MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a "family," as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean anything if a creator doesn't have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families. 

FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn't the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles. Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee's penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby's passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever "origin story" fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

In juvenile sci-fi comics, "hunting" doesn't connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females' function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn't challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.

 Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same "nest," often depicting Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "siblings." Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the "den mother" gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as "female vs. male" agency a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott's run on the FF title-- from issues #1-46 (2018-2022) -- has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called "The Reckoning War."

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into "War" that one has to track down in other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott's FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There's some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott's main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are "the Reckoning," and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift."

Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can't equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The "fake death" sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge-- in other words, endless "hunting"-- holds peril for the "nest" of the family.    

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed's chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF's family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.        

    

NEAR MYTHS: THE THING VS. THE IMMORTAL HULK (2019)

 

Though "TTVTIH" (FF vol 6 #12) doesn't have the symbolic discourse of a mythcomic, it does ring in one of the best takes on that near-mythic question dear to the hearts of Marvelites: "who's stronger, the Hulk or the Thing?"

 

Now, in a technical sense the real question wasn't "who was stronger." If Lee and Kirby had been in any way ambivalent when the two characters first met in FF #12, "The Hulk vs. the Thing" in FF #25 made it abundantly clear that the larger Hulk had the strength advantage. The real question was "what can the Thing, the FF's heavy hitter, do to beat an unbeatable adversary?" Issue #25, which focuses mostly on the Thing and the Hulk, and its second part in #26, which brings in the Avengers as well, is practically a masterclass from Jack Kirby in the depiction of dynamic combat-scenes (even despite the ham-fisted inks of George Bell). During the same period, the Thing often had battles with other powerhouses, such as the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer, and some of these battles were repeated. But without checking I'd guess about 10-15 later artists attempted to exploit the suspense of a Thing-Hulk battle once again. Some of these latter-day battles were adequate, and others mediocre, but none of them even came close to the high standard of Lee and Kirby-- until 2019.

The great cover by Esad Ribic presages what turns out to be an exceptional story built around yet another contest between Orange Guy and Green Guy, drawn by Sean Izaakse and scripted by Dan Slott. And, almost unbelievably, Slott makes a silk purse out of one of Marvel's hoariest "sow-ear" plots: the one where the villainous Puppet Master uses a radioactive puppet to force one hero to attack another hero.

 Now, unlike many writers who resorted to the "Puppet Master plot," Slott set up a special connotation to the villain's actions. The Puppet Master, currently in prison, has become aware that his stepdaughter Alicia intends to marry Ben Grimm, one of the evildoer's worst enemies. So the irate puppet-maker takes control of the Hulk and sics the behemoth on the Thing when the hero is beginning his honeymoon with his new bride. Thus, the villain's motives are much more personal than usual. In addition, in contrast to every other such story I've read, this time the Hulk is aware of being controlled, but he has such a long-standing grudge against the Thing that he somewhat cooperates with Puppet Master. Slott does this, I believe, because when he comes up with a unique way for Ben Grimm to win his battle, the writer wants readers to feel like the hero finally beat his green-skinned nemesis "fair and square"-- that is, with the Hulk largely in control of his faculties, even while being controlled.

And how does Ben win? Well, even though I don't have a large readership, I won't say, on the chance it might compel even one person to check out THE THING VS THE IMMORTAL HULK. And "not revealing the ending" is a courtesy I almost never extend to any other thing I've ever reviewed.

TTVTIH doesn't top THVTT. But it's now a close second.                   

SLOTT RACING

 

I haven't been a fan, in the "fanatic" sense of the word, of hardly any comics-creator since the 1990s, which is pretty close to when I stopped buying new American comics. (I have continued to collect a handful of new manga.) And even in the 80s and 90s, I often resorted to quarter boxes to fill issues of magazines I was only mildly interested in following. But by the 2000s, I had so many comics I even stopped getting many used comics either. By then, TPBs had become profitable enough that public libraries carried a lot of them, and so I could sample newer books at no expense. And that's how I found Dan Slott's FANTASTIC FOUR, which began with "Volume 6, Number One" in 2018 to issue #46 in 2022. (Two issues later, the title rebooted for a new sheriff in town.)

I had already read a smattering of Slott's comics in titles like SPIDER-MAN and SHE-HULK. I thought those stories okay but nothing that compelled me to read everything he wrote for those features. I wouldn't have thought he would be the first writer I ever liked on FANTASTIC FOUR almost as much as I like Stan and Jack.

The last FF stories I read with any frequency was the Tom deFalco run, ending in 1995, and of course I'd read everything up to that point. Some contributors to the FF legend were extremely mediocre, like Thomas, Conway, and Byrne. Others, like Wein and Englehart, were able to work in a few interesting ideas. But as far as I could tell, none of the writers got the "voices" of the characters that only Stan Lee conveyed, and only a few artists, like George Perez, communicated some of the verve of Kirby. That said, I might have missed a lot of great stuff in the 2000s, when I only picked up a very small handful of secondhand books. I did see the introduction of Valeria Richards, whom John Byrne created as a stillborn infant and whom Chris Claremont retconned into a living teen girl, who eventually got retconned again into the legitimate daughter of Reed and Sue. Other characters, who would become important in Slott's run, debuted in the runs of earlier raconteurs, such as an intelligent version of the android Dragon Man. And of course, DeFalco deserves credit for undoing the whole "Johnny Storm marries his best friend's girl" thing from Byrne's run.

             

 Yet, despite my having hopped over a decade of continuity, I feel like Slott went in new directions. The above-seen "wedding of Ben and Alicia" was a welcome development, but far more incisive was Slott's reading of Johnny Storm as a "player," which he arguably was in some of his first appearances. First, he begins dating Sky, an alien female with wings, who believes that the two of them were born as soulmates. But in a few issues, Johnny manages to inveigle the affections of Zora Victorious, a Latverian soldier who idolizes her armor-clad monarch. Naturally, when Doom persuades the young woman to become his queen, this sets up a situation that will make Doom despise Johnny almost as much as he does Reed Richards. I also like Slott's handling of Reed, Sue and Ben as well, but over the years they've received quite a bit of character-buildup from various authors, while the Torch usually gets short shrift.

 

Now, though almost every writer who worked on FF had emphasized that the group was "a family," the only literal addition to that familial group in the 20th century had been Franklin Richards. Claremont's Valeria, after substantial tweaking, was brought into the title as a regular at some point in the 2000s, but I can't speak to how good the book might have been thanks to the original addition. But I can say that Slott captures the "teen-voices" of Franklin and Valeria quite well, and arguably he does even better by bringing in two younger kids, who provide considerable contrast when they're adopted by the newly married Ben and Alicia. This was a clever way of bringing in the ongoing history of the Kree and Skrull Empires, for one child, Jo-venn, is Kree while the other, N'Kalla, is Skrull. The heroes stumble across a space casino where these two pre-teens have been trained to fight one another for the entertainment of onlookers, a faux extension of the famous "Kree-Skrull War." Slott skillfully shows that even though the two kids have been trained to fight for the entertainment of audiences, they actually have a grudging respect for one another and become annoyed when the Thing and the Torch seek to liberate the two kids from the only life they've ever known. Once the Baxter Building has four kids on the premises, it seems more like a "family affair" than anything since Stan and Jack-- and one could even argue that the two creators might have done better on that score.

Not everything is golden. There are a few too many trips to outer space and/or alien dimensions where the inhabitants aren't all that interesting, and that includes the planet from which Sky hails. However, I'll deal with two other stories-- one a mythcomic and one a near-myth-- that should show why Slott's tenure deserves more attention.        

COSMIC FLIGHT, SPIDER BITE

 I'm currently working on an extensive FANTASTIC FOUR critical evaluation that will encompass the two mythcomics posts I have planned for this month, respectively posts #399 and #400. (Since the first time my posts reached 100, I have endeavored to make each hundredth-post something special, as do many comics-serials.) Since I'm planning to eschew my critical jargon where possible, I decided to get at least some of that out of my system by expanding on the following remarks from last year's DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3:

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age... In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them.

Here, then, are some demonstrations of my perceptions re: the four potentialities in each Silver Age serial.

 The kinetic potentiality in fiction concerns anything that's an analogue to physical sensation. Often I've referenced this potentiality with respect to those immortal selling-points, "sex and violence," but it also includes all sympathetic and antipathetic affects linked to sensation. Within the sphere of the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, Jack Kirby designed an almost unparalleled rogues' gallery of unattractive villains to engage in combat with the generally attractive heroes (and yes, over time the Thing becomes cute than horrifying). This cover to FF #100-- which I for one wish could have been Kirby's last contribution to the series-- shows a good cross-section of the heroes and their opponents.

Ditko's run on SPIDER-MAN was not as long as Kirby's on FF, and he never showed a literal assemblage of all his best villains. (To be sure, both artists produced a handful of loser-foes, whom no one would particularly want to see again.) The closest thing to a Ditko "greatest hits" would be the "Sinister Six" tale in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1.

Despite how long each artist worked on each series, they're both in the same domain as far as how well they exploited the kinetic potentialities for repulsion and attraction. However, as I said above, the ways in which each writer/artist combo approached the dramatic potentiality took very different forms.

In the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, melodramatic tragedy arose every once in a while, as in the story "This Man, This Monster." Yet I believe editor Lee chose most of the time to soft-pedal such emotional tumult, if only because he was always writing about four characters in an ensemble that had to remain together for the series' sake, no matter how often they talked about breaking up. Thus I'd argue that comedy rather than tragedy tended to rule the FF-realm, as seen in these pages from FF #54:         

In contrast to this series, though, SPIDER-MAN was a loner. Thought the series displayed an ample amount of comedy-- often in the form of playing jokes on J. Jonah Jameson-- there was a marked emphasis upon Peter Parker being caught in a tangled web, woven by some dispassionate god and in which Parker was tormented as for sport. From AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #17:

I'm not in any way devaluing comedy over drama; that's the sort of thinking that makes the Oscar Awards such a drag. But I am saying that because Lee and Ditko focused so much on teen melodrama, with some parallel crime-melodrama content, they often didn't veer into the vertical level of meaning very often.

 All of the famous Spidey villains seen above are just crooks in costumes; they want to steal things, Spider-Man gets in their way, and they want to kill him so that they can go back to stealing with impunity. That's why I've found so few mythopoeic or dramatic complexities in the L/D SPIDER-MAN, or, for that matter, in later iterations of the franchise. A couple of Spider-foes have world-conquering ambitions, like Doc Ock and the Lizard, but arguably Lee and Ditko devoted less space to their abstract motivations. 

The Red Ghost, in his first (and only good) story, wants to dominate Earth's moon for the glory of Communism. The Puppet Master has more interest in controlling other people's lives than in interacting with his stepdaughter. Doctor Doom is obsessed with being the best at everything and thus wants more than anything to prove that he can beat his detested rival. All of these motivations BEGIN in the dramatic potentiality, but as I've argued in the various mythcomics essays I devoted to each FF-villain, the creators found ways to organically develop the mythopoeic and the didactic OUT of the dramatic motivations.       

And with all that in mind, my next essay will deal with a quick and dirty history of the Fantastic Four after Lee and Kirby.
              

LEGACY REALIGNMENT

 While glancing through issues of Eclipse's 1980s AIRBOY comics-- all of which I reviewed in 2019-- I realized that I'd never seen anywhere a case of such "super-cosmic re-alignment." That is, in articles like this one, I've usually been addressing only minor re-alignments, where Character X is introduced in Cosmos Y but then gets transferred to Cosmos Z, or even becomes a "free agent," bouncing around into any cosmos where some raconteur wants to place him or her.

"Large pastiche" concepts are somewhat more ambitious. The original run of MASTER OF KUNG FU centered upon the new character of Shang-Chi, whose exploits drew upon the hero's acrimonious relationship with his father Fu Manchu, an established and familiar fictional icon. In the course of the series, the writers worked into their cosmic continuity about a half dozen other Sax Rohmer characters. But there was no idea of a total re-alignment of all Rohmer's "Fu-concepts" into the cosmos of Shang-Chi.

What Eclipse did with the "cosmos" of Hillman Comics was rather different. Though Hillman ceased publication in 1953, a handful of reprints had established a very loose continuity for a few of their features. In three stories I examined as a quasi-triptych, first one AIRBOY story introduced a new villain, Misery. Two issues later, the titular hero encountered a new opponent, Valkyrie. But though she started off fighting the Allies as a native of Germany, in the same story she was converted to the cause of good by Airboy's charms and is turned against the Axis. Then, three years later-- during which time Valkyrie had again appeared alongside Airboy as an ally a couple of times-- the two of them took up arms against the recrudescent Misery, in what might be considered an "informal crossover." After Misery's defeat, I don't believe he appeared again in the Golden Age, though Valkyrie did, even not all raconteurs were consistent with her character.

          

Another type of "informal crossover" appeared in AIR FIGHTERS #3 (1942), in the feature SKY WOLF. This titular hero and his squadron, in the midst of battling evil Nazis, had to take time out to destroy a weird muck-monster named The Heap. It seems unlikely that the creators of the story meant for the Heap to be anything but a one-off menace. However, it's been claimed that readers wrote to Hillman wanting to see more of the once-human monstrosity. This the Heap got his own backup feature, which only fit into AIR FIGHTERS because the creature had been a WWI German pilot before getting transformed into a swamp-thing. Further, though I don't believe Golden Age Airboy ever met the Heap, Airboy had at least one crossover with Sky Wolf. However, most Hillman featured characters-- the Black Angel, the Iron Ace, etc-- never encountered any other characters in the "Hillman Universe."

  

 Rather ambitiously, Eclipse sought to forge the idea of a fully shared universe, built around a legacy version of the original Airboy. The original hero, now some thirty years older in 1986 since his feature's demise in 1953, appears only in the first issue long enough to be killed by the forces of his old foe Misery. Davy Nelson III, the dead hero's grown son, takes over his father's mantle, and by so doing becomes the new Prime to whom Misery is a Sub. In addition, the original Valkyrie is restored to life without having aged, and she too becomes a regular Sub in the new AIRBOY series. Other characters from the Hillman-verse, whether they had their own features or not, get drawn into either the Airboy cosmos or that of his backup strip, the revived Sky Wolf. Such characters ranged from the aforementioned Heap and Iron Ace to a couple of new iterations of old icons, like a Black "Black Angel." Some new characters were created as well for the AIRBOY and SKY WOLF cosmoses, but the focus was clearly on having them host all the characters that Eclipse had acquired.

After a year or so, Eclipse also promoted Valkyrie to Prime status with two mini-serials and two solo outings of her combined with an all-female group of stalwarts, "The Airmaidens." The stories were always decent if unremarkable formula-work, even in the one-shot "maybe-a-dream-crossover" AIRBOY/MR MONSTER SPECIAL. But though I can name off a lot of large pastiches in which current authors pulled from the creations of many authors, the "Air Fighters Universe" at present does seem to be the only example of a "legacy realignment," totally attributing every possible crossover-icon from one cosmos to another.                

THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

 The PRELUDE to this essay should explain why the concept of "the sublime" is so important to the history of metaphenomenal literature. What now follows is more in the nature of my reworking some of the categories in my personal literary theory.  

Following some of the concepts laid forth by both Carl Jung and Northrop Frye, it's become a rock-solid assertion of my theory that all literary works are comprised of a lateral meaning (this concerns what things happen in the text) and a virtual meaning (this concerns how things happen in the text). Both can be as simple, or as complex, as the author of a work desires these meanings to be. Over the years I have sought to bring the lateral/vertical concepts into a perceived harmony with other categories, particularly in the 2023 essay MIGHT AND MYTH and in the 2025 essay CORRELATING COGITATIONS.  Both essays are largely still valid, but there are some problems with my coordinations between the two modes of sublimity that I deduced from my reading of Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I no longer believe this passage from MIGHT AND MYTH:

the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime."

Nor these two from CORRELATING COGITATIONS:

That the ontocosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT."

That the epicosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH."

The respective terms ontocosm and epicosm still incorporate all lateral meanings and all vertical meanings, respectively. But I was incorrect to correlate the ontocosm with the dynamic-sublime, and the epicosm only with the combinatory-sublime. 

I might not have made this error, had I more fully concentrated upon another duality of equal relevance, one I did mention in the 2023 essay but not in the 2025 one. Here's the mention from 2023, which immediately follows the 2023 quote from above:

Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination. 

What I failed to do was to re-assess was the extent to which the four potentialities as a whole aligned with the two very different modes of the sublime. I've now decided that, whatever Kant meant with his modes of the sublime, mine apply to the different ways in which human beings approach the "non-directed thinking" of play and the "directed thinking" of work.

The combinatory-sublime is first and foremost applies to the subject's experience of plenitude of forms, which in my system takes the place of Kant's "mathematical-sublime." Thus I now find that this form of the sublime takes in the least "directed" modes of play, which would be (1) the excitations of the kinetic potentiality, and (2) the correlations of the mythopoeic potentiality. Conversely, the most directed modes of play apply to (3) the emotions of the dramatic potentiality, and (4) the cogitations of the didactic potentiality.

I may explore these matters more thoroughly later, but my new categorical alignments go as follows:

KINETIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic combinatory mode

DRAMATIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic dynamicity mode

MYTHOPOEIC-- aligned with the epicosmic combinatory mode

DIDACTIC-- aligned with the epicosmic dynamicity mode           

 

   

    

PRELUDE TO THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

“We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.”

― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble 

I'll be writing more about the impending "shift" in some of my literary categories in the next post. This post provides a history of the concept of "the sublime," supplementing much of what I've already written here about the concept's appearance in the works of such 18th-century critics as Burke and Kant.

I confess that, though I've read more about the sublime than many people, for overall history I'm as dependent on online sources as anyone. But as a first-time experiment, I decided to consult not just the dominant source Wikipedia, but also Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated competition for the allegedly over-liberal online encyclopedia. What I found has nothing to do with the political sympathies of either encyclopedia's compilers, whether direct (Wikipedia) or indirect (the programmers behind the Grokipedia AI). The Grokipedia entry is much stronger than the competing entry on the elaboration of the sublimity concept, and cognate concepts, in ancient Greece. But it then cites, as did other sources I relied upon in past, Edmund Burke's 1757 writings as the first important post-Renaissance meditations on the sublimity concept. The Wikipedia entry says little about the Classic Greek developments but includes more data about the 17th and 18th centuries. Since I'm more interested in the post-Renaissance developments, from now on I'll build on Wiki's historical observations, like this one.

In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis. These authors expressed an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.^[3]

I find it fascinating that the three authors cited in the passage cited the Longinian idea of "the sublime" in relation to their sightseeing tours of the Alps. The article discusses, as I will not, some of the differences in their interpretations of their separate experiences, and I will take Wiki at its word since I've read nothing of Addison, Dennis, or Ashley-Cooper (the last of whom-- fun fact-- got a shout-out in the teleseries LOST). I suspect that all three invoked the sublime in reaction to some anterior observation about the concept, possibly from one of those persons who translated Longinus into English in either the late 17th or early 18th century. Is it possible that all three authors journeyed to the Alps with the advance suspicion that the Alpine sights would give them the elevated experience Longinus wrote about? Impossible to know, but it has been said (by sources I forget) that pre-Renaissance Europeans of sufficient means simply did not mess about in the mountains for any such gratifications.

So Longinus was one of many Classical authors, including Aristotle, whose original works became available to Europeans, for the first time in centuries, during the Renaissance. The first distinct era of the post-Renaissance is usually dubbed "The Age of Enlightenment," and I observed here that it was particularly marked by an embrace of heavily rationalized philosophy and literature.

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of 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.  

In an essay I've not placed on The Archive, I similarly observed that critics of the period began using Aristotle's term "mimesis" (imitation) to connote the reproduction of observed reality with absolute fidelity-- though that was not the way Aristotle had used the term. 

So the Age of Enlightenment began, at least in part, by an act of rejecting fantasy. But since human beings as a whole are as much attracted to the limitless as to the limited, fantasy literature came back in a relatively short time. The 1600s concluded with the rise of the literary fairy tale, closely followed by the recording of popular oral folktales. The first European translation of the ARABIAN NIGHTS appeared in 1704, and despite the concurrent rise of naturalistic literature, European literature began a perhaps illicit love affair with genies and elephant-stealing birds. The late 1700s birthed both the first Gothic novel (1765) and the first important magical-era fantasy novel (1785's VATHEK) of the post-Renaissance period. For good measure, the year 1785 also hosts the last pure manifestation of the pre-Renaissance genre of "the fantastic travelers' tales," embodied by Raspe's BARON MUNCHAUSEN. These works and others laid the groundwork for the various works in the Gothic and Romantic movements throughout the 19th century, not least Walter Scott's sadly neglected LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the first important post-Renaissance fantasy in the combative mode. I am not saying that any contemporary readers of any of these works necessarily called them "sublime." But I am saying that even as various European countries got themselves engaged to the rational, they kept getting drawn back to the charms of the non-rational, which some called "the sublime" while others would come to call it "the sense of wonder." In this essay I endorsed an equivalence of the two affective terms, summed up adeptly by this passage.

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.-- Paul K. Alkon, SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE 1900.