THE READING RHEUM: AYESHA, THE RETURN OF SHE (1904-05)

 

Roughly the same amount of time passed between this review and my 2008 review of Rider Haggard's masterpiece SHE (beginning here) as between the 1885 serialization of that novel and that of its sequel in 1904. I wll not, however, be devoting three separate posts to AYESHA as I did with SHE. While AYESHA also qualifies as a high-mythicity novel, the later book doesn't even come close to touching the hem of SHE's robe.

Eighteen years also passes between the climax of SHE-- wherein POV characters Horace Holly and his adoptive son Leo Vincey witness the immortal queen Ayesha when she re-immerses herself in the Flame of Life-- and the beginning of AYESHA. Haggard didn't have to wait that amount of time to write his story, but perhaps he felt he had to experience what his characters experienced: the sense of "time's winged chariot hurrying near." Still, it creates a mild continuity problem-- one that Haggard seems aware of-- in that once Ayesha is reincarnated in a new, living body, there's no strong reason she must wait a full eighteen years to summon her reincarnated lover Leo and his adoptive father. Haggard chalks the delay to vague metaphysical factors and moves on.   

In any case, Holly and Leo are summoned from England to Tibet, the new exotic locale where Ayesha hangs her veil. Almost certainly Haggard chose Tibet because of that culture's associations with reincarnation, a major theme of the first book. And Haggard did admirable homework in researching the physical perils the two Englishmen would face. as well as the often-dizzying complexities of Tibetan Buddhism. That said, what distinguished Haggard's African novels was his personal experience with African lands and tribes, and thus AYESHA lacks those touches of verisimilitude.

Ayesha's original body was destroyed at the end of SHE, but her magically endowed spirit has usurped the dying body of a Tibetan holy woman, and with that form she has become the queen of a new race of people, and she's once more seeking union with Leo. However, since the novel needs conflict, Ayesha's power is challenged by another female who also falls in love with Leo before he reaches Ayesha. This cosmic chick-fight was fresh when Haggard did it in SHE, and it worked because Leo fell in love with the tribal girl Ustane before he met Ayesha or knew of his archaic association with the immortal queen. Here, Leo is pursued by Atene, whose name alone indicates her non-Tibetan, "lost race" heritage-- but he's never interested in Atene. Thus Haggard chose to copy from himself and did so badly.

The strongest aspect of AYESHA is that Leo doesn't quite know how to take his beloved being in a new, older body, rather than in the dazzling female form he knew. He's still in love with her mind, so to speak, but he also desires her beauty. To compensate, Ayesha calls upon supernatural powers and essentially remolds herself into the image Leo loved. But at novel's end the transformation levies a price, not unlike the one paid by the mortal Semele when she demanded that Zeus reveal to her his ineffable glory. In addition, though Ayesha spouts a lot of Buddhist teachings and the unity of religions, her character remains the same as it was in the first novel: once she's united with her eternal love, she plans to use her great knowledge to conquer the world.  

There are a lot of good scenes in AYESHA, but they just don't add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, as was the case with SHE. The other two SHE novels are prequels, so SHE and AYESHA together constitute the entirety of the story of the Ayesha-Leo romance. And though Haggard would never put things this way, I can't help thinking that what the author committed to literature was the longest case of "male and female blue balls" in narrative history.         

ABOMINABLE ACT

 Re: ACT's successful campaign against cartoon superheroes in the late 1960a--

____________

ACT might be considered the stepchild of W.  I doubt they bothered citing case studies-- even studies as flawed as those of W-- but they shared W's "monkey see, monkey do" attitude regarding audiences.

As a superhero fan, I hated ACT's successful campaign against animated supers back then. But maybe they would have petered out no matter what-- and maybe they took the hit that could have happened to hyper violent Marvel Comics. Despite being more overt about fight scenes than, say, SUPERMAN was even in the early days, I'm aware of no serious anti-Marvel screeds in the sixties, and instead, at least one vaguely friendly estimation from Leslie Fiedler in the 70s. Somehow Spider-Man never seemed threatening to the bluenoses of the time; he may have seemed of a piece with weird new cultural developments-- TM, the British Invasion, and of course "Camp Batman."  Mrs. Grundy still didn't want Spidey cartoons on TV, but nobody seemed to mind Spidey kicking butts in the comics. There might have been protests of the Warren horror mags, but if so nothing ignited a movement. I doubt Wertham could have started one had he tried to engage with Silver Age comics, but it would have been fun to see what he came up with.   

THE READING RHEUM: DOCTOR WERTHLESS (2025)

 

For some years I've wondered: what kind of child was Frederic Wertham? There are no official biographies of the man who "nearly killed the comics industry." Even the friendliest overview of the psychiatrist's career, Bart Beaty's 2005 FREDERIC WERTHAM AND THE CRITIQUE OF MASS CULTURE, contained no more information than Wikipedia: born in 1895 and raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany, moved to the US in 1922 to pursue his psychiatric career. Of the childhood of the doctor who became famous for analyzing the fantasies of children, there was nothing to say if he had problems as a Jewish child in pre-Weimar Germany, or if he ever read German translations of pulp characters like Nick Carter or the (fictionalized) Buffalo Bill.

But thanks to the graphic novel DOCTOR WERTHLESS by writer Harold Schechter and artist Eric Powell, it's clear that Frederic Wertham's psychological past probably will never be plumbed. Schechter and Powell's biography-- admittedly also "fictionalized," though only in the sense of creating imagined dialogue for real-life persons-- establishes that Wertham never publicly discussed his early life. He also became estranged from the rest of his family even before moving to America, so like many other Euro-expatriates, the US was the place where Wertham re-invented himself.

And yet, that reinvention had almost nothing to with American popular culture, much less comic books, which did not become a mass medium until the late 1930s and didn't excite Wertham's attention until the late 1940s. He gained celebrity from his somewhat lurid studies of the serial murderers Albert Fish and Robert Irwin, whose crimes dominate the first half of WERTHLESS. Here I'll note that readers may need strong stomachs to tolerate the detailed descriptions of their many perfidies. And yet those details are important to understanding Wertham's career. 

WERTHLESS is careful to show that according to what records we have, Wertham was generally empathetic toward all of his patients. And this empathy is key to understanding how the doctor could treat the iniquities of an Albert Fish with clinical dispassion: to Wertham, Fish was simply sick. The source of the sickness lay outside the patient, though the labeling of that contagion would not take place until Wertham tapped into the postwar mania linking juvenile delinquency to popular culture. Other pundits of the period went after popular culture in general, but comic books became Wertham's Great White Whale; a virus he could imagine stamping out.

Despite Schechter and Powell's (correct) negative assessment of the doctor's search for easy solutions, the authors are careful to show the positive aspects of his empathy. For about a decade Wertham donated his expertise to a low-cost psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and he gave valuable court testimony that led to the downfall of "separate but equal" segregation. The authors pass a little rapidly over his association with the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but it's possible the doctor was simply fooled by their pose of innocence. Though Wertham as drawn by Powell looks unprepossessing, he had assorted minor encounters with a smattering of celebrities-- Al Capp, Richard Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Lipton-- so it would seem that Wertham possessed some charisma in addition to his empathy. Indeed, celebrity-spotting is one of the pleasures of WERTHLESS.   

Yet in both the first and last pages, Schechter and Powell make clear their disagreement with Wertham's "belief that brutal aggression was not innate in human nature but [was] the product of social and environmental forces." Wertham opposed the execution of Albert Fish because, being insane, Fish was not responsible for the many people he murdered. Yet in Wertham's 1954 alarmist screed SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the psychiatrist excoriated comic book creators as being responsible for crimes and murders, even though he never cited a single case proving that any comics story had engendered a crime. To all of those artists and editors, Wertham attributed aberrant motives for "seducing" children-- and since none of the creators were clinically insane, Wertham could condemn them absolutely as he could not morally condemn serial killers. The accumulation of knowledge about serial murderers was supposedly valuable enough to justify preserving their lives in asylums for study, even when it was clear that the killers took immense pleasure in their acts. Readers' pleasure in fictional depictions of violence and sex, however, was something for which Wertham could not or would not allow any justification. Eric Powell redraws several of the scandalous comics-images Wertham reproduced in SEDUCTION, the better to boost his crusade and to sell his book.  

Wertham never overtly retracted his opposition to fictional violence, though Schechter and Powell present a curious incident that may have been spun partly from their imaginations. It's a fact that in 1957, artist Wally Wood-- one of the artists Wertham criticized for horror-comics-- produced a satire of Wertham, "Doctor Werthless," for MAD Magazine. It may be the fantasy of the two biographers that Wertham framed the cartoon strip and kept it on his wall. If that is not just a fantasy, it could indicate an indirect admission of his biggest error. But the biographers also indicate that one of the last things Wertham wrote before his death in November 1981 was a response to a correspondent posing the question as to whether Wally Wood had "produced monsters"-- and Wertham answered in the negative. Wertham did not live a worthless life. But the crusade for which he's best known, and all the skewed data he used to support that jeremiad-- those truly are without worth.                  

    

                   

MYTHC0MICS: "CALL OF THE WILD" (CONAN THE KING #28, 1985)

 

I'm sure it's been at least twenty years since I read an issue of this Marvel magazine, which began in 1980 as KING CONAN and which lasted a healthy nine years, albeit under the altered title CONAN THE KING. It was a relatively high-ticket item, starting at $1.25 and ending at $1.50, and was the last Conan project from Roy Thomas before he left Marvel for DC. I imagine KING was launched for the usual economic reasons, but I'd like to think there was some thought of giving the barbarian a venue more expansive than the regular color comic.

There's a certain irony to Marvel devoting stories to the famed sword-slinger in his mature years, since Young Conan was always the most popular incarnation in prose and in comics. Robert E. Howard devoted one short story and one novel to Mature Conan, but clearly the WEIRD TALES readers liked the hero best when he was a young freebooter ranging from realm to realm. Nevertheless, KING presented Conan at an even later phase of life than Howard ever had. By the time of KING #28-- the last Conan tale for writer Alan Zelenetz-- the barbarian has sired a teenaged daughter and a somewhat younger son by his queen, Zenobia. The text of "Call of the Wild" implies that Conan is sixty years old, though artist Alan Silvestri draws both the barbarian and his red-haired guest-star as if they're merely in their forties.

Despite having ascended to the kingship of Aquilonia, Conan chafes at the confinements of civilized life. He dons a disguise and goes drinking at a lowly tavern. Monarch's business intrudes, so Conan orders everyone to clear the hall. One hooded figure seems minded to defy the King's order but then chooses to leave. 

Back at Conan's palace, his daughter Radegund anticipates her "confirmation" (whatever that means in Hyboria) but her father has conspicuously forgotten the Big Event. He's selfishly mourning the freedom of his younger years, and he departs the castle grounds for the forest. However, his cloaked "friend" from the tavern has apparently followed him-- a good trick, given that she couldn't have known when he'd leave and which way he'd go-- and reveals herself to the startled potentate.    

Unlike Conan, Mature Sonja has remained true to the wanderer's life, never marrying or settling down. She claims to have come to Aquilonia only to fulfill a commission, and to have run into Conan purely by accident-- though she could hardly be ignorant of the barbarian's royal attainments. It's worth remembering that in the first two-part tale of the Marvel Comics Sonja, she tricked Young Conan into doing heavy lifting for her. Mature Conan is delighted to see her and dearly wishes to talk over old times. She scorns his royal ascension, and her refusal to be Conan's nostalgia-buddy very nearly crushes him. But then Sonja switches gears and "allows" Conan to render her aid.

              

Zelenetz could have had Sonja lead Conan to any number of routine treasure-troves-- a lost tomb, a wizard's castle. Instead, Sonja's quest takes them to "a death barge-- sacred to the darkest gods of the nether realm." Aboard the ship, guarded by fanatics, lies the enshrined body of a necromancer, and Sonja's been hired to steal a gem from the dead wizard's eye. The two thieves have no real compunctions against robbing the dead, though in a symbolic sense the Death Barge might represent the world of Death itself, which will eventually consume all living warriors. In fact, Married, Not So Mature Conan can't quite resist getting grabby with Sonja's forty-something charms. Yet he doesn't resent getting her boot in his face, since his desire for the allure of pure adventure surpasses all else.

While Conan kills a bunch of guards (I'm sure they were all Bad People), Sonja steals the jewel-- but the dead wizard retaliates with a spell of deadly smoke. Conan hits on the idea of flooding the cabin, which interrupts the spell for some reason. Sonja keeps only her stolen eye-jewel while Conan randomly takes a "token" in the form of a necklace. Then they swim back to land, leaving the disposition of the Death Barge up to the reader's imagination.

Conan is all for deserting his throne and returning to his old wild ways, but Sonja tricks him one last time, albeit for his own good. Silvestri does a fine job showing Sonja's stoical acceptance that she's no longer a part of Conan's life, and off she rides, leaving him to his kingship-- and implicitly to his queen and children (though Sonja's only comment on the Cimmerian's marital life is a catty remark about Conan having a "harem.") Conan's poised to pursue her-- and maybe, his lost freedom-- when he hears temple bells and remembers that he's got a daughter waiting for him to perform his paternal duties.

     

But "all's well" for the King, whose dereliction of his responsibilities put into his hands just the right sort of booty to be a gift to the daughter he completely forgot. Zelenetz and Silvestri came up with a sort of "family melodrama" take on barbarian adventure, and my vague recollection of the whole series is that it often pursued storylines more in the vein of Hal Foster than of Robert E. Howard. To be sure, the KING series never lets an issue pass where Conan isn't mightily smiting enemies with his iron thews, so a lot of his complaints about civilized life ring false. Zelenetz's title is as ironic as his conclusion, for Conan's trajectory is less like that of Buck in London's CALL OF THE WILD-- the dog who embraces the wild life-- and more like that of White Fang, the star of London's other canine outing, the wolf-dog that finally gives up the wilderness in favor of domesticity. As a further irony, it's the she-devil with a sword-- the hero whose gender is best known for "nesting"-- who remains loyal to the allure of wanderlust.

THE READING RHEUM: STOP, IN THE NAME OF GOD (2026)

 

In KEEPING VS SHARING, I confessed that I was not well-acquainted with the philosophy of Charlie Kirk at the time of his untimely assassination. Since then, I've listened to assorted podcasts, and I've come to admire his Socrates-like ability to engage total strangers in sustained debate, particularly on college campuses like the one on which a demented trans took Kirk's life. But such forums could not provide a holistic view of Kirk's life-philosophy-- and although the majority of Kirk's books were dominantly political in nature, his devotion to his evangelical organization Turning Point suggests to me that his conservatism was based in his religious views. His last book-- which I will abbreviate as STOP-- concentrates primarily on Kirk's beliefs, centering upon the Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. Kirk declared that since 2021 he had obliged himself to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, despite his many time-consuming commitments. And as I suspected, in STOP Kirk used his meditations on the Sabbath custom to elucidate his religion in general.

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm an agnostic who admires religion's power to tap humanity's propensity for archetypal concepts. So on one hand I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kirk's religious leanings, though not to his evangelism. Kirk insists that the intertwined faiths of Judaism and Christianity are, or should be, the universal truths for humankind, and I reject that assertion whether it comes from theists or atheists. So I can only value Kirk's formulations in a Jungian fashion, even though Kirk rejects that sort of comparativism.

The short review is that STOP is strongest when Kirk is speaking passionately about the Sabbath as a means of recapturing one's spiritual energies by "tuning out," as the hippies used to say. For instance, since Kirk's God is a being incapable of becoming tired from activity as humans tire, Kirk declares that when God finished creation, his "rest" on the seventh day was not a matter of exhaustion. Rather, he was simply looking upon his creation and deeming it good.  Similarly, for humans the Sabbath is not intended to be just a day to "veg out." Keepers of the Sabbath are supposed to be connecting with the traditions of their faith(s) and recognizing their place in God's creation. 

Since I knew Kirk was not a comparativist, I didn't attach much importance to his statement that the archaic Jews were first to formulate any custom like that of the Sabbath. If corrected on this point, Kirk could have always claimed that even if the Jewish Sabbath wasn't the first custom of its kind, it was still the best because "reasons." This is the sort of special pleading Kirk indulges in during Chapter 1, where he makes the self-aggrandizing claim that for all other religions of the ancient Near East, the gods were purely expressions of natural forces while the Hebrew God was totally outside nature. Kirk holds similar views when speaking of modern polytheism. Also in Chapter 1, he mentions how, as a child, he encountered the many gods of Hinduism and could only think of the lack of "moral order" implied by such a plenitude of competing deities. Yet in a later chapter he's not above quoting Scripture to demonstrate that the Church Fathers possessed a far-sighted tolerance toward individual customs and/or proclivities-- which IMO also explains the early evolution of polytheism:

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.-- Romans 14:5-6

Thankfully, Kirk mainly attacks secular movements that compete with Judeo-Christianity. He doesn't devote much space to the most execrable movement seen in his lifetime, that of the so-called "anti-racists," but that's probably because he couldn't make their grievance-happy rhetoric relevant to his theme. More space is given to the influence of modern American atheism, but most of these arguments are funneled from Stephen Meyer's RETURN OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS, which I found interesting though not compelling, given my Jungian preferences. Kirk only attacks one Marxist for having dumbed-down the academic campuses, Herbert Marcuse. But Marcuse seems a good choice, since one Wiki-author claims that he is "considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s." But though I realize that STOP's subject could not take on a voluminous topic, I'd like to have seen more on that subject here, since Kirk lost his life making his philosophical appeal to an academic audience.

A couple of titles have a self-help ring to them, such as "The Sabbath Improves Your Sleep," though I believe Kirk was sincere, not playing huckster-games. His most egregious special pleading appears in Chapter 8, which takes as its starting-point Exodus 20:8-11, a section emphasizing that the Hebrew Sabbath and its blessing of rest was extended not only to Hebrew believers but also to "livestock" and to slaves of any faith. Kirk labors mightily to sell the notion that the custom of the Jewish Sabbath was an "ontological" change from older cultures' beliefs about the status of the enslaved. Kirk also seeks to distance Hebrew slavery from the "moral abomination" of American chattel slavery. However, this opens Kirk up to a familiar criticism of 19th-century Christianity, which has become notorious for using a particular Scriptural citation in defense of slavery:

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.-- Genesis 9:24-25

Did 19th-century Christians quote Genesis out of context? Probably, but slavers in both North and South were still practicing Christians. Maybe they were abominable because they didn't keep their version of the Sabbath properly? Also, I tend to doubt that even the most liberal translation could erase the core idea in that passage: that the children of Ham, whoever they were, were destined to serve Hebrews. To a believer, this declaration is as much a part of sacred history as the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. Since as a comparativist I believe that the anthropological evolution of the slavery custom is far more complex than Kirk represents, I could wish he hadn't gone wading in such deep waters.

STOP offers a good portal into the mind of a celebrity evangelist. Not all of Kirk's justifications hold water, but he was still more dedicated to a vision of human improvement than, say, anyone in the Frankfurt School or any of their exploitative descendants.   

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 3

 

Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones...-- ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2.

Aesop's famous tale, "The North Wind and the Sun," has often been used to describe the difference between "active power" and "passive potency"-- more typically known as "force and persuasion." The titular wind and sun make a bet as to who can make a certain mortal man take off his coat. The wind bombards the man with chilly gales, but that manifestation of force only makes the fellow clutch his coat around him more tightly. Then the sun slowly increases his heat-- and in due time, the man removes his coat of his own volition.

I just lied a bit, for effect. Both of the sky-entities are exerting force/active power; the sun's exertions are just subtler. A true illustration of passive persuasion might involve the sun assuming the appearance of another mortal, and in that form, he could mess with the coated man's head, suggesting how hot it was, until the power of suggestion caused the guy to remove his garment. Since the folktale-sun would not be exerting direct force, only indirect persuasion, my ad hoc revision of Aesop would fit the category I've termed "passive potency." The example loosely parallels that of Mulan's supernormal allies cited in ANOMALIES PT 1, who don't give the heroine any active aid, only bits of information or (often unhelpful) advice.      

In the quote above I mentioned the generalization that "the marvelous" most often deals with "power" and "the uncanny" with "potency," and in many past essays, I've drawn the distinction between marvelous and uncanny as that of "reality" and "fantasy," as in this statement from 2015's OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW: 

When attire is not actually marvelous-- that is, when it does not confer marvelous power on a character, like Iron Man's armor-- it must conform to the rules of causal coherence. However, it can still be "uncanny" rather than "naturalistic" on the terms cited in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2.  It's not that clothes "make the superman," as they do with Iron Man. But if they are uncanny, they can make the man SEEM LIKE a superman.

 

This is not so much a rule, though, as a broad generalization with respect to all twelve of the "uncanny trope" categories I devised.  (Tangentially, it doesn't look like I've done any surveys of all twelve categories here since 2014's THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2 -- and that was written before I severed the "outre outfits" category from those of "superlative skills" and "diabolical devices.") At present I can't think of any uncanny costumes that confer "passive power." They only confer "passive potency," in that they persuade witnesses to deem the wearers to be larger-than-life representations of justice or of corruption. 

However, in Part 2 I briefly referenced Tarzan. He doesn't "seem" like a superman within the uncanny domain; he would only "seem" like a superman if compared to a superman from the marvelous domain. But Tarzan possessing the utmost strength and speed attainable to a human makes his skill "superlative." Both Tarzan and Superman possess "active power" despite their disparate phenomenalities, while the previously mentioned Major Victory has only "passive power" by virtue of having been restored to life after his death. "Passive potency" applies to beings that may be marvelous or uncanny, but who operate more on the level of suggestion. Mulan's dragon is marvelous but cannot do anything beyond the level of "persuasion," and every hero who dresses up in a non-powered uncanny costume is using the art of persuasion to make himself seem more than normal. 

Finally, the best examples of "passive power" would seem to be in the category of "diabolical devices." As originally conceived, the Batarang was just a fancy version of a naturalistic boomerang, and so it possesses the same level of power when used. Aside from that usage, the Batarang can't do anything but look a little cooler than a regular 'rang.

However, if Batman attaches any sort of specialized tech to his Batarang-- even something as relatively simple as a smoke-bomb-- then it's no longer functioning as a boomerang, and the tech-addition registers as "active power" once more. Fin ally, examples of "active potency" are rare by my reckoning, with the most fruitful category being that of "enthralling hypnotism," since hypnotists are using specialized skills of persuasion. Somewhat similarly, the metaphenomenon that started these ruminations-- a Chinese doctor's use of weird acupuncture in LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING-- coheres with active potency, since the doctor was working with his patient's "chi meridians" to produce a curious metaphenomenal effect.

                  

CURIOSITIES: DITKO RUBS OUT RATS

In JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 81-- slightly before the debut of Thor-- Lee and Ditko have an exaggerated opinion as to the power wielded by comic strip artists.  

For good measure, the same issue plays host to yet another King Kong Kalamity, name of "Kunga."