MYTHCOMICS: "TURNABOUT" (WEIRD TERROR #7, 1953)

 

"Turnabout"-- the only concrescent story I found in the entire run of Comic Media's WEIRD TERROR title-- is a turnabout in both an intrinsic and extrinsic sense. The writer's name is lost to the ages, but the art is credited to a fellow who signed himself as "Tewks."

 

The splash panel indicates that if Tewks did not write the story, he composed this panel with an eye to the final page's Big Reveal. Despite the superimposed image of a woman's lips and heavy-lashed eye, there's no woman in the first six pages of "Turnabout." The opening caption tracks better, for by the second page it's evident that racer Walt Barker has something of a Frankensteinian relationship with his car, initially addressed as "Pete." Barker doesn't construct his auto out of disparate parts-- though that would have been a nice touch-- but in order to make Pete faster, Barker gives him a brain. Barker also mentions that he was thrown out of "the academy" and called crazy. So far, given Barker's experience with rogue racers, it looks like the tale will follow the usual pattern of a scientist unleashing a horror to take revenge on persecutors, only to fall victim to his own creation. On page 4 the car comes to life to defend its creator against the rowdies, so one might fairly assume that we're going to have a visit from one of the ancestors of Stephen King's CHRISTINE.

 Well, the writer satisfies one of his readers' most likely expectations, killing the rowdies when they come back to assault Barker and his creation. But here's also where the tale takes a weird turn: Pete has already become so hostile toward the evildoers that he's learned a skill the Frankenstein Monster never mastered: the ability to propagate his species, by creating another intelligent car like himself.

But now we're six pages into this seven-page story, and the writer has precious little time to set up his "turnabout." So a caption tells us that the monster car manages to become a scientist in its own right. Pete, now called "Peter Engine," whips up a stand-alone city called Motorcadia, presumably populated by intelligent cars, and shielded from human interference, possibly by the standard force field. The humans make peace with the robot city, and in two more years, Barker gets an invitation from his "son" to visit the "wonder city." The script also mentions that Barker has somehow upgraded himself from car-racer to "chief scientist of robatomics." One might think Barker would keep his innovations secret from humanity, given that he's fathered a new competitor for the human race.

And what does Peter Engine want to show his creator? Why, that Peter has outstripped him, in that now he's able to create, and market, lissome human females "with all accessories." The story stops short of suggesting that humans will become dependent upon Peter's creations. One might assume that such a fate is implied, though, in the closing line, "Nowadays, when monsters are created, they don't kill you; they SELL you."

                  

NULL-MYTHS: DEADPOOL TEAM-UP #1-5 (2024)

 

This five-issue mini-series is one of the most entertaining null-myths I've reviewed here-- and it's purportedly a complete project by Rob Liefled!

I've only read bits and pieces of Liefeld's oeuvre, but the Image star always churned out lots of big splashy panels with minimal narrative content. But here, Liefeld's placing in his co-creation Deadpool into a comics-form that really needs minimal narrative content: the "team-up book." 

Most team-up books exist just to juxtapose the brief interaction of two or more icons, who have little to no effect on one another's lives. Liefeld starts TEAM-UP off like most such crossover-stories, whipping up some paper-thin reason for main star Deadpool to interact with his first co-star: Ral Dorn, a super-obscure support-character from a 1980s FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL (though Ral was also associated in that story with ongoing FF-monster Dragon Man). But once that shaky framework has been established, Liefeld throws continuity-consistency out the window and bombards "the Merc with a Mouth" with guest-stars who pop in and out of the narrative so readily, the effect is slightly surrealistic. There is, for instance, no attention to matters like, "what was Cable doing before he decided to involve himself in Deadpool's affairs?" Characters like the now obscure Shatterstar get no explanation of who they are or what they're about, and a few better-known types, like Hercules and Doc Samson, only appear for a page or two.

That said, Liefeld did pick some oddball continuities from which to draw. When I saw that the guest list included Crystar-- a character from a failed toy line, one of many who got his own Marvel comic during Jim Shooter's editorial tenure-- I thought Liefeld might be unearthing the crystal warrior, having determined that his copyright from the Remco Toys had lapsed. But it turns out that Crystar returned to Marvel Comics in a 2015 series, based loosely on the 1970s magical-fantasy concept WEIRDWORLD. Consider me educated.

No one will find any stunning examples of graphic art; it's just lots of panels of fantasy-icons slugging each other. The two-page fight between Wolverine and Lady Deadpool is probably the best battle, as well as satisfying fans who want *A* Wolverine-Deadpool fight any time the two characters share panel-space.    

NULL-MYTHS: RECONSTRUCTION (FF #544-550, 2007-2008)

 I don't know what the overall scheme was for the clusterfubar known as CIVIL WAR: THE INITIATIVE, aside from finding another means of monetizing the CIVIL WAR. But for writer Dwayne McDuffie, the seven issues of FANTASTIC FOUR's part in this farrago seem to have been his excuse to recycle familiar FF-tropes with some minor new touches.

Though these issues are given the umbrella title RECONSTRUCTION, they're three separate stories loosely associated by (a) Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman take a "second honeymoon" break from the team, and (b) Black Panther and his relatively new wife Storm substitute for them.

RECONSTRUCTION is a pleasingly slick routine, with McDuffie supplying many wry one-liners and Paul Pelletier providing glamorous art. But the first is a "cosmic" story in which the New FF tries to save a living planet, name of "Epoch," from Galactus, which is little more than a redo of an old THOR idea with the Silver Surfer guest starring. The third story is an even more rushed idea involving the entity Eternity, who's "dying" from what might be called cosmic antibodies. Both stories are wrapped up with deus ex machina solutions. Oh, and Doc Strange guests.

The middle story shows McDuffie more in his normal vein, as the Frightful Four sets a series of traps for the New FF. Actually, this time the Frightful group is a quintet, including usual suspects Wizard, Trapster, Titania, Hydro-Man, and relative newcomer Klaw. Efficient if unremarkable superhero fare, with the odd decision to make the Wizard into Doctor Doom in one sense: that he hates Reed Richards for being the superior intellect.

The middle story's also a source of interest in that it seems to foreground a trend that took off in the 2010s: Marvel's attempt to play down the X-Men, because the film rights to the merry mutants were owned by 20th-Century Fox. In one possibly coincidental line, the Wizard mocks Storm and the Panther as "C-listers." Maybe that was just meant to be standard villain-snark, but it's hard to believe that any character in the Marvel Universe would have regarded any X-MEN member as a C-lister. The Panther, yes, if a villain deemed him just a costumed athlete. But Storm and the other X's were highly visible "in-Universe," if not nearly as popular with average citizens as the Fantastic Four.

True, the Marvel Cinematic Universe only launched with IRON MAN in 2008, the final year of this short McDuffie arc. It probably took a few years for Marvel (or Disney) to decide that when the comics hyped the still-popular X-MEN, they were actually publicizing properties that made money for Fox, not for Disney. But if the Wizard's putdown of an X-Woman was just coincidence, rather than a harbinger of things to come in the 2010s, it's still the most interesting thing about this arc.      

VERTICALLY CHALLENGED

 

In 2012 I blogged an essay entitled VERTICALLY CHALLENGING, but it bears little in common with the subject of this essay except for using the ideas of "vertical meaning" and "lateral meaning," derived from my reading of Aldous Huxley. 

This is not a proper review of Jodi Picoult's NINETEEN MINUTES, but is more my attempt to grapple with its "vertically challenged" nature. By that I mean that while it's not possible for an organized work of fiction to lack all vertical meaning, MINUTES focuses so thoroughly upon the journalistic minutiae of its narrative that there's barely any vertical meaning beyond a truism like "do as you would done by."

A Picoult interview in the back of the book informs the reader that she undertook the story-- dealing with a school shooting in a fictional New Hampshire high school-- because her own children had to cope with bullying. The main character of MINUTES is student Peter Houghton, who's been relentlessly victimized for years by thoughtless classmates. The novel starts after Peter has sought revenge by killing students, but Picoult shuttles across her timeline, showing quick cuts of his experiences and those of other townsfolk within his orbit. In the end, Peter is quite logically convicted for his crimes, but Picoult works in a surprise or two to increase narrative tension.

Still, to use my alternate terms for the two meaning-forms, Picoult concentrates almost exclusively on "what things happen" as opposed to "how things happen." Because I usually read both considerable amounts of canonical literature and metaphenomenal fiction, I haven't encountered quite so exclusive a focus upon lateral meaning, which I defined here thusly:      

 I think the "literal meaning" is not something that looms "over" the poem, as a dialectical theme can be descried 'from above." The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened."

To be sure, there have been many similar isophenomenal works in which one could not easily draw out a vertical meaning. Earlier this year I reread Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES, and the most I can say is that all the disparate events in the lives of Hemingway's characters suggest a leveling of the previous era's certainties about life's meaning-- even if Hemingway had no countervailing meaning to promote.

MINUTES, though, doesn't have any reference to history outside the years prior to the book's publication in 2007. Because of that limitation, I find it hard to deem MINUTES to qualify as canonical literature, though it's too well done to deem it no more than simple "melodrama" along the lines of, say, PEYTON PLACE.

Though MINUTES doesn't possess a vertical meaning that might grant it the sheen of literature, it's a well-wrought drama about a sociological problem. Years after its initial publication, the book's was banned from over thirty school districts in the 2022-23 semester, apparently over some very brief sexual depictions. Since most school boards will not testify as to their reasons for banning, one can only speculate on those reasons. MINUTES is not a sex-book, but it's possible that it got swept up in general bans of more intentionally provocative works, such as the 2019 graphic novel GENDER QUEER. An alternative reason might be that MINUTES is fairly critical of the fictional school system that allows Peter to be bullied for years, and that might be a depiction that many real-world school systems might not like to have in their school libraries.       

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD (1932)

 

TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD, the sixteenth in a series of twenty-four tales about the ultimate noble savage, was almost certainly the second Tarzan novel I read, following a paperback of TARZAN OF THE APES. Yet I might have formed a lesser impression of the ape man had I read any other books past the halfway mark of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan oeuvre. Not a bad impression, for ERB at his most formulaic was always entertaining. But most ERB books aren't emotionally moving, and GOLD was. I haven't read all the books he authored, but I would not hesitate to consider GOLD ERB's best work after Tarzan's origin tale.

Before this novel, ERB had Tarzan get involved three times in stories where he had to sort out the differences between two warring cities inhabited by White colonists-- sometimes "lost cities" that reproduced some earlier era's culture, sometimes fantasy-domains with no relation to real-world history. GOLD includes two warring cities, but this time the ape-man spends the whole time in Cathne, the City of Gold, and never visits Athne, City of Ivory, aside from learning of the latter from an Athnean denizen, Valthor. After Tarzan rescues Valthor from bandits in the first few chapters, Valthor guides Tarzan to the locale of the two cities, but floodwaters separate the two. Tarzan then spends the rest of the novel interacting with the greatest of Burroughs' pagan queens.

Tarzan gets captured by Cathnean soldiers and hauled before Queen Nemone on suspicion of his being a spy. ERB then has the ape-man compare Nemone to the first pagan queen he ever met: La, Priestess of Opar, who first appeared in the second TARZAN book. This is more than Tarzan's wife Jane gets, as she's not even vaguely referenced in the entire novel. La is not much more than a reference point, for in all of that character's appearances, she doesn't have much more than beauty going for her, so that La always comes off as a roadshow version of Rider Haggard's lost-city queen She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

Nemone, however, represents ERB's attempt to produce a psychology for a female ruler with nearly unbridled power and no moral compass. When everyone else in the courtroom kneels in Nemone's presence, Tarzan does not, thus piquing her interest in him. Still, she accepts her counselors' opinions that the stranger is a spy and sentences him to face death in an arena at the hands of Cathne's strongest man. When Tarzan inevitably trounces his opponent, the ape man becomes even more attractive to Nemone.

The pop-fiction woods are of course full of stalwart heroes who nobly refuse the attentions of corrupt female monarchs, but ERB is going for something subtler. Through Tarzan, the reader becomes interested in what factors make Nemone act cruelly even toward her own subjects-- for instance, levying death or disfigurement to any Cathnean woman whose beauty might rival Nemone's. To be sure, everyone in Cathne is barbaric. Poor and rich alike hunger for the bloodsports of the arena, and no one opposes ritual sacrifice, since long before Nemone's birth, the nobles train lions to hunt human prey. One might argue that their city might be better called "City of the Lions," as their mining of gold is not that important to the story, while Athne is the City of Ivory as a consequence of their totemistic worship of elephants. Indeed, in an early chapter, Valthor, though a "good guy," tells Tarzan that both cities regularly raid each other, and remarks, "There is a sport for men!"

At no point does Tarzan seek to broker peace between the warring cities, and though he does abet a romance between a young man and a young woman, that part of the narrative is very minor. Once Nemone becomes smitten with Tarzan, she gives him enough liberty that the ape man could escape Cathne with the greatest of ease. He's given an excuse to stay, that of protecting a local noble made responsible for keeping the ape man confined to the City of Gold. But the hero's real reason is that he admits to being fascinated by Nemone despite her cruelty and insecurity. Three times in the novel the stalwart savage comes close to yielding to Nemone's seductions, until at last he exhausts her patience. Tarzan almost meets his doom, hunted by Nemone's totemic lion Belthar, and the ape man is only saved by his own "beast-mastery," in that his pet lion Jad-Bal-Ja shows up and slays Belthar.

Most of Tarzan's villains are one-dimensional power-seekers and rapists. But ERB constructs a history for Nemone rich in racial and sexual mythology, for behind the loveliness of this African White Queen is a spectre of Blackness. Nemone's mother is a raddled old Black woman and former slave who somehow convinced all of Cathne that her child was the true heir of the previous king-- a king whom Nemone's mother and the counselor Tomos probably poisoned on their path to power. A confidante tells Tarzan that some Cathneans believe Tomos to be Nemone's true father, and adds, without much condemnation, that it's believed Tomos would like to marry his queenly offspring. But Tomos is distinctly secondary to the mother of Nemone, to whom ERB gives a name suggestive of negative femininity: "M'duze."

It's plain that, even if Tomos was not Nemone's real father, he and M'duze have raised her to be their puppet, indifferent to her happiness, and this has contributed to her massive insecurities despite her glamorous attainments. And yet ERB is so in love with his character that he allows her to speak truth on her political situation. When Tarzan argues that a true ruler should show her subjects mercy, Nemone cannily replies, "If I were gracious and merciful they would think me weak; then they would take advantage of me and eventually they would destroy me." Tomos and M'Duze, being inferior villains, merely meet bad ends. Nemone, being ERB's greatest villain, meets a memorable fate. Convinced that she has a mystical connection to her lion Belthar, she dies when he dies, and none of her subjects mourn her. Only Tarzan does so, with the conviction that in death she has found the happiness that eluded her in life.

                                      

MYTHCOMICS: CIVIL WAR II (2016)

 

CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.-- MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

Where to start? I suppose by saying that I'm not the least concerned with the twenty-plus comics tied into the core tale of CIVIL WAR II, only with the nine issues written by Brian Michael Bendis and dominantly drawn by David Marquez. And even that core tale suffers from many more flaws than appeared in the twelve-issue core story of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

Flaw 1: This 2016 clusterfubar modeled itself on the previous CIVIL WAR series, meaning that it sought to duplicate the same base narrative of Marvel heroes divided over a political issue. Though I don't remember reading much of the original CIVIL WAR core story or any of its derivatives, what little I read led me to believe that it was irrelevant to my concern with symbolic discourse.

Flaw 2: It's drawn by David Marquez, who specializes in a lot of grandiose Alex Ross panoramic panels. While Marquez's up-close renderings of human expressions are good, most of his fight-scenes are static and uninvolving.

Flaw 3: It's written by Brian Michael Bendis, who makes ALMOST all of the characters sound the same-- sort of a "Buffyspeak" without the humor-- though I'll come back to the "almost" shortly.

Flaw 4: CIVIL WAR II is deeply implicated in what may stand as Marvel Comics's most fucked-up creative decision, though admittedly the policy was imposed upon them by their Disney overlords. In GENETIC FREAK-OUTS I wrote about the monumentally stupid "build up the Inhumans" decision that reigned throughout 2016, only to be reversed the next year, partly because of the spectacular failure of the INHUMANS live-action TV show, but mostly because Disney bought Fox and made the X-Men their property. WAR II's narrative depends absolutely on a running plotline where the Inhumans' "terrigen mists" got loose and started randomly transforming humans into super-powered Inhumans. One such human, Ulysses Cain, provides the narrative motor in WAR II, much as the Superhero Registration Act did in the first CIVIL WAR.

Yet, two virtues ameliorate WAR II's flaws. One pertains to the "almost" above, in that whereas the previous WAR was about Iron Man and Captain America butting heads over the Registration Act, while here the two major buttheads are Iron Man and the current Captain Marvel. With these two characters alone does Bendis transcend his habitual Buffyspeak, for he does catch the sense of how both Tony Stark and Carol Danvers ought to speak given their respective histories. This is particularly impressive with respect to Carol Danvers, who was thrust into the position of a New Captain Marvel less as an organic process than as a strategy for feminist virtue signaling.

The other virtue in WAR II is that Bendis' narrative motor is more than just political. It's true that one can reduce the quarrel of Danvers and Stark down to an intellectual opposition between "security" and "freedom." But Bendis-- whom I've never found philosophically stimulating-- ventures here into the domains of a non-political myth, the myth of free will. Danvers embraces the mutant (yes, I'm calling it that) prognostication talent of Ulysses, because it seems to offer her the ultimate means of ferreting out crimes before they happen. However, Stark is less than pleased with the results, since pro-active measures bring about the deaths of his friends War Machine and The Hulk. (I have no idea what later raconteurs did to bring the Hulk back, and even less interest.)        

The nature of the Hulk's killer comprises a subplot that probably got more development in one of the ancillary titles, and it proves very unsatisfying here. It's only in Part Four that Bendis brings forth Tony Stark's analysis of the prophet's mutant power, with a considered emphasis upon Stark's own status as a "futurist." Frankly, this section is the heart of WAR II, and all the rest is just the usual Marvel meshuga-ness. Yeah, there's a big end-fight between Iron Man and Captain Marvel, but it doesn't really add anything to the story. Further, Bendis dilutes some of his own theme with a lackluster and contradictory conclusion, so no one should take my appreciation of Bendis' "master trope" for approval of all the stuff around it.        

NEAR-MYTHS: BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES 1-2 (2017/2018)

 

I finally got around to reading BATMAN/TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES years after having reviewed the OAV years ago. 

Plot-wise, there's not much to add, since the video closely followed most of the beats of the GN. The Turtles, Splinter, Shredder and the Foot Clan cross from their dimension into Batman's Gotham. While Shredder makes an alliance with Ra's Al Ghul, Batman and Damian-Robin fight the Turtles before becoming buddies. There's no Batgirl in the GN, but there's an early section in which Killer Croc meets the Turtles. I guess that there would have been no point for Croc to appear in the Arkham scene in which a bunch of Bat-foes get turned into half-animals. The physical action of the OAV was more bracing, but artist Freddie Williams II, by chance or design, has an art-style reminiscent of the way the original TURTLE-artists drew the characters with a rough Corben-esque style.

My OAV review does not mention writer Tynion's subplot re: all the action taking place on the anniversary of the deaths of Batman's parents, and without checking I think it a safe bet it was excised. This lends the GN a gravity the OAV does not possess, particularly in a scene where the Caped Crusader gives the hothead Turtle Raphael a primer on Why a Filthy Rich Plutocrat Became a Crimefighter.  

The success of the first series begat a follow-up the next year. The first one was light on theme since so much of the story was characters meeting each other and taking one another's measure. #2 is obliged to repeat the basic trope where a villain from one universe invades another one, and since Shredder invaded Gotham last time, this time Bane invades "Turtle-New York." Bane isn't a great villain, but he suits the theme here because he's a ruthless believer in dominion through pure strength. His absolute conviction in his power contrasts with the character who gets the most attention: Donatello. As the "big brain" of the four terrapins, he's somewhat less skilled at ninjustsu than his brothers, and that lack of confidence leads him to indirectly place power in Bane's hands. Tynion packs in some solid character moments, and works in Batgirl and Nightwing just because. Ryan Ferrier takes over art duties, and again there's a loose Corben-esue feel, but he's a bit weaker than his predecessor re fight-scenes.

I also read the third and last of these crossovers, but there's not much to say about it. The Turtles' enemy Krang causes the universes of the Turtles and DC-Earth to merge in weird ways, and things must be sorted out by story's end. I'm not putting this one in the title since it's not a near-myth, and as a null-myth it's not worth analyzing. I got more entertainment out of the "Amalgam" titles DC and Marvel executed in the 1990s.