THE READING RHEUM: THE HELLBOUND HEART (1986)

 My general negative estimation of Clive Barker's work probably discouraged me from bothering to check out "The Hellbound Heart" until now. But given that I did read the 2015 SCARLET GOSPELS, in which Barker sought to construct a "Cenobite mythology" independent of the movie franchise, that probably motivated me to gauge the origins of the Cenobites in prose fiction. In my review I rated the "iconicity" of those characters in the movies over that of the GOSPELS novel, and that made me more a little curious about the source novel. There's also another reason for my reading-reticence, but I'll come back to that later.                                                                       

 To my great surprise, HEART was the best Barker prose work I've ever read. The characters are clearly delineated and confined to a small group of necessary functions in a tightly plotted tale. At base HEART is a "devil's bargain" story, in which a mortal makes a deal that he thinks will be to his benefit, but that instead ends up leaving him both burned and burning. The transgressive mortal this time is Englishman Frank Cotton, a hedonistic reprobate who travels from city to city, getting by on his charm and looks. His one relative is his brother Rory, but Frank holds Rory in contempt for his dull conservatism. On the day Rory wed his glamorous bride Julia, Frank secretly seduced Julia and then blew town.                                                                                                                                                       

But a life of heedless pleasures leaves Frank wanting something beyond ordinary experience. At a family house in England, Frank uses that iconic "puzzle box" to summon other-dimensional beings called "Cenobites." They're not connected to any religious entities, so there's no soul-bartering going on, but Frank thinks that he can make a deal with them anyway, one he thinks will result in his gaining access to new levels of heterosexual pleasures. Instead, the Cenobites' definition of pleasure is the imposition of endless forms of torture upon the body, until pain becomes synonymous with pleasure. Frank is taken into their dimension for the Cenobite games, and the book loosely suggests that these strange entities, with their body piercings and mutilations, may have been humans who became enthralled with self-inflicted mortification. None of the Cenobites in the story are as vivid as their movie-counterparts, by the way.           

Barker's first HELLRAISER movie followed the novel's plot fairly closely, and since I minutely described the plot-action of the 1987 HELLRAISER in this review, I won't repeat myself here. The greatest alteration the movie made to the book is that Kirsty Singer, a friend of Rory's nursing unrequited feelings for him, gets changed in the 1987 movie into Kirsty Cotton. This Kirsty is the unmarried daughter of Rory (whose name is changed to Larry), who resents her stepmother without knowing precisely why. In both book and movie, Kirsty is responsible for consigning Frank back to "Hell" after Frank has murdered his brother. So, in the book Kirsty's no relation to either Rory or Frank. Yet HEART includes a strange scene in which Frank's trying to masquerade as Rory to deceive Kirsty. To lure the young woman, Frank utters a come-on that Barker himself calls "incestuous:" saying "Come to Daddy" to Kirsty Singer. But if Kirsty's not related to either man, how can the come-on seem "incestuous" to anyone, least of all Kirsty?                                                                                                           Despite the various actions of Kirsty, Frank and Julia, Barker throws his narrative spotlight upon the mysterious Cenobites, though they're much more nebulous in prose than in cinema. One Cenobite displays the "pinhead" look and gets more lines than the others, so obviously in crafting the movie Barker built up that character to be more of an authority over the others, so as to take advantage of the talents of actor David Bradley. The movie still edges out the novel in terms of iconicity, but the mythicity of the two is about equal. Lastly, the other reason I was reluctant to read HEART was that I wondered if Barker, who has been public as a gay author for many years now, might not have constructed Frank's "bad bargain with the Devil" as a punishment for his heterosexual excesses. I've seen no shortage of modern narratives willing to punish fictional characters for the sin of being "heteronormative." But while I don't dismiss the possibility that Barker might have had some sort of punitive notion in mind, at least subconsciously, he succeeded in creating myth-figures that went beyond the boundaries of ideology. That the Cenobites deserve that status is suggested by the fact that other authors could excel in depicting the infernal pain-freaks in terms Barker would not have attempted, not least the HELLRAISER movie sequel. Ironically, though SCARLET GOSPELS wanted to stand apart from those other works, Barker's character of "The Hell Priest" owes a lot more to the movie's Pinhead than to the vague figure from HEART.                                               

THE GAIMAN CONTROVERSY

 I've recently finished listening to the six-part "Master" podcast series from the British news outlet Tortoise, which collated interviews from five women, all claiming that they had been sexually assaulted in differing ways by famed comics-author Neil Gaiman.                           

First, though there have been many public "he said she said" allegations that lacked corroborative evidence-- not least the 2018 accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey-Ford and her copycats-- I must admit that the Tortoise reporters generally seem to play fair. They present both evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the allegations of the five women. That doesn't mean that Tortoise's conclusions are correct. But the journalists are not guilty of constructing a hit-piece.                                                                         

  All that said, of the five women who spoke with Tortoise, only two prove consequential. This Wikipedia article provides a summing-up of the testimonies. Two of them report their getting nonconsensually kissed or groped by Gaiman, while the third, a tenant on land owned by Gaiman and his then-wife, alleges that Gaiman required sexual favors in exchange for her tenancy. But these three don't have nearly as much punch as the other two testimonies. One woman said that in 2003 she began a romantic relationship with Gaiman (he was about forty, she had just turned twenty), but she was distressed by an incident in which he initiated anal sex with her despite her stipulation that he should not do so. The other of the two, and the one who provided Tortoise with the original testimony, alleged that she became a nanny for Gaiman's young child in 2022 at Gaiman's house in New Zealand. Gaiman, then a little over sixty, encouraged the woman to take a bath to relax. The nanny says that Gaiman then inserted himself into said bath and fingered her. This woman did not state that she refused his attentions, however. And I believe the last two are the only ones who reported that during their experiences with Gaiman, he required that each woman call him "Master"-- hence the name of the Tortoise podcast.                       

   Gaiman insists in a recent response that even though he wasn't always as "caring" as he should have been in his relationships, everything that transpired was consensual. This may be a rationalization, but as one of the podcasts explains, under British law at least, consent does not protect the accused from the law if the law determines that the accused has wrought harm. Yet some of the testimonies don't support the allegation that the rough sex was non-consensual, and thus the New Zealand police, after the nanny filed a change of sexual assault against Gaiman, declined to charge the author precisely because the nanny's own texts and recorded phone calls suggested that she had consented.                                                                                                                                                                                       As a reader who only spoke briefly with Neil Gaiman once, I have no idea of the true nature of his character. The testimonies certainly indicate that he likes rough sex and rough talk in his relationships, which for some might seem a one-eighty away from the affable, literate persona Gaiman adopts in public. At the same time, I think it's important to note that all the faux-horror generated by the use of the term "master" does not indicate Gaiman's devotion to the principles of a full-time sadist like the Marquise de Sade. I think Tortoise did slant their reportage somewhat to reflect a horror of whips and chains, much as Frederic Wertham did when he accused comic books of turning all juvenile readers into budding young sadists. In one podcast, Tortoise raises the topic of BDSM, but only to make an invidious comparison: regular practitioners of BDSM have "safe words" and even contracts, and Tortoise comments that Gaiman had no such restrictions. But none of the testimonies allege anything about rituals of dominance and submission except that of the New Zealand nanny, who said that in the past she had indulged in "light BDSM." But none of the five women testify to being whipped or placed in bondage. So the only connotation of "master" is one of playing a humiliation-game: "I have power and you don't," "You need me more than I need you." Maybe Gaiman, reacting against the nice-guy persona he projects as a celebrity, enjoys acting like a jerk in private. But at present I'm not seeing that anything Gaiman had been alleged to have done rises to the level of criminality. However, he probably will suffer some economic penalties for these accusations, and for once I can't entirely say that's a morally wrong response. This situation isn't comparable to the cowardly vilification-in-advance of Kevin Spacey, where he was denied employment years before he met his accusers in court, and their testimonies were shot down. I think Gaiman's too important an artist to suffer total cancellation for being a horndog-- but I could be wrong on that.                 

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES PT. 4

 For once I'm writing an essay here that I plan to use part of in some online forum discussion. Because of such a discussion on one such forum, I began reviewing the history of the American Civil War in Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's masterful 1996 overview EMANCIPATING SLAVES, ENSLAVING FREE MEN. I won't go into the many complexities of Hummel's work, but even in the first chapter I found an interesting statement that corrects one of my claims in this not-really-a-series agglomeration of essays. In Part 3, I said:                                                                                                                 Though anti-slavery abolitionists campaigned for the end of the institution even before the signing of the Constitution, Northern politicians did not become highly invested in anti-slavery rhetoric until the 1830s-- which just happens to coincide with the establishment of the "Tariff of Abominations," whose purpose was to make Northern goods more appealing than the lower-priced European goods, all of which led to the Nullification Crisis.

  Hummel, however, pegged the genesis of the anti-slavery issue as about ten years earlier.  "Not until the decade following the War of 1812 did slavery fully divide the South from the North... Opponents beat back last efforts to legalize the institution in Indiana and Illinois. Simultaneously, the free states were beginning to overwhelm the slave states in total population. Already in 1819, the North outvoted the South in the lower house of Congress, 105 to 81. Only the Senate maintained a balance between the country's two sections: eleven free states to eleven slave states."                                                                                                                                            Hummel cites the 1819 efforts of New York Representative James Tallmadge to set arbitrary limits on slave-state Missouri's admissibility to the Union. I've been aware of Tallmadge's influence on the slave-free conflict for many years, not least because the conflict that legislator introduced led to Henry Clay's "Missouri Compromise" of 1820. But I didn't realize that the Northern states had swelled in population so early, though Hummel specifies in the same section that a number of Northern politicians, termed "doughfaces," sometimes made common cause with Southerners, being "northern men with southern principles." Hummel concludes this line of thought thusly:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  "Southerners furthermore became advocates of inviolate states' rights. What particularly disturbed them was that Tallmadge's amendment would have imposed antislavery upon a full-fledged state, and not just a territory. Previously states' rights had been an ideological issue with support and opposition in all parts of the country. But once the Missouri controversy exposed the South's vulnerability as a minority, states' rights increasingly turned into a sectional issue. Southerners came to realize that only strict limits upon national authority could protect their existing slave system from hostile interference."                                                                                                                                                           

WHERE VICTIM AND SADIST MEET

It was only coincidence that I finished writing my analysis of the 2004 manga ZEBRAMAN a few days after two parallel, but apparently unrelated, mass murder rampages in New Orleans and Las Vegas respectively. I don't have any expertise in the typology of mass murderers, but I can look up such things on the Net as well as anyone, and it got me thinking about the three types of mass murderers that others have identified, and how those formulations compare with artist Yamada Reiji's puzzling evocation of famous killers' names in his entirely fictional story.                                                                                                                                                                                     The salient distinctions between types of mass murderers rely on categories of time. Serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, generally pick individual victims and commit their murders over a significant span of time. Spree killers, such as Charlie Starkweather, commit a series of murders in a short span of time, often in a particular area. Rampage killers (whom some sources also call "mass murderers") execute (or try to execute) a group of victims in one place and all at one time, as did both of the New Years' Day killers, Matthew Livelsberger (Las Vegas) and Shamsud-din Jabbar (New Orleans).                                                                                                                                                                                                      Rampage killers are often slain at the scene of their crimes, though sometimes they leave behind manifestos, as did the deceased Jabbar and Livelsberger. (Technically Livelsberger did not succeed in killing innocents, but he injured enough people that his intent seems clear.) The precise reasons each gave for their actions are not important to this essay, though both subscribed to a type of mentality I've labeled "victimology," by which I meant "the politics of victimization." Their idea seems to be that they can emancipate themselves from their own sufferings by reducing others, usually complete strangers, to dead or injured victims, and this crime gives the victim-types some perverse status in their own minds.                                                                                                       

  Now, Yamada's ZEBRAMAN is not principally about mass murderers, but it does make an odd usage of the names of three real-life killers for three of its villains. The 2004 movie from which Yamada derived the manga's loose structure included a costumed maniac named "Crab Man," who was supposed to be an analogue of the many bizarre villains from Japan's superhero TV shows, but one brought into real existence by alien influences. Yamada eliminated the movie's aliens from his story and also altered "Crab Man's" name to "Crabjack the Ripper." He then introduced new opponents for his hero: both named after mass murderers: "Scorpio-Dahmer" (who is seen in all the pages I reproduce here) and "Shrike-Manson."             

I don't think Yamada had any particular insights about the social or psychological phenomena associated with mass murderers, and his use of particular historical names is questionable. But I believe Yamada wanted to contrast the sort of "dead-end ideologies" represented by such callous lust for multiple victims. In the sequence I reprint here, Zebraman refutes ScorpioDahmer's belief that the sins of his victims justify him taking their lives.                                         

In contrast, Zebraman proposes an ethic of forgiveness over that of punishment. The dialogue implies that the fictional killer subscribes to the ideology of "the victim who wants to create more victims." However, it's strange that Yamada would use the name "Dahmer" for such a fictional figure. In my view of the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, he didn't kill to quell his own past tragedy. Real Dahmer was a sociopath who took sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others, and so in my own private typology, he's a "sadist type" of mass murderer-- as well as being the type of serial killer who elaborately plans his killings.                                                                                   

One can't speculate on the typology of Jack the Ripper, since that mass murderer was never identified. But as it happens, the third ZEBRAMAN villain with a mass murderer's name goes to the other extreme. This character, Shrike-Manson, wears a bird costume and emulates Charles Manson in that, instead of committing crimes himself, he brainwashes younger persons to do the dirty work. Ironically, though, Charles Manson was a far closer match to the "victim ideology" I'm propounding than was Jeffrey Dahmer. That doesn't mean that Real Manson wasn't capable of sadism. Yet sadism doesn't seem to have been his main motive in inspiring/directing the Tate-LoBianco slayings. Everything I've read by Manson seems infused with the idea of his being the victim who's getting back at people who wouldn't give him the things he deserved, like a studio recording contract, or leadership of a post-apocalyptic social order. Though his modus operandi was obviously different than that of other rampage killers, the effect was the same: a group of innocents killed in a single place at a single time.                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Though all mass murderers wreak violence mostly on innocents, often on strangers who have no personal associations with their killers, the rampage killers prove particularly difficult to cope with. Most strike without signaling their actions in any way, as seems to have been the case with both Jabbar and Livelsberger, neither of whom was on any watchlist. Again, I emphasize that I'm not drawing direct comparisons between real criminals and fantasy-villains from a manga. But I was intrigued by the dichotomy Zebraman offers to persuade ScorpioDahmer. In essence, this victim-type of killer is imprisoned by his past, forced to keep killing to assuage his pain. Both the hero and his allies suggest that the true orientation should be the future, because, as Kana says above, "You only have this life." (Though to be sure, that sort of logic refutes only the victim-ideologue: the sadism-ideologue may be perfectly fine, consecrating his life to the suffering of innocents.)              

NEAR-MYTHS: STAR-SPANGLED ROGUES' GALLERIES

In THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER, I made some generalized comments on the debt that Jerry Siegel's STAR-SPANGLED KID feature had to the Batman-AND-Robin team that was launched in April 1940 (with the usual allowances for inaccuracy of cover-dates). Jerry Siegel didn't rush to come up with his risible reversal of a kid hero with an adult sidekick, since STAR SPANGLED COMICS #1 debuted as a regular DC feature almost a year and a half after Robin's debut. (To be sure, the Kid and Stripesy first showed up the previous month in ACTION COMICS #40, where the raconteurs clearly hoped that Superman's fans would rush to check out the New Dynamic Duo in their own magazine.) DC editors may have thought, "Hey, Batman was conceived when Bob Kane (supposedly by himself) tried to do his version of Superman. So why wouldn't it work for the creator of Superman-- teamed with humor-artist Hal Sherman-- to riff on Batman?" At any rate, the very name of STAR-SPANGLED COMICS was clearly contrived to spotlight the name of the cover-featured hero, and for the first half dozen issues Siegel and Sherman's heroes got three adventures apiece. There were other features in SSC, but none were all that prepossessing, with only the Mort Weisinger-Hal Sharp Tarantula maintaining any place in DC history.                                                     

  Now, as the title may suggest, my main interest in these early stories is to demonstrate some early examples of the "pattern criminal," which formula I think developed largely in comic books. This conception contrasted with such pulp-favorites as the "one-gimmick villain" and "the all-purpose villain" types, which I argued were the dominant templates for the prose pulps. Thus the only two relevant features of SSC are those of Tarantula and of the Kid and Stripesy. The first adventure doesn't trouble to retell the pair's origin from their debut in ACTION COMICS, but the last one in issue #1 introduces their most persistent enemy, Doctor Weerd. After the villain's regular ID is humiliated by a rather snotty Sylvester Pemberton, the villain reveals that he has his own "Mister Hyde" potion, that changes him into a shaggy-locked, barrel-chested hulk. Unlike Siegel's Superman, whose repeat villains appeared off and on, Weerd appears in every single issue until #7, and he's clearly an all-purpose type like Luthor, whipping up diverse weapons like giant robots, a vortex machine and a mirage-maker. Did Siegel hope Weerd would be the Kid's "Joker?" It seems a fair conjecture. Issue #1 also features the first outing for Tarantula, in a forgettable exploit that doesn't give the spider-man much of an origin either.                                                               

   Issue #2 introduces the comic's first "one-gimmick villain," but in the TARANTUALA feature. Such was the Crime Candle, whose big thing was doping people with candles that exuded toxic gases.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                        Issue #3 holds nothing relevant, but in #4-- dated January 1942, and thus a month or two after Bill Finger unveiled The Penguin in a December 1941 issue of DETECTIVE COMICS-- Siegel and Sherman introduced the Needle. Now, the Needle's weapon of choice was a gun that shot needles, so he didn't "branch out" as the Penguin did, using different gimmicked umbrellas and (a little later) trained birds. But though neither Needle nor Penguin gets an origin as such, both seem to have "patterned" their respective weapons after their respective physical appearances. That said, the Penguin seems like a developed character from the first, and the Needle is a just a flat bad guy.                                                                                                         

   Siegel and Sherman distinguish themselves a bit more in SSC #5 with new villain Moonglow. A wimpy type of professor, he discovers that he can enhance both his intellect and his penchant for evil by prolonged exposure to moonlight. The small touch of characterization, though, doesn't lead to anything comparable to, say, Two-Face, or even Green Lantern's foe The Gambler. More relevant to my "pattern criminal" project, though, is the TARANTULA tale in the same issue. "Warlord of Crime," whose script GCD credits to Manly Wade Wellman, introduces a crimelord named Siva. This villain uses a whopping TWO gimmicks patterned on the mythos of the Hindu god: (1) he's served by a henchman named Ganesha, who wears an elephant-costume like that of Mythic Shiva's divine son, and (2) Siva burns rebellious followers with fire the way the Hindu god annhilated his opponents with fiery powers. However, for whatever reason Siva never appeared again, and remained at large at the end of his only story.                                                             

With issue #6, the Kid gets scaled back to two adventures (one featuring the omnipresent Doctor Weerd, again) -- and then, just one tale in issue #7, in which Simon and Kirby's NEWSBOY LEGION bumps the Kid off the covers. Robotman and TNT join Tarantula as backup features who (I believe) never get cover-featured in SSC. The solo Kid adventure does feature the comic's first villain-teamup in "The Picture That Killed," as The Needle and Doc Weerd challenge the not so dynamic duo. In #8, Manly Wade Wellman apparently caught the teamup bug from Siegel and Sherman, since he assembled three of Tarantula's very forgettable villains into "The Trio of Terror." Siegel and Sherman trumped Wellman by bringing together their three most noteworthy nasties-- Needle, Weerd and Moonglow-- in "Crime by the Chapter." None of those villains, together or separately, were as good as the best Finger foes, though at least the Sherman antagonists were more visually memorable than those of Hal Sharp (except the aforementioned Siva). And that's where I'll leave this short study, for by issue #9 it was clear that the Kid/Stripesy duo had failed to impress the kid-readers as their model had, and whatever "pattern criminals" may have appeared were then overshadowed by many more momentous features in the early forties. Despite various post-Silver Age revivals of the original characters, the two seemed to distinguish themselves most when Geoff Johns reinvented the core idea for his STARGIRL concept, which in turn begat the last good superhero TV show for the CW network. But clearly there was a good reason that no one ever bothered to bring back (to my knowledge) any of the Kid's villains, or those of any other foemen in SSC.                       

THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." It's possible that there were "pattern criminals" in the sense I'm using the term in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and there might even be one or two that preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be a third type: the "pattern criminal," who as I said keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

MYTHCOMICS: ZEBRAMAN (2004?)

  In my December review of the 2004 Takashi Miike film ZEBRAMAN, I originally wrote the essay without knowing that a manga version existed, so I attempted a quickie correction when I discovered the manga's existence, saying, "Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read."                                                                                                                                              However, according to the automatic translation of a Japanese-language Wiki, it now appears that the movie came about first-- partly celebrating Miike's career, as it was his 100th feature film-- and that the manga apparently came afterward, ostensibly more the creation of artist Yamada Reiji.                                                                                                                                                                                            'Although the basic setting is borrowed, the story and other aspects are almost original to Yamada. In the movie version, the monsters who appear are "aliens who invaded the Earth", but in the manga version, they are "ordinary people who have been brainwashed because they have darkness in their hearts and have committed evil deeds according to their desires". Even the people who "play" the phantom also have loved ones, and the main character's own feelings and conflicts, which are suffering just like the monsters while playing the hero, and the process of the protagonist reexamining himself through battles and awakening to true family love are depicted more vividly than in the movie version, and the themes of "humanity" and "family ties" are more brought to the forefront.'-- Japanese-language Wiki.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm familiar with the fact that manga serials are sometimes responses to anime serials or to "light novels." On this blog, I've reviewed a couple of manga-serials concocted from such prose novels, such as MAYO CHIKI and ZERO'S FAMILIAR. But now that l have read Yamada's version of ZEBRAMAN, it seems to have been designed to oppose much of the content in the Miike films.                         

 First, as the Wiki-article states, the 2004 Miike movie (like its 2010 sequel) takes the view that Shinichi Ishikawa, forty-something schoolteacher in Yokohama, has idolized the "Zebraman" tv show of his youth without knowing that, all along, he has always lived in a tokusatsu world. By the time Ishikawa reaches age forty-two, alien influences abound so much that bizarre entities are spawned, many of whom are strange recapitulations of monsters from the tv show. The same ET phenomenon confers special powers upon Ishikawa, allowing him to become Zebraman and combat the evil aliens. But in the manga, there are no genuine aliens, only human beings who dress up in weird costumes. Some have odd resources, such as hypnotism. but that's the extent of the metaphenomenality here.         

                                                                                            

 Ishikawa's contempt from his family is about the same as what the movie depicts, with a son who finds his father lame, a wife who cheats on Ishikawa with a younger man, and a daughter who signals some weird Oedipal issues by sleeping around with older men. Yamada alters the dynamic between the teacher and his daughter, though, by showing that as a child Midori idolized her father and wanted to marry him. Ishikawa encounters Midori while he's dressed as Zebraman, though when the unwitting hero encounters his first opponent, he ends up saving another teenaged female victim from the TV-monster "Crabjack the Ripper " Yamada doesn't pursue the psychological trope of "knight rescuing damsel" to any transgressive conclusions, though, because the author wants to build upon the film's suggestion that Ishikawa may get the chance to choose between his bad real family and a potential new one.                             

  Ishikawa's relationship to Shinpei, a "better son" to take the place of the real one, stays roughly the same, and the manga even keeps a version of the scene in which Shinpei overcomes the mental block that keeps him in a wheelchair. But Yamada builds up the character of Kana, Shinpei's mother, to the extent that now she's Ishikawa's childhood girlfriend, the "good wife" to take the place of the unfaithful one-- who's never particularly sympathetic, despite the gospel of forgiveness put forth in the late chapters.                             

                                                

Crabjack like Zebraman, is really a forty-something man in a costume. This serial killer, Kitahara, has been dating if not definitely screwing Midori, and he finally decides to massacre her like his previous victims. Zebraman saves his daughter and eventually regains her respect, but Kitahara introduces a new wrinkle not in the film: that he goes after sinful young women because he himself possesses a young daughter he believes to be pure-- which comes up again in later chapters. Kitahara also tells Zebraman that he thinks they both come from "the Galactic Church," founded by a mystery man named "Gray." Yamada will build up the contrast between the opposed "black and white" of the Zebraman-ethos and that of Gray.         

                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

For brevity's sake I'll pass over the next sequence, which more or less duplicates the Midori sequence, but with a killer named "ScorpioDahmer," who preys upon on unfaithful wives, yet targets both the bad wife Sachiyo and the good potential wife Kana. Toward the sequence's end, though, Kana introduces the ethic of forgiveness that Zebraman will articulate later. Before dying, ScorpioDahmer articulates the same ethic of "black and white decisiveness" vs. "gray equivocation" that Zebraman has dreamed of.                                             

   Yamada then introduces his last sequence, which runs through most of the remaining 26 chapters: one in which the emissaries of Gray seek to manipulate children-- including Ishikawa's son Kazuki -- into becoming maniacal killers. During this continuity Yamada introduces two more female high-schoolers, Rin and Sayaka. I found Rin something of a waste of time, and not much better conceived than Kazuki. But Sayaka proves a little more interesting, because she's the supposedly "pure daughter" of Midori's erstwhile psycho-lover Kitahara.                                                                                                               

                                                                                                      Gray's servant "Shrike-Manson" (who wears presumably artificial wings) is another adult employee at Ishikawa's school (and thus another reflection of Ishikawa). He seduces the high-schooler Sayaka in the process of turning her into one of his killer minions, and at one point she even beats down Zebraman himself with some sort of knuckle-dusters.                                                                         

                                         

This part of "the Kazuki arc" includes Zebraman countering Shrike-Manson's pernicious claim that his adherents can take on special powers by serving him and emphasizes the common clay of all human beings instead. Kazuki doesn't forswear his master due to Zebraman's speech, though, so Yamada pivots to the unsolved mystery as to who created the Zebraman TV show and who's the architect of the imitation monsters. Ishikawa then gains access to the final, never-filmed script for the show, which seems to end with the death of Zebraman.                                                                                         

Ishikawa ultimately wins back the heart of Kazuki, and for good measure, Sayaka aids the hero against Crabjack, without even knowing that he's her father Kitahara. After dragging out the "Shrike-Manson" sequence far too long, Yamada then concludes his epic with the hurried revelation that the mastermind Gray was a failed idealist who became frustrated when his television show was cancelled. Gray's reasons for forming his "Galactic Church" and fostering real versions of his fantasy-monsters never makes much sense, and I have no idea why so many of the phony monsters have serial-killer names. At best, Yamada loosely implies that Gray, by making monsters, wanted to bring forth a real version of his hero-- which he did. Zebraman does avoid dying like the hero of the script, leaving him free to decide whether he will stay with his old family or choose the new one.                                                                                                                                                         ZEBRAMAN the manga is thus distinct enough from the film to be viewed as a separate work with its own themes, and a different orientation, hewing closer to the drama than to the film's ironic mythos. The series is definitely uneven, possibly because the author was sometimes making things up on the fly while trying to keep at least a loose connection to his source material. But it's one of the few adaptations of a contemporaneous work that seeks to strongly deviate from the source material, the only other precursor being the Robert Aldrich film of Mickey Spillane's KISS ME DEADLY.