NEAR-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME TWO (1991)

 

This four-issue series, credited to "writer-penciller Phil Foglio and inker K.S. Wilson," never became part of DC's ongoing continuity for any length of time, despite its tying together three different DC franchises. I can't claim that APE II is any sort of neglected gem. Often it comes off like an unholy marriage of Roy Thomas (for continuity-linkages) and Alan Moore (inserting transgressive materials into kids' comics). Given that Foglio sports a comical bigfoot-style-- which is being applied to the silly, short-lived detective spoof from 1968--the humor is unusually shrill and, well, not especially funny. But APE II does make an attempt, however flawed, to follow through on the transgressive vibe I detected, at least in a house ad for the 1968 series.

APE II starts out with girl-on-ape violence.

  

For a moment, this seems like a sequence from the '68 series: a dizzy blonde girl detective messing around with her partner, talking ape Sam Simeon. One big change, though, is that, possibly in deference to feminist imperatives of the period, Angel O'Day becomes more of a tough, no-nonsense action-girl a la the heroines of Chris Claremont. However, while the original series never explained how Angel and Sam became partners in the first place, Foglio devises an origin. As a small child, Angel meets the talking gorilla on a safari in Africa, and somehow or other, Sam gets adopted into Angel's family.

However, Foglio decides that this family also includes Angel's half-sister Athena, a.k.a. "Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five." My guess is that, because Silver Age writer E. Nelson Bridwell created INFERIOR FIVE and wrote stories for the '68 APE series, Foglio melded the two comic series with this maneuver. Thus Sam is raised alongside both half-sisters, who he regards as his real-but-only-figurative sisters. Athena, unlike Angel, is allowed to be somewhat like the dizzy blonde from the 1967 series, but with a more practical difference. Because she possesses immense super-strength, she's unable to have a physical relationship with an ordinary man. She tells her sister that she thinks she might be able to make Sam her boyfriend-- albeit a platonic one. (DC editorial probably said, "NO BESTIALITY.") 

In the midst of this subplot, it's established that the reason Gorilla Sam has been able to walk around the city without (usually) being noticed is that he has some mental powers he uses to fool people. But something starts messing with the people of the city, turning them (temporarily) into a bunch of damn dirty apes. Plus which, Sam and Angel are attacked by a squad of super-strong humans, who turn out to be apes from Sam's old African haunts-- the Gorilla City of many FLASH adventures.             

  Sam, when told that Athena has a thing for him, is aghast, though Angel seems to have become somewhat more reconciled to the idea. Then, the mysterious boss of the ape-men stops by the detective office, puts Athena through a nightmare in which she kills both Sam and her father, and then introduces himself to all as Sam's grandfather, Gorilla Grodd.  

Athena summons (rather unwisely) the rest of the Inferior Five, who are easily defeated. Grodd drags Sam to his laboratory hideout, revealing that he's gained control of an entity called "The Green Glob" (the narrator of a handful of DC SF-stories). He's tested the power before, and now he plans to transform all humans into apes to solve the problem of human incursions on Gorilla City.  

Then, to his credit, Foglio does come up with a sort of "No Exit" take on things, for Grodd forces Sam to reveal that he does have a covert passion for one of his "sisters"-- but it's Angel, not Athena. I won't go into the way Foglio works all this melodrama out, except to say that Sam doesn't end up with either sibling, and everyone's more or less okay with the way things turn out-- except for Grodd, who gets cursed with a love for human junk food.     

Though I didn't find APE TWO very funny, the original feature on which it's based wasn't that great in that respect either. So APE TWO is at least more diverting than APE ONE, and the way Foglio monkeys around (yes, I went there) with the "beauty and beast" trope at least elevates this short series to the level of a near-myth.  

NULL-MYTHS: ANGEL AND THE APE VOLUME ONE (1968-69)

 

The best thing about the original run of DC's ANGEL AND THE APE -- lasting just one SHOWCASE issue and six issues of a regular magazine-- was the above house ad.

Now, whenever I first saw this 1968 ad, I had been collecting superhero comics for at least two years. Thanks to an easy-to-reach used bookstore where a lot of kids dumped their comics, I had amassed a substantial collection. (Just as a marker, by the time the first SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted on TV in September 1967, I had read reprints of all the Spider-stories that the show was kinda-sorta adapting.) I didn't have much interest in DC Comics' comedy features, so I never bought any issues of AATA. 

I would have been at least twelve whenever I saw this ad, so I'm not sure my memory is entirely accurate. But what I seem to remember is wondering if the opposition of the "Angel"-- a lithe-looking young woman-- with the brutish (albeit clothed) "Ape" was supposed to have some weird romantic vibe. I may or may not have seen the 1933 KING KONG by 1968, but I'm sure I had heard that there was at least a one-sided amour fou going on there. And everyone knew, without being able to put into words, that the classic fairy tale BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was all about an angelic human female getting mixed up with a hideous male brute. As it turned out, there were no real romantic vibes between the titular "funny detectives" Angel O'Day and her partner, intelligent gorilla Sam Simeon. However, I still think that the artist who drew the ad had a little salacious intent-- for I now notice something I didn't in 1968. I might have mistaken the shape with the logo, the form separating Angel and Sam for an angel's wing-- but now I realize that angel-wings don't have stems. The object separating angelic female and brutish male is the venerable fig-leaf of Judeo-Christian art.     

Two years before AATA, one of the feature's creators, E. Nelson Bridwell, had been responsible for another DC humor-title, THE INFERIOR FIVE. But though both IF and AATA boasted roughly the same sort of cornball comedy, IF at least had a rationale for its parody of superheroes. AATA was a detective parody in which a martially-trained human girl and an intelligent gorilla went around solving mysteries. The creators-- which seems like a committee of three or four guys throwing crap at the wall-- don't supply even a minor rationale as to why the two of them run a detective agency, which kind of conflicts with Sam Simeon's regular job, that of drawing comic books. (He sometimes used Angel as his model.) 

Given the short duration of the original title, I gather most readers weren't even slightly curious about the feature. It didn't help that most of the time the stories wandered about from one comic schtick to another with no rhyme or reason, as if the creators thought the fans would simply go ape over a funny gorilla-- or, in a different fashion, over the toothsome hottie Angel, ably rendered by artist Bob Oskner. Probably those Silver Age fans who remember AATA at all recall that it was one of the first times any comic satirized the figure of Marvel editor Stan Lee, in the form of Sam's wacky editor Stan Bragg. However, Stan himself had already produced better self-satires than anything in this comic.

The only story that stays on point in spoofing detective cliches is issue #3. In "The Curse of the Avarice Clan," Bridwell produces a decent sendup of the "old dark house" subgenre, in which some mystery killer seeks to murder all the heirs to a fabulous will. But how many kids in 1968 even knew what an "old dark house mystery" was? 

The last story in the last issue was the only one in which there was a very minor suggestion of gorilla romance. In it, Angel goes on a date with a handsome rich guy, and Sam spies on their date, allegedly because he doesn't think the judo-savvy lady detective can defend herself against a masher. The main schtick of the story is that Sam repeatedly masquerades as human beings like waiters and cabbies, and that only Angel can see through his transparent disguises. It wasn't much of a story, but it's the only one in which there's a little conflict between the two principals-- and though the jealousy angle is only potentially present, it would finally get some development (albeit not much better executed) in the 1991 ANGEL AND THE APE reboot, to be discussed in a future post.     

ADDENDUM: I posted the house ad on CHFB and another poster thought the "leaf" was a bunch of bananas. If any of the serrations along the edge of the shape were rounded, I would agree that this was a good possibility, since banana jokes were frequent in AATA. At the same time, I admit that the shape dividing the characters doesn't look like a real fig leaf-- and in both canonical and pop art, most fig leaves need to have those compound blades in order to cover all the unmentionables.  My revised theory is that the house-ad artist knew he needed to leave room for the letterer to place the logo on the shape, so what he produced is more like a standardized serrated leaf-- and there's no reason to associate leaves with angels and apes unless you're thinking about primeval angel-ape encounters.

THE READING RHEUM: VATHEK (1786)

 

Following the first European translation of a version of The Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, various European authors attempted to emulate the freewheeling charms of the famous Oriental story-collection. The English lord William Beckford produced one of the most enduring such works of the period. Apparently he fell in love with the Nights in his early twenties and wrote VATHEK in a white-hot expression of literary ardor. Then Beckford never wrote fiction again, according to Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback of this unique effort, a favorite for such authors as HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I say "unique effort" advisedly, because I don't consider VATHEK great literature, even of the sort produced by Lovecraft and Smith. The book feels a bit like Marlow's Faust festooned with Oriental tropes and suffused with Beckford's perception of the casual cruelty in the original stories. Beckford also copies the paper-thin characterizations and wandering narratives of the Nights, and though neither of these is necessarily a bad thing, one does have to be prepared for this style of writing. VATHEK doesn't capture the wilder fantasies of the Arabian Nights, though, because the main narrative-- as well as three side-stories-- all share the theme of the Satanic overreacher. 

The Caliph Vathek, ruling in the city of Samarah in the Abbasid period, only appears to be the defender of the Muslim faith. In truth he's a thoroughgoing hedonist who thirst after forbidden knowledge, much like his mother Carathis, a sorceress who follows the fire-worship attributed to the Zoroastrians (frequent villains in the Nights). One day Vathek is visited by a Giaour ("non-Muslim foreigner") who slowly draws the caliph into renouncing Allah to gain knowledge. That the Giaour is clearly not a human being is shown by an amusing scene in which he somehow morphs into a ball and lures Vathek and the rest of his subjects into becoming a huge soccer-team, kicking the animated ball all the way out of Samarah and up to the edge of a cliff. Beneath the level of the cliff is a literal doorway to the Islamic Hell, where rules the Islamic Satan "Eblis." At the cliff's edge Vathek receives a private message from Eblis' servant The Giaour: Vathek can gain supreme knowledge if he will sacrifice fifty Muslim children to Hell.

That Vathek does not succeed in delivering this sacrifice is not for lack of trying. But in Vathek's single-minded, impious quest, a lot of innocents do perish-- including fifty Samarah citizens who attempt to save Carathis from what they think is a raging fire, and who all end up getting killed by the witch's servants. Vathek and his mother make excellent, utterly conscience-less villains.

Unfortunately, in the second half Beckford's narrative vacillates. He has Vathek and a great entourage leave Samarah to visit an Emir, whose daughter Vathek eventually weds. This romantic subplot drags the narrative pace downward, partly because Beckford initially suggests that the Emir's daughter Nouronihar will resist Vathek because she's in love with her nancy-boy cousin Gulchenrouz. Then for no clear reason Beckford changes Nouronihar's character, so that she joins Vathek because of greed. Carathis, hearing about the effeminate Gulchenrouz, thirsts to sacrifice the youth. However, a beneficent genie rescues the cousin and takes him into a bower of immortal existence, along with the fifty children Vathek tried to sacrifice to Eblis. (Beckford does not explain why the genie didn't return the children to their parents in Samarah.)  Then eventually Vathek and Nouronihar make their way to the Islamic Hell, thinking they're going to enjoy the fruits of paradise, only to become, like all other damned souls, bereft of joy and hope.

Before coming to this dolorous conclusion, Vathek listens to the testimonies of three other damned souls about what deeds brought them to Hell. I lost interest in the first, "Prince Alasi," which just seemed like a reprise of Vathek's own career, and so have little to say about it. The third story, "Princess Zulkais," is a little better. It starts out with another tyrant who goes to extremes to push his only son into becoming a great ruler. The trouble is that son Kalilah really has a passion to stay in the company of his twin sister Zulkais. Beckford never shows any incestuous act, but Zulkais also goes to extremes to stay within the orbit of her brother, makes a deal with the devil, and so they both end up hopeless in Hell.

The middle story is meatier if still uneven. The eponymous narrator of "Prince Barkiarokh" is like Vathek an overreacher who hungers for anything he cannot have. By dumb luck a female peri, Homaiouna, falls in love with Barkiarokh at first sight, and maneuvers things so that he marries her and she sets up him up to ascend to the throne of Berdouka. However, Prince B. doesn't want to live the virtuous life Homaiouna expects him to observe. He betrays her with a mortal woman, hires thugs to knife his peri-wife over and over just to make her go away (he's aware it won't kill her), and finally falls in lust with his grown daughter by his mortal wife. Again, the main attraction of this story is much the same as the main one: to see just how ruthless a villain Barkiarokh can be, just as the main story focuses on the iniquities of Vathek and Carathis.

Scholars of the period have seen Vathek as a precursor of the obsessed Byronic hero (not least because Byron admired the book and wrote a narrative poem called "The Giaour") and of the Gothic villains who arose mostly in the 1790s (in belated reaction to Walpole's OTRANTO in 1764). But I find Beckford's concentration on over-the-top intense sadistic scenarios to have more in common with the works of the Marquise de Sade. Beckford began VATHEK four years before it was published, and the year after VATHEK was published in 1786, Sade wrote the work that made him famous, JUSTINE, which when published four years later would comprise an introduction to his doctrine of libertinage and Sadean excess. I'm not arguing direct influence. But it seems as if something was in the wind around that time, even though Beckford and Sade were in most other respects utterly unalike.      

             

THRILLS WITH THROUGH-LINES

 This post is largely just a terminological update, exploring the subject of what makes it possible for the launch of a spinoff character to qualify as a "proto-crossover." In the 2022 essay STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE, I explained my view as to why the early appearances of certain comics-spinoffs, such as The Black Panther, qualified as proto-crossovers while others, such as Adam Warlock, did not.

The logic set forth in STATUTE remains intact, but I came across the word "through-line" that serves to describe the difference in the two types of spinoffs. The Merriam Webster definition is as follows:

a common or consistent element or theme shared by items in a series or by parts of a whole

The relevant "element" is that of intentionality: whether or not one can show a probable intention of the creator(s) plan to use a character again in either a Prime or Sub role. In the case of the two heroes mentioned, there are numerous textual clues as to editor Stan Lee's plans to use the Panther again in a superordinate role, and those textual elements comprise a 'through-line" linking his early subordinate appearances to his slightly later superordinate status. In contrast, there are no such clues linking Warlock's subordinate appearances to his later starring status, so the former Sub appearances have no through-line and so do not have the status of proto-crossovers.

The same principle applies to the essay example of the Green Goblin. The Goblin is introduced as a new Sub in the cosmos of Spider-Man, while his partners, the Enforcers, are an ensemble-team who collectievly make up an "old" and established Sub. Thus, the initial story possesses a through-line to all of the Goblin's future appearances. However, he's an "old" villain by the time he encounters the "new Sub" Crime Master. But Crime Master will not make future appearances in the Spider-cosmos, so there is no through-line and his appearance alongside the Goblin may be called a villain-mashup but not a villain-crossover.   

In STATUTE I used Frasier Crane as an example of a character who was selected to be a spinoff character from CHEERS. Frasier made regular appearances in his Sub status on CHEERS, as opposed to the brief and scattershot appearances of Warlock in two separate Marvel features. Nevertheless, there's no suggestion of a through-line in episodes of CHEERS that Frasier was going to be launched in his own series.

The spinoff of the show ANGEL from that of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER program is arguably a little more complex. The character of Angel is introduced as a mystery-man who comes into Buffy Summers' life in the first episode of her eponymous TV show, and he functions, like Buffy's other confidantes, as part of her bonded ensemble. (In an earlier essay, I argued that Buffy was a Prime and that her confidantes were Subs, but since reviewing all of the BUFFY episodes I've reversed myself on that statement.) So Angel became a Prime in that first episode, as much as characters like Willow, Xander and Giles, and there's no need to see him as any sort of crossover, proto or otherwise, when he branches off into his own program. However, after he gets his own show, any appearance he or one of his ensemble-mates made on BUFFY became a crossover, and vice versa with respect to BUFFY characters on ANGEL.  

The BUFFY Sub character Spike is even more involved. He's introduced as a pure Sub in the show's second season and continues in that status. The character's enormous popularity led to his becoming a regular member of the ensemble in the fourth season, though he was in the nature of a "opposed ensemble-character" after the nature of those described here. The transformation of Spike to said status is first set up in the 1999 episode "Wild at Heart." This episode, loosely inducting Spike into the ensemble, is the only one to qualify as a crossover due to a new "through-line" that affects all of Spike's future appearances. But only the first such episode that changes Spike's status gains a crossover-vibe, since only the first "phase shift" foregrounds Spike's acquisition of collective stature, as described in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. 

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. Yet, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic"--particularly in this essay-series-- I'm surprised I missed this one, in which Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Literature following the Renaissance rejected, as Fiedler says of the naturalistic novel, all those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from a distant medieval era. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and when he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There were also a few freewheeling fantastic like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even whem the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must have *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Henry, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Henry and Henry's family, though no one in Henry's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Henry-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Henry's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

    

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM

I suppose the following "wish" might be deemed by some self-fulfilling-

I may as well as mention that the writer I **wish** had some strong candidates in this idiom is Sir Walter Scott. It looks to me like he single-handedly reinvented the adventure genre in the early 1800s, after the Age of Enlightenment made most of the fiction very talky and didactic, even when one sees occasional glimmers of adventure in Gothics or Byron's proto-swashbucklers.

-- because, after I read various summaries of Walter Scott works online, and chose to analyze the 1805 LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, I found what I wanted on my first try. "What are the odds?" a skeptic might say.   

Still, I'm fine with admitting that MINSTREL is not the ideal "first post-Renaissance almost-superhero." While Scott's narrative poem was popular in its day, its status as a long poem probably kept it from being influential on genre fiction of the 19th century. This stands in contrast to the way, say, Scott's novel IVANHOE unquestionably influenced the 1844 penny dreadful THE BLACK MONK. So other candidates for "first almost-superhero," such as one finds in the French crime-novel THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS or the fictionalizations of the English "urban legend" Spring-Heeled Jack, would seem much more credible as DIRECT influences on the superhero idiom that would eventually include such later 19th century proponents as Allen Quatermain and Nick Carter.

However, in a purely FORMAL sense, MINSTREL has most of the right elements for what might be termed a "fantasy-hero" if not a superhero. The poem has one supernatural creature in it-- a goblin with magical powers-- and a combative conflict between powerful opponents who can be loosely framed as "hero and villain." The fly in the ointment is that though the goblin might be said to be allied to the side of the "villains" in a general sense, the creature is not opposed to the hero in the way readers now expect from most fantasy literature following the birth of "sword-and-sorcery." MINSTREL also has a sorcerer, but he's not specifically helpful or harmful to either heroes or villains. In essence I think in MINSTREL Scott was trying to meld elements of "feuds between rival Scottish clans" with those of "people encountering the supernatural"-- both of which elements appeared in the older ballads Scott had been translating before he wrote MINSTREL, his first notable original work. One may argue that the two sets of elements don't quite cohere as one might desire.

Still, since I don't imagine I'll ever be devoted enough to this topic to read the entire Walter Scott oeuvre, I'm pleased that even on the purely formal level, the author has some skin in this particular literary game.