CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS PT. 2

 

I ended Part 1 on this observation: that even though it was possible for raconteurs to use the name of a famous literary character for any number of secondary doppelgangers, the mere use of the name did not confer a prior status or charisma upon a doppelganger that shared no points of continuity with the original. Thus, a few dozen Dracula-doppelgangers may register as either strong or weak template deviations of the Stoker creation—but “Dracula, Superhero” did not. The latter would be a “total template deviation,” in that he has no gradations of “strong” or “weak” points of continuity.

A similar “total deviation” appears in the case of impostors who assume a familiar guise for some clandestine motive. A few months before Marvel Comics revived the 1940s hero Captain America, Stan Lee had a criminal impostor, the Acrobat, assume the guise of the WII hero in order to deceive the Human Torch. The Acrobat was a total deviation because he clearly shared no continuity with any previous version of the star-spangled adventurer. 

Once a continuity was forged between the forties and sixties version of the character, a “retcon” had to be devised to explain away a previous fifties-era iteration of both Captain American and his sidekick Bucky. Those characters then became demonstrably separate from the original iterations.

The clandestine motive may even remain hidden only from the doppelganger. In the amusing script for issue #4 of THE JOKER, an actor playing Sherlock Holmes suffers amnesia, and becomes convinced that he is Holmes. He then assumes the Holmes persona in order to track down and defeat the Clown Prince, though neither the Joker nor any reader of the comic thinks that the actor is the real thing.

Cycling back in the other direction, it’s possible to have a valid template derivation even without using a famous name, by invoking only images or tropes familiar to an audience. A major plotline of the first LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN sequence includes a turf war in 1890s London between perennial Holmes-foe Moriarty and a mysterious figure called “the Doctor.” Moore used both images and verbal tropes to imply that the Doctor was Fu Manchu, but he never named the character since Fu Manchu is still trademarked, unlike all the public-domain characters in the LEAGUE franchise. 

Similarly, Moore may not have been sure as to whether the prose-and-film character Bulldog Drummond was free and clear. Thus when a version of the character appears in BLACK DOSSIER, Moore changed the doppelganger’s given name from the “Hugh” of the original prose books to “Hugo.” Ironically, the prose character is barely known to modern audiences, having been eclipsed by cinema’s heavily glamorized “strong template deviation,” but Moore’s “Hugo” bears more resemblance to the rude, brutish character in the original prose series.

However, also in DOSSIER we find a “total template deviation” of a different nature: the spoof. The story also includes “Jimmy,” an easily recognizable parody of James Bond, but Jimmy has no significant points of commonality with the Bond of either prose or films. Moore created Jimmy to mock what he deemed the unlikable aspects of James Bond, but he lays it on so thick that the reader no longer believes that there exists any continuity between the two agents, any more than one could believe that “Bats-Man,” a spoof of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, had anything in common with any version of Batman.

Some points of continuity may exist when the doppelgangers are not merely impostors, but re-creations of the originals that invoke specific memories in those that observe them. In the story “Santa Claus in Wonderland,” Santa never actually meets any denizen of that Lewis Carroll domain; he merely dreams his encounters with Alice, the Mad Hatter et al. But these dream-figures maintain at least a weak continuity with the originals, because Santa imagines that they are like the characters in the books (which for the most part, they are).

However, in SCOOBY DOO 2, the teen detectives and their Great Dane encounter doppelgangers who are artificially concocted versions of ”spooks” who were all originally just costumed human beings. As entertaining as it is to see the Scooby Gang attacked by a “legion of doom” that seems made up of their old enemies, these artificial menaces no more share identity with their originals than a Hulk-robot does with the Incredible Hulk.

One more "total deviation" will suffice for the time being: the type openly based on some familiar characters but who are meant to be entirely separate characters. The four main characters of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS do not claim to be identical in any way with their 1950s SF-movie models, who are, going left from right, the Fly, the Fifty-Foot Woman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Blob. Because they don't share any continuity with their models, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS PT. 1

In CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2 I introduced the notion of "crypto-continuity," using the term to describe the way the second cinematic King Kong (of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA) retains some of the stature of the original Kong from the 1933 film, despite all the "irreconcilable differences" between the two iterations. I didn't explain my term, but I simply meant that the continuity shared by the two was partially "hidden" by all the discontinuities. Yet the discontinuities in that case are relatively weak in that they don't keep casual viewers from thinking of Kong II as co-existent with Kong I, which means that Number Two still possesses essentially the same stature as Number One. Ergo, employing the terminology that I introduced in CONVOCATION PT. 4, I consider Kong II as a "weak template deviation" of the original template provided by the 1933 KONG film.

"Crypto-continuity" is certain not unique to crossovers, for the principle pertains to any adaptation in which a secondary work fails to match up with the continuity of the primary one. The 1931 adaptation of DRACULA, for example, possesses several discontinuities with the original 1897 novel. Yet the 1931 film would also qualify as a "weak template deviation" of the original work for the same reason cited above, because the average viewer can see a fairly strong continuity between original and derivation in terms of the plot-action and character-depiction. 

The opposition of the weak type, plainly, is the "strong template deviation," of which I wrote in Part 4:

...there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.

This was a misstatement on my part, for the passage suggests that my term "strong template deviation" applies only to what I later called "innominate texts." In that section I was principally discoursing on the character of Billy the Kid from the 1966 BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA, explaining how this cinematic version of William Bonney had nearly nothing in common with the real gunfighter.

 However, the movie's version of Dracula also has nearly nothing in common with the Dracula of the original Stoker book, so he too is a "strong template deviation." (Certainly no one trying to emulate the Stoker character would have invented a Dracula who's immune to gunfire but gets knocked out when the Kid crowns the vamp with a thrown pistol.) 

That said, even a strong template deviation may display the same stature found in the original template, and this applies not only to the Dracula of the 1966 horror-western, but also to the various counts seen in OLD DRACULA, DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, and ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. But to pursue the point I made at the end of WHAT'S  IN A NOMINATIVE TEXT?, it's certainly possible to use the name "Dracula" for some character who has absolutely no resemblance to the Stoker template, as we see with the "bad-but-not-bad-enough-to-be-good" Dell comic book entitled DRACULA, otherwise known as "Dracula, Superhero."

 

NEAR-MYTHS: THE JUDAS CONTRACT (1984)

 

  

 

 

I referenced this TEEN TITANS story-arc in my essay NO FOOL LIKE AN OLD PRO, where I talked about the futility of imposing moralistic restrictions on transgressive content in art. More recently, I decided to reread JUDAS CONTRACT and review it. I was certain that it was not a mythcomic, but was it just a near-myth, like many other stories in the Wolfman-Perez corpus, or a null-myth, like the narrative I reviewed here?

 

My verdict is that although writer Wolfman’s focus here is the same as in “Trigon Lives”—the almost Manichean presence of sheer evil—here his focus is a little better because he embodies his evil not in some road-company Satan, but in a teenaged superheroine, the junior to the older teens (and non-teens) of the Titans group. This is “Terra,” who is admitted into the ranks of the Titans despite her generally snarky attitude and occasional outbursts of uncontrolled rage.

 

According to Wolfman’s public statements, he meant to fake out readers by making them believe that Terra would fulfill a role not unlike that of Kitty Pryde in Marvel’s X-MEN. I don’t how many readers were fooled back in the day—Wolfman is not exactly known for the subtlety of his writing—but the fact that one established Titan, Beast Boy, was deeply in love with the minx probably helped put the hoax across. After a handful of issues in which Terra serves as an apprentice member of the super-group, the first issue of “Judas Contract” reveals that she’s a mole, using a miniature eye-camera to take pictures of the Titans’ routines and local haunts. She then funnels this intel to one of the heroes’ worst enemies, Deathstroke the Terminator. The same issue also reveals that fifteen-year-old Terra is not only Deathstroke’s partner in crime, but also his partner in bed.

 

Once Wolfman tips his hand in the first part, a great deal of time is devoted to depicting the ways in which Deathstroke systematically captures capture of most of the heroes, all of whom look rather stupid for not harbored any serious suspicions of the teen traitor—not Raven, despite her empathic powers, and not the former Robin, with his detective training. I say “former Robin” because it’s also in this story-arc that Dick Grayson assumes his new (and still current) superhero identity of Nightwing. He’s the only Titan to escape capture, though he’s only able to secure the release of his friends with the help of yet another “new member.”

 

As if to compensate for the loss of Terra, he and Wolfman debut the character of Jericho, who can possess the body of most if not all living beings and usurp their wills. Just to ramp up the soap operatics, Jericho also happens to be the son of Deathstroke. The arc also reveals the origin of the Terminator and his own tangled familial history, but neither Deathstroke nor his superhero son rise to the level of mythic presences.

 

Prior to the inevitable scene in which the captive heroes are released by Nightwing and Jericho, Wolfman twists the knife for his protagonists by having Terra strut around, gloating about how easily she tricked them. When the rescue comes off, followed by the usual pyrotechnics, Terra goes berserk, lashing out at Deathstroke as well for supposedly betraying her. In her big death-scene, Wolfman leaves no doubt that she’s a “Bad Seed” with no real motive for her obsessive hatred of all things good: “Due to the fault of no one but herself, she is insane. No one taught her to hate, yet she hates… without cause, without reason.” At least one later writer chose to claim that Deathstroke had driven her mad with a drug meant to enhance her powers. But even though Wolfman’s portrait of destructive behavior lacks any psychological depth, I prefer the idea that this “nasty Kitty Pryde” is just evil for the sake of being evil.

 

On a side-note, Wolfman and Perez seem to have had eye-symbolism on their minds during this arc. The first section of the arc repeatedly emphasizes “The Eyes of Tara Markov,” meaning the camera-implant with which the traitress records everything she sees while spying on the Titans. Jericho also uses “the windows of the soul” to make his power work, since he must catch the gaze of anyone he wishes to control. During the big end-fight, Jericho possesses his evil father and makes him slug Terra, after which she tries to kill him as well as the escaping Titans. Then, if all this eye-stuff wasn’t enough, Beast Boy commits a classic “injury to the eye.” Even though the shapechanging hero doesn’t believe that Terra’s truly corrupt, he turns himself into a small insect and assails the camera-lens in one of Terra’s eyes. Instead of making her more vulnerable, the minor injury enrages her so that she loses control of her powers and kills herself. Though Wolfman and Perez could have chosen a lot of ways to inflict this injury, and even though Beast Boy isn’t being vindictive when he assaults her, the attack on the traitorous “eyes of Tara Markov” provides an ironic way for the simon-pure heroes to vent their wrath on the rogue heroine—and to pave the way for a new member who knows how to use “the power of the gaze” for the forces of good.

THE READING RHEUM: JIREL OF JOIRY (1934-39/1969)

This 1969 paperback was one of my "gateway drugs" to the super-genre of fantasy, and as I remember I purchased this along with my first collection of CONAN stories. In those pre-Internet days I had no idea that the titular character was the first noteworthy sword-and-sorcery heroine in prose fiction, and I'm not sure that I knew (though I believe I soon learned) that JIrel's creator C.L. Moore was one of the pioneering female fantasy/SF writers from the days of the American pulps.

The five stories in this volume were the only ones Moore wrote with this character, except for an anomalous "crossover" story between Jirel and Moore's space-opera hero Northwest Smith, reviewed here. All of the stories appeared in WEIRD TALES, and may have been a response to the popular success of Robert E. Howard's Conan series. However, whereas the Howard stories are rigorously plotted historical epics with a smattering of magical elements, Moore's five Jirel stories are all wild phantasmagorias of violence and bizarre supernatural imagery. There's never more than hints about the background of the fiery, sword-swinging heroine, who has somehow risen to the rulership of a medieval French province, Joiry, but who spends most of her time fighting mystical threats. I'll discuss some of these in detail, so-- SPOILERS.

The first story in the series, "Black God's Kiss," was published in 1934, and it's easily the best of the five. "Kiss" starts off with a bang, showing Jirel in the throes of defeat, taken prisoner by the warlord Guillaime, who has also conquered Joiry. Guillaime kisses Jirel, suggesting that he'd like to make her his leman, and when she responds by sinking her teeth in his throat, he belts her and sends her to the dungeon. Jirel breaks free and decides that the only way to strike back against the warrior is to venture down a forbidden stairwell that leads to Hell itself. Once there, Jirel braves a variety of bizarre Lovecraftian menaces, none of which resemble the standard horrors of the medieval Hell. Finally she finds a weapon, acquired by kissing the stone lips of a black statue, and when she communicates the kiss to Guillaime, he perishes immediately. In a turnabout sure to be unpopular with feminists, Jirel then belatedly realizes that since being forcefully kissed by the warlord, her hate for him was really an all-consuming love.

"Kiss" evidently pleased the readers of WEIRD TALES, for Moore followed up with "Black God's Shadow." Following the events of the first story, Jirel has managed to re-take Joiry, but she's haunted by the spirit of Guillaime, tormented in the afterlife, Jirel assuages her guilt by once more descending into Hell to liberate the warlord's spirit. Though Moore tries to combine some new horrors with those familiar from the last trip, the story lacks the narrative drive of its predecessor.

The title of the third tale, "Jirel Meets Magic," seems odd given her previous journeys to Hell, but it is her only meeting that the swordswoman has with a sorcerer (discounting "Starstone.") Jirel pursues the rebel magician Giraud into a weird dimension, where she finds that Giraud has a protector, an enchantress whose name, Jarisme, is modestly close to that of Jirel's. The two women hate each other at first sight, but Jarisme doesn't kill Jirel right off due to a vague prophecy of doom. Jirel pursues Giraud and Jarisme to the latter's castle, where the warrior woman witnesses a convocation of bizarre alien beings, all apparently sorcerers allied to Jarisme. Despite the superior powers of her adversaries, Jirel triumphs as expected.

In "The Dark Land," Jirel spends nearly no time in the real world, when Pav, overlord of a weird alien dimension, spirits her into his realm. Pav has observed Jirel's adventures in dimension-hopping and wants her to be his new queen. Pav's human form is essentially an illusion, as he is coterminous with his whole dimension, so he has no human weaknesses. Only by seeking out Pav's previous queen can Jirel manage to escape her absorption into this alien domain.

The last story, "Hellsgarde," includes no voyages to otherworlds, though most of the action takes place in the haunted castle of the title.  Jirel is taken prisoner by a weird, vampire-like family, whose purpose is to lure out the spirit of their ancestor, who assaults the noblewoman with kisses. (These days, the lustful ghost probably would not be quite so restrained.) Jirel isn't able to save herself this time, and she perseveres only because the vamps's real purpose is to feed not off her, but off her spectral attacker.

One interesting aspect of these five tales is that even though Moore produces some tantalizing "cosmic horror" images worthy of Lovecraft, those images possess a greater vibe of sexual perversity than one finds in the Providence writer. Moore mostly wrote short stories, aside from two solo novels and some book-collaborations with her husband Henry Kuttner, so she probably never would have contemplated a longer work with her intriguing creation, nor would she have believed such a work would have been saleable. Today a Jirel of Joiry novel could find an audience. Yet the unique blend of perversity and cosmic imagery could probably never be duplicated in these more politically correct times, so it's best to leave the first lady of sword and sorcery to her own era.

  

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #7

 From CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #32: almost certainly the first "Mole Man" at Timely, though the character is so forgettable, I doubt Lee remembered the name years later.

NEAR-MYTHS: “SANTA IN WONDERLAND,” SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES #2 (1943)

 

This Santa-tale, which might have been crafted by the same creator(s) of “Santa Claus in Trouble,” isn’t nearly as strong in the mythic sense. But since I’ve been writing a lot about crossovers lately, I can’t resist the temptation to hold forth on the novel idea of having the folkloric figure of Santa interact with the literary creations of Lewis Carroll.

The reader may suspect that the old “all a dream” resolution is in the offing when Santa, about to go to bed before making his Xmas Eve ride, encounters young Alice, who wants him to bring Christmas to Wonderland. Good-hearted Santa can’t resist her appeal, and she leads him to the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. Since the author has a lot of Wonderland-tropes to condense into a very short tale, Alice gets the old fellow to try a few bites of a “magic mushroom” (minus its resident Caterpillar). The two of them spend a couple of pages changing size, until Santa finally gets into Wonderland (“At least this is easier than going down a chimney”). 

He soothes the weeping Mock Turtle with a toy of its own species, but the White Rabbit gives Santa attitude, so that the frustrated old elf calls him “mad as a March Hare” (more condensation). Later Santa duplicates Alice’s feat of growing too big for the house of the Duchess, and visits the Mad Tea Party, consisting of the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter.

Santa tries to introduce the joys of Christmas tree-trimming to the partiers, but the Hatter screws things up with another size-change that takes them into “Mother Goose Land,” apparently for no reason except that the author remembered that the next Wonderland character Santa meets, Humpty Dumpty, did not originate with Lewis Carroll. “Mother Goose Land” or not, the Red Queen’s court is playing croquet in this territory, and she gets mad when Humpty spoils the game by falling upon her wickets. In the story’s best exchange, the Queen orders her card-soldiers to cut off Humpty’s head, and one guard responds, “He’s nothing but head!” The soldiers turn on Santa—Alice having absented herself from the last two pages—but he blows all the cards away just as book-Alice does, wakes up, and immediately rushes off to begin his world-wide ride.

It’s a pleasant confection of a story, whose main point seems to be exasperate Santa’s genial personality by exposing him to the terminal naughtiness of the Wonderland crew, none of whom express the least desire to learn about any aspect of Christmas, not even gift-gettting-and-giving.

MYTHCOMICS: “SANTA CLAUS IN TROUBLE” (SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES #1, 1942)

 

I had picked out my last mythcomic for the year of 2021 when something occurred to me: of all the 300 comics-stories I’ve analyzed, I don’t think any of them directly build upon either of the principal myths of this season, be it the birth of the Messiah or the folklore surrounding Santa Claus. I believe the closest I’ve come is the SON OF SATAN story “Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," though it’s only of incidental importance that the narrative takes place on Christmas Day. I didn’t expect that the comics medium would have turned out anything on the level of Dickens’ CHRISTMAS CAROL, or even A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (whose storyline was not derived from any PEANUTS continuity, though a few “quotes” from the strip are worked into the tale). Still, I thought that during the long history of comics, someone somewhere must have played with the complex symbolism of the Yule holiday.

Not surprisingly, the figure of Santa appears in commercial comics a lot more often than the Christian savior. But to be a myth in my reckoning, the story must have some epistemological content, and can’t just grind out all the expected Santa-tropes. As it happens, the story I selected touches on one of the less well-traveled of these tropes: “Santa as the Master of the Frozen North.” This was used to some good effect at the opening of the 1985 SANTA CLAUS, though it was pretty much the only good moment in the flick.

“Santa Claus in Trouble” doesn’t have an author attributed, but thanks to the story being posted on Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine, a reader identified the artist as George Kerr. I will assume for the convenience of my essay that Kerr was the sole author.

Though Kerr never claims that his Santa Claus actually rules the fantasy-land of the North Pole, there’s the suggestion of one-upmanship in the first panel of “Trouble,” in that Santa’s eventual antagonist, “Belinda the Ice Queen,” lives “just a little north of the North Pole,” as if to say that she’s a little “north-ier” than the jolly toymaker. The Ice Queen, who may be loosely based on the folk-figure of Jack Frost, is in charge of crafting all the “snow and ice” that contribute to a “white Christmas,” and her “faithful snow men” mass-produce all of these frosty phenomena—including “26-inch icicles”—in a manner that clearly bites the style of Santa’s workshop.

Santa stops by Queen Belinda’s castle to inquire about the Xmas weather, only to find that the enterprising snow men have begun making “ice toys.” This clearly bugs Santa, who wants Belinda to stay in her own lane. He’s less than diplomatic in claiming that “I thought making toys was my job.” Belinda defends her snow men’s creations against the toys made by “those silly little gnomes of yours,” but Santa astutely points out that if humans touched, or even breathed upon, these icy objects, they’d simply melt. Belinda turns Santa out of her castle, but Santa’s such a jolly old elf that he doesn’t even suspect that she’s going to counterattack.

While Santa goes to bed that Christmas Eve—making a side comment about the complications of delivering toys during “war time"-- Belinda’s snow men abscond with Santa’s sleigh and reindeer. Santa can’t track the thieves in the heavy snow, but he has a winsome weapon in his arsenal: magic snowshoes that allow him to bound above the snow-clouds in order to find his missing possessions. He still doesn’t suspect Belinda of the deed, and when he accidentally steps through a cloud and lands outside the ice queen’s castle, he naively enters her domain, seeking aid.

Belinda and her snow men broadcast their guilt so strongly that even good-hearted Santa figures out what’s going on—though it helps when he hears the jingling bells of his sleigh in the next room. Santa doesn’t exactly become violent, since that wouldn’t have fit with his saintly demeanor, though in taking off in his flying sleigh, he does demolish Belinda’s castle, remarking, “That will teach you to try to keep toys from boys and girls on Christmas Day.” Since we never see Belinda again, the young reader is left to assume that she is duly chastised and from then on will stick to doling out ice and snow. Thus, even if Santa isn’t the undisputed Master of the North Pole, you don’t mess with the jolly elf when it comes to making toys.