MYTHCOMICS: "ENDS OF THE EARTH" (ALL-STAR BATMAN #6-9, 2017)

 The stories that endure? The "demons" that win? They're the ones that speak to who we want to be. Not the ones that scare us into being who we don't. They're true because we want them to be badly enough that we MAKE them true. -- Batman to Ra's Al Ghul, ENDS OF THE EARTH FINALE.  

A tagline on the back of the TPB reads, "This is not a Batman story. It's a villain story." It's a reprise of a line Ra's Al Ghul speaks to Batman, albeit in his Bruce Wayne guise, as part of a climactic dialogue between the two enemies. Yet it's not true, and I suspect writer Scott Snyder knew it wasn't true when he wrote the line. For roughly the last fifty years-- the period in which fans became the dominant writers of superhero comics-- an identity between the Dark Knight and his gallery of grotesques and arabesques has been irregularly suggested. The "old pros" of BATMAN's first thirty years probably would have found this imputation of identity too metaphysical, whether one was addressing the creator of Poison Ivy (Robert Kanigher), Mister Freeze (Dave Wood), or the Mad Hatter (Bill Finger). Denny O'Neil, one of the first of the fans to turn pro, possibly understood the identity-dynamic when he created Ra's. Yet Bill Finger seems to be the driving-force behind the dynamic-- Finger, who tapped the power of psychological obsession for heroes and villains to an extent not seen in earlier media like pulps and serials. I commented on this common element in my 2020 essay, THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD.

Plot-wise, ENDS OF THE EARTH is in many respects a standard Bat-villain team-up. Ra's is trying once again to wipe out much of the Earth's population. He suborns the talents of Mister Freeze and The Mad Hatter. Batman interferes, this time with some assistance from Poison Ivy. Snyder injects some elements that are probably original to his take on the Dark Knight-- an armored adult partner named Duke (whom I found tedious), and some new iteration of the Blackhawks. But Snyder surely knew he was selling his particular take on four of the celebrated rogues, by delving into their obsessions as the hero seeks to take them down.

Mister Freeze is one of Snyder's best conceits, with the writer framing Victor Fries' apocalyptic nihilism as springing from a childhood reading of Robert Frost's "fire and ice" poem-- and thus not purely a consequence of his quest to restore the health of his cryogenically preserved wife. In the service of Ra's Al Ghul, Freeze has perfected world-killing spores in his Arctic sanctum-- and even though Batman knows that a squadron of The New Blackhawks plans to firebomb the frigid fiend's laboratory, the Knight is compelled to get there first. Perhaps Batman feels he must be sure of ending the threat up close and personal. Perhaps he still pities the demented scientist, despite his murderous project. Or--

--Maybe Batman just wants to vanquish the cool, cruel villain with his nemesis, that of "heat." I frankly don't know what the propensity of real bats to generate high levels of body heat has to do with Batman using his own anti-virus to destroy Freeze's spores. But it does give the villain the chance to imagine his apocalyptic world of icy stillness ending in a cataclysm of fire.

The hero's triumph is mitigated in Part Two, in that some of the spores escape destruction, and so Batman must seek the help of another old foe. This time the Princess of Plants is off in some wasteland, conducting her biological experiments for the love of pure science. Knowing that Ivy's feeling for humanity is strained at best, Batman still seeks to prune knowledge from his enemy-- while additionally, for some vague reason, the Blackhawks menace Ivy as well. Ivy does help Batman after a fashion, though she makes him listen to a lecture about a supposed true ancestor to the legendary Tree of Life. If Freeze looked forward to a still, cold world of the future, Ivy is by comparison a being who seeks truth in the imponderable world of life's pre-human origins.

But Ivy's aid only slows the fatal influence of Freeze's spores. Batman uses his detective skills to track down a corporation that helped Freeze in some unspecified way and finds himself in the Carrol-esque domain of The Mad Hatter. Freeze and Ivy might not see themselves as aspects of Batman's own psyche, but the Hatter is an enthusiastic advocate of solipsism. But there's only one fantasy to which Bruce Wayne is beholden to, and that's "the window moment," the moment when he saw a bat come into his window and beheld the metaphor to which he dedicated his life.

And so, the Hatter, despite his love of fantasy, provides the real-world clue that leads Batman to confront Ra's Al Ghul in America's capital. The hero doesn't seem to make much of how he found several of the Blackhawk agents working with Hatter, and for all the reader knows, Batman learned nothing from them. He knows only that their confederates are holding Duke prisoner and planning to execute him at a particular time-- as if the threat of Ra's to exterminate half the world isn't sufficient to motivate the crusader. There's a confusing scene indicating that Batman gets Catwoman to masquerade as Batman to draw the villain's fire, and overall this segment doesn't show Ra's at his best. Still, the dialogue describing their conflicting visions-- one demon-haunted, the other haunted by a vision of perfectibility-- makes the more baffling details less worrisome.         

And so ends ENDS OF THE EARTH. Snyder packed in far too many extraneous details to make ENDS an outstanding Bat-story. (For instance, the last section reveals that the Blackhawks weren't working for Ra's after all-- so why were they working for Hatter?) But I can appreciate that Snyder and his five artist-collaborators went the extra mile to spin a new story of the hero and the villains who define him.    
        

GRIEVANCE IS NOT DIVERSITY'S GOOD BUDDY

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."-- Robert Frost.

“The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."-- Ibrem X Kendi.

Whenever creators of "woke" popular culture indulge in the practice of swapping the established ethnicities of characters formulated by earlier creators, they often defend their actions by pointing at American pop culture's long tradition of privileging Caucasian characters and of stigmatizing "people of color" when such characters were depicted at all. Because of this history-- which wokesters do not hesitate to dub "white supremacy"-- they assume that any alterations they make are beneficial to the culture as a whole, and that only unregenerate racists would object to their idea of diversity.

This radical definition of racism was not born along with the so-called modern Progressives, who became increasingly prominent in the 2010s, not least by reviving the term "woke" to describe a recommended state of liberal hyper-vigilance against any opposing conservative values. Like "woke," the term "institutional racism," aka "systemic racism," had an earlier genesis, appearing in the 1967 book BLACK POWER by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. That decade saw the political articulation of the two dominant forms of Liberalism, meliorism and radicalism. The names say something about their ideological orientations. Meliorism stems from a Latin word for "better," and thus suggesting the overall betterment of persons influenced by the ideology. Radicalism arose from a Latin word for "root," and became associated with the ideal of theoretically hunting out the "root causes" of some conflict-- though with the added connotation of attacking whatever is alleged to be the root cause, often benefitting one group or ideology rather than society as a whole.      

Froom the 1960s on, American pop culture tended to favor meliorism. When, for example, Marvel Comics introduced Black characters to their universe, such as The Black Panther and the Falcon, the liberal writers involved wanted their readers to better understand the culture of Black Africans and Black Americans. This did not mean that the White readers were in any way expected to cease appreciating either American majority culture or any of the European, dominantly-Caucasian cultures from which America's majority citizenry had been derived.

In comics, this meliorist pattern reached its apogee in the creation of THE NEW X-MEN in 1975. GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 sidelined four of the older, entirely Caucasian-American members of the 1960s team and devised an excuse for the two remaining members, Cyclops and Professor X, to go on an international scavenger-hunt for new mutant heroes. Seven crusaders obligingly sign on: one White Canadian, three White Europeans, one Native American, one Asian, and one apparent Black African (later revealed to be of African-American extraction). In the ensuing series, Cyclops still remains the only member from the sixties comic, with the other four from that period being written out (though a slightly later plotline brought back Marvel Girl within the space of an issue or two). Two other members left and stayed gone, ostensibly to reduce the number of characters readers had to keep track of. As it happened, they were both POC, with Native American Thunderbird dying in action and Asian Sunfire leaving just because he felt like being a dick.

The larger point to be taken from these meliorist examples is that there was no trace of a radical ideal that anyone of any race was "owed" representation. Writer Chris Claremont most probably eliminated Thunderbird and Sunfire because he didn't have anything to say about them, while he ostensibly kept Wolverine because he offered more story potential. Yet he also arguably gave more attention to Black African Storm than to Banshee and Colossus, two of the three White Europeans. Narratively speaking, Claremont had three "favorite children" in Storm, Nightcrawler and Wolverine. He concentrated on them so much that even the Caucasian-American Cyclops probably would not have got much attention had Claremont not brought back Jean Grey, who would eventually become entangled in a romantic arc with Wolverine.

So successful was the X-MEN franchise that nearly all other superhero team books, both from Marvel and from its main rival DC, emulated Claremont's melioristic liberal template, all the way through the 1980s and 1990s. That said, larger forces in popular entertainment would eventually shift that melioristic tendency, as grievance-based radicalism began to assume a greater cultural role in the 1990s, specifically through the mainstreaming of hip hop music and of the New Black Cinema, spearheaded by Spike Lee and John Singleton.

 In contrast, so-called mainstream comics, whether about hero-teams or not, didn't show much of a taste for radicalism. However, the same economic forces that birthed the direct-sales comics market made it possible for the industry to market concepts with a more radical agenda. Ironically, though Marvel Comics had provided most of the first "diverse" superheroes, their main competitor DC Comics invested far more heavily in imprints aimed at adults, principally Vertigo. Some of these "adventures in diversity" had a meliorist orientation. But arguably the more radical ongoing titles attracted more attention, setting the tune for the mainstreaming of "woke comics" in the 21st century. And although titles like SWAMP THING and SANDMAN had their "woke moments," none of the ongoing Vertigo titles were more grievance-heavy than Peter Milligan's SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. The first issue, for example, opens with a sequence in which a noble Black Man intercedes when his White girlfriend is menaced by a White slasher covered in the blood of his victims-- only for the Black Man to be shot dead by a Racist White Southern cop. Edgy, right?

I mention Milligan partly because he seems to be the first writer to taint Claremont's even-handed X-MEN with grievance-based radicalism. This rather short run-- only 22 issues, X-MEN #166-187, from 2005 to 2006-- makes him something of a precursor to the flood of woke comics from Marvel and DC in the 2010s, though not necessarily any direct influence. The proximate reason for the "woke comics boom" was the initial, albeit short-lived, popularity of MS MARVEL in 2014. But if one wants to see an early example of the X's getting put through the grievance mill, the Milligan run is a great place to start.  

Here's Milligan introducing a mutant named "Boy," because his rich White masters think it's hilarious to call him that. You know Milligan's being edgy because he claims the richies are "liberals"-- though I suspect Milligan counts on his readers not to believe him.  

Here's Milligan having Boy rant about "colonialism" for some damn reason.

Here's some general and the President (wonder which one) showing ingratitude to the mutants for having saved the world again.

And finally, here's some villain dissing John Wayne, and the gung-ho American superheroes being deeply offended.

I imagine Milligan viewed his jejune grievance-baiting as "satire," but it's less insightful than even a nineties issue of MAD Magazine. These 22 issues don't show the heroes and their opponents relating to one another in interesting ways: it's all just superficial "head games," particularly the opening arc "Golgotha," involving an alien spore that causes all of the heroes to rail at one another. The only breaks I'll cut Milligan are (1) he probably didn't think he was going to be writing the X-title very long, so he may have just wrote some piddling stories while keeping the status quo stable, and (2) even Claremont wrote his share of "head game stories." But whenever Claremont did this sort of "Naked Time" schtick, the characters weren't only spouting grievances to attack America, capitalism or just overall White Culture, both European and American.     

Though I don't follow current comics, the few comics podcasts I follow don't indicate any major movements back toward an ethic of meliorism at either Marvel or DC. Possibly there aren't as many extreme examples of radicalism as "Gay Son of Superman" and "Captain America, Hydra Agent." But I suspect that the radical ideal of representation for all aggrieved groups-- rather than the ideal of seeking common ground-- remains entrenched. I consider this ideal, as per my Robert Frost quote, one equivalent to maintaining walls-- walls to be exploited by those who profit from divisiveness and so make it unlikely than diversity measures will ever succeed. It's ironic that as I write this, there's ARE indications that Hollywood, which exploited or even exacerbated the most radical tendencies of Marvel and DC, might be backing away somewhat from peddling grievance all the time.      

DENSITY=EXCESS

 This essay exists for the most part to draw a line between both 2013's THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS and its corollary from 2017, EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, and the more recent LOVE, DENSITY AND CONCRESCENCE from 2025. In the last of these, I wrote:

because density has a stronger association than does concrescence with the quality of some physical substance, it also proves somewhat better for describing the finished product. I might say, using my most recent emendations of my potentiality terminology, that "Dave Sim's work excels at dealing with didactic cogitations, while Grant Morrison's work excels at dealing with mythopoeic correlations." That quality of excellence can be metaphorically expressed as a given work's density, in that such density shows how thoroughly the author was invested in a given set of fictional representations (sometimes, though not usually, on a subconscious level).

In contrast to my meager usage of the term "density," I probably have many references to "excess" scattered throughout this blog, since that philosophical concept was thoroughly explored by one of my major influences, Georges Bataille, particularly in the first of his works I ever read, VISIONS OF EXCESS.  In the two linked essays above, my main concern was to apply Bataille's concept to my own concepts of the two forms of sublimity. I won't get into those formulations here, for I'm concerned that excess is a general rule, like density, for judging the presence or absence of excellence in fictional works.   

The difference between the two concepts relates to authorial motive. The author who achieves excellence in one or more of the four potentialities does so because he/she becomes engaged enough with the material to DESIRE to give it a density, a thoroughness, that seems to be like that of lived experience. The creator of a poor work, within whichever potentiality one judges the work by, has no desire, or next to none, to convey investment in the material to his audience. The creator of a fair work has some desire, but only up to a point. It's only the creator of a good work who's totally invested with respect to at least one potentiality.

One example of authors investing "excess effort" in various potentialities can be seen in a comparison I floated between the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR and the Drake-Premiani DOOM PATROL. I still believe that the Lee-Kirby work shows an excess of the mythopoeic imagination and that the Drake-Premiani work does not. However, I now realize that the later issues of DOOM PATROL put forth a density of specification with respect to the dramatic potentiality. More simply put, even though the Lee-Kirby FF set the early standard for using soap-opera dramatics, one might argue that Drake was, over time, better at finding interesting ways to exploit the dramatic conflicts of the team and its opponents, at creating the illusion of character progress. In contrast, though Stan Lee was the boss in the collaboration with Kirby, he often let Kirby "have his head"-- and Kirby was not really a "details man." On close study the sixties FANTASTIC FOUR has a rather herky-jerky progress with respect to its characters' serial development, even if Lee's dialogue usually managed to paper over any perceived discontinuities. I said that I doubted that artist Premiani contributed much original material to the collaboration; he probably just drew whatever Drake related in his full scripts. Drake wasn't often capable of mythopoeic imagination, unlike Kirby. But he conveyed a sense of density in the interrelations of the Patrol members, because that was the part of his inspiration to which he best related.              

CURIOSITIES: ONE MAIDEN, ONE MUSLIM

 

While visiting Comic Book Plus. I came across a listing for a small publisher named Elliot, possessed of only two titles, launched in 1944, near the conclusion of WWII and both showing a strong patriotic air. The above cover is from BOMBER COMICS #3, showing most of the characters featured therein. On top are two costumed heroes, Wonder Boy and Kismet, and on the stage below are a black kid named Sunshine (from KID PATROL), the ghost-busting star of GRIMM GHOST DOCTOR and one of his specters, and hero-pilot EAGLE EVANS beating down an enemy while a hot nurse looks on.

The other title was SPITFIRE COMICS, named for its lead feature, SPITFIRE. This concerned a butt-kicking lady spy named Spitfire Sanders, and it's a minor point that it's probably the first war-themed comic with a female lead. 

The title only had two issues and the only other feature worthy of note is JUNGLEMAN, about a jungle-hero who can literally summon beasts to his aid. According to one source Jungleman first appeared in a Harvey title and so this single story may be a licensed reprint.

BOMBER, the other title, lasted four issues and showed a bit more diversity. GRIMM GHOST DOCTOR also appears to be a Harvey recycling, but I have not yet checked the other character's appearances.  Unlike a lot of ghost hunters, Grimm possesses an arcane weapon against spiritual menaces, a "ghost disintegrator," but the hero doesn't seem to use the device much in these four stories. I notice that most of the stories, mainly Rudy Palais, involve the spirits of comely women.          
      

Wonder Boy had been a hero at Quality, which was not yet defunct in 1944, so maybe this was a rare example of a hero being sold to another company without the first company collapsing. One source says that the Quality version didn't have a girlfriend, so the brunette above, seen catfighting a hefty woman, suggests that these are new stories.

Finally, all four issues of BOMBER play host to KISMET, MAN OF FATE, who may be the first Muslim costumed hero. Kismet has neither origin nor special powers, and all four adventures have him fighting Nazis in Europe while garbed in trousers, a cape and a fez. Each episode has the light-skinned Kismet swearing "by the beard of the Prophet" or invoking Allah, so his creator, billed as "Omar Tahan," almost certainly was seeking some personal representation, not unlike Black artist Matt Baker giving Black African tribesmen White wives in the same time period. The stories are nothing special except for #2, in which Satan is so annoyed with Kismet's victories that he sends two infernal emissaries, a big brute and a sexy siren named "Flame," to give the bumbling Hitler a new super-weapon.    

 

EXCITING REACTIONS! REACTIVE EXCITEMENT!

Because few things in life can possibly be more exciting than an essay in which I revise some old terms.

I was never quite satisfied with the terms I devised in 2020 and 2021 for the basic oppositional setup of the roles of protagonist and antagonist, which are fundamentally integral to all narrative. I started out with a three-part series, starting here, in which I used the terms "challenger" and "defender." Later I sought to substitute "aggressor" for "challenger," but I never found myself using any of the terms on a regular basis. From experience, this indicates that I'm not fully comfortable with a given term or set of terms, because when I am comfortable, I start interweaving new and old on a regular basis, as can be seen with all the stuff I've been doing lately with "eminence."

It hit me that I needed terms that were more neutral in terms of moral nature, since some icons have no morality as such. This line of thought led me back to the beginnings of life, at least as conceived by Ernst Cassirer:      

Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven...

This struck me as so basic to the fundament of all life that I wanted my new terms to reflect this process in lit-crit terms, and this led me to two terms, most often used in chemistry. From Merriam-Webster: 

EXCITANT: tending to excite or stimulate

REACTANT: a substance that enters into and is altered in the course of a chemical reaction   

Examples time:

In the original debut-film of GODZILLA, the sulky saurian rises from the depths, and whether he's out to trash Modern Japan for its sins or is just looking for old feeding-grounds, he parallels the stimulus, the excitant, that hits an organism's receptor-system-- said organism being Japan. Japan then takes the role of "reactant," marshaling the energies of its "effector system" to protect itself. As in many monster-movies, not least those devoted to Rodan and Mothra, the excitant, the thing that shakes up the status quo, is the Prime icon.

Godzilla becomes one of an ensemble of three Prime icons in GHIDORAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER, but this time, all of them are reactants. The titular Ghidorah provides the excitant, invading Earth and threatening its destruction. Humankind can do nothing to stop Ghidorah, but some humans are able to intercede with the fundamentally beneficent Mothra, and she attempts to enlist Godzilla and Rodan into defending the Earth. Though the scene of the "monster-conversation" might be one of the looniest things ever in a giant monster film, it still culminates in the three rampaging titans joining together like a Jurassic Justice League to stomp three-headed butt. This time the three former excitants become reactants, but they're still the Prime icons here.

Things get more complicated in those situations where excitant and reactant share the Prime spotlight, rare though it is. In KING KONG VS GODZILLA, the Big G still doesn't quite have the moxie to get first billing. But as in his previous two films, he functions as the excitant. Now, having said that. KKVG was not the first of Tojo Picture's "monster duel" films. That was GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN-- but in that film, Godzilla is faced with two separate reactants: the humans with their guns and tanks, and another colossal critter, Angilas. Both Angilas and all of the humans are Sub antagonists to Prime Godzilla. Angilas was probably created only because it was cheaper to film a battle between two men in rubber suits than to have Godzilla stomp all over Tokyo again. But Kong had more stature than Godzilla, and so he, the "reactant," gets an arc as developed as that of the "excitant." Though Kong is originally brought to Japan for the same reason an American entrepreneur takes his first iteration to New York, his desire to pick a fight with the big reptile ends up making his interests converge with those of humanity, who make Kong into their unwitting catspaw. Despite the role of the humans in arranging the battle of the two Primes, they remain Sub icons only.        

The sort of human string-pulling seen in both KKVG and GHIDORAH is not strictly necessary, though. THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS concerns two brother-monsters-- one that seeks to avoid conflict and only feeds on fish, another who feeds on humans. This leads to human armies seeking to exterminate both giant beasts, but even if no humans appeared in the story, the main conflict would still be between "excitant" Gaira and "reactant" Sanda, who comprise the Prime icons of the narrative.   

More examples to come, as they occur to me.

      

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 6

 In the first MIKAMI MEDITATIONS, I hadn't read the full corpus of the 1991-99 GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga, so I followed the only available information source for a particular datum: the age of the female lead Reiko Mikami. Wiki claimed that Mikami was 31 years old, but I never saw anything in the original manga that even came close to confirming that inaccurate info. However, upon re-reading one of the later arcs, "Relentless War," Mikami's age is decisively stated-- at least. as decisively as anything else that appears in an amateur online translation, the only source for the SWEEPER stories in English.

So there's no question that Mikami is 20 years old, only three years older than her high-schooler colleague Tadao Yokoshima. His age of seventeen is frequently repeated, and maybe artist Takashi Shiina felt he had to keep reminding readers of Yokoshima's status, since he spends so little time in school. There's some degree of change in the characters' attitudes and circumstances during the span of the series, but SWEEPER is a static series timewise, so no one really ages. In an early story, Mikami tells Okinu that she considers herself a "mature woman" and her ardent suitor Yokoshima to be a "brat." Mikami also avers that the student needs another ten years to catch up with her, which might have impressed me as her admitting to considerably more years than twenty. And then there are a couple of late stories where Yokoshima insults Mikami by calling her an "old hag," which certainly sounds odd if only three years separate them. 

However, I am aware of one other manga, ZERO'S FAMILIAR, in which a teenager calls a woman of only twenty-three years an "old woman." So there's some probability that this was a familiar type of joke in Japanese culture, a slam meant to be aggravating but not technically accurate.

Had I thought about it, an early story, "Love Needs Its Time," shows that Shiina always had a loose sense that Mikami and Yokoshima aren't far apart in age. At the conclusion of "Time," Yokoshima flashes back in time to when he was a baby, and a very young Mikami, possibly just three years old, encounters him.

  Mikami's age puts an interesting spin on the first time Shiiina depicts Mikami and Yokoshima meeting as relatively mature entities, in a sequence from the arc "The Right Stuff."

              

The main point of the flashback is to regale readers with how the Mikami/Yokoshima relationship got set in stone from the start: the lust-monkey makes some foolish pass at his boss and she beats the hell out of him. However, the flashback is more important for offering a deeper motivation for Mikami to hire the high-schooler. As I've said before, if she was truly repulsed by Yokoshima's advances, Mikami would just fire him and look for another cheap employee to do her heavy lifting. 

The internal chronology of "The Right Stuff" also mentions that Mikami's mother Michie died (or rather, faked her death) five years previous to the "static time" of the ongoing series, which would make Mikami fifteen at the time. One presumes she finished both high school and her training as a ghost sweeper under her sensei, so she's about twenty when she opens her agency. Clearly she wants to be an independent businesswoman, and she appears to have no romance in her life. The only time Shiina showed her evincing any interest in romantic life was when Mikami was ten years old and crushed on the older Saijou. Yet he had only filial feelings for her, and thus one may assume that, for all intents and purposes, Mikami's turned her back on romance at this crucial time in her life. 

Mikami wants to carry on her mother's profession of ghost-sweeping, but for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, she also intends to make a lot of money from it. She's aware of her phenomenal looks but views them only as assets in attracting a customer base. She may not be totally immune to flattery, though, since after scorning Yokoshima's clumsy come-on, she responds to his verbal praise with the interesting sentence, "Since you're so honest, I'll forget about that [attempted assault] from before." In other words, before Yokoshima has said anything about being willing to work for cheap, Mikami unfreezes a bit at his compliments. She starts unburdening herself as to how she thought she'd hire a good-looking guy to help sell her image to customers, but she was afraid she'd have to pay a lot of money for such an assistant, which would cut into potential profits. Yokoshima knows he's not good-looking, but he's so besotted with Mikami that he offers to do her dirty jobs for a pittance. However, in practice, Yokoshima does gain some additional remuneration whenever he peeps on his boss in the shower, and she brings this up frequently-- though again, it doesn't bother her enough to make her sack him. But does she keep Yokoshima around purely because she saves money by employing such a doofus to do all her hard work? She almost certainly enjoys holding on to her money and may even get some sadistic satisfaction at beating him down when he propositions her, apparently wanting to keep her virginity as much as a big bank account.                 

Yet Shiina almost certainly knew the persuasive power of the "hot girl falls for homely guy" trope, so as early as the Volume Four arc "Dad's Here," Okinu suspects that Mikami harbors tender feelings for Yokoshima despite his considerable demerits. Yet Shiina waits until the late arc "Right Stuff" to depict the original dynamic that prevailed when the sexy exorcist met her stooge-- and that flashback takes place during a real-time story in which Yokoshima has harnessed his psychic powers to a level that almost surpasses Mikami's abilities.

Yet Shiina was careful not to undermine the comical tension, so Yokoshima never transcends his "stooge-self" and Mikami always remains the harsh mistress. The capstone story to the entire series, "Break Your Destiny," shows Mikami as a true tsundere, unable to dispense love without putting her potential paramour through the wringer to make sure of his devotion. The two of them being closer in age, though, makes it seem as though their perverse relationship came about in the same period of life wherein more normative couples usually date and get married for the first time. That makes it more likely, at least for proponents of the "hot girl/homely guy" trope, that this fractious couple will be able to unite at some future date as well.          

MONSTERS VS. VILLAINS

 Though I've made distinctions elsewhere on the blog as to the theoretical nature of monsters and villains in terms of the goal-affects "persistence" and "glory," here I'll confine myself to one quick observation, building off the following quote:

"Why, this fellow seems to take a diabolical--I might almost say pathological-- pleasure in crimes of violence, revenge, avarice and self- protection. Sometimes it seems as if he delights in the pure deviltry of the thing. It is weird."

The "fellow" in question will later be revealed as The Clutching Hand, a nemesis to Arthur B. Reeve's hero Craig Kennedy in both the 1914 silent serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE and the identically-titled movie novelization (which ran in 1914 magazines to promote the serial). Though Reeve was the sole creator of Craig Kennedy, in all likelihood he was a hired gun in working on the serial, whose narrative would have been controlled by the producers, principally George B. Seitz, also a director and writer on the serial. The Clutching Hand may not be the first costumed villain in literary history, but he has been credited as being the first in narrative cinema, for whatever that's worth.

The full serial is not extant, but the Reeve novel is. I haven't yet decided to read the book online, but that opening line struck me as very indicative of the appeal of villains. While there are villains who have tragic backstories, they're usually not as tragically-oriented as monsters. One thinks of the Frankenstein Monster arising, a tabula rasa in a grotesque form, only to find himself an instant pariah, or the Browning version of Dracula, vaguely yearning for a proper death. Stoker's Dracula is more the cold-hearted plotter, but I see in him none of the glorious elan one sees in super-villains like the Hand. Dracula doesn't leave mocking notes about his lawbreaking ways, much like a later breed of villain who obligingly leave clues to their virtuous opponents. Not dissimilarly, Fu Manchu has his own way of "signing" his murders, and in the first novel Nayland Smith remarks on how Fu won't lower himself to use mundane weapons but always has to use more exotic devices.

More on these matters as they occur to me.