MYTHCOMICS: THE INHUMANS SAGA, FANTASTIC FOUR #44-48 (1965-66)

 

The title of FF #44"-- "Lo, There Shall Come an Ending"-- is more appropriate than its creators knew, for it can be seen as the ending of the First Phase of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. The first phase of the title was marked by a blend of both science-fiction explorations and regular crimefighting adventures, usually done-in-one-issue stories. The Second Phase plays up the FF's science-fiction milieus, and some storylines last four or more issues. Further, the later issues of the First Phase initiated the first shakeup to the super-group's status quo, for in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #3-- cover-dated October 1965 and taking place in between the continuity of FF #43 and #44-- as Reed Richards makes an "honest woman" of Sue Storm. Most comics-critics would probably agree that the period in 1965 marked the greatest creative phase for the two collaborators. As specified before, Lee probably allowed Kirby to pursue more ambitious storylines than they'd been attempting earlier, a creative period I believe ended with issues #67. After that, the issues 68-102 comprised the Third and Final Phase, in which the creators largely returned to a new status quo, mostly repeating previously seen menaces.

Because Lee may not have been exercising as much editorial input as before, INHUMANS SAGA has a more disjointed structure than most of the previous storylines. For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I believe Kirby didn't have a consistent narrative worked out for his Big Reveal of Medusa's true nature. But Lee and Kirby are entirely on the same page so far as realizing how the Thing and the Torch react to the increase in the domesticity factor at the Baxter Building. Ben Grimm becomes maudlin about the chances of his enjoying any wedded bliss with Alicia, and Johnny Storm seems manifestly uncomfortable with his sister's "Suzie Homemaker" routine. For the first time within a FANTASTIC FOUR story, the Torch alludes to Doris Evans, his girlfriend from his own solo strip. Her character appeared irregularly in the TORCH feature from 1963 to 1965, but Johnny didn't have any romantic arc in the FF magazine, just a few minor dates with characters who never appeared again. Ben Grimm would never get any fulfillment of his romance with Alicia during the Lee-Kirby years. However, INHUMANS SAGA was clearly meant to shake up the previous status quo with respect to the younger Storm sibling.

Just as the Torch decides to hit the road and seek out his girlfriend, Medusa decides to hide herself in Johnny Storm's car. She never admits that she was coming to seek aid from her former enemies, though this would seem to be the only logical reason for her to be lurking around the Baxter Building. She puts a gun to Johnny's head and forces him to drive out of the city to get away from some menace named "Gorgon," presaged by the sight of his cloven hoof creating a earthquake under Johnny's car. Johnny and Medusa get away, but Gorgon pursues by stealing a helicopter from the FF. At no point does either the superhero or his comely captor make reference to the way Johnny let Medusa go free in issue #43, so clearly Lee had decided to let that plot-thread unravel. But connubial matters seem to be on Johnny's mind, for he "coincidentally" takes Medusa to the grounds of the very university where Reed proposed to Johnny's sister. To be sure, Lee has the hero do this so that, by dumb luck, the two of them revive the android Dragon Man, plunged into a coma in FF #35.                             

Dragon Man, more or less a child in an artificial body, forms an attachment to Medusa, only to fight Gorgon when the latter arrives. Medusa tries to flee both of them, but the flying android seizes her and takes her-- back to the vicinity of the Baxter Building, for no plausible reason. The four heroes alternate between fighting the dragon-creature and the goatish-faced Gorgon, until Gorgon finally explains his purpose in seeking Medusa: to take her back to her people. But this brief convo is just an interlude to set up events in issue #45.

Gorgon escapes with Medusa, but the Invisible Wife is able to work her feminine charms so as to pacify the childlike android. The Torch gets some down-time, and readers soon learn that the only reason the script brought up Doris Evans was to dispense with her. Depressed that his steady wasn't waiting breathlessly for his call, Johnny goes for a walk and meets the first real love of his life, Crystal of the Inhumans. (Stan captures the youth's passion by having him think that Doris seems "like a boy" next to the redheaded enchantress.)

Crystal, seeing the Torch demonstrate his power, mistakes him for one of her people, The Inhumans, and she happily invites him to meet her family, which includes new faces Karnak and Triton in addition to Medusa and Gorgon. Lee doesn't tell us much about the relationships of these five characters-- six if one counts their teleporting dog Lockjaw, and seven with the absent Black Bolt, who shows up for the next installment. Again, the writer-editor might have been deferring to Jack Kirby to fill in some blanks, but neither of them bothers to account for why Medusa was afraid of Gorgon back in issue #44.

Johnny summons his partners to the conveniently deserted neighborhood, setting up a big donnybrook between the crusaders and the fugitives in issue #46. And now Kirby shifts the conflict to a new plane. The story is no longer "Medusa's afraid of being captured by Gorgon," it's "all of the Inhumans are afraid of being captured by an entity called The Seeker." It's quite possible that Kirby's original idea was that Gorgon would be working for the real villain of the story. Then he may have realized that he wanted Gorgon to be more sympathetic, so the artist changed horses in midstream and concocted the Seeker, a pretty colorless flunky armed only with super-weapons and some henchmen. When we meet the Seeker later in #45, he seems even less well-informed than Crystal as to who is and isn't an Inhuman, for he rather comically gets the idea in his head that the Dragon Man must be one of his people, based on nothing but news reports of the android's recent rampage. (I guess he would've made the same assumption had the rampager been anyone from the Hulk to the Living Totem.) Dragon Man never really coheres with the rest of the SAGA, and after one more big battle with the FF in the next issue he's summarily packed off to some installation. Kirby may have revived the monster just to give regular readers a touchstone in the midst of this panoply of new characters.

The FF-Inhumans battle wraps up when one of the Seeker's agents abducts Triton-- though the agent somehow misses the other five Inhumans (and super-pooch Lockjaw) engaged in a big fracas nearby. Crystal and Johnny are torn asunder amid many Romeo-and-Juliet histrionics. The heroes later track down the Seeker, and he finally provides the SAGA's big exposition moment, giving the good guys a brief history of the hidden race of genetically manipulated superhumans. The Seeker doesn't explain why he and his men, if they are Inhumans, don't have super-powers, nor does he cite any reason for wanting to take the six fugitives (and dog) back to the "Great Refuge." aside from stating that their return is the will of "Maximus the Magnificent." 

Reed allows the Seeker and his minions to leave with Triton but puts a tracer on their ship. The colloquy between Reed and Sue makes clear that despite Sue's contributions to the team, Reed wears the pants in the family. On a sidenote, some fans liked to believe that Lee alone was responsible for Reed's chauvinism, and that their idol Kirby would never be so toxic-- except that later in this issue, Sue displays a feminine flightiness that's clearly been concocted by Kirby.      

So where did the five Inhumans (plus dog, but minus Triton) go, when they teleported away from New York? Why-- they shunted their way to the Great Refuge, the very place they were supposedly attempting to stay away from, in order to live covertly among the humans. We meet Maximus, ruler of the Great Refuge, though it's quickly revealed that he's taken over from his brother Black Bolt, who was supposed to be the designated monarch of the Inhumans. What happened to exile Black Bolt and his fellows, whose relationships are far from pellucid (though Medusa calls Crystal her sister here)? Kirby hasn't allowed much space for exposition here, for suddenly Black Bolt re-assumes the Inhumans crown and the craven Maximus allows it to happen. The villain's only ace in the hole is that he has some sort of doomsday weapon, designed to eliminate the humans with whom Inhumans have been forced to share the planet.

Finally, when the story's close to being over, Lee and Kirby deliver the sociological moral: the Inhumans, like the Japanese before the advent of Admiral Perry, are wrong to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. Reed's utterly positive that the super-powered race has nothing to fear from humans, which strikes a false note given all the times Marvel heroes got hassled for "being different." But the argument becomes academic when Maximus triggers his human-killing weapon.     

                            

In the conclusion-- wrapped up in the first seven pages of issue #48-- there follows an unintended "WATCHMEN moment," for the heroes are unable to prevent the villain from triggering his doomsday device. What defeats Maximus is not heroism but his own hubris: his belief that his people are a race apart from human beings, despite their having arisen from a common stock. No one on Earth perishes from the device of Maximus. However, the "Good Inhumans" are spared the decision as to whether to embrace inclusiveness, for Maximus seals off the Great Refuge with his own version of an Iron Curtain. Cue more fiery bathos from Johnny Storm, though he doesn't get much time to grouse, for this issue also begins the first installment of the three-part GALACTUS TRILOGY.       

As most Marvel-fans know, the Inhumans did not remain isolated from the Fantastic Four but rather became the most regular supporting-cast members of the series during the feature's second and third phases.  Indeed, for a time Crystal even takes Sue's place as the group's female member. Whereas I think that Lee and Kirby probably worked together on deciding the nature of the Fantastic Four's members, Kirby probably conceived the Inhumans without input from Lee. It's rather hard to say what the King was going for, though. Unlike both the Silver Surfer and the Black Panther, who also emerged during the Second Phase, the Lee-Kirby Inhumans have just one dominant character-trait: dourness. They all feel like road-company spear-carriers from a Shakespeare historical play, and during the Lee-Kirby years they don't bounce off one another as do the members of other Marvel teams. Only Crystal shows a range of emotions, and that may be because Kirby had some idea of her functioning to "merge" the two families. Rather than just letting the Torch have a mundane girlfriend the way Ben Grimm had Alicia, I think Kirby wanted to tap into the pomp and circumstance of stories about royal families coming together-- though I can't say he was ever consistent in putting across this ideal. I commented elsewhere that I didn't think Stan Lee ever had much interest in the Inhumans, and that may be because Kirby didn't put that much thought into the characters' eccentricities. There are various mythic "bachelor threads" that don't coalesce very well, not least the apparent "runaway bride" thread dealing with Medusa. But the master thread, dealing with the Human Torch's struggles to chart his own romantic destiny through an exogamous marriage, proves strong enough to give INHUMANS SAGA high-mythicity.       

NEAR-MYTHS: "LO, THERE SHALL COME AN ENDING," FANTASTIC FOUR #41-43 (1965)

 

For my four-hundredth mythcomic, I'm going to put the original "Inhumans Saga" under the myth-scrutiny lens. But Lee and Kirby built up to that ambitious multi-parter with a less impressive three-part arc, lasting from FF #41-43. I'm not going to examine this arc-- which I'll just call "Ending" after its final installment-- in depth, because the story doesn't really have any. But "Ending" does play into one of the major elements of the Inhumans Saga in the way the arc presents the character of Medusa.

Before getting into the story proper, I have to make the usual disavowals: I don't believe Jack Kirby created the FANTASTIC FOUR stories on his own, as he (in)famously claimed in a JOURNAL interview. But I believe he created most of the iconic characters in a process of discussions with credited editor/writer Stan Lee, and that creative interaction made even a minor story-arc like this one more consequential than many of Kirby's solo outings. Also, it is indisputable that after a certain point Lee did start to follow Kirby's lead more than in the earliest collaborations, because Lee himself said that he did so.   

There's nothing very venturesome about the villains of this arc: the Frightful Four, making their third appearance as a team here, following their previous appearances in issues #36 and #38. Three of the members were just recycled reprobates from other strips: the Sandman from the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and both the Wizard and Trapster from HUMAN TORCH. The fourth member of the so-called "Evil FF," though, made her debut in FF #36 under the name "Madame Medusa." No origin is provided for the long-haired villainess, nor does she voice any particular reason for joining these three criminals-- all of whom at least had previous jousts with the Human Torch-- in their mission to overthrow the Fantastic Four. I could easily believe that Kirby created Medusa and worked her into the story without yet knowing what he and Lee would do with her, in terms of origin or motives. So Kirby and Lee just played her as a standard super-villain, eliminating crimefighters for some vague purpose of gaining power later on.   

"Ending" is largely formulaic. At the start of #41, the Thing quits his partners, feeling like they've been taking advantage of him. He's captured by the Frightful Four, and the Wizard brainwashes the hero so that he wants to destroy his former allies. The three older villains are all routine in their characterization, but Lee and Kirby do start expanding on Medusa a little. As the "evil counterpart" to Sue Storm, Medusa seems briefly interested in Mister Fantastic, and by the way Kirby depicts this scene, it's pretty standard "evil girl has a yen for noble hero." But nothing more comes of this momentary infatuation, here or in any other FF story I've come across. As Lee's dialogue for the scene states, Medusa has no feelings about the other three heroes, and in the second part of the tale, she shows her willingness to mousetrap the Torch, knock him out, and deliver the youth to the Wizard's tender mercies.

         

However, in the concluding installment, all one can say is that by that time, Kirby had decided that he wanted that story to end with Medusa getting away, so that she could make a separate appearance in the beginning of the Inhumans Saga, starting in FF #44. Judging only from the art-- which might or might not have some ancillary story-notes in the margins of the original artboards-- the Torch chases the long-haired villainess and seems to pause while she gets away. The Torch returns to his partners-- including a de-brainwashed Ben Grimm-- and from the art alone, one can't be sure that Kirby meant (a) to have Mr. Fantastic question the younger hero about failing in his task, or (b) to have the older hero imply that Johnny Storm allowed the comely criminal to escape just because she's hot and he's a horny teenager. Then nothing more is said about the hypothetical "torch" Johnny might be carrying for Medusa for the rest of the Lee-Kirby run. However, in issue #44 Medusa will meet the Torch one-on-one again, and though there's no romantic vibe between them, here Lee and Kirby introduce the idea that Medusa is a member of a race of hidden superhumans, and Johnny does forge a love-connection with one of them-- to be sure, one more age-appropriate than Medusa would have been.

It's not impossible that Kirby never meant to imply that the Torch had the hots for Medusa. He might as easily have hesitated to overtake the villainess because his flame was getting weak, which was a common thing in those days. (Note the above panel where Johnny complains that because his flame has gotten weaker, Medusa can defeat him with the equivalent of a wet mop.) Lee might then have decided to toss out the idea of Johnny having a fiery twinkle in his eye for the older female, just because it was more dramatically interesting than Johnny just complaining that his flame was about to go out. If Kirby hadn't mentioned his burgeoning plans for Medusa to Lee, then to Lee that would have been as good an idea to pursue as any other, even if they didn't follow through. But whether the two creators were on the same page when they ended "Ending," they soon began a new phase in the career of Marvel's First Family.          

SUPERHERO REPLACEMENT THEORY PT. 2

Earlier I examined the two ethical systems, of conservatism ("Keeping") and of liberalism ("Sharing"). in terms of the dynamics of human societies from ancient times onward. The same systems apply equally to the ways in which those societies determine their identities in terms of cultural matrices.

No one ever really knows why a given society, whether of antiquity or modernity, decides to dominantly pursue one cultural course over another: whether the tribe should worship one god or several, or whether it's good or bad to seethe a kid in its mother's milk. Even in modern times, pundits can make anterior comments about how some cultural development MAY have come about, but that's not the same as KNOWING how a dominant majority chooses that course. But it can be fairly stated that once the course is chosen, the Ethos of Keeping comes into play, as the majority members of the culture continue to "Keep Faith" with the choices of their ancestors. Minority cultural developments can still exert some historical influence. For instance, certain citizens of one culture may embrace the religion of another culture, ranging from Romans flirting with the worship of Cybele or George Harrison converting to Krishnaism. This can be seen as an articulation of the Ethos of Sharing, in that the majority culture shows tolerance for the tastes of the minority by not requiring absolute fidelity to the majority rule. 

Conservatism does rule the roost in most if not all societies when it comes to allowing members of other societies to join the ingroup, and in ancient times there would be zero examples of dominant societies that voluntarily changed to accomodate either migrants joining the dominant society or separate vassal societies. Minority societies did not manipulate but were manipulated. Minority "outgroups" could be (1) transported away from their native land to some other location, (2) absorbed into the majority culture under various restrictions, or (3) allowed to function in the majority culture as sojourners but subject to random expulsion. The Ethos of Sharing arguably grew somewhat stronger with the rise of pietistic religions like Buddhism and Christianity. These systems of faith stressed a latitudinarian approach to cultural differences, though one could argue that this ecumenical approach had the ulterior purpose of spreading a particular religious credo through the medium of cultural tolerance.

All of this groundwork concerning the inherent conservativism of human societies should provide context for the fact that the United States of America, for the first 150 years of its existence, tended to exclude potential immigrants who did not resemble the dominant culture. The Naturalization Act of 1790 specified that naturalization of aliens was limited to "free white persons." Isolated members of various minority groups did gain citizenship over the course of the next 175 years. Yet America immigration law was not substantially affected by any Ethos of Sharing, except in special cases, such as the Truman Directive of 1945, which fast-tracked visas for displaced persons from war-torn Europe. 

Then in 1963, President John F. Kennedy attempted, but failed, to overthrow the exclusionary strictures. Roughly two years after Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1965 Immigration Act, thus ensuring a greater liberalism in terms of making American immigration law less exclusionary.

Now, exclusion on the basis of race was always wrong, so I don't take issue with the 1965 act on that basis. It's demonstrable that human beings of all ethnicities were able to assimilate to the American culture and to become valuable members of the society, and that without being as legally restricted as, say, Jews and Christians in Muslim societies. However, buried within the Democratic imperative of liberation was the assumption that immigrants of other cultures would ALWAYS be willing to assimilate to established American culture.

As with the contemporaneous Civil Rights Act, political advantage, as much any sincere beliefs in societal tolerance, informed the changes in the older exclusionary immigration policy. However, the admission that "exclusion was wrong" led to the unjustified corollary that "inclusion must always be right." Liberals promoted the sophistry that, because the majority culture had been unforgivably racist and/or sexist, members of minority cultures had no responsibility to assimilate with the majority culture. This would slowly morph into the idea that the federal government could (and should) be blocked by so-called "sanctuary policies" at the state level. In the 21st century has become an "Ethos of Sharing" in which the state expects the federal authorities to accede to the wishes of the "minority culture" of that state.

In Part 1, I mentioned how most Liberals who addressed the phenomenon of illegal immigration almost invariably resorted to the "Honest Juan" paradigm. Said paradigm always portrays the illegal as a wholesome, honest person who's just trying to make a better life for himself and his family. I will admit comic books and films didn't promote this idea nearly as much as television shows, particularly legal dramas, where the sympathetic lawyer is always on the side of the poor but honest illegal. Even TV shows with a conservative slant, such as 24 (2001-2014), didn't tend to critique lax Liberal policies with respect (say) to admitting dangerous aliens into the country.    

I don't doubt that many of the Libs who support illegal entry sincerely believe that by assisting illegals, they're atoning for the sins of "Racist America." This is currently most evident in the fanatical anti-ICE protests of the past year, both in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, though in some ways these protests are a side-development of a general Democrat meme, in which everything the opposing party does today is irredeemably racist in nature. The upshot of this Ethos of Sharing, which resulted in the growth of sanctuary cities as a consequence of the 1965 Immigration Act, is that its proponents cannot deviate from the falsehood that every illegal must be an Honest Juan. Thus, Minnesota Liberals have made the not-quite-conscious decision to share their state with a wide variety of criminals, from rapists to drug-dealers to child molesters. I've even come across a few Liberals who defend this policy on the basis that there are an equal proportion of criminals within the ranks of legal American citizens. It's as if they think there should be "equal opportunity" for criminals from, say, Somalia to rip off the majority culture, because that culture is so irredeemably evil in nature. 

While it's not totally incorrect to critique the ethics of the dominant majority, there's no concomitant guarantee that the minority is going to be any more virtuous. Surprisingly, one of the few places I saw some pop-cultural pushback against the one-sided vilification of the dominant majority appeared in the 2017-18 Marvel series called FALCON. This eight-issue series appeared in the same year that "Black Captain America" failed to replace "White Captain America" in the hearts of comics-fans. Marvel then put Sam Wilson back in his Falcon outfit, and in the first issue, Falcon-Sam explains his ethical compass to a friend in terms that reference then-recent developments in the "Secret Empire" arc:

Steve being a traitor validated every cynic who felt America was an idealized metaphor for the dominant culture's survival and the minority's suffering. I can't let that idea take hold. People need HOPE"-- FALCON #1, writer Rodney Barnes, 2017.

To be sure, that ship had already sailed. The very agenda of Superhero Replacement in the 2010s showed that some people believed the very thing Barnes' Falcon wished to tamp down, and grievance-based anti-Americanism had been around since the rise of liberation movements around both Blacks and women. The chaos in Minnesota continues to validate protesters who have subscribed to the notion that their minority opinion re: illegal immigration "trumps" the opinions of the dominant majority, to say nothing of federal law. I don't agree that this belief is, as Barnes said, merely "cynical." Rather, false idealists like the Minnesota protesters have convinced themselves of their rightness by drawing upon a very old formula relating to uncritical liberality.             

SUPERHERO REPLACEMENT THEORY PT. 1

The term "replacement theory," a designation for a Right-leaning conspiracy theory, didn't come into vogue until French author Renaud Camus coined the term in 2011. In that context, Camus argued that vested interests in Europe were attempting to replace White Europeans with immigrants, legal or otherwise, the better to control the population. Camus made the interesting remark, derived from Brecht, that "the easiest thing to do for a government that had lost the confidence of its people would be to choose new people."

In September 2025 I argued that many of the political disagreements in American society stemmed from a conflict between two ethical systems: the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing.  In that three-part essay-series, I concentrated on explicating the idea first and then provided particular examples of the idea's application in pop culture. This time, I'll go the other way and start with an example.

Since I won't address "replacement theory" in terms of immigration law and politics until Part 2, here I'll concern myself with "the superhero replacement theory" that arose at Marvel Comics in the 2010s. This was a loose editorial policy aimed at portraying the Marvel Universe as having been too dominated by the Dreaded White Male, a tendency that the new breed of editors, like Axel Alonso, proposed to correct. TIME thought it worth covering this replacement of old characters with new ones, supposedly more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender-- and all this roughly a year before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became heavily invested in its own replacement theory.

Alonso, a journalist turned modern-day mythologist, is leading the world’s top comics publisher during a time of great disruption. In an industry historically dominated by caucasian males, Alonso is breaking the laminated seal of stodgy tradition by adding people of every ilk to the brand’s roster of writers and dramatis personae. Under his watch, the Marvel universe has expanded to accommodate costumed crimefighters of myriad ethnicities: a biracial Spider-Man, a black Captain America, a Mexican-American Ghost Rider, to name a few.-- "Meet the Myth-Master Reinventing Marvel Comics," 2017.

It's ironic, though, that the TIME essay appeared in 2017, for by that time, the most famous/infamous replacement-- that of White Captain America by Black Captain America-- had utterly failed. According to the first collection of SAM WILSON CAPTAIN AMERICA, there were about a dozen stories in which Sam Wilson, formerly "The Falcon," assumed the mantle of star-spangled avenger. Following those dozen appearances, Marvel launched CAPTAIN AMERICA: SAM WILSON. This title lasted 24 issues from 2015 to 2017, with all scripts written by Nick Spencer. Spenser made his biggest splash with the notorious "Secret Empire" plotline, in which White Captain America was revealed to be an agent of Marvel's Nazi-adjacent terrorist cabal. Hydra. But I only read the first six issues of Spenser's WILSON, which just happen, in a serendipitous manner from my POV, to concern illegal immigration.

Spenser doesn't bestow individual titles on any stories in the six-issue arc. So because Wilson-Cap's main opponents are the Sons of the Serpent and the Serpent Society, I'll give the arc the arbitrary Marvel-style title "Serpents in Eden," albeit with the caveat that my ideas of who the serpents really are isn't the same as Spenser's. I'll pay Spenser a small compliment: while "Serpents" is a one-sided Liberal take on immigration, it's not nearly as stupid as either of the MCU stories focused on Wilson-Cap: 2021's teleseries FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER and 2025's CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. But Spenser is unapologetic about slanting his discourse on America's unsecured borders by relying on that hoary old Liberal cliche. the "Honest Juan" paradigm.

So Wilson-Cap is approached by the grandmother of one Joaquin Torres about her missing grandson. I think Spenser meant to imply that both Joaquin and his grandma were US citizens, though the writer doesn't actually say so. But Joaquin does resemble just about every other illegal-lover in American pop culture. Joaquin sets up resources to help migrants survive their attempts to illegally cross the border-- which proves he's a good guy, because he's saving lives but not directly providing aid in said crossings. (The grandma is careful to say that Joaquin is not a coyote.) Wilson-Cap soon discovers that a new incarnation of the Sons of the Serpent-- originally an American-nationalism group introduced in the 1960s-- has been kidnapping migrants to use for the subjects of mutation experiments. 

However, these Sons are only hired thugs, working for the Serpent Society, rebranded as "Serpent Solutions." The new snake-fiends are oriented upon getting rich White conservatives to invest in their villainous schemes-- because, as we all know, there are no Liberals who ever promote massive illegal schemes. In the midst of all this politically tinged superhero actions, not much is said about most of the migrants victimized-- except Good Samaritan Joaquin. As it happens, when he gets mutated, he gets turned into a guy with natural arm-wings, so that by the climax of "Serpents," Joaquin gives up helping illegals and assumes Wilson-Cap's old ID of "The Falcon." Not that Wilson-Cap ever totally dropped the avian part of his identity. I think two crusaders with wings, but not with a mutual bird-motif, feels a lot like gilding the lily, but that's me.

There are certainly some entertaining bits in "Serpents." Wilson-Cap has a "will they-won't they" thing going in these six issues with old femme-favorite Misty Knight, and for a good portion of the story the hero gets transformed into a wolf-man, which is a callback to a nineties CAPTAIN AMERICA arc, "Man and Wolf." But naturally Spenser's political take on illegal immigration is completely dishonest. He puts into the mouth of the villains' leader the standard claim that objections to illegals is all about xenophobia: "Afraid of losing your job? Perhaps you'd be interested in a border wall to keep out immigrants who might undercut your current pay." The presumption here is that average Americans ought to be willing to let their wages be cut by greedy corporations-- the same ones Spenser excoriates-- because the presence of cheap scab labor makes such wage-cutting feasible. As with most Leftist racial theories, the persons thought to be "marginalized" are incapable of causing harm, even unintentionally. They can only be framed as victims, even if real-world victimage doesn't involve getting turned into human-animal hybrids.

As an ironic conclusion to this particular part of Marvel's replacement experiment, after the final issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA SAM WILSON in 2017, another group of raconteurs came out with an eight-issue FALCON series running from 2017 to 2018, possibly in an attempt to please the readers who wanted Sam Wilson to return to his previous super-ID. However, Axel Alonso was only credited as Marvel's editor-in-chief for the first three episodes of this series, and by issue four he had been ousted from the position by his successor C.B. Cebulski, whose editorial credit appears on the remaining five issues. I didn't read this series any more than I read the rest of the Spenser issues of WILSON, so I don't know what rationale was used to restore the status quo. But clearly the failure of Wilson-Cap indicates that the Marvel readership wanted to "Keep" Steve Rogers as their Captain America and didn't support the commandment that they ought to "Share" their entertainment with Liberals seeking to rewrite superheroes to be one-dimensional expressions of political correctness.

Next up: more stuff about "Sharing" when it takes the form of shoving messages down the mouths of consumers.

                     

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 2

 In PART 2, I cited one possible formula for all of fictional narrative, based largely on the radical of conflict:  

most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

This conflict doesn't always eventuate in fictional violence. But the first two important critics of the comic-book medium, Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thought that, at least within the context of children's entertainment, fictional violence was always capable of poisoning the well of young minds, resulting in the unwanted syndromes of sadism or masochism. Though their ideals were not the same, Legman and Wertham favored the same sort of one-sided, hectoring arguments to prove they were right. Today, Legman is barely known to comics-critics, and Wertham is seen as a massively dishonest, though possibly well-meaning, fraudster. I may be the only person who's critiqued them in tandem within essays written for this century, emphasizing that neither of them seemed to know how to distinguish between syndromic and non-syndromic forms of sadism. In SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND I wrote:

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind.

I'm also probably the only writer who ever gave either of them any credit for getting anything right in the midst of their overall wrongness. In the 2024 essay GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE, I mentioned how at age 10 I encountered a mention of Legman in this 1965 TIME essay, whose writer was enamored enough with Legman's 1949 book LOVE AND DEATH to quote a significant passage, part of which reads:

...in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily.

Now, suppose in that same year of 1965, there had been another young reader of that TIME essay, name of "John." Being also about ten, John would have been reading comic strips since he could read, including both BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS, but he probably wouldn't have known anything about sadism or masochism. But John reads that passage, and though he doesn't give a squat about the Katzenjammers, John gets a bit of a buzz from the idea of hapless Dagwood being "degraded daily," in such a way that all the pains and humiliations he suffers, no matter their origins, are somehow ascribable to "the kewpie-doll character of Blondie." John isn't sure, because of Legman's vague language, as to exactly why the adult readers of Chic Young's domestic comic strip would find such fantasies attractive. But the broad implication would seem to be that something about seeing Dagwood forced to be The Eternal Goat must also give those adults such a buzz.

Now-- was John, or any of the millions of Americans who regularly watched the tortures of Dagwood, necessarily a syndromic sadist because he, or they, derived some sadistic or masochistic pleasure from seeing those tortures? Legman would have said so. I would say that one only becomes a syndromic fetishist of any kind because the subject continues to seek that particular pleasure over and over, rather than just getting the buzz from time to time when one encounters the stimulation in a "casual" fashion, without especially looking for it. This is the same "casual sadism" that moved Elizabethans to watch both "bear baiting" spectacles and Shakespearean dramas, because the cruelties of both were diverting, though not necessarily syndromic.

Now suppose that I read every Ditko comics-story in existence, and I found no sadistic/masochistic content in anything but in his collaborations with unquestionable fetishist Eric Stanton. That could prove that Ditko had no more than a casual creator's interest in the dynamics of sadomasochistic art. We don't seem to have any testimony from the reticent Ditko as to what he thought or felt about working with Stanton. However, Stanton did make a significant comment on general relationships of artists sharing the same studio.

PURE IMAGES: I've shared studios with different artists and you can't help but work on each other's stuff. You'll be there reacting with energy to their work, and in turn they get excited about the project.

STANTON: Yes, you have to. You'll be working in one train of thought and you don't even realize that there are other opportunities.

PURE IMAGES #1 (1990)

To slightly reiterate my point from the first essay, if Ditko were a syndromic sadist, I think we would have seen much more evidence of his inclinations in his rich career. I would expect to see something closer in spirit to the oeuvre of Tom Sutton, who produced both sadomasochistic art for the erotic comics market and edgy mainstream horror stories that dripped with perversity. But that's just how things look to me at a point when I've yet to read every story Steve Ditko ever produced.             

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 1

RIP JAGGER'S DOJO now carries this recommendation for a book by one Richard Seves. The book concerns the fetish art of Eric Stanton, as well as the American subculture in which certain types of fetish art were promulgated, usually concentrating upon sadism, masochism, or some combination of the two. Stanton is not well known to most comics-fans even today, but during about ten years of his career, he shared a New York studio with an artist who was then reaching the apogee of his fame in the limited venue of American comic books, Steve Ditko. 

I have not read the book but will probably plan to do so some time in the future. At least one reason for me to do so is that much of my literary project on this blog is to examine art of all types from the viewpoint that most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

I don't remember encountering info on the Ditko-Stanton connection any time before the 1990s. A few quotes from Stanton appear in PURE IMAGES #1 (1990), a magazine devoted almost entirely to Greg Theakston's essay "The Birth of Spider-Man." Those quotes were purely focused on the question of what, if anything, Stanton might have contributed to the web-slinger. Most fans seemed to take the position that Ditko, well-known for taking strong moralistic stances in his essays and comics-works, probably participated very little in the quasi-legal erotic comics/artwork that Stanton produced. But the Seves book, going on Rip's review of it, seems to take the position that Ditko's contributions, if only in terms of inking artwork, were much more substantial than many fans imagined. 

 Based at least partly on the Seves book's information, Rip said:

I confess little interest in this form of kinky presentation, and at the risk of protesting too much I think like many this has perhaps caused me to overlook something quite obvious. Steve Ditko was a fetish artist. He was not as I had previously thought a colleague who helped touch up an image here and there for his studio mate who was a fetish artist, but instead he was part of an artistic team which intentionally created narratives within the confines of the fetish field. It's a bit of a surprise to find this out about a guy who despite his reclusive nature has had his work feverishly examined for decades now.

 I too don' t tend to associate Ditko with any form of fetishistic erotica. Yet I have no problem in arguing for such content, even if it's expressed on a purely subconscious level, if there's strong textual support for the argument. And that's the only way one could approach Ditko's work, because as most fans know, the artist never gave interviews and only started disseminating his memories of SPIDER-MAN's creation very late in his life, through the venue of privately printed fanzines. I've only read a few Ditko essays, usually in excerpted form, and I tend to doubt that Ditko ever discussed in any terms the increasing cultural focus on erotic art that began in the decade of the 1960s, the same era in which he came to prominence. I also get the impression that Ditko never publicly commented on his work-relationship with Stanton. But if he did, I'd guess that said commentary would have been minimal at best, dwarfed by Ditko's marked concentration on his many Randian social pronouncements.

If the totality of Ditko's oeuvre contains any significant fetish-content, I would think it would have manifested less through his various superhero works for Marvel and DC, than in the short horror stories in which the artist specialized before his sixties breakout success and after he left the Big Two for a time in the 1970s. These would probably represent Ditko in his purest state, in which he was most free of editorial oversight. My impression of those stories I've read-- but usually not reviewed-- is that they lack erotic content, and that they usually hinged on the trope of "the biter bit," where some malicious or foolish individual Gets His in the End. I guess one could argue, as did Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, that such tropes are fundamentally sadistic. But I do not, as I'll try to clarify in Part 2.           

  

 

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2

 I encountered the word "anomaly" used as a literary term in a book I referenced here:

“Status quo” science fiction. . . opens with a conventional picture of social reality. . .  This reality is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption. At the story’s conclusion, the initial reality (the status quo) reasserts itself (ix).

Later in the quotation, it's clear that Frank Cioffi applies the term "anomaly" to isophenomenal works as well as metaphenomenal, given that he mentions "crime" serving the same disruptive function in a mundane detective story. One problem with his concept, though, is that the "status quo society" may just as anomalous to the reader's mundane experience as the entity/circumstance that disrupts the society. Thus Dick Tracy's status quo can accomodate anomalous, quasi-futuristic technology like the "wrist radio" in the detective's battle against a horde of freakish criminals, and the status quo of DUNE's Atreides family, with its space-opera resources, is disrupted by the resistance of the equally anomalous Fremen. Cioffi even mentions a similar work himself, Van Vogt's story "Black Destroyer," which pits the crew of a futuristic spaceship against a powerful alien creature. 

I spent all this time reworking Cioffi's overly simple schema because I want to rescue a perfectly good term for my own use, which only concerns metaphenomenal anomalies, whichever "side" utilizes them. And that leads me into a development of my somewhat neglected distinctions between "power and potency." given its fullest articulation here.      

In that essay I favored these definitions of "power" and "potency." 

POWER: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality

POTENCY: The power of something to affect the mind or body

That essay spoke of distinctions between "body" and "non-body" concepts, more or less derived from my reading of an Octavio Paz analysis. Now, in place of that dichotomy, I would favor the idea that an anomaly that displays "power" to be "active" in nature, while one that displays "potency" is "passive" in nature. 

Examples of powerful anomalies are legion, but the POWER AND POTENCY series mentions a number of anomalies, both uncanny and marvelous, in which the anomaly conveys more or less "indirect" influence. 

For instance, Part 4 and Part 5 both concern marvelous narratives about formerly mortal men who are brought back to life to fight evil, but who don't possess any special powers beyond the "passive" condition of having been thus resuscitated. Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones, and in LUNATIC LAWMEN I referenced such examples as the psycho-film EYES OF A STRANGER and the near-future "alternate history" film RED DAWN. In both of these movies, the eminent icons-- one a monster and the other a hero-- were in terms of power almost indistinguishable from isophenomenal versions of similar menaces or champions. But both possess what I've called a "larger-than-life" quality, one that references their dependence on artifice more than verisimilitude-- and this emphasis upon the artifice of their natures too is a form of passive potency.