In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here, owes someth...
In case anyone was wondering what MLJ was doing before they were taken over by squeaky-clean Archie and his kindred, here's a splash page as gory as any of the later reviled horror comics.
Back to my debates with online materialists, one of whom tried to counter my position with the idea of "atheists who still believe in things supernatural, just not gods."
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If you choose to search this forum for the word "psychic" you will see that I've noted, possibly a half dozen times, that belief in psychic forces does not presuppose belief in gods.
That, however, does not mean that the former belief was not influenced by the growth of materialist interpretations of the universe.
On this page I responded to (name withheld) as to previous posts in which I asserted the possibility that gods were not necessarily purely imaginary, but may rather have been inchoate forces molded by human imagination into culture-specific icons. This theory is not one in which I "believe," but is rather an agnostic counter to the materialist belief that all gods must be purely imaginary.
But this informal postulate, which I did not originate, was also influenced by mainstream materialism, albeit without being in any way identical with mainstream materialism. This "spiritual materialism" is what is represented by your non-mainstream atheists who assert that supernatural forces are generated by humans and disembodied principles rather than by gods.
I've said repeatedly that theism and atheism grow out of intellectual discourse. Theism is almost certainly first. It's possible that early man did sense what the Polynesians called "mana" in both living and unliving phenomena, but such inchoate forces lack any power to personify the mysteries of the universe for human meditation. Thus we get the articulation of "departmental gods" who administer different aspects of reality, whether physical phenomena like storms or social phenomena like war. Possibly in their earliest forms one would not even call such figures "gods," but something more like the millions-of-years-later Japanese concept of kami.
This informal postulate, though, does not assume that even if this is the way belief in gods evolved, that tribal peoples were conscious of such formulations. They would not have been able to stand back from their own assumptions, just like modern materialists. Therefore it's probable that most tribal humans really did believe that gods had existence independent of human interaction. Naturally any given tribe would have become aware at an early date that the neighboring tribe might have different gods, but this would not have led to the assumption that all gods were imaginary in nature. Rather, it probably led to henotheism, the idea that rival gods exist in the common universe but that the god of one's own tribe is the biggest and the best. This form of theism appears in a few Old Testament passages in which it's implied that the Hebrew God does share his celestial space with rival gods, rather than being the only one.
Eventually we do see the historical development of actual atheism, the spawn of intellectual discourse that I've fruitlessly tried to explain to my opponents. It might have appeared earlier than the documents of the Greeks, but that's our main source for the history of that philosophy. One assumes that theists pushed back against the atheists, as attested by Socrates and his deadly cup, but theists were not the only opponents of atheists.
It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed.-- Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.
We have only sketchy documents of what figures like Epicurus and Lucretius believed, but I think it likely that they are among our first "spiritual materialists." Lucretius believes in the gods as principles more than as departmental chiefs, and while he's not agreeing with "natural philosophers" who believed that Greek science explained everything, he's been influenced by them.
So when we come down at last to modern spiritual materialists, we are dealing with individuals like Lucretius, who have some notion that supernatural forces exist but do not conceive of gods in the sense of mainstream theism. Moderns who attest to supernatural force residing in their chakras, but not in the universe as literal gods, have been influenced by mainstream materialism; in a "man is the measure of all things" formula. By taking this human-centered form of supernatural belief, the supernatural materialists are still subscribing to one doctrine taken from mainstream materialists: that gods are not necessary to explain the functioning of the universe. And thus the discourse of the supernatural materialists remains influenced by atheist discourse, accepting that at least some phenomena are entirely explained by material evidence, including the chakras, which may have also started from theistic belief but grew independent of it thanks to the influence of mainstream materialist discourse.
Though the popularity of Popeye had already hit new heights three years after his introduction in E.C. Segar's THIMBLE THEATER, 1932 also provided the one-eyed salt with a new venue, as he made the transition to animated theatrical shorts. As many before me have mentioned, the mere fact that Popeye had just had a week-long battle with a pirate named Bluto resulted in this one-shot comics villain becoming ensconced as the go-to evildoer for the cartoons.
The Bluto arc and the one after it were just business as usual for Segar, wherein he would generate some loose concept and use it as an excuse for an assortment of gags. However, the arc after the arc that followed Bluto's managed to form the gags into a spoofy satire of politics.
The post-Bluto arc involved Popeye and various other characters rendering aid to King Blozo as he sought to harvest gold from a sunken city in order to solve the economic problems of his postage-stamp kingdom Nazilia. (Whatever the origin of the name, I think it's unlikely that Segar derived the country from a notorious German political party.) However, in Blozo's absence his foremost general Bunzo tries to take over the throne. After being ejected, Bunzo forms a new scheme, hiring a hot young foreign woman to vamp Blozo. Her name is "Dinah Mow," eventually explained by her ability to "spark."
Bunzo only wants Dinah to trick Blozo with the idea that she'll become his queen later (despite the fact that Bunzo is married). But Dinah pitches some woo in Popeye's direction as well. Despite his intention to remain true to his sweetie-pie Olive Oyl, Popeye does yield to the "vampirate's" blandishments. "I thought I could resisk ya by bein' a man of steel, and here ya happing to be a woman fulla magnetism. Arf! Arf!" Olive rails against Popeye, who makes no excuses for his waywardness, though to be sure the sailor's idea of "sparking" is to sit holding the vamp's hand. Dinah conveniently decides she's really in love with Popeye but leaves Nazilia of her own accord.
Blozo's own citizens are still not very impressed with his kingship, so Popeye suggests that Blozo hand out a big nugget of gold to each of his subjects. However, in the tradition of welfare states everywhere, Blozo then finds that no one in Nazilia wants to work for a living. At first Blozo thinks he'll simply tax everyone heavily, but Popeye has a quicker solution: using his skill with dice to turn everyone back into paupers.
But Bunzo challenges Blozo in an election. This is one of the funniest sections, in that Popeye, despite his notorious intregrity (intekrity?), cheerfully tampers with the ballot-box as much as Bunzo's agents do.
One of the first martial heroines in popular fiction, the Golden Amazon, also has one of the most convoluted histories.
Created by British writer John Russell Fearn, the Amazon, a.k.a. "Violet Ray," began as the heroine of four novelettes in the pages of the American pulp mag FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, appearing from 1939-1943. The character seems to have combined aspects of Tarzan and John Carter, in that as a child she was abandoned in the jungles of Venus, yet grew into a powerful crimefighter due to the effects of Venusian environment on her human body, giving her some measure of super-strength. I've read just one of these stories and can attest that it included a lot of knuckle-busting action.
In 1944 Fearn sought to remodel his character for a somewhat more upscale, and perhaps less evanescent, market. The author succeeded, for the Revised Amazon enjoyed twenty-four novels from 1944 to 1960, many of which were published, in whole form or in serialization, in American and Canadian periodicals.
The first appearance of Golden Amazon sparked enough positive reader response that it virtually guaranteed Fearn with a regular berth at the Toronto Star Weekly. However, the first novel is not exactly the adventure of a hero. I speculate that Fearn wasn't exactly sure if his new approach would prove popular, not least because the story wraps up with the apparent death of the main character.
In place of following the model of Tarzan, the Amazon borrows some pages from Frankenstein. This time she starts out as a baby separated from her parents during the London Blitz. Obsessed scientist James Axton uses endocrine-gland experiments to transform the child so that as she matures she will become a veritable superwoman. with superior strength and intelligence.
Some analysts have wondered if William Moulton Marston might have chanced across the early stories before he published Wonder Woman with DC Comics in 1941. There's no evidence of this. Oddly, though, the Axton character from 1944 sounds much like an inversion of Marston's credo as expressed in the 1940s WONDER WOMAN comics. Marston frequently reiterated the belief that not only were women going to win equality with men, they were going to bring to civilization a new era of "loving kindness." Axton sounds somewhat similar, telling a colleague that "there is a beauty of soul, a depth of understanding altogether lovely, which the finest of men can never attain." Axton hopes that his "new woman" will become a leader that will eliminate the world's dependence on the masculine propensity for violence. However, his mutation of the child will have two consequences. First, her accelerated metabolism will burn her out at a young age. Second, because she has to some extent become "masculinized," she grows up with no interest in sexual encounters.
By assorted contrivances Violet is adopted by a regular British family and grows up alongside the couple's natural child Beatrice. Upon reaching maturity in the year 1960-- ironically, the year of her actual creator's passing-- not only is Violet stronger than an average woman her size, she also displays a ruthless desire for temporal power. And here Fearn ingeniously draws upon another "upscale" genre for his revision: what I will call "the tycoon narrative." Stories about big-business "captains of industry" (a term coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1833) had become such a genre in the 20th century, CITIZEN KANE being the most well-known. Violet uses her great scientific acumen to create products that propel her to become an industrial magnate, and her golden-tinged skin gains her the nickname "Golden Amazon."
However, the Amazon makes many enemies. Some are business rivals who try to have her killed, and she's no less ruthless in retaliation-- in one instance, wiping out a planeful of innocents to get one enemy. Other adversaries are her own sister Beatrice, who recognizes Violet's iniquity and turns on her, as does Beatrice's boyfriend Chris Wilson. It's through a literal brawl with this square-shooter that the reader sees that this Amazon does not have literal super-strength, but simply has the optimal strength of a woman, which still gives Wilson a good tussle before he subdues her with judo.
To speed to the end, Violet uses her resources to become a virtual dictator in Britain, thus dedicating her first character arc to the halls of villainy. She is, interestingly enough, undone largely by women, particularly sister Beatrice. She seems to perish of her accelerated metabolism, and that seems to end the matter-- until readers wanted more.
The revised AMAZON is a good melodrama. Fearn never explores the gender politics very deeply, but he makes a fair case for the once canonical idea that women were fundamentally different from men. From this one adventure it's impossible to judge whether or not Fearn has much to say about Marston's favorite subject, female empowerment. But I have the next two books in the series and will make some effort to find out.
Curiously, the cover to the 1963 Ace paperback, in which the company reprinted the short ERB novels MOON MEN and RED HAWK, looks like it belongs with a standard Burroughsian SF-romance along the lines of the Mars books. But the scene, showing a normal sized man dueling a nine-foot armored giant, derives from the end of the concluding novel RED HAWK, the one with the least amount of standard science-fiction content. (In the book the giant doesn't have blue skin or pointed ears, but-- creative license.)
Like MOON MEN, RED HAWK takes place entirely on ERB's future-Earth. In MOON MEN the key conflict only appears to concern the tyrannized Earth-humans attempting (and failing) to throw off the chains of the virtually indistinguishable humanoids from the Moon, the Kalkars. But arguably the real focus is the resistance to ethnic assimilation. The good guys, all of whom are Americans, have managed to keep themselves genetically separate from the invading Kalkars. Yet the Americans are far less persecuted by the literal aliens than by their offspring, who are hybrids of Kalkars and Earth people. The American leader is the descendant of the heroic Julian from the first book, while his worst enemy is a descendant of the villainous Orthis-- and both characters perpetuate their legacy through women from the Moon, Julian through a Va-na woman and Orthis through a female Kalkar.
Three hundred years later, the scope of the conflict has taken several odd turns. If any conflict still takes place in big cities, the reader never hears of it, and the narrative concern with religious suppression utterly vanishes. Instead, the heirs of Julian and Orthis now both lead nomadic tribes in the American Southwest, and the tribes have taken the names of their progenitors: "Julians" and "Or-Tis." There's no more distinction between pure Kalkars and half-breeds, and for all one can tell, all Kalkars on Earth may be mixed-race. In contrast to the first two books, these Kalkars have gone out of their way to practice eugenics so as to distance themselves from common humanity, in that the males are on average seven feet tall. (Apparently the females stay average-sized, since there's a scene in which the hero mistakes a non-Kalkar woman for a Kalkar.)
Said hero is the twentieth scion of the original Julian, but his main name is Red Hawk, and all the people in his tribe have names like those of Native Americans, as well as wearing Native American attire and living in teepees. (They also practice scalp-taking, though ERB does not show this.) But both the Julians and the Or-Tis (which is both a singular and plural noun) are pretty evidently White people who have, for reasons never explored, taken to living like Native Americans. (That the two tribes are not Indians is made clear by ERB's introduction of real, dark-complected people called "In-Juns," more on whom later.) The social organization of the Kalkars is not very well explained. They're not parasites like the old Kalkars, but just unrelenting brutes who treat their women like slaves. Though the line of Orthis was originally allied to the Kalkars, now the Or-Tis tribe has separated from their former patrons, though the Or-Tis and the Julians harbor more hate toward one another than they do for their giant-sized enemies.
What makes all this "Fake Indian" business fascinating is that ERB ends up pursuing the exact opposite theme from that of MOON MEN, in that Julian-Hawk becomes the fulcrum of a movement TOWARD assimilation between the Or-Tis and the Julians. Hawk is actually a fairly chauvinistic hero at the start. Then he's captured by the Or-Tis, whose leader offers the possibility of a peace between them. When Hawk refuses, he's imprisoned with a renegade Or-Tis man. This prisoner claims that the current leader is an impostor, and that there's a real direct scion of the original Orthis out there somewhere, who wants a real peace with the Julians. In actuality, the unnamed man really is this true valid leader, though he barely figures in the main plot, except in that he's the brother of the obligatory Burroughsian heroine.
After escaping the Or-Tis tribe, Hawk falls in with a curious tribe of pygmy-sized people who live in very small teepees and who call themselves "Nipons," after their ancestor, the normal-sized "Mik-do." These Japanese pygmies, whose small stature goes unexplained, are also enemies of the brutal Kalkars, and the Nipons' greatest enemy is a nine-foot giant named Raban. Hawk, being chauvinistic again, thinks Raban is just a superstitious fantasy. But upon leaving the Nipons, Hawk encounters a Kalkar man with a female prisoner, and he nobly kills the Kalkar raider even though he assumes his prisoner is Kalkar too.
The woman Bethelda is a little more contentious than a lot of ERB heroines. Though grateful for her rescue, she withholds her true secret: that though she's not a Kalkar, she is an Or-Tis. Bethelda eventually reveals all and criticizes the warrior for holding her people responsible for the sins of an ancestor long dead. By this time, they've fallen hard for each other, so this leads to the usual ERB trope of the female being captured and the male rescuing her. And her captor is none other than the mythical Raban, who is also the nine-foot-tall armored guy on the cover. After Raban's inevitable conquest the human tribes are united, in part through the wedding of Hawk and Bethelda, and the Kalkars are at last driven to the sea.
If this wasn't already such a long post I'd linger over a lot of Burroughs' character beats here. ERB was a formula writer but he worked in a good range of dramatic and comic scenes here, far more than he has in MOON MAID and MOON MEN combined. Once he even came back to previous themes, for after dropping the matter of cannibalism that occupied a few MOON MAID chapters, the topic arises again in Raban, who purports to eat his victims. And since ERB never gives a reason for his Japanese pygmies, maybe he was just playing with Nordic myth-images, giving readers a world with both "giants" and "dwarfs."
But since I have to wrap up with something, I'll discourse on the Fake Indian thing. On one level, it's tied into Caucasian fantasies about being a nature-dwelling savage outside the bounds of civilization, like the 1984 film RED DAWN. But there's a little more to it.
Burroughs actually had been a ranch-cowboy for a time in his youth, and served with the Seventh Cavalry for a year before his health got him discharged. During his army hitch he claimed he rode with troopers seeking out the Apache Kid, as seen in this post on the FRONTIER PARTISANS blog. So though he didn't interact with the Apaches on a personal basis that we know of, he had some acquaintance with real Native Americans. It's often been noted that the Mars books place John Carter in the middle of conflicts between tribes of "good alien Indians" and "bad alien Indians," and though ERB didn't write a lot of westerns, I think it's evident that he worked a lot of Western archetypes into his books. Thus, even though the real "In-Juns" in RED HAWK have no agency in the novel, one of ERB's most unique lines in all of his stories is spoken to Red Hawk by an old Indian woman, who didn't get the standard message on the Vanishing American:
Like the coyote, the deer and the mountains, we have been here always. We belong to the land, we are the land-- when the last of our rulers has passed away, we shall still be here, as we were in the beginning, unchanged. They come and mix their blood with ours, but in a few generations the last traces of it have disappeared, swallowed up by the slow, unchanging flow of ours. You will come and go, leaving no trace, but after you are forgotten we will still be here.
I wasn't paying much attention to current comics in 2013, so I was unaware that IDW had released five or six one-shots that crossed over the franchise MARS ATTACKS with other properties. I came across MARS ATTACKS POPEYE, and though there's not a lot to say about it, it's a pleasant callback to both franchises. The Martians attack the Earth of Popeye's universe, and the sailor-man's old enemy The Sea Hag abets their wave of conquest. Mad genius Professor Wottaschnozzle comes up with a way to nullify their disintegrator rays, so that the rays only annihilate clothing (but only to a decent level!) Thanks to this leveling of the playing field, Popeye and his irascible daddy Poopdeck Pappy eat their spinach and drive the skull-headed raiders back into space.
ATTACKS is moderately amusing though not laugh-out-loud funny, and is primarily admirable in that writer Martin Powell shows great facility in emulating the voices of Popeye and several of his cast-members, some of whom may be appearing for the first time in a 21st-century comic. Terry Beatty's style is more openly "bigfoot" than Segar's but he's faithful to the designs without being slavish. It might've been amusing to contrast the Old World feel of the Segar strip-- created when a huge portion of American comics-readers were immigrants-- with the "space-age" vibe of the Martians, but one can't have everything.
To quickly recap from my review of ERB's 1923 MOON MAID: that novel's "sequel" was actually written first as a stand-alone story set on a future-Earth dominated by Communism. When that project didn't sell, ERB reworked it into the sort of "science romance" for which he was known. MOON MAID established the existence of a race of humanoids on the moon, and at that novel's conclusion the bad humanoids, the Kalkars, apparently wipe out the good ones, the Va-nas. The one survivor, Nah-ee-lah, is taken to Earth as the wife of MAID's hero Julian V, while Julian's enemy Orthis, an Earthman who collaborated with the Kalkars, remains on the moon, plotting his next move.
Four generations later, the narrator tells how the enmity between Julian and Orthis was resolved: that the two met one another in a spaceship-battle, and when Julian got the upper hand in the struggle, Orthis achieves a pyrrhic victory by blowing up his ship and that of Julian V. But Orthis also leaves behind his seed in a Kalkar woman, and thus, when Julian V's descendant Julian IX reaches manhood, he will contend with the descendant of the original Orthis.
Following the death of Julian V, craven Earth-rulers pave the way for the Kalkars to invade and take over the planet. Obviously in the original story it was probably just Russians and their allies, but the end result is the same: Americans are dominated by tyrants who keep normal humans in bondage and forbid them from worshiping God. Continuing ERB's motif from the first novel, in which Kalkars are described as lazy scum who want others to do all their work, the Earth-Kalkars are the same, and it's their constant tyrannies that cause the powerful young Julian IX to start a revolution.
Surprisingly, ERB spends much more time setting up the revolution than showing it, possibly because he really wants to convince the readers of the Kalkars' evil (and thus, indirectly, of Earth Communism). Yet we don't really see that many "pure Kalkars." I mentioned in my MOON MAID review that ERB illogically referred to the moon-Kalkars as "mongrels," which was impossible in ERB's setup, since the Kalkars and Va-nas were a homogenous people despite their division. But in MOON MEN, most of the villains in the novels are what ERB calls "half-breeds," resulting from the unison of the moon-humanoids with Earth-women, whether willing or not. In this trope I see a strong similarity to Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD, in that Doyle's character Roxton claims that the casual enslavement of Bolivian Indians is largely the fault of Caucasian/Indian half-breeds. Naturally, Julian IX and all of his American friends and relations are treated like "pure" humans, though no one brings up the fact that one of Julian IX's ancestors was an alien Va-na. ERB even claims that the unseen pure Kalkars are not as cruel as their half-breed spawn, because the latter feel like they must be extra cruel to humans because of their mixed heritage. Or-Tis, one of the local commanders of the Kalkars, is the foremost of these, though ERB creates a lot of lesser evildoers on whom the hero vents his wrath before the big climax.
The matter of ethnic mixing also surprisingly comes up in regard to the hero's inevitable romantic interest, a young woman who takes shelter with Julian IX's family. Julian IX falls into immediate love with her-- with the amusing note that he thought his mother the world's beautiful woman until he met this young girl-- and she with him. Inevitably, the nasty Or-tis tries to get control of the girl to debase her, even as his ancestor pursued Nah-ee-lah. The ethnic mixing I mentioned, though, is signified by the heroine's name, "Juana St. John." Why ERB gave this character a Hispanic first name and an English surname will probably never be known. A charitable view might be that he didn't think mixing between different ethnicities was wrong in itself, as long as the products believed in God and hard work. But one will search through the novel in vain for any details on Juana's Hispanic heritage.
Though Juana is a little less of a damsel than Nah-ee-lah, neither she nor any of the other MOON MEN characters are very evocative, and the novel has a downer ending in that the revolution actually fails and Julian IX is executed-- though again, with the implication that he has left behind the seed of a heroic male descendant. I doubt the original stand-alone novel ended this way, and the conclusion is probably the result of ERB's decision to continue another chapter in the saga, set over ten generations later. That said, the end of MOON MEN is very close to that of ERB's probable inspiration, Jack London's 1908 IRON HEEL.
MOON MEN has no mythic core; ERB just keeps blathering about American values and God and the horrors of miscegenation. But I will exonerate the novel of one suspected "crime." I didn't mention this in my MOON MAID review, but there's an odd detail there in which it's asserted that the moon-Kalkars all have hooked noses. Any time one reads of characters being given prominent noses, there's a tendency to think that the author is evoking, consciously or not, a bias against Jewish people. And since the moon-Kalkars are analogues to Earth-Communists-- and since some famous real-world Communists possessed Jewish heritage, like Marx and Trotsky-- I wondered if ERB had worked some anti-Semitism into his series. However, MOON MEN has no mention of hooked noses, and I suspect I won't find any in RED HAWK. More, one of the main support-characters is an elderly Jew, Samuels, whose Jewish background is as respected as the Christianity of the other good guys. Samuels suffers a "noble death" at the hands of the oppressors, and so I tend to dismiss the theory of anti-Semitic influence upon the series, unless I find something really egregious in RED HAWK.
