughout his afterlife-- and so I judge the story "marvelous.")

The last ironic twist is a character making the risible comment that the house must have sunk in accordance with Belding's wishes: that he built on the land because he wanted an "underground shelter" against the holocaust. This does raise the question as to why Belding didn't simply construct a real bomb shelter in a more dependable place, but the realistic inconsistency is what makes Belding's misanthropic mania mythic in nature. The author is not interested in a psychological study of nuclear apprehension, such as Philip K. Dick produced about a year later in his similarly themed short story "Foster, You're Dead." But in addition to giving the comics-reader his expected "gotcha-grossout," "House" catches much of the same equation between privacy and death found in this famous couplet from Andrew Marvell:

"The grave's a fine and private place,

"But none, I think, do there embrace."