MYTHCOMICS: "MOON MADNESS" (THE UNSEEN #7, 1952)

 "Searchers after myth haunt strange far places. They climb to the zenith of the sky in the sun-god's chariot; they descend to the depths of the sea to marvel at pearls the size of houses. They visit islands swarming with prehistoric beasts, or with beasts that walk like men. The shadows of the minarets of Araby conceal for them a thousand treasures. Yet for the true epicure of the mythopoeic, there is no better breeding-ground for the combinatory power of archetypal phantasms than the pages of the humble comic book."-- Happily Phony Lovecraft.

      Just like last year I'm only managing to get one horror-story myth-analyzed this month of Halloween. But IMO this one's a doozy. This forgotten gem from Nedor Publishing has no credited writer, so as I've done in the past, I will impute for simplicity's sake full authorship to the credited artist, Jack Katz, later famous for a multi-issue fantasy I've not yet read, name of THE FIRST KINGDOM. After reading this short horror tale, maybe I'll give his fantasy-domain a closer look.

Katz starts off MADNESS with a bang and barely slows up thereafter. Protagonist Emil Jankow, identified in the opening caption as belonging to the class of "vagrants and hobos," is attacked by a mad dog belonging to a "witch-like creature named Agnes." As Emil faints from his wounds, Agnes uses a pistol to kill the dog, sparing Emil's life. The reader alone hears Agnes ruminate that she won't tell the hobo that her dog was rabid, though in due time it will become apparent that the pooch didn't have garden-variety rabies. Aside from naming her watchdog after the Prince of Darkness and having some allegedly "magic" salves on hand, Agnes doesn't seem especially witchy until she warns the recovered Emil to "stay out of the light of the new moon." That Katz departs from the usual werewolf trope re: the full moon shows that the artist was playing fast and loose with lycanthropic mythology.

The next departure is that Emil's wounds from the dog don't heal in the approved Larry Talbot fashion but instead give him a sort of "Phantom of the Opera" disfigurement. This development makes panhandling a little easier, and so does the very non-rabies effect of his injuries: that all dogs become Emil's friends. This also sets him on a fatal course when he runs across wealthy girl June and her dog Duke, and he instantly charms the bite out of the former member of the K-9 corps. (June doesn't quite say that Duke suffered PTSD because his experiences in the war, but it's a fair extrapolation.) June perhaps tosses out too much information when she goes on about how a local named Kirk Lamarr has been June's personal dog-hating Mrs. Gulch. But it's info the reader needs to know, just like learning that, within a week, Emil falls in love with June and resents her boyfriend Jim.

   Now the experienced horror-reader will expect poor Emil-- who at this point has done nothing bad, only had bad thoughts-- will have an unhappy encounter of the lunar kind. And the transformation of the lycanthropic (caninthropic?) victim is marked by an accidental killing before beginning his own killing spree. But the victim's victim is not of another shape-changer as in THE WOLF MAN, but by a member of the canine species that seemed to recognize Emil as a "big dog" of the pack. Emil accidentally shoots Duke dead, and he decides to conceal the dog's death to avoid blowback. (Katz was careful to show that Duke was not June's only dog, so the K-9's passing doesn't mean Emil would have been terminated.) However, Emil then transforms into a were-creature and immediately pounces on the first "smooth white throat" he comes across. But is he transformed by the moon, or by committing a sin against dog-kind?

Even though Emil wasn't bitten by a wolf (except in the general sense of dogs having evolved from wolves), he thinks of himself as a lycanthrope once he's returned to his human (albeit disfigured) form. Emil learns that that local pain Kirk Lamarr believes that Duke killed Emil's victim, and Emil's attempt to cover up his killing of the dog implicates the dead canine in Emil's crimes of the next few days. (It's interesting that June refers to Duke as a "watchdog," the same term Agnes used for her rabid pooch Satan.) The aggrieved dog-trainer seeks to quell his animal rage by chaining himself in his quarters and tossing away the key. I guess he didn't toss it far enough, because June finds it and unlocks his chains, which practically begs Emil to unleash his demon and attack both June and Jim.

  Improbably, Jim is able to drive off Emil with a mere club. Maybe it works because Emil didn't really want to kill either Jim or June? The couple can't convince dog-hater Lamarr that they witnessed a werewolf, though strangely, within the course of one day, some unnamed professor is able to talk the rest of the town into crediting the reality of werewolves. Said prof even convinces the polity that they don't need silver bullets, just ordinary torches, to kill a werewolf. Did Katz have a thing for all the cinematic scenes where Frankenstein's Monster got repelled by torches? Emil's near the end of his run now, because he didn't transform back this time. He decides to seek another victim in the unguarded town.

And who's one of the few people who didn't join the posse, because he didn't believe in werewolves? Why, it's skeptical smarty-pants Lamarr, though strangely he's not home when Emil invades his house, forcing the were-dog to cool his heels a bit. I assume Katz did this so that Lamarr would arrive at his house just as the posse just happened to return to town. It's surprising that Katz spared the dog-hater's life-- certainly no one who read the story then or now would cared if Lamarr had died. Indeed, killing the enemy of the woman Emil still loved would have given the doomed man one last, slightly altruistic deed before dying. But Jim bursts in and destroys the monster with nothing but a thrown torch. In death Emil not only does not look burned by the torch, his "rabies" disfigurement goes away too. I note in closing that Katz does keep drawing the moon in the sky, though technically a new moon should only last about three days, and it sounds like Emil was "wolfing out" longer than that. But I don't think Katz really cared about the moon-schtick popularized by Universal movies. I think he had a genuinely original take on lycanthropy, portraying it as a curse activated less because of the lunar satellite than because of the cursed man's sublimated failings and/or hostilities. And while MADNESS is not a masterpiece like THE WOLF MAN, Katz's tale seems to be playing with some of the same mythic concepts.           

INFLUENCE OF ANXIETY

 Response designed for a forum-post, context implicit.

____________

Because you and another poster raised the spectre of influence between the daughter of Sax Rohmer"s Fu Manchu (1912) and the daughter of Ming in FLASH GORDON of Alex Raymond (and all uncredited collaborators), here are my hot takes.

First off, there's no doubt in my mind that Ming derives from Fu Manchu, even though their specific characters are not very similar. The fact that both have disobedient daughters is one big factor, though surprisingly the big thing everyone knows about Princess Aura-- that she falls big-time for studly Flash Gordon-- is not initially a feature of Fu's daughter Fah Lo Suee.   

Now, the element of a female ally of Fu Manchu falling for one of the heroes is a big part of the first two books, published respectively in 1912 and 1916. Fu's beautiful slave-girl Karameneh inexplicably becomes enamored of Doctor Petrie, and thus helps Petrie and his cop-friend Smith out of some jams. In the second book Karameneh even shoots her master to save Petrie, and the only thing that saves her from the devil-doctor's vengeance is that Fu uses his former servant as a bargaining chip to compel Petrie's aid in the third book.

This book, HAND OF FU MANCHU (1917) also introduces Fu's daughter, though she's not given a proper name and is never disobedient to her father's will. Then there's a lacunae of about fourteen years, during which there are no official Fu Manchu novels (though the doctor kind of "guest-stars" in THE GOLDEN SCORPION). DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU debuts in 1931, and here Fah Suee does get a name, and she does seek to wrest control of the Si-Fan from her father. However, she doesn't ally herself to any Englishman. In this and in the subsequent book, she implicitly uses drugs to make a young guy her lover, though there's no sense that she's in love with him.         

The sixth book, BRIDE OF FU MANCHU, again portrays conflict between father and daughter, though not over any romantic alliance of hers. Then finally, in April 1934, Rohmer starts serializing, in Collier's, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, Fah stuns her dad by claiming that she's fallen in love with Fu's worst enemy, Smith. In two or three later books, this romance is mentioned, and at least once Fah helps the heroes out of a fix, but the plot is left hanging by the end of the series.

However, FLASH GORDON debuts in January 1934 and its first arc, in which Aura meets and desires Flash Gordon (even as Ming desires Dale Arden) finishes up in April-- which as noted is pretty much when TRAIL got started.

Of course, Raymond et al could have taken the element of the romantically traitorous daughter from a lot of places other than Rohmer. But Rohmer did use that element, albeit with a slave-girl rather than a literal relation, for whatever that might be worth.  

    

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

 Here I'll discuss an "alignment-inversion" like the one primarily addressed in Part 3, where the main topic was the alteration that took place when Lois Lane, a Sub to Superman's Prime in the SUPERMAN titles, assumed the Prime posture in the LOIS LANE feature. I said that despite being in the position of a Prime for some years, Lois Lane's status is dominantly that of a Sub-- just like another subordinate-ensemble member who never had Prime status (Perry White) -- because she owes her existence to Superman.  

A similar situation pertains with the cast of the long-lived ARCHIE franchise. Because the titular character makes his first appearance alongside the equally durable characters of Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones, I gave some consideration as to whether Archie was the series' only Prime, or if he, Betty, Jughead, and the slightly later additions of Veronica and Reggie were all Primes within a superordinate ensemble. But it seems to me that the main focus is upon the simple ordinariness of Archie Andrews, "America's Typical Teenager," and that thus the other four are meant to play off him in one way or another. That makes the other four Archie's primary subordinary ensemble, who are the ones who appear most of the time in any ARCHIE story, while a secondary Sub ensemble is formed by other teens (Dilton Doily, Moose and his girl) and various teachers and parents, whose usage is more occasional. 

Thus when in the late forties-early fifties MLJ bestowed ongoing titles for all four Subs, their situation was the same as that of Lois Lane, for no matter how long their individual titles persisted, they were always determined as Charisma Dominant Subs. For the record, the title devoted only to Jughead (ARCHIE'S PAL JUGHEAD), and the one to both Betty and Veronica (BETTY AND VERONICA), lasted into the 1980s. The first title devoted to the acerbic Reggie only lasted five years, 1949-1954, but the concept was revived under a new name (REGGIE AND ME) in 1966 and then lasted until 1980.    

  

However, the setup changes somewhat for a group of phase-shifted variations on the originary characters. The first full wave of Silver Age superheroes had swelled forth at least by 1958, meaning that in 1966 the wave had persisted in the comics for roughly seven years before people began hearing about ABC'S new BATMAN series. Said news began the second wave, in, which many comics companies joined the spandex parade, and MLJ decided to produce spoofy superheroic versions of four of the firm's five best-known characters. Archie was the first, transforming into the noble Pureheart (who sometimes lost his powers if a girl kissed him, implicitly threatening his super-purity). Jughead became Captain Hero and Betty became Superteen, and all three had separate as well as crossover adventures, though it would take a fan more dogged than I to sort out the "continuity" of these haphazard stories.  Still, not even the naivest fan of the time would have believed that all three super-teens were continuous with their absolutely ordinary identities as middle-class/upper-class adolescents. So the whole "super-Archieverse" can't be judged on the same terms as the originary proposition. In essence, all of these superheroes have phase-shifted away from their models. In these stories, it's possible for Betty and Jughead to be Primes in their superhero personas, as much as Archie.   

But there was also-- EVILHEART, the costumed persona of nasty Reggie Mantle. He didn't tend to have separate adventures as did Super-Betty and Super-Jughead. Usually if not always, Pureheart was in those adventures too, because the whole point of Reggie Mantle was that he existed to rag on Archie Andrews, so that's what Evilheart did to Pureheart. So it might sound like Evilheart might be dominantly a Sub antagonist, and his independent adventures would be in the mold of, say, The Joker having his own feature in which he fought with villains and heroes, triumphing over the former and losing to the latter. Evilheart for his part enjoys his first supervillain team-up with none other than Mad Doctor Doom, who was first introduced in the pages of LITTLE ARCHIE in 1962.      

And yet, the Mad Doctor Doom episode loosely anticipates the pattern of all the later Evilheart stories, where he more often ends up making common cause with Pureheart against some third menace, even if Super-Reggie is primarily motivated by the desire to one-up Super-Archie. So for that reason I do regard Evilheart as being just as much a Prime as the other three, because all four super-spoofs exist in their own cosmos and are, to use my new term again, "discontinuous variations."    

VARIATIONS STRONG AND WEAK

 Though I've used the terms "strong" and "weak" at times to denote the way later authors render their variations on originary fictional propositions, a better pair of terms would be "continuous" and "discontinuous."

The continuous variation, usually (though not always) produced by a succeeding author dealing with an earlier author's originary proposition, makes some effort to make it seem as if what he the secondary author writes is largely "in continuity" with most or all of what has gone before.

The author of the discontinuous variation, however, makes little effort to assert continuity with the originary proposition, and may even call attention to the lack of continuity.

To illustrate this, I will mostly concentrate on the examples I used in the two VARIANT REVISIONS essays from last July.

One example cited was the intertwined propositions of DC's first two Green Lanterns. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern was initially "out of continuity" with the Alan Scott Lantern, because the Jordan-creators had only borrowed a few tropes from the Scott version, be the tropes visual (hero wears a ring he can use to conjure up weapons) or explanatory (hero has one specific weakness to his powers). However, DC editor Julie Schwartz decided that since he and John Broome had introduced a spiritual connection between the then-contemporary Flash and his Golden Age ancestor, there should be a similar association between Scott and Jordan. I'd say this never panned out because the rationales for each hero's powers were too different, making it harder to play one off the other. However, from then on the two characters shared an intertwined continuity that most if not all subsequent authors respected. 

 

Not much later, though, Bob Haney attempted to bring back a character he created, The Gargoyle, for a second appearance. But although this second story only took place a few years after the first one, Haney either forgot aspects of the originary proposition or just ignored those elements in order to churn out a quickie filler-tale. This second story was discontinuous with the first proposition, and yet became accepted as the reigning continuity, on which at least one other author based his variation.  

   

In contrast to both, though, when Grant Morrison concocted his new version of Animal-Man, he intended from the start to play up the fact that he was producing a variation on another author's concept. Thus, when he has the current Animal-Man encounter the previous avatar, there are no attempts to paper over the discontinuities. Indeed, putting said discontinuities on display is the whole point, and arguably the entire "Deus Ex Machina" arc in that title is meant to question the validity of an overly niggling continuity-consciousness.

I also pointed out the example of HEKYLL AND JEKYLL. There's no way to imagine a "retcon" that would resolve the differences between the first magpie pair, a married couple, and the second, a pair of mischievous males-- unless one wanted to follow the multiversal path, and claim that they existed in separate universes, having parallel sets of adventures-- though who would want to bother?  

Yet even when there is no direct benefit to observing continuity, it's interesting to see that some franchises generate an expectation of continuous variations. Sherlock Holmes is a public domain character and has been for some time. Yet most authors, like Cay Van Ash in the above pastiche, seek to keep some continuity with the Doyle canon-- and this seems to be the case even with the more preposterous propositions, in which Doyle encounters vampires and Martians and so on. There are a few examples where an author seeks to upend the usual setup, as with the 1988 movie WITHOUT A CLUE, in which Watson is the brains behind the mystery-solving and Holmes is just an actor hired by the doctor.

In contrast, Dracula is just as much in public domain as Holmes, but only a minority of authors seek to abide by the Stoker canon, the most obvious being FRANCIS COPPOLA'S DRACULA. Possibly the early success of the stage play and movie variations, which did not closely follow the original story, encouraged the majority of authors to riff on the bare bones of the vampire, so to speak. Hundreds of discontinuous variations of Dracula have been produced over the last century, often making Dracula a member of a monster-mash and nothing more. Dracula too often gets crossed over with assorted icons, ranging from Billy the Kid to the Filmation Ghostbusters, but in these crossovers, unlike the ones for Holmes, Drac is little more than a shadow of his original self. Marvel's TOMB OF DRACULA falls somewhere in the middle. The comic book's plots don't abandon all the backstories from the Stoker novel, but the emphasis is upon all the new characters devised for the Marvel version of the vampire lord. Similarly, Marvel-Dracula's character is only loosely similar to the one in the Stoker proposition, the better to make him blend somewhat with the multitudinous icons of Marvel, like Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer.      

THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

NEAR-MYTHS: JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. GODZILLA VS. KONG (2023-24)

 

Now THIS is what JLA cluster-crossovers should be: valiant superheroes battling colossal monsters, and monsters battling other monsters, and villains trying to control the monsters before being taken down by the heroes. 

One thing I like about JL/G/K is that even though the DC-verse depicted here is not entirely congruent with the mainstream one-- for one thing, three regular villains and two regular heroes take the dirty nap-- there's no pretense by writer Brian Bucccelato that this is some amalgam universe where the Justice League and the Legion of Doom occupies the same world as the cinematic "Monsterverse." Buccelato possibly realized that it provided more opportunities for exposition if the Legion stumbled into the Monsterverse and brought back its progeny to menace this version of DC-Earth. 

The only icons directly imported from the Monsterverse are Godzilla, Kong, Mechagodzilla, and the Skull-Crawlers, though some new ones are invented to take the place of various Toho-titans. There were no such restrictions on the use of DC characters, so this is not a story for noobs, who really won't be able to tell the players without a scorecard. There's even a scene with some heroes breaking up a supervillain jailbreak in which I, expert though I usually am, strained to figure out some of the obscurities given a few panels here and there.

Characterization is understandably simple since the primary story is about stopping giant monsters, but Buccellato works in some pleasant dialogue nonetheless, and Christian Duce does a fine job of imparting the sense of monolithic hugeness to the big beasts. Sometimes there are continuity goofs because everything's so rushed. When in the story did someone bring the Teen Titans into the mix, and why is the Big S almost killed by Godzilla's atomic fire? If the Legion contacts Deathstroke to employ the League of Assassins, why does Ra's Al Ghul get into the thick of things? But since it's a one-off universe, the blips don't get in the way of all the looney hero/monster/villain fun.