STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS

 In contrast to some of my revisions, these two should be relatively painless.

I've only used the term "postulate" three times. In the essay THE INFORMAL POSTULATE, I tossed out the titular term in response to a critic's use of the phrase "formal postulate." Then I wrote two linked essays, Part 1 and Part 2 of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE. The only limitation I see in the use of the word "postulate" is that I don't think it has as much broad applicability as my previously used term "proposition," even though the two words mean approximately the same thing. So from now on, I will only speak of formal and informal propositions.

I have used the linked terms "master thread" and "bachelor thread" more often, both beginning in 2020. Here's my rationale for the metaphor from the first part of MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD:

I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

About two months later, I formulated the complementary term "bachelor thread" as a pun on "masters' degrees" and "bachelors' degrees." In the essay DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM, I was particularly focused upon the fact that what I called "open serials" usually did not manifest master-threads.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

Of course, this formulation was not exclusive only to serials, open or otherwise. It's possible for any narrative, whether a serial, part of a serial or a monad, to sustain only a master thread and nothing more, which is the way I used that term in MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3, even though I specified that the master threads in my first two examples were relatively simple in symbolic development next to my third example. In monad-narratives, bachelor threads usually manifest when the author chooses to develop other concerns peripheral to the master thread. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, I spoke of "meaning-threads" in MOBY DICK being subordinate to the book's master thread, and this conception was simply later borne out in the formulation of the complementary "bachelor thread" term.

However, though I still like the "thread" metaphor, henceforth I'll speak only of "master tropes" and "bachelor tropes," in order to make my take on literary thematics hew closer to my analysis of what literature is made of, as per my statement in 2021'S QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM.

just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Indeed, all of the statements I've made about both types of "threads" are symbolic scenarios that take the same form as "tropes," and thus I don't see any difficulty in making the change, except that now all the categories that used to read "thread" will now read "thread/trope" to reflect this altered priority.

 

 

 

ANOTHER EINSTEIN INTERSECTION

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein.

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.-- Albert Einstein.

I encountered these two quotations in Graham Joyce's excellent novel SOME KIND OF FAIRY TALE. Both quotations appear on the Net, which does not necessarily mean that Einstein said those precise words, given the many ways in which celebrity figures are frequently misquoted.

But if one could prove definitively that Albert Einstein, a genius in the realm of the physical sciences expressed these unbounded sentiments in favor of unrestrained fantasy-- what would that mean?

My guess is that Einstein felt that fantasy enlarged the scope of his ability to imagine new patterns, and then to test them as to whether or not those "shadows of imagination" represented anything in the perceived patterns of consensual reality. If this was the case, then one might accuse Einstein of advocating fantasy for utilitarian purposes, as Peter Washington said of Calvino in this quote:

By presenting possible worlds, [the writer] can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

But of course Einstein didn't make any definitive statement as to the utility of fantasy. All he says is that fairy tales are good for intelligence, and that the gift for fantasy has meant more to him than his lauded capacity for "abstract, positive thinking," which I compare to Cassirer's concept of "discursive thinking." 

Purely for motives of self-flattery, I'd like to think that he had some intuition along the lines of my own: that the capacity for fantasy, for representing what may not be real, goes hand in hand with the capacity for testing reality, for representing what seems to be real. 

But as I said-- no one really knows.

MYTHCOMICS: "I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH" (STRANGE WORLDS #1, 1958)

I went into a lot of detail in this essay about the importance "philosophical SF" had on both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1950s, prior to their contributions to "The Marvel Superhero Universe." Thus it behooves me to provide at least one example of such a story from the period following Kirby's return to the company.

Since the title STRANGE WORLDS only lasted five issues, from 1958 to 1959, it was relatively easy to read all five in quest of mythcomics with a philosophical slant. Now, I never claimed that every story at Atlas/Marvel was in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke (any more than was true of the celebrated EC SF-line). Of the fifteen or so comics stories in STRANGE WORLDS, most of them are "gotcha" stories in which some fool or criminal gets his destined comeuppance, or the opposite, in which some steadfast character's travails are validated, if only in the viewpoint of the reader. But LAST not only has a philosophical bent, it also manages to breathe new life into what's often considered one of prose science fiction's hoariest cliches.

After the first two panels, most of the story is related by the "last man" in flashback, though by his own testimony he will continue alongside what is implicitly "the last woman." The flashback establishes that this Future-Earth has banished the majority of human ills, but has remained hemmed in by biological constraints, since humans still only live eighty years or so. But then a report from a space-mission brings back biological data on the planet Xernes. On Xernes, the atmosphere  will allow humans to endure for five hundred years. This immediately fills almost all human beings with a passion to emigrate, to leave a qualified paradise for a garden where the grass seems much greener.

I'll mention in advance that the emigrants never suffer, to the reader's knowledge, any dire "gotcha" fate. As far as the reader knows, all of the emigrants are wildly successful in reaching Xernes, settling the planet and living extended lives, with absolutely no consequences. Such a gotcha, in my opinion, would have diluted the author's philosophical question: is it right for people to desert the "cultures that were born out of the pain and suffering of countless millions of people?" The Last Man doesn't go into detail about why he considers the emigrants "ungrateful, greedy fools." But he avers to the Last Woman that the two of them will manage to build an "even better world" even without all those greedy souls; a world that implicitly will be marked by the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors.

As noted above, there are a number of science fiction stories which end with a man and woman of some futuristic civilization traversing space and becoming stranded on some Edenic alien world, with the big revelation that the man's name is Adam and the woman's Eve, with the clear implication that the "alien" world is really "our" Earth. Usually this trope is simply a bland attempt to recast an archaic myth into science-fiction terms, and some iterations, like the 1966 WOMEN OF THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, are content to use the situation with characters not named Adam and Eve. At most the point is to present the reader with a conclusion that suggests the continuity of the human species in a paradisical environment, wherein Adam and Eve will be fecund and multiply.

Fecundity, however, is not the point in LAST, but rather, continuity between the labors of the past and the labors of the future. Whatever the original intent of those who first told the story of Genesis, the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden has usually carried a tragic note. Because the first two human beings disobeyed God, they were cast out of Paradise and forced to labor for their bread, and Eve, who may or may not have been able to bear children in Eden, became the first woman to know the pains of childbirth. The broad implication of Judeo-Christian myth is that through future obedience to God, mortals have a chance at some "Paradise Regained," if only in some afterlife.

LAST, however, anticipates a contrarian reading of the Story of the Fall along roughly the same lines as the 1967 STAR TREK episode "The Apple." This story also validates the virtues of hard work and the necessity to bear children in response to limited lifespans (though to be sure the STRANGE WORLDS author does not bring up the question of restoring the population except in the most general sense). But since the TREK narrative deals with a genuinely alien race, that tale cannot address the question of a continuity with earlier, hardier cultures. 

LAST interestingly takes both God and The Serpent out of the picture. All that exists is the temptation of Planet Xernes, which takes the place of the Tree of Life in Genesis. Clearly the world of The Last Man is one in which humankind has never been in Eden at all, but has from the start pulled itself up by its bootstraps, and after centuries of suffering, has finally rejected violence and endorsed reason. But whereas all the children of Adam and Eve in the Bible have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the human beings in LAST *are* given a comparable choice-- not in terms of being free from labor, but in terms of being able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor for five times the normal human span. The story's author does not quite say that shorter lifespans force humans to take more risks and to live life more fully. But I think that's implied, and it was certainly a familiar enough theme in 1950s prose SF.

While the penciller of LAST is unquestionably Don Heck, I've been circumspect about the writer because the story bears no writer's credit. Stan Lee usually signed any story he fully wrote, so it's possible that either (a) he had nothing to do with this tale, or (b) that he supplied a basic idea to a writer who completed the actual plot and dialogue. GCD also notes that LAST was used as a template for two other "Adam and Eve" anthology-stories with altered plots, and of those two, Lee DID write and sign one. It's my opinion that writers usually find it easiest to swipe from themselves rather than others because their own earlier works always encode the writers' own story-priorities. In any case, there are also a handful of other Lee works that stress the necessity for risk and conflict, most notably THE ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER. So in my mind, I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a prime example of Lee himself using, or at least signing off on, the use of science fiction for philosophical reflection.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to note that the title contains a mythic irony not present in all similar Adam-Eve SF-tales, since this version of Adam is at once "the last man" and "the first man" on Earth. "The last shall be first," indeed.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 4

 A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.-- CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there...-- ICONIC BONDING PT. 3.

 

In the second quote, I mentioned first two types of bonded ensembles in which villains who had been "familiarity-icons" since their introduction did not incarnate a crossover-value. My first example was a duo of villains, the Enchantress and the Executioner, who had been introduced as a team in their first appearance and who remained in that configuration in most though not all of their appearances (at least up to the point where the latter character dies). The second type, as specified, was that of a coterie of evildoers more or less permanently bonded into the service of a leader. But now I've become aware of what may a third, even more rare type, thanks to beginning a re-watch of the Fox teleseries GOTHAM.

Prior to GOTHAM, I believe every adaptation of the BATMAN franchise has utilized only Batman himself as the sole superordinate icon, or else has combined Batman with various other partners, whether bonded, semi-bonded or unbonded. Most of these iterations also include a sampling of characters from the franchise to serve the same subordinate-icon purpose that they serve in the comics, such as Alfred the Butler and Commissioner Gordon.

GOTHAM formulated a relatively new approach. It's set in the years that most iterations pass over: the period immediately after twelve-year old Bruce Wayne is orphaned. But in this universe, Young Bruce receives succor not only from faithful Alfred but also from a young James Gordon. During the five years of the series, Young Bruce grows older but does not don his caped costume until the show's last episode. Nevertheless, the youth, slowly maturing toward crimefighter status, enters into a superordinate, semi-bonded ensemble with crusading cop Gordon. I say that they're semi-bonded because though both are central characters involved in investigating crimes in Gotham City, they don't "team up" as such but rather pursue parallel courses that sometimes dovetail. 

Most BATMAN iterations also maintain a subordinate ensemble, and that ensemble usually consists of icons who are allies to the hero or heroes. GOTHAM has a wealth of such characters, but the show seems unique in that some of its villains who also belong to the subordinate ensemble, in that they're present in most episodes and are woven into major story-lines. This is NOT the case with the ongoing serial comics, even when they utilize long arcs focusing on various criminal figures. 

Some of GOTHAM's ensemble-icons are relatively mundane characters, either derived from the comics (mob boss Carmine Falcone) or created for the teleseries (ambitious lady gangster Fish Mooney). And some villains from the comics are introduced in long arcs that eventually terminate, just as they do in the comics. But from the show's first episode GOTHAM set up its analogues of three comics-villains so that they would enjoy story-arcs that lasted the length of the entire series. These three were Catwoman (a fourteen-year-old street thief who befriends Bruce), Riddler (an eccentric medical examiner who eventually blossoms into a psychopath), and Penguin (a junior mobster who eventually becomes one of the crime bosses of Gotham).

Now, I've usually said that any time a given episode of a serial crosses over two distinct icons, either unbonded or semi-bonded, that counts as a crossover, even when both are regular members of the main hero's "rogue's gallery." However, much of that logic was based on the idea of the crossover being what I've called "dynamic," something that the regular reader does not expect to see on a regular basis. 

A "static" crossover generates a different aesthetic. That's why I went into laborious detail about this type of crossover in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. In AVENGERS #16, three characters who had only been subordinate icons in other features-- Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch-- were transformed into superordinate icons, possessed of stature rather than charisma. But after that first change of status, the membership of the three new inductees becomes something that the reader does expect to see on a regular basis. So as far as those three icons are concerned, only the one issue in which their status changes is a crossover-story.

A loosely similar change in status takes place in the transition of Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman from the comics-pages to GOTHAM. Within the sphere of Batman serial comics, not counting any narratives focused upon the villains as main characters, the trio are all subordinate icons. However, upon transitioning to the GOTHAM serial, they all become members of that show's cast of regular subordinate icons. None of them have stature, but they do have greater charisma than any of the shorter-term villain-adapations, like Hugo Strange and Firefly. But-- to pursue the same aesthetic I put forth with respect to the Avengers, only the first episode of GOTHAM sustains a crossover between those three characters, simply because they all have agency within the story, though none of them literally meet one another in that first episode.

Now, other episodes can be crossovers when they bring any of these characters into proximate contact with other adapted villains from the comics. A second-season arc introduces GOTHAM's version of The Firefly. The TV character has almost nothing to do with the template provided by the comics, not least in that the TV version is female. I would tend to say that Firefly just being in the same story as Penguin and Riddler is not much of a crossover, if it is one at all, specifically because the latter two have been "regularized." 

Yet in the same arc Female Firefly is befriended by Young Catwoman, and the two pull off a robbery together. And at least the specific episodes showing that interaction carry the "dynamic crossover" vibe. 

All this to say that at least the three premiere villains of GOTHAM don't automatically cross over with one another, or with other villains, unless there's a narrative effort to transition past the bond tying the three of them into high-charisma members of the subordinate ensemble.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to add "The Court of Owls," whose presence is only implied in the first episode, but who are later identified as the killers of the Waynes. They, like Penguin, Catwoman, and Riddler, are also "crossovers" only for the first episode, albeit by implication only.

NULL-MYTHS: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO (2007)

 I read this collection of stories online and have not been able to find out if the stories made individual appearances except in TPB format. But frankly, it's not something I care much about.

The comic is apparently filmmaker Rob Zombie's goofy salute to monster flicks and Mexican luchador movies. The titular Superbeasto is a brawny ex-wrestler who goes around hitting bars and hitting on bimbos (Santo would be aghast). He keeps getting mixed up in adventures with monsters, Martians and super-villains, amid lots of nudity and bad jokes, nine-tenths of which are pop culture references.

If I wasn't going to do a review of the animated SUPERBEASTO film I probably wouldn't have written this much about this non-comical comic book. But I did like this splash page by artist Kieron Dwyer.

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION

For once, I got permission from a forum-poster, one DoctorHermes428, to reprint here a post from CHFB that sparked my current essay. The conversation involved in part talking about the reasons why in the late 1960s Jack Kirby declined to accept any offer Stan Lee may have made re: taking over Lee's de facto Art Director duties for Marvel Comics, and why he Kirby decided instead to sever relations with Marvel in 1969 and go to work for DC Comics under head editor Carmine Infantino.

____________

I don't see how Jack Kirby would have enjoyed being Art Director, no matter if it paid better. He loved working on his own, sitting up all night over the drawing board. Being in an office with people coming in and out all day, the phone ringing, arguments over a cover layout... all this would have annoyed him beyond bearing (as I see it).
What happened at DC really broke Jack Kirby's heart. His grand plans for the Fourth World books where he had some of his favorite creators working for him, as well as his ideas for a line of black and white magazines, weren't supported by DC (mostly Carmine Infantino). 

I don't think Kirby was ever the same after this. He still turned out some fine comics but increasingly he was jus going through the motions. The spark had been damped. He wasn't out to change the world or create his life's work, he just settled down to make a living. I know most people will say, "It's just comic books, what's the big deal?" but to me it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in pop culture ever. -- DoctorHermes428.

Now in my essay STAN, JACK, AND JOE STUFF I mentioned in a general sense the way the Marvel Universe had in essence undermined Kirby's independent way of doing comics, though I didn't address any long-term creative consequences. I wrote:

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different [from the Simon-Kirby collaboration], and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.

 First, I should enlarge on what I said about "new directions." 

I've the impression that both Lee and Kirby read widely in many pulp genres as young men, and that, unlike many of their contemporaries, they were able, whether with one another or with other collaborators, to convey that enthusiasm to their young reading-audience. And of all the genres they both absorbed, the most important one to their 1960s collaborations was the genre of science fiction.

Now, the prose pulps of the 1940s would have offered a rather schizophrenic view of the genre, for one could encounter on the stands both pure "gosh-wow" space operas like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Captain Future alongside and deeper, more thoughtful philosophical meditations by authors like Asimov and Heinlein. So far as I can tell, though, almost no comics raconteurs of the 1940s tapped into the philosophical side of SF. All, including Lee and Kirby, were totally invested in "gosh-wow." And I will extend that argument (for reasons that will soon become clear) to the employment of SF in American cinema. In the decade of the 1940s, nearly no "philosophy-SF" was attempted, and the few attempts hardly came close to touching the hem of Fritz Lang's trouser-leg.

But comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship  SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I can't say at present how much the changes to comics-SF and movie-SF affected either Lee or Kirby in the first half of the fifties. I don't think by that time either man was likely to be reading pulp magazines any more, whether the magazines were simple or sophisticated. But I have the distinct impression that both of them kept a weather-eye on the new breed of SF-movies, and that both men began emulating cinema's version of "philosophical SF" in their comic books, and MAYBE imitating EC's efforts in that department too. How much these emulations affected their work in the early 1950s is not important to my thesis. But it seems without question that when they started collaborating on SF-work in the late 1950s-- even on the works where Stan's brother Larry Leiber provided the dialogue-- they began giving the characters in their short-term anthology-tales more characterization than anything one could see in DC's gosh-wow stories of the decade.

The DC gosh-wow dynamic also informed the company's SF-heavy superheroes of the late fifties and early sixties: FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE. But when Lee enlisted Kirby to collaborate on their flagship superhero title in 1961, the first thing they did was to work in one of the tragic monsters they'd been using in their SF-anthology tales, but as an ongoing hero. 

Though Lee and Kirby were very different individuals and had very different attitudes toward their creative endeavors, I think the synergy between them came from a common understanding that you could tell far more engaging comics-stories if the characters were at least on the same level of a movie like 1953's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. From the years 1961-1964, that's as far as their aspirations went.

Then, during the years 1965 through 1967, Kirby goes through a period of incredible dynamism in terms of designing new characters. In FANTASTIC FOUR alone, he visualized the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Kree, and the Black Panther in that short period. It's possible, as Kirby apologists believe, that Lee simply let Kirby create everything during that period and just filled in the dialogue. But there's no literal proof that Kirby never picked up any ideas from his editor and collaborator. One can only say that Lee probably could not have designed a character to save his life. That said, before Kirby wasted time coming up with a design for comics' first Black superhero, I think it's axiomatic that Lee would have signed off on spotlighting such a character. Indulging some of Kirby's wilder flights of fancy didn't mean letting the artist do whatever he pleased. Lee was the editor, the guy who made decisions about what did or didn't benefit the image of the company he was building into a small empire. So if Lee had wanted to turn King T'Challa into just another White jungle-hero, that's what Kirby would have been obliged to draw.

As DoctorHermes says, in the late sixties Kirby saw that for the first time his works were getting a little serious attention from the non-comics world. He didn't think, probably correctly, that he was getting due credit for his contributions-- though to be fair, outsiders would not have cared about the specifics of who created what. As I said in my earlier essay, only hardcore fans kept track of such minutiae. For the last two years of his second Marvel tenure, Kirby reined in his creative impulses, probably to keep from giving away any more profitable ideas to the company. One anecdote suggests that Kirby might have shown Stan Lee a few rough ideas he'd later take to DC Comics. When some interviewer related this anecdote to Stan Lee, the Marvel editor typically said that he didn't remember one way or the other.

Ironically, one of the models for Kirby's "Fourth World" was not a major SF-author, but the foremost fantasy-author of the sixties decade, J.R.R. Tolkien. To be sure, the only thing Kirby really took from Tolkien was a general metaphysical attitude toward the struggle between the Good of New Genesis and the Evil of Apokolips, a theme not present in most SF prose works. But almost all of the imagery of the Fourth World stemmed from science fiction, not fantasy. 

What Kirby presented in the Fourth World was usually "gosh-wow" SF garnished with occasional philosophical content. Nevertheless, the scripts he wrote were fully as ambitious as those he co-created with Lee. I think it's likely that, aside from just wanting to be independent of his collaboration with Lee, Kirby hoped to establish his Fourth World as an artistic rival to the Marvel Universe he'd helped build.

I like many fans wish that Carmine Infantino had allowed the Fourth World story to come to a decent conclusion. But even given such circumstances, I don't think Kirby-at-DC had a chance in hell of challenging the popularity of Marvel. I hypothesize that in the early years, both Lee and Kirby probably enjoyed, as much as any professional adults could, the fannish pleasure of having two heroes from different features clash. At least I can't look at the 1964 "The Hulk vs the Thing" and see anything but two creators having fun, rather than just hacking out a job for pay. But when Kirby went to DC, the only way he could prosper at that company-- where various characters were parceled out into separate feifdoms-- was to keep his creations isolated from everything in mainstream DC, apart from some minor usages of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and new incarnations of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. 

By 1970, though, the DC approach of keeping their features largely isolated from one another was beginning to lose favor with the hardcore fan audience. Those fans were a minor subgroup of the general audience, of course. But the casual comics-readers weren't ready to commit to Kirby's big project. Could the hardcore fans have made the Fourth World profitable enough to keep it going a little longer? No one can possibly know. All we know is that comics fandom of the early 1970s was divided on the merits of the New Kirby Universe. I've seen a fair number of fans reminisce that they just couldn't get into Kirby's rather eccentric scripts, and that may be because they'd become accustomed to the greater quality control seen at Marvel under Lee's editorship. I'm fairly sure that Don Thompson expressed contempt for the Kirbyverse in his fanzine NEWFANGLES, just a year or two before he and wife Maggie began writing for the tradezine THE BUYER'S GUIDE.

I concur that after the premature cancellation of the Fourth World books, Kirby never again sought to equal the incredible creativity of either that creative era or of the 1965-67 period. Some particular ideas are very good; some are pretty bad. As for mainstream comics after Marvel's classic period, I don't see a lot of writers and artists seeking inspiration from either prose or cinematic SF with the intensity that I discern in the works of Lee and Kirby. More often, I saw the tendency to rework tropes from the Lee-Kirby days, or from standout SF-comics of the sixties, like the Fox-Infantino ADAM STRANGE. (Chris Claremont riffing on the ALIEN movies is not my idea of a meaningful SF-influence.) Kirby's creative decline mirrored the demise of both gosh-wow SF and philosophical-SF in the comics medium so far as I can see, as Lee's linking of superheroes and soap-opera melodrama (which merits separate discussion) took precedence. 

And that's as good a place as any to end these somewhat doleful meditations.

NEAR-MYTHS: "IN THE GALLOWS OF THE GHOUL" (HANGMAN #8, 1943)

Many superhero comics of the Golden Age possess the extravagant and horrific elements of Gothic prose fiction, and a fair number of them use an expressionist style that's sometimes labeled "Gothic." The series I'm considering here, THE HANGMAN from MLJ, is one with such an artstyle.

The earliest prose Gothics, such as THE MONK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, are noted for emphasizing a particular horror-element: that of incest. Despite the fulminations of comics-haters, most comics of all genres seem innocent of this particular element, in its sexual form.

In other essays I formulated an umbrella-term, "clansgression," to include all literary effects that even suggested incestuous activity or feelings, even if actual sexual transgression did not transpire. One form that did occasionally appear was the form of violence-clansgression. This usually took the form of madness-- fathers killed daughters, or brothers sisters-- but no sexual activity was suggested; such events were mainly melodramatic excess.

On the surface, "In the Gallows of the Ghoul" seems one of these. A madman, Jed Jennings, strangles his sister Mary, and on the next page throws his nephew out a high window. But Mary's plight has come to the attention of the heroic Hangman, and he saves the boy, though he can't prevent Jed's escape. So far, just "ordinary madness."

Hangman then tells his girlfriend the tale Mary told the hero (in his other identity)-- and then the story takes an unusual turn. Jed had been the sole support of his "widowed half sister." But when Mary conceives a child-- presumably from the late, unnamed father-- Jed becomes tormented with worry about being able to provide for both of them. As rendered by artist Bob Fujitani, the uncredited writer shows Jed spiraling down into madness, feeling himself mocked by the outside world-- though it's hard to say why the impoverished fellow would think the world would mock him for being poor. Then Hangman concludes his story, speaking of a "secret" revealed to him by Mary-- only to have the last narration cut off by the madman's appearance. Jed claims that his "secret" is that he suffered from a "brain disease" that made him feel persecuted. The villain kayos the hero, and threatens to strangle the hero's girlfriend the same way Jed strangled his sister. Hangman rises. Jed runs at him with a weapon, Hangman dodges, and Jed takes the same high dive out a window that he bestowed on his nephew, but with fatal results.

Yet the unknown writer created some odd discordances in the narrative, possibly even strange enough to make young readers think twice. The first picture those readers would've got with regard to Jed during the backstory was that when his half-sister was delivering her child, he was pacing the hospital floor "as though he were her husband, instead of her half brother." Then his first words to the doctor express his wish that the child will be born dead. In adult melodrama, these two elements lead to one conclusion: Jed *is* the child's father, but he's so ashamed of his sexual congress with his half sister that he wants all evidence of the act expunged.

Possibly the writer actually played around with using this raw idea-- man wants to murder his sister and sister's child-- but the writer realized he couldn't get away with such adult material in a kid's comic, even a gory one. Thus the script claims that Jed's concern is about having enough money to feed another mouth in addition to that of his half sister. And since worries over money were not enough to motivate a murder-- particularly since Jed could have just picked up and left Mary and her son to their fate-- the writer has to add in the excuse of a "brain disease."

Admittedly neither Mary nor her kid, due to their brief appearances, provide any support for this view. But I find it odd that the writer specified that Jed and Mary were half-siblings. It would make more sense if the two had been raised together, so that Jed felt a responsibility to take care of a full sister. But if they're half-siblings, the reader has no expectation about their having been raised together. Indeed, if they were not raised together, one might expect that sexual inhibitions would not have been naturalized by the so-called "Westermarck effect,"

Is it clear that literal sexual incest occurs in "Ghoul, as it does in Matthew Lewis's MONK. No. But Jed's extreme antipathy for his sister's son would have been a trope that many adults of the period would have recognized within the framework of an adult melodrama, enough to at least suspect some forbidden hanky-panky. The kids reading HANGMAN COMICS probably did not think twice about the matter, and probably accepted the explanation given. But the writer of the story was certainly an adult in the early forties, and one can't presume that he was at all innocent of the tropes used by adult melodramas. Even calling a man a "ghoul" is suggestive, not of a victim of psychological guilt and/or brain disease, but of a being that transgresses against society. And rather that transgressing by eating the flesh of corpses, Jed Jennings seems to commit murder to cover up a very different "sin of the flesh."