MYTHCOMICS: SWAMP THING 1989 (2026)

 

So, the only vote is in, and all four stories of SWAMP THING '89 make the "mythcomics cut," unlike all previous 23 issues of Rick Veitch's run on the regular SWAMP THING comic.

This was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. I suspected, after reading just a few pages of the first of the four installments, "The Morning of the Magician," was fully concrescent, and so I easily could have written only about that story and dismissed the others as "near-myths." But in point of fact, Veitch does succeed in pulling all four installments into a larger theme of spiritual rebirth and resurrection that is as close as a work of popular culture can get to the Christian doctrine of salvation (or, for that matter, to any religious doctrine). Not that there aren't "literary works," from PILGRIM'S PROGRESS to THE SATANIC VERSES, that are as poorly conceived as any bad comic book. But I digress.

There are still flaws. Veitch never really furnishes readers with a decent answer to his gimmick of having the monster-hero propelled through time-eras by a chunk, or chunks, of amber, and I would have thought that before his run was suspended, the author should have had that particular plot-device worked out. To be sure, the gimmick isn't used in "Morning," though.

In any case, at the end of the 1989 issue known as SWAMP THING #87, Swampy is banished from Arthurian times by an amber talisman. However, this time he's pursued through the corridors of time by one of Arthur's paladins, The Shining Knight, who becomes one of the more consequential guests in Veitch's version of SWAMP THING TEAM-UP. At any rate, while ST is once more tripping the light temporal, in ancient Judaea things are coming to a head. A trio of necromancers-- loosely compared to the Three Wise Men-- summon the hell-demon Belial, to rid them of the "magician" Jesus. Belial sends his "only begotten son"-- and yes, the demonic parody is intentional-- to possess the Roman centurion Marcus Tiberius. (Marcus was one of three DC characters to have his own feature in the first incarnation of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, initially launched as a title featuring historical adventures.) Note that here Veitch has Marcus cohabit with prostitute Mary Magdalene, thus following the popular confusion between the Biblical woman of Magdala and one or more prostitute figures.

Swamp Thing manifests in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus's disciples have fallen asleep and Jesus sits alone with the vessel that will later be called The Holy Grail. Veitch doesn't explain why Jesus -- not explicitly said to be divine here-- brought the vessel along, given that the Last Supper had ended. The cup's presence gives ST the chance to offer the Messiah a soothing drink, though Jesus is too distracted by his mystic communion to quaff the drink. Then the possessed Marcus arrives with Roman soldiers. Swamp Thing appears to battle Etrigan, but Jesus sends Swampy back to the time-stream and exorcises Marcus. Jesus then endures all the rigors of the Passion and perishes. A greybeard, implicitly the non-Biblical character Joseph of Arimathea, is shown holding the Grail, and from somewhere he also obtains a shard of amber, which he places within the Grail, all the better to maintain continuity with the Camelot issue. ST continues his backward journey, meditating on Jesus' perfect sacrifice.

"Time Upon a Once" alternates between ST getting trapped in an earlier era by the super-villain Chronos, only to receive succor from The Shining Knight, and John Constantine's attempts to suss out the muck-monster's fate, with help from such figures as Jim Corrigan and "The Hairies" (from Kirby's "Fourth World" cosmos). Also, pregnant Abby is due to give birth, so naturally she does so in a stable in the swamplands. ST is once more sent into time by an amber talisman, and this time he seems to disappear into "The Big Bang," where even the Knight cannot follow him.  

However, Swampy encounters another Kirby Kreation, signaling that the Kirbyverse is closer to being the metaphysical heart of the monster's world than any religion's concepts. The "moving finger" of The Source counsels Swamp Thing to attempt reincarnation through "the shared collective spirit that binds reality." This entails ST's "sacrifice" of his conscious memories, and so he next appears as a sprout upon a primeval tree, "Yrgsll" (patently an ancestor of "Yggdrasil). After many centuries as an unthinking plant, St encounters primitive humans, including that DC cave-boy Anthro. The exposure to humans reminds ST of his 20th-century incarnation, just in time for him to come to life and repel hostiles who attack the primitives. Readers get a very shaky rationale for the "amber gimmick" here, in that as a sapling, Swampy weeps "tears of amber sap" when wounded. But why exposure to amber talismans caused ST to jaunt through time? Not so much.

Meanwhile, Swampy's arch-nemesis Arcane has got paroled from Hell on the promise of his expunging John Cosntantine, but he proceeds to the stable, hoping to wreak havoc upon his niece and her child. However for some reason Constantine joins the fight, wielding an amber talisman-- and for some dubious reason, ST in the primeval past is able to reincarnate into the amber, because at that time the swamp-hero placed some of his essence in the amber chunk. Further, Swampy doesn't need to battle Arcane this time, for thanks to his exposure to the Prince of Peace, no hate abides in the elemental's heart, and Arcane cannot harm him or anyone else. Back to Hell goes the villain, while ST, Abby and their newborn child get to depart to a sort of figurative "heaven" where no one will trouble them. This wasn't the first or last time a creator sought to impose a sense of closure at the end of his comics-run-- even knowing that the character's adventures would go on under other hands-- but Veitch's closure is not without a certain rough appeal. And at least he saved the best parts of his tenure for the last.  

NEAR-MYTHS: "WILD THINGS," "TIME UPON A ONCE" (SWAMP THING #65-87 (1987-89)

 

My proximate reason for re-reading Rick Veitch's 23-issue run on the artist's run on the regular SWAMP THING was to remind myself of the setup for the conclusion of Veitch's storylines. As Veitch himself observed, that conclusion became the medium's most famous "unfinished story," since DC refused to publish Veitch's conclusion, resulting in his refusal to work with DC Comics again. DC for its part simply enlisted another raconteur to finish the Veitch storyline and went on publishing SWAMP THING comics. But now, after 30-plus years, DC decided to publish the Veitch conclusion, with the storyline unaltered though of course new art had to be produced and paid for. It's my intention to review this storyline in the next few days in a separate essay.

DC's moratorium on the conclusion did not prevent the company from packaging the Veitch SWAMP THING run-- as well as some ancillary materials I did not examine for this essay-- in three hardbound volumes, respectively titled "Wild Things," "Synchronicity," and "Time Upon a Once." Whatever the reasons for these divisions, I'd say the 23 issues break down into two distinct plotlines, and the titles "Wild Things" and "Time Upon a Once" are as good as any to denote those two stories.

Of the two, "Time" is easier to discuss, and the more pleasurable, so I'll deal with that one first-- even though it's the part that was left without a proper conclusion until recently. According to this interview, Veitch anticipated that DC's 1988 summer crossover event, INVASION, would oblige him to orient the SWAMP THING feature upon the "invading alien hordes" storyline. Instead, Veitch devoted two issues to setting up the contrivance that before the aliens could invade, they had to get rid of Swamp Thing due to his plant-based powers. So the aliens send the spirit of the muck-monster careening down the corridors of time-- which also gave the author the chance to revisit an assortment of DC characters set in other time-periods. As Veitch said:

“I figured if I got Swamp Thing off the planet and out of our time zone, then Swamp Thing comics could just be about that and they wouldn’t have to be a part of whatever that crossover was. The other aspect of the time-travel sequence was there were a few DC characters at the time who hadn’t been staked out by various creative people who wanted to retcon them. The richest vein of available characters were all in the past. The cowboys and the cavemen and the gladiators and the knights and all of that kind of stuff. I was really attracted to that, that I’d have that in my little sandbox and be able to play with all of them.”

Here's how the crossovers broke down.

#82-- ST interacts with DC's most famous war-hero Sergeant Rock in the closing years of WWII, as well as with an earlier incarnation of ST's enduring enemy Anton Arcane. With minor appearances by the Unknown Soldier and (in modern times) Jason Woodrue in his regrettable NEW GUARDIANS phase.

#83-- ST flashes back to WWI, and to the Germany of Hans Von Hammer of ENEMY ACE fame. He also meets a younger Arcane, who's been diddling his sister and almost kills his mother. 

#84-- ST takes a back seat to his girlfriend Abby as she deals with her dying husband Matt Cable, and also manages to host crossovers with Adam Strange, Morpheus and John Constantine.

#85-- It's "Go West, Young Thing," as Swampy is enslaved by a Native American wizard, and becomes entwined with such luminaries as Jonah Hex, Bat Lash, Johnny Thunder and his wife Madame .44, Hawk Son of Tomahawk, Firehair, El Diablo, and that short-lived savage superhero, Super Chief. Also, The Demon makes a cameo.

#86-- My favorite of the bunch. as ST jaunts back to revolutionary times, and meets DC's long running frontier paladin, Tomahawk. There's also another encounter with The Demon, and with the once and future Batcave, complete with a giant bat--which gets more or less explained in the ensuing issue.

        

#87-- Swampy witnesses the Fall of Camelot, as well as interacting with Merlin, his demon Etrigan, the villainous Morgaine LeFey, and the Shining Knight. A couple of background figures look like Prince Valiant and Hal Foster's version of the knight Gawain. The issue ends with the Shining Knight in modern times, informing Abigail of his interaction with the time-dispersed swamp-spirit, and then swearing to locate Swampy again-- at which point the tale ends.  

So "Time Upon a Once" is a great read, with the story being told backwards as the monster-hero keeps getting flung further back. It's fun but there's no epistemological pattern uniting the continuity, just playing in the DC sandbox.

"Wild Things" is harder to suss out. Given that Alan Moore changed the parameters of the SWAMP THING feature by importing a wealth of metaphysical concepts, Veitch was a good choice to follow Moore, since Veitch was at least equally invested in mystical matters as his English colleague. Veitch pencils many fascinating visuals depicting ST's journeys into the higher realms. Yet though I appreciated the intent, I found a lot of Veitch's design-work static. Just as a brief personal comparison, six years before Veitch's ST run, I remember being mesmerized by Marshall Rogers' vivid rendition of the DOCTOR STRANGE cosmology.

The title "Wild Things" references the storyline's main conceit: that due to ST's absence from Earth during an extended Alan Moore arc, Earth's plant-consciousness "The Green" generates a new spirit destined to merge with a dying human and to become a new Swamp Thing. ST would like to give up being Earth's elemental protector and let the "new guy" take over, but for some reason all the candidates prove inadequate and just die without hosting the new swamp-spirit-- and this repetitiousness drains whatever mythic grandeur might have informed the proceedings. On top of that, ST and Abigail get the idea to let "the Sprout" inhabit the body of Abby's unborn child, at which point they stop talking about the matter of the new Thing having to die violently. My overall feeling is that Veitch let the story's complexities get away from him.

Lastly, while Moore was no shrinking violet about his Liberal beliefs during his ST run, Veitch was twice as heavy-handed. I even remember being turned off by Veitch's political asides even though I was dominantly Liberal in the 1980s). The nadir of this virtue signaling appeared when Veitch took the old character of Roy Raymond (a know-it-all 1950s TV detective) and turned him into a conservative douche who got trapped for several issues in a car being driven by a mindless New Swamp Thing clone. There are certainly some weak moments in the Alan Moore, but as a reader I felt that he had a better control of the overall narrative.  But I must admit, at his worst Veitch's follow-up was better than 90% of similar follow-ups. 

     

LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR PT 3

I've altered my thoughts on this passage from LEGENDS 2:

Historical figures, when subjected to fictionalization, can go either the way of artifice or the way of verisimilitude. To repeat one of my earlier counter-examples to Billy the Kid, Adolf Hitler's historical record can never be diminished by fictionalization. Hundreds of years in the future, he might become a legend of evil, but at present his presence in literature is always dwarfed by his presence in history. A fiction-story can depict Hitler in dozens of completely artificial situations-- he creates the Red Skull, he gets burned to death by The Human Torch, his body (or, more frequently, just his brain) gets preserved so that he can be revived in some new, world-conquering form. But these artifice-tropes never supersede the historical record.

I've decided that "superseding the historical record" is not that important in most cases, since often legend-types don't supersede history so much as exaggerate it. The average citizen interested in Old West history usually knows that Jesse James and Billy the Kid in reality are very different from any fictional treatments. So when that consumer enjoys a fictional story of Jesse James meeting the Two-Gun Kid, there's an automatic disregard for historical facts.

If anything, a simple, uncomplicated demonization of a historical figure-- such as Hitler's contemporaries Mussolini and the Emperor Tojo-- is usually so one-dimensional that it fails to take on "legendary" status. Hitler, though, is nothing if not a demon who fits many fictional roles. I might not consider Hitler to be "legendary" when he merely appears in a cameo, as in the film INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE. But he would qualify as a legend when he's used to launch schemes against WWII superheroes, as in THE INVADERS cover I printed in LEGENDS pt 2, and certainly in stories where he's a contemporary villain who's escaped the confines of his historical record. Such is the Adolf who appears in a 1947 multi-part SKYMAN story that I choose to call "Hitler on the Moon."

    

MYTHCOMICS: ONE MORE DAY (2007)

 

I quit following any of the SPIDER-MAN books on the 21st century, only occasionally availing myself of the occasional public-library TPB. But I wasn't so isolated that I didn't hear the many complaints about ONE MORE DAY, a storyline which ran in three separate Spider-titles, in which Peter Parker made a deal with The Devil to save Aunt May's life, costing him his happy marriage to the love of his life, Mary Jane.

I also heard that this retcon came about because editor Joe Quesada-- who also furnished the art for DAY-- didn't like the status quo of Peter Parker being married to Mary Jane. Unlike many of DAY's critics, I didn't have strong feelings about the marriage. I found it mildly pleasing that Parker should enjoy a measure of domestic contentment, not least because the post-Silver Age Parker wasn't, in my opinion, ever likely to generate scads of romance-subplots. I doubt the retcon improved the overall quality of Spider-stories based on my spotty readings, and in any case it's rare that any retcons have been instrumental to generating higher story quality. Yet I found that DAY, by itself, found interesting ways of playing with the often-moribund mythology of Spider-Man, particularly in its usage of guilt.

               

The web-slinger's career begins with his guilt over his accidental complicity in his Uncle Ben's death. Now, because Parker revealed his true ID to the world (something to do with the elephantine "Civil War" plotline, I think), the Kingpin sends a gunman to kill Parker but fatally wounds Aunt May. While the old lady barely clings to life, Parker makes the rounds of Marvel's wonder-workers, looking for some means to stave off the Grim Reaper. He explicitly tells Doctor Strange that while he thinks he could accept his aunt's natural death, he can't accept the calamity being his fault. 

I had low expectations for the "deal with the devil" part of the story, given how cliche the trope has become over the years, and perhaps I was influenced by all the negative press DAY received. However, though I've not liked the few comics-stories I've read by J. Michael Sraczinski, his handling of the "Satanic bargain" was the most mythic aspect of DAY.    

Once Parker's at his lowest ebb, he meets a devil's envoy who seems the incarnation of innocence: a sassy little girl who knows all about his problems, critiques him for his narcissism, and runs away.

Spider-Man loses the girl but comes across a young man in glasses. He discourses on the human need for escapism in a world that doesn't allow for personal heroism. Moments later. an older man drives up in a expensive car and takes Spidey for a little ride. He too related a life-story, a life that sounds a bit like Tony Stark's. (Earlier in the sequence, Spider-Man tells Stark that to Parker Stark was "like a father.")  He ends his story--mostly that of petty revenge against the classmates who tormented him in high school-- by emphasizing how he lost the one woman he loved.

 Parker then meets a woman in an old-fashioned dress. They discuss dreams, which gives Parker the chance to reference one of pop culture's most famous retcons. She then informs Parker of a fact most readers will suspect: the two males he met are alternate-world scenarios for ways that Parker could have turned out: Parker as complete nerd and as ruthless businessman. 

All of these discussions are primers for the subject of reality's mutability, at which point the woman reveals that "she" is Mephisto. He quickly disabuses Parker of the idea that he's offering to save Aunt May in exchange for Parker's soul. He brings Mary Jane into the discussion, revealing that he wants both of them to surrender their marriage, just for the purpose of spreading more misery. Mary Jane furthers the deal, ensuring that Spider-Man's identity will once more become secret. And as the last few moments of the Pert-MJ romance count down, Mephisto sticks in the knife: the little girl Parker met was the daughter he and MJ would have had, had they not chosen to save Aunt May. 

Then reality changes. Aunt May was never shot, and Parker never had a romance with Mary Jane Watson, though she continues to exist in his world. The tale ends with Peter at a party, as the partygoers toast Harry Osborn's recovery from trauma as "A Brand New Day"-- which was used for the name of a 2008 Spider-arc. Said arc does not follow up on any of the Spider-myths from ONE MORE DAY, and though both titles were used for the two most recent SPIDER-MAN, neither film is strongly indebted to either comics-arc. Given that I didn't find BRAND NEW DAY to be more than average, I doubt ONE MORE DAY provided any great inspiration for better Spider-Man stories. But clearly, the feature remains popular even without a "Mrs. Spider-Man," so in that respect, all the protestations of MJ fans did nothing to reverse that trend.

THE READING RHEUM: MEMORIES, DREAMS, REFLECTIONS (1962)

 

In the last years of his life, Carl Jung collaborated with analyst Anelia Jaffe to produce what I'll term a "transpersonal memoir." By that I mean that MEMORIES contains very few purely personal items of information in comparison to most memoirs. There are some such items in the first three chapters authored by Jung, such as his interactions with his relatives and classmates-- but even in those chapters, Jung places his emphasis on his transpersonal experiences: his penchant for dreams with archetypal content, his thoughts on various religions, and assorted experiences with psychic phenomena. This emphasis becomes more pronounced in the rest of the book, which Jaffe compiled by drawing on Jung's recorded conversations. 

One aspect of Jung's life I find puzzling is that despite his rich imaginative life, from these reminiscences he never seems to have attempted artistic expression in any medium. Once, late in the memoir Jung is informed by one of his "spirit guides" that something Jung wrote was "art," and he scoffs at the very possibility of his doing so. If one assumes Jung's not covering up youthful indiscretions, I can only guess that Jung had such high regard for the makers of great art, such as Goethe, that he wouldn't even "try his hand" at writing poetry or fiction. It's also possible that Jung's "Number One personality"-- the one he claimed was preoccupied with science and empiricism-- always exerted more influence over the ways in which he approached his career.       

  

REVIEWS: ONE NEAR, ONE NULL

 I don't review most of the comics I read while looking for mythopoeic material, but these two items are worth a few comments.

Though I can usually find strong myth-motifs in any of Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN stories, I remember being somewhat disappointed with SEASON OF MISTS when I read it in single-issue form. Putting aside the long-range plot-threads Gaiman was weaving into the background, the main idea here is that Lucifer, lord of Hell, suddenly decides to resign from his position. Further, he sticks the dream-lord Morpheus with the key to Hell, and with the job of choosing who will receive said key and thus reign over that infernal piece of real estate. Will it go to other Hell-demons, or to the representatives of other pantheons-- Egyptian, Norse, Japanese-- who desire the metaphysical terrain for rather vague reasons? With all these deities mingling, surely Gaiman's story must be filled to the brim with mythicity. But dumping a bunch of gods into the same story--even if they're reasonably respectful to the religions represented-- doesn't generate myth. Gaiman's initial postulate-- that Lucifer can just walk away from being the Hell-King whenever he pleases-- contradicts the general view that the Christian God has consigned Lucifer to his fate. One might have come up with some thoughtful take on the nature of "free will" to justify the premise, but Gaiman doesn't follow any line of logic here. And without discussing the resolution, it occurred to me, on first reading, that maybe Morpheus can't give away Hell because he's not the entity who created that domain. And indeed, the entire conflict is solved by a literal deus ex machina.         

DANGER STREET is the first of two collections of a twelve-issue limited series, with Volume One collecting the first six issues of the continuous plotline. The premise here is oriented on the comics-collector's love of historical minutiae. for almost all of the DC characters in the story appeared at least once in DC's 1970s "showcase" title, FIRST ISSUE SPECIAL. A few were revivals of previously established franchises, such as The Creeper, Doctor Fate, Metamorpho, and The New Gods. However, in fan-circles SPECIAL was best known for launching new concepts. One of them, The Warlord, spawned a long running series, while another, Manhunter, was re-interpreted and became a significant source of plotlines for years afterward. though Manhunter himself was not a successful featured hero. However, the rest of the newbies were an eccentric bunch. A couple were simply okay formulaic premises-- a new Starman (the second DC character to sport the name), or a muscular hero named Atlas. But the rest-- Assassin, The Green Team, Lady Cop, The Outsiders, and The Dingbats of Danger Street-- were singularly wacky or faux-realistic propositions,

As a fan of crossover concepts-- both the good and the charmingly bad-- I appreciate how much work writer King must have put in to stage-manage all these disparate characters into a unified narrative, even judging DANGER only on its first half. Unlike a lot of DC smorgasbords of famous and forgotten icons, King seems to be patterning this assemblage on the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN, devoting lots of space to the ways the characters interact. Further, the crisp yet subdued art of Jorge Fornes paces the narrative in a manner that I thought recalled Gibbons. But I won't go out of my way to read the second half of DANGER, because though I was diverted, I wasn't entertained. King too often relied on simplistic tropes of "realistic superheroes," even as Moore often did, but King lacks the greater ambitions of WATCHMEN. Often he has characters act stupidly because that's the only way his story will work, and I found none of the characters appealing, even on the level of "what if The Creeper acted like Rorshach?" So one trip to DANGER STREET was enough for me.          

COMPELLING REPETITIONS

I've not yet finished my reading of Jung's 1962 memoir MEMORIES, DREAMS. REFLECTIONS, but I appreciated this passage in which he speaks of his secondary education, years prior to his decision to pursue psychiatry. By this time, he had a sense of psychological division, as if he were two personalities in one body.    

In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very large extent, the needs of No. i personality, whereas the humane or historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2.

Later Jung became inspired by the potential of psychology while reading a work by Kraft-Ebing:

It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

These passages reminded me of a post I'd made near the beginnings of this blog, CASSIRER AND THE GREAT DIVIDE, which also concerned the unison of the objective and subjective domains:

whereas the natural sciences take their evidential base from the sphere of thing perception, the cultural sciences take theirs from the sphere of expressive perception, and, more specifically, from the fundamental experience of other human beings as fellow selves sharing a common intersubjective world of “cultural meanings.”

The term "intersubjectivity" did not pop up in academic circles until the 1970s and thus patently did not appear in the works of either Cassirer or Jung. Jung, however. wrote elsewhere that he viewed myths as factual based on the element of their repetition within the sphere of culture:

"Myth is not fiction; it consists of facts that are continually repeated and observed over and over again."  

To be sure, one should specify that myths and other intersubjective concepts are "observed" through the lens of what the Encyclopedia calls "expressive perception." Jung's memoir is replete with examples of his use of dream interpretation through explication of repeated myth-concepts, and while one need not take Jung's word as gospel, there's also no reason to dismiss his findings out of hand. 

While myths are not facts in the commonplace use of the word-- "truths" is probably better-- myths are tied to "the sphere of thing perception," a concept I relate to that of epistemological patterns. For instance, near the dawn of World War One, Jung dreamed that he and a hunting-guide killed Seigfried, the archaic hero who strongly represented German culture in that era. Now, that myth would not be universal, because a pro-German of the time might dream of Seigfried conquering all Europe, and that dream would be just as true in the expressive sense as Swiss citizen Jung's horror at the human cost of the impending war. Such politically opposed dreams would be mutually predicated upon the war.

It is, however, possible to fashion a pseudo-myth with no expressive connections to experience, and here another psychiatrist comes to the fore. Frederic Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT mounted an involved, though incoherent, attack on "crime comics." SEDUCTION was not just factually wrong in terms of characterizing (say) Superman as a Nazi, but he was also *expressively* wrong in that he projected his antipathy for violence upon American culture as a whole-- which might have shown an animus for the extreme violence of crime and horror comics. but not so much for costumed crusaders.            

ADDENDA: In the section describing the Siegfried dream, Jung does not elaborate on his animus toward the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, but in a later chapter, he says, "The hubris of the Wilhelmite era alienated Europe and paved the way for the disaster of 1914."

Also in that later chapter, Jung mentions that in 1602 the city of Frankfurt "seems to have been a center of alchemical philosophy." For Jung, alchemy was not about making physical gold, but spiritual or philosophical gold-- which contrasts with the dominant association Frankfurt has for me: that of the Marxist Frankfurt School. While Wertham's connection to the Frankfurters is circumstantial, their common ground was that of taking the gold of popular culture and changing it to dross. See this 2010 essay for further information.