NEAR MYTHS: THE THREE CAMILLAS

In literature the name "Camilla" first appears in Virgil's Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC. There's no evidence that any character with that name appeared in earlier Roman myth, though because she was an athletic huntress-type, she might have originally been either a servant of the Hunt-Goddess Diana/Artemis, or even a mortal version of Diana herself.

In JUNGLE COMICS #1 (1940), an artist billed CAW (identified on GCD as Chuck Winter, best known for co-creating DC's "Liberty Belle") did a thinly disguised ripoff of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. An explorer named Jon finds the requisite lost city of white people in the African jungle, all descended from Vikings. This "Lost Empire" is ruled by an immortal queen named Camilla, who stays immortal with the help of a sulphur spring. She tries to make Jon her consort, but he resists, and ends up destroying her Viking city. With the destruction of her spring, Queen Camilla ages and dies.

In the very next issue, Winter virtually reprised the same story, presenting a queen with the same name, but ruling over a people descended from the Mongols of Genghis Khan, while the explorer she romanced had a wholly different name. (Note that despite her supposed Mongol descent Camilla II looks like any old blonde flapper of the time.) The most interesting near-mythic aspect of this story is that despite originally possessing no science themselves, the Mongols somehow acquire super-science over the centuries thanks to the "raw materials" in the area, including some mineral that gives off "flexodium, a radium ray unknown to the outer world." Camilla II's city is also destroyed by her unwilling consort but she refuses to be rescued, walking back into her burning city, never to be seen again. The story is mostly interesting as a predecessor to the 2018 BLACK PANTHER film, in which African natives acquire super-science purely by their access to a magical mineral, not because they have any contact with advanced technology outside their world (in contradistinction to the way Wakanda was portrayed in its first FANTASTIC FOUR storyline).

Apparently, having tried on two versions of the same Haggardian idea, Winter decided he liked the first one better, so Camilla I, despite having already died, gets better, as does her previously destroyed Lost Empire-city. She has another encounter with the white explorer in JUNGLE COMICS #3, and this time he escapes without blowing everything up. Then in issue #4, it appears that Winter decided to give his evil queen a moral makeover. Camilla I gets tossed out of her own lost city, wanders around a while, and runs into Jon and his girlfriend Ruth. She suddenly reveals magic powers, turning Jon into a block of ice. Yet once Jon goes back to normal, he and Ruth help Camilla I regain her throne, and she swears to be a good queen from then on. By issue #6 Winter was gone, replaced by Bob Powell, and Camilla suddenly develops swordfighting skills.

Camilla I's first brush with mythic complexity occurs when she decides in JUNGLE COMICS #7 to challenge the powers of "Hades itself." (By now, the idea of Camilla I's having been a Viking has been utterly forgotten.) She takes with her a hunchback named Caredodo, introduced in the previous issue, and the two of them face down Mephistopheles, who looks like every standard devil ever created, and Satan, who for a change has a more Dante-esque look, being a two-headed green monster. Camilla I conquers Satan with the use of a Christian cross, and a visiting angel descends to grant the courageous woman a wish. (Maybe he thought he was a genie?) She wishes for Caredodo to be transformed into a handsome cavalier, whom she named "Sir Champion," which makes one wonder if her wish was more for her own amatory benefit. 

However, Camilla and Champion only enjoyed about twenty more adventures-- none of which were particularly romantic-- before her status as Queen of the Lost Empire dwindled away. In JUNGLE COMICS #31, Camilla is suddenly a standard Sheena-like jungle crusader, with no consort or lost city-- and though I haven't read all of these, I doubt there's anything close to symbolic complexity therein.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE TIGER WOMEN OF WILDMOON MOUNTAIN" (JUNGLE COMICS #13, 1941)

 I stated in my review of THE CITY OF SHIFTING SAND that I wasn't especially enamored of the sort of Golden Age comics-story where "anything can happen." This may explain why I've been less fascinated with the cult of Fletcher Hanks. To the best of my knowledge, this Golden Age artist was almost completely forgotten by organized comics-fandom. In the past ten or so years, some of Hanks's work saw print in Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine, and since then there have been three collections of the work he did for assorted Golden Age publishers. 

Without attempting to analyze in depth Hanks's appeal for later afficianados of comics, I think it boils down to what I called "freewheeling silliness." Hanks's heroes, such as the superhero Stardust and the jungle-magician Fantomah, encounter grotesque beings that pop out of nowhere and start killing innocents. After a lot of killing, Hanks's heroes decide to exercise their powers-- which often seem limited only by whatever the artist happened to think up-- and the heroes destroy the villains, usually in equally grotesque, sometimes monotonous ways. 

One can find other Golden Age stories that offer as little rationalization for their heroes and their boogiemen, but Hanks does have a singular artistic approach to his material, in that even characters who are supposedly good looking come off as subtly distorted. Hanks's flights of fancy are not mythic in themselves, but I did find one story that suggests the complexities of myth, even without rationalizations.

So on the first page, Fantomah-- a protector of some African jungle, whose origin and powers are never explained-- learns that the local tribes are being invaded by strange women riding on the backs of tigers. Fantomah instantly knows that they are "vahines" (a Polynesian word meaning "woman" or "wife"), and that they come from a place known as Wildmoon Mountain.

The image of wild huntresses may owe less to anything from Polynesian sources than from the Greek stories of the hunting-goddess Artemis and her forest-dwelling acolytes. At the very least, even in 1941 most pop-fiction raconteurs knew something of the Greek Amazons, as seen by the creation of Wonder Woman and her "isle of women" in the same year. But the vahines have a destructive purpose like nothing I've seen in other Amazon-tales. The tiger-women decide that they want to kill all of the other women in the world, so that "men will be at our feet." It's not just the ruthlessness that impresses me, but the sheer chutzpah of thinking that a handful of women could monopolize all the men in the world in order to rule them. (Are the vahines perhaps thinking of having lots and lots of daughters over time?)

Fantomah starts summoning jungle-animals to fight the vahines, and while she's doing that, the evil females wipe out all the women in a village. 

To their credit, the vahines apparently anticipate Fantomah's tactics, for they bring along a "glow-worm oil" that makes them shine like phantoms. Whether the animals believe that the invaders are actual ghosts, or because they think they're on fire, they won't attack the vahines with that glow. Fantomah signals her displeasure by transforming into her skull-headed "wrathful goddess" aspect.

Fantomah exerts her "powerful will"-- which for some reason she couldn't manage before another tribe's women gets wiped out-- and she nullifies the ghost-glow. Then Fantomah's minions destroy the tigers and send the vahines leaping for the trees.

At last the heroine's pet vultures use their talons to grab the vahines by their long hair, after which the birds transport their prisoners back to their point of origin, Wildmoon Mountain. Up to this point the name sounded like nothing but an idle poeticism, possibly with a slight connection between moon-worship and the worship of Artemis/Diana. But Fantomah's powers bring a shining, "super-sized moonstone" from inside the mountain, and according to one of the vahines, this is an object of their veneration, without which the women cannot survive.

Fantomah then decides to let the tiger women get hoist on their own petard. By the jungle-heroine's will, the giant moonstone suddenly has something like a magnetic attraction, and when the vultures drop the vahines, they all get attached to their god-stone, and then get pulled into the orb's interior, as if it was a giant womb. Then Fantomah cancels earthly gravity under the giant globe, and it rockets away from the earth and into space. Perhaps appropriately, the moonstone collides with Mars, the nearest planet named for a male god. The vahines are utterly destroyed and Fantomah takes pleasure in the return of jungle peace.

As contrived as Hanks's story is, the base idea of a band of women trying to get rid of all worldly competition has few if any precedents. It reminds less of any literary ancestors than of the observations of ethologists speaking of the sometimes vicious ways that female creatures, particularly apes, retaliate when they have competition for the males of the tribe. Yet no men actually appear in the story, not even to come to the defense of their women. This doesn't exactly satisfy the provisions of the "Bechdel Test," insofar as the vahines talk about men with the plan of dominating them. But it might be the first comic-book story in which the entire conflict revolves entirely around a battle of powerful women.

SLAVE WAGES

 In April 2021 Louisiana state representative Ray Garofalo got in trouble because he made this obviously humorous remark in a debate over education:

“If you are having a discussion on whatever the case may be, on slavery, then you can talk about everything dealing with slavery: the good, the bad, the ugly,” Garofalo said.

The mere fact that he was quoting an old Sergio Leone film-title ought to have made clear that he wasn't making an in-depth judgment on the conditions of slavery in the United States. Nevertheless, righteous liberals descended like locusts, and Garofalo had to walk back his comments to some extent.  

Perhaps even more insidious are recent cancellations of actress Ellie Kemper and BACHELOR host Chris Harrison due to the appearance of giving props to the Confederacy in one way or another. As with the crusades against Confederate statues and flags, the Left has decided to play the part of the Inquisition in this game of race-shaming, and they're not likely to back off on what seems to have been a political success for them, at least for the present.

I'm going to avoid repeating the observations I made in THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES, but I wanted to address the specific idea that everything in a given hated culture must be abolished. The BACHELOR tsunami came about because Harrison dared to take lightly the stigmatization of a contestant who had attended a so-called "antebellum party." This sort of event probably has little or no political ramifications, being the equivalent of people dressing up for a Halloween event. But the Left must attack everything even tangentially connected with the Confederate States.

In this essay I wrote:

The pro-slavery proponents were, without doubt, greedy and venal people. But you know what? Every damn country has to make allowances for greedy, venal people in power. That’s the only way anyone ever manages to create a unified nation, and it’s only with a unified nation that wrongs can be redressed and slaves liberated.

The only addition I'll make to this is that every people who has exerted power over other persons has also produced a range of both great and banal art. Most of Western culture descends from the innovations of the Greeks, who did not for an instant question the propriety of keeping slaves to do the dirty work. I can't claim that the literature of the Southern American states before or immediately after the Civil War was as pivotal of that of the Greeks. Nevertheless, the ornate fashions and architecture of the Southern plantations still has the power to impress moderns on the aesthetic level, even if they may abominate the institution of slavery. Note as example the final episode of the 1980 teleseries DESIGNING WOMEN, which concluded with the female characters-- all of whom were liberal soapboxes for the show's liberal producer-- dreaming that they were wearing GONE WITH THE WIND outfits.

The wages of slavery, in the social sense, can only be trauma and turmoil. But every culture oppresses some underclass at one time or another, and at no time has that fact kept any such cultures from producing "good" things alongside the "bad" ones. Thus it's logically impossible to render such a judgment only against American Southern culture prior to the Civil War's conclusion.

 

SOCIAL DECONSTRUCTIONISM

For a politics forum, I wrote the following mini-essay as a means of expressing some of the ambiguities in human "ingroup chauvinism" as a counteractive to the poorly reasoned ideology of "race as socially constructed." I largely anticipated that the reasoning would be lost on the ultraliberal ideologues, and my prediction proved true. One moron thought I was trying to float some sort of racial murder-fantasy, when it should be entirely evident that the standards I'm applying to my hypothetical African tribe are being applied across the board to all human ingroups, all of whom participate in the same practice of phenotypic chauvinism.

___________

First, so I don’t have to type “social construct doctrine” over and over, I will abbreviate it as SCD.

SCD came about as an overreaction to European theories about human racial groups from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many if not all of these theories tended to promulgate absolutist ideas about the respective capacities of the racial groups, often with the probably intentional effect of putting the white race on top of the heap. A reaction against this polemic was natural.

SCD, however, decided that the best solution was to claim that race was a social construct. Sometimes the rhetoric asserted that “race” was given the context of “species,” but I seriously doubt that even the most xenophobic theorist would have claimed that the various human races could not interbreed, given so much evidence to the contrary. The principal purpose of SCD was to assert that racial differences had been invented by Evil Overlords seeking to stigmatize some differences and champion others. The use of the term “cline” came into vogue as a way of discussing phenotypic differences between groups without bringing the taboo word “race” into the question.

To test the validity of SCD, one must abandon both the worlds of Eurocentric pundits and their equally impaired opponents, and seek to imagine how phenotypic differences might have resonated with homogeneous groups “in the wild” as it were.

So I imagine a homogeneous Black African society in pre-colonial Africa, far removed from contact with any heterogeneous societies. Since there’s nearly no exogamy, most everyone in the tribe shares the same hair and skin color. There could be a few neighboring tribes, but they’re genetically almost identical to Primary Tribe. The natives have no cognizance of any humans who are not black skinned and wiry haired, and if they imagine the forest beasts taking on human form, the magical animals share all the routine appearance of the tale tellers.

Given this scenario, the tribe can have no concept of race, and no overlord would seek to advance one. But given that humans like to feel good about themselves, the phenotypic norm would still be the tribe’s aesthetic baseline. If your skin looks black, you’re healthy, but if it turns grey from illness, that will be physically repugnant.

Now imagine that into this tribe is born— the first albino infant ever. Imagine further that the child’s mother and father are the only ones present when the baby is born.

They look over the infant. There’s nothing in their experience to account for this. They exchange looks, and simultaneously opt to smother the child and bury it.

Now, we are not privy to their thoughts. SCD would say that, even without the tribe having a concept of race, they kill the child because they’re afraid that their neighbors will abominate the atypical infant, and that this would be the equivalent of “constructing race.”

But what if their primary thoughts are aesthetic? What if the parents themselves are repulsed by the infant’s color, and they feel shame at having produced such a bizarre creature? In the real world, we certainly have ethnological evidence of parents who have slain or abandoned offspring for no better reasons.

Proponents of SCD are stuck in a box. They MUST believe in some form of “race construction” by the society in order to remain on-point against the Evil Overlords. But often it’s the people, not the Overlords, expressing preferences that have nothing to do with social controls as such.

Ah, that was good exercise. Wish I thought the bulk of responses would provide me with as much.

MYTHCOMICS: PROMETHEA #1-32 (1999=2005)

 

I’ll start off my analysis of PROMETHEA by celebrating the intricate, near-visionary artwork of J.H. Williams III. Of the hundreds of artists who have attempted to depict supernatural realms for the comics-medium, Williams deserves to be counted as one of the five most accomplished such raconteurs.

For the rest of the analysis, though, it’s almost inevitable that I must generally speak of this series as if it sprang unassisted from the fragmented brow of writer/co-creator Alan Moore. And there exist two separate but equally important reasons for viewing Moore as the project’s shaping influence.

On one hand, this series was one of several continuing features released by the Wildstorm (later DC) imprint “America’s Best Comics.” Moore founded the company, conceived most if not all the features, and wrote the majority of the scripts. The imprint ran from 1999 to 2005, concluding more or less with the run of PROMETHEA.

On the other hand, the feature was conceived as a forum upon which Moore could expatiate his views on the subject of the Western tradition of occultism. Allegedly, as the result of Moore’s 1990s research into magical concepts for the FROM HELL graphic novel, the author became fascinated with these mystic disciplines, and proclaimed himself as a “ceremonial magician” in 1993. While it’s hard to assess what Moore might have done with ABC had Wildstorm not sold the imprint to DC Comics, it seems unlikely that PROMETHEA would have continued much beyond its 32-issue run, given that the series’ continuity was clearly designed to come to a definite conclusion. Even if PROMETHEA had enjoyed “X-Men sales” in the direct comics market, an iconoclast like Moore probably would not have prolonged the title once he’d said what he wanted to say.

Now, the mere fact that a given work is produced from a hellacious amount of research into a given subject does not mean that the author will produce from that research a work strong in symbolic discourse. In this essay, I cited a Gardner Fox story in which the author reeled off an assortment of factoids about the properties of minerals, but the story as such did not comprise a cosmological myth. The same principle holds true for this work: Moore could not produce a mythcomic simply by deluging his readers with tons and tons of info about mystic systems like the Tarot and the Kaballah, or about the careers of occultists like John Dee, Austin Osman Spare and the unavoidable Aleister Crowley. Many sections of PROMETHEA feel a bit like school-masterish lectures on occultism, or (perhaps worse) the exultations of a fan desperately asking his audience, “Isn’t all this stuff cool?”

Fortunately, Alan Moore does manage to impose a loose structure on the 32 issues (compared by Moore to the 32 paths of the Tarot). The master thread of the series is Alan Moore’s celebration of all things feminine, using as his focal point an icon of heroic femininity, more or less emulating the example of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. Of course, Promethea was not designed to continue as long as readers were willing to buy the heroine’s adventures. But perhaps more importantly, Moore’s heroine is a vehicle of an adult sexuality impossible to the DC character—and in part, Promethea concerns sex because sex is also a vital part of ceremonial magic, at least in Alan Moore’s interpretation.

Though Promethea’s physical appearance conjures with the Amazing Amazon, her nature is probably closer in essence to that of the Golden Age Captain Marvel. College-student Sophie Bangs is the “Billy Batson” of the series. As the result of her research into a supposedly fictional character who appeared in various 20^th-century media, Sophie finds that she can call upon the archetype of Promethea from an otherworld known as “the Immateria.” Promethea then transforms and takes over Sophie’s mortal body in order to battle the evils of the mortal world. But even though Moore gives Sophie the trappings of a life for a “double identity” heroine—residence in a “great metropolitan city,” a handful of supporting characters—the author’s interest is clearly not focused on righting wrongs on the earthly plane, but on exploring the joys of assorted otherworlds, generally patterned on Tarot and Kaballah formulations.

Moore labors mightily to give his heroine a feminist gravitas. She seems to be an archetype who, before encountering Sophie, has conferred her power on numerous women (and at least one man who had a woman’s nature, so to speak). Moore loosely implies that Promethea may be a mythic reaction against Christian patriarchy, since the writer references the historical figure of Hypatia, a female intellectual murdered by religious fanatics during early Christendom. But at times the feminism angle makes a difficult fit with the exploration of occult traditions, since most of the well-known ceremonial magicians—the aforesaid Dee, Spare, and Crowley—were male. Perhaps to make up for this lack, Moore devotes a subsidiary thread to another of his favorite subjects: that of the intertwining history of fictional creations. Some earlier incarnations of Promethea arose from the archetype merging with mortals like Sophie. Yet it seems that some of the incarnations may have been taken on life in the Immateria because they appeared in fictional narratives, which can range from a pulp-fantasy “barbarian queen” to a gender-flipped version of Windsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO. (Moore does not really bother to suss out this particular cosmos-building point.)

At any rate, focusing on the role of female characters in fiction helps shore up the feminism theme a bit, though Moore’s main purpose is still the exploration of magical states of being. Being a canny comics-maker, Moore probably realized that he needed to sell PROMETHEA as a superhero comic, and so he dutifully introduced many of the requisite elements—marauding villains like Jellyhead and the Painted Doll, a team of local “science-heroes” roughly modeled on the Doc Savage Crew, and even an occult conspiracy-group, the Temple. Moore even rings in a crossover of sorts, revealing that other ABC heroes exist in Promethea’s world. But Moore does little with all of these elements, because they’re essentially commercial distractions from his main concerns.

Considerable narrative space is consumed as Sophie, accompanied by her preceptor and predecessor Barbara, journeys through the various spheres of the Kaballah in search of Barbara’s husband, though he serves no function in the plot but to provide the two females with a motive to go “sphere-exploring.” As I said, some of Moore’s salutes to Chokmah and Binah and all the rest are a bit pedantic—even for a reader familiar with the topics, as I am—but some of them succeed as rough visual poetry on particular themes, of war, of peace, of emotion and of intellect. One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.

I can appreciate that Moore’s vision of a world liberated by his feminine icon is a pansexual world, wherein the author approves of all things sexy, whether they might be despised by the Right (homosexuals) or the Left (old men sort-of getting in on with sweet young things). On the minus side, it wouldn’t be an Alan Moore production if the author didn’t take some gratuitous swipes at other authors. In issue #6 the Promethea with the “barbarian queen” persona takes on an equally fictional wizard who is the conglomeration of all the bad writers who wrote the heroine’s adventures. I’m not sure why Moore thought a jihad against pulp writers was necessary, especially since one of the writer’s attacks is unfounded. (Sorry, Alan, it’s correct to describe a breast as “heaving;” breasts, like chests, heave when the owner is stressed or excited.) And if anyone is unable to cast stones at bad writing, it would be the poet who penned numerous doggerel-lines like this one from PROMETHEA #12:

“Around and round the fable goes,

“Eternal like Ouroboros.”

In the end I remain ambivalent about PROMETHEA. It certainly does have mythic content, though in some cases the intellectual conceits rein in some of his more inspired moments. His most mythic line, and the one most in tune with his concerns, interprets the Biblical pairing of “doves and serpents” as the tension between the serpentine desire to rise and climb in the struggle for life, versus the sacrificial bird’s descent into death for some greater cause than life. If every one of Moore’s lines ventured that deep, I’d be able to talk about him in the same breath as Melville and Hawthorne.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #4

 I lost interest in my crossover project on OUROBOROS DREAMS some time back, but though this one isn't great, it is one of the most peculiar.

In FEATURE COMICS #81 (1944)-- a comic whose headliner was the long-lived but nearly forgotten Doll Man-- a humorous character named Blimpy got himself shrunk to doll-size. So he calls Doll Man about his predicament, and the hero refuses to help because it would break "union rules."

On a totally unrelated subject, here's a late fifties cover from Simon and Kirby's THE FLY:

It's a pretty cool cover, unless one stops to wonder why a superhero who can fly is bothering to swing at the villains on a rope.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CITY OF SHIFTING SAND" (ALL FLASH #22, 1946)

Prior to reading all the issues of ALL FLASH on ReadComicsOnline, I might have thought that it might have been a little more venturesome, even for a kid's comic, when the whole forty-something pages of each magazine were devoted to one story at a time. Certainly in the Silver Age, the most mythic stories of the Barry Allen Flash were those in which the writer (usually John Broome) could devote as much space as possible to his imaginings. 

But such was not the case. All the "book-length" adventures of the Golden Age Flash (a.k.a. Jay Garrick) were pretty much of a piece with the short stories he'd enjoyed in anthology comics like the original FLASH COMICS. That is to say, the tales had a sort of freewheeling silliness-- one story in ALL-FLASH sports the title "Anything Can Happen"-- but,. following one of the arguments of Coleridge, this was just "fancy," not the deeper form of imagination. Ironically, the only story I found mythic in ALL FLASH appeared during the period when the magazine was once more devoted to three short tales per issue.

"The City of Shifting Sand" starts off with a schtick that hadn't been used in the regular FLASH stories for a time, wherein Jay Garrick relates one of the actual adventures of the Flash to his "liar's club" as if it's a story he made up-- without, of course, mentioning that he himself is the Flash. In a world of superheroes and supervillains, I would think no one would feel the necessity of trying top "reality" in that manner. but such is the conceit.

In contrast to the more freewheeling science-fantasies in THE FLASH, ""City of Shifting Sand" starts off by grounding its wild notion of "sand-people" with explanations of the function of sand in human culture, for glass, pottery, et al. Appropriately for a fantasy, sand's importance to human culture is just the first step to imputing intelligence to the substance.

As the Flash, Garrick comes to the rescue of a man beleagured by the sand-people, but like a number of heroes after him, he finds that sandy villains don't present good targets.

Later, Flash comes across a city of silicone men, who are more like glass than their sandy brethren. They, quite naturally, resent the hegemony of carbon life-forms and plan to eliminate the competition. John Broome, the unbilled author, has some fun hypothesizing that the glass-men are nourished by sunlight, which is one of the weapons they plan to use against humanity.

Like villains of the carbon variety, the sand-men make the mistake of putting the hero into a gradual death-trap, from which of course he breaks free. Having learned that the sand-people store their energy in their hearts, Flash then attacks the silicon beings in such a way as to disrupt their energies. Moreover, he defeats the silicon men in their redoubt simply by "leaving the solar light on," while exposes the creatures to so much energy that they all perish of "overeating."

Compared to some of the better cosmological myths of Silver Age DC, "CIty" may seem to be built on a foundation of "shifting sand." But in contrast to most SF-stories in the comics of the time, the pseudoscience is rendered with an eye toward internal consistency-- even if, in the last panels, Garrick seems so disturbed that his jacket goes from orange to off-white.