In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here, owes someth...
There might have been some real newspaper called "The Daily Bugle" that influenced Stan Lee's choice of that name for Jonah Jameson's newspaper. But since Lee might have been involved to some degree in editing this kid-humor strip "Skinny Bones," I think this is the likeliest culprit.
From one viable POV, most of my meditations on "base iconicity" and "elevated iconicity" in Part 1 were meant to lead to the subject of this post: to clarify that there are three types of crossover-stories, and one type of story that only superficially appears to be a crossover.
The first type involves two or more "familiar" icons, meaning icons that appeared in two or more separate venues, usually both serial in nature, available to consumers prior to the crossover. When the original Human Torch contended with the Sub-Mariner in the 1940s, both icons were familiar to the comic-buying public. Both of those characters happened to be widely popular prior to the crossover. However, the same principle prevails when a publisher launches a new series within the context of an established one, and then immediately launches the standalone series as well. One mostly forgotten launch of the Golden Age appeared in the popular feature KID ETERNITY, the main star of Quality Comics' title HIT COMICS. The Kid had barely been introduced himself when his creators had him encounter two humorous ladies of larceny, Her Highness and Silk. Almost immediately after that, Her Highness and Silk got their own backup feature in the HIT title, where they survived for the remainder of the title's run. Their guest-shot in the Kid's feature might have made no difference, but even that early in the history of superhero comics, creators understood the appeal of advance publicity.
The second type of crossover is what I've termed the "proto-crossover." A novel icon appears within the sphere of a familiar icon's world, but the novel icon does not get a featured venue right away. As long as such a venue does eventuate within (as a rough measure) five years, then all of the novel icon's previous appearances are retroactively crossovers, looking back on the icon in terms of his/her/its history. The guiding example here is Marvel's Black Panther, who only received a regular venue in the title THE AVENGERS, four or five years after the character debuted in the FANTASTIC FOUR comic.
Usually, there is some authorial intent to launch the novel icon in a starring venue. Yet this doesn't always happen. The history of television is replete with "back-door pilots" in which a producer sought to use a regular episode of an established series to debut one or more icons in the hope of selling said icons to networks. When no separate venue comes to pass, the novel icons just remain Subs within the established series and nothing more. However, audience intent can take the place of authorial intent. When the creators of Hillman Comics' feature SKY WOLF introduced a muck-monster named The Heap, those creators meant the creature to be a one-shot opponent. But the readers wanted to see more of The Heap, and so he got a backup series in the same magazine publishing SKY WOLF.
In both of these forms, all of the characters start out with basal iconicity but then attain elevated iconicity if they even appear in two serial adventures. Their iconicity is elevated by the quantitative form of escalation whether the stories possess any standout quality or not. Most serial icons require more than two adventures to deserve qualitative escalation, though Wally Wood's WIZARD KING duology is a noteworthy exception.
The next type is purely monadic and therefore not capable of having its status being altered by quantitative escalation. Walter Scott wrote one story of his knight Ivanhoe, and Ivanhoe's novelty becomes a crossover only by dint of his association with a previously established icon, in this case, Robin Hood. As I've said in earlier essays, other historical figures in IVANHOE do not have iconic status, but Robin of Loxley does because he had attained the status of a legend long before Scott wrote IVANHOE. Yet here is a point I never elaborated before. The only way a monadic icon like Ivanhoe can be one-half of a crossover-dyad is if he does, in his sole appearance, merit a high level of qualitative escalation-- which Ivanhoe, apart from his association with Robin Hood, does.
The fourth form-- the one that only looks like a crossover-- is a monadic work in which an established icon-- whether entirely fictional or based in history but given legendary status-- meets a novel icon lacking any claim to qualitative escalation. For instance, even though Billy the Kid was a real historical personage, he's become the stuff of legend due to many fictional iterations of his persona. So anytime the Kid appears in any story, even one that purports to be closely based on real history, the Kid-icon carries crossover-potential-- even in a work like the 1970 feature film CHISUM. Though this film, dealing with the Lincoln County Cattle Wars, includes historical personages other than Billy the Kid, none of the other figures possess legendary status. As for the novel icon of the movie (and, I assume, of the prose source material), he possesses only base iconicity, and so cannot function against Billy the Kid in a crossover-matrix. The fictional cattle baron John Chisum has no special distinctions that would indicate elevated iconicity. The character is not only nowhere close to the qualitative level of Scott's Ivanhoe, he's not even close to some of the better characters essayed by actor John Wayne, such as Quirt (ANGEL AND THE BADMAN) Evans or Ethan (THE SEARCHERS) Edwards. Had either of those monadic luminaries happened to have crossed paths with a legendary Western character, *that* might have been a crossover. But John Chisum is just another routine placeholder, undoubtedly selected for film adaptation because it was the sort of character John Wayne could play in his sleep.
I've introduced a panoply of new terms this year, and so I'm going to try to coordinate them better, starting with one literary work: Walter Scott's IVANHOE. This novel bears a number of distinctions in general literary history, having fomented the genre of the historical novel, as well as being one of the few Scott novels that educated people remember fairly well. Within my own critical system, it also bears other distinctions.
After two centuries in which European and American literature produced no significant combative works, IVANHOE was the first truly popular work of that type, even though, as I've discussed, Scott's long poem LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL occupies "pride of place." IVANHOE seems to be the first important work of crossover-fiction of the "Moder Era," given Scott's usage of the legendary hero Robin Hood within the narrative of the totally fictional hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe. And the novel was central to my discussion of "centricity" in this 2018 essay, even though the term centricity has become somewhat subsumed by the term "eminence." But before I procced to the topic of elevating eminences, I'll detail the substance of the IVANHOE novel with attention to my new narrative terms "excitant" and "reactant."
The novel's setting is 12th-century England. Prince John sits the throne, representing the obnoxious Norman lords who came from France and took control of the country from the earlier occupants, the Anglo-Saxon populace. Not all of the Normans are bad guys, though. The noble protagonist faces disinheritance by his Anglo-Saxon father for Ivanhoe's loyalty to King Richard, even though Richard left John on the throne so that he the King wanted to go off and fight in the Crusades. That said, the "bad Normans" are the "excitants" of the story; they create the conflict with which Ivanhoe must deal. Historically, the Normans will remain in power, and so the only thing Ivanhoe, the "reactant," can do to fix the situation is to help the good Norman king Richard regain the throne. Ivanhoe cannot defeat all bad Normans, but he can defeat one of their foremost paladins, Sir Brian-- even though Brian's defeat also comes about due to other factors as well.
Now, one of my main concerns in the 2018 "centricity" essay was to dispute the claim made by Nancy Springer: that she did not consider Ivanhoe the book's "real hero," because despite being the "common thread" binding all the other characters into Scott's pattern, he had "no personality." I responded in part:
From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own.
What I called "color" probably corresponds with what Springer deems "personality," even I don't find Ivanhoe as colorless as she did. Springer preferred characters with more pronounced character traits, but I don't deem that to be the defining factor of what makes a particular icon centric/eminent. This year I defined all forms of eminence, superordinate and subordinate, in terms of the dual factors of activity and resonance:
I advanced my new concept that iconicity, the nature of fictional icons, stemmed from two factors: activity, what the icons do, and resonance, what the icons represent. By extension this means that whatever icon or icons are superordinate to the other icons are so judged in terms of "eminent activity," "eminent resonance," or a combination of the two.
In Ivanhoe's case, his superordinate eminence stems from both activity (he's an admirably strong warrior) and resonance (he's a tolerant square-shooter, treating the Jews Isaac and Rebecca decently when many of his contemporaries see them as victims to be exploited). If IVANHOE has been more of a pure romance-tale revolving around the forbidden liaison of a Christian knight and a Jewish female, then Rebecca could have shared Ivanhoe's eminence, as Romeo and Juliet are equal eminences in the Shakespeare play. But Scott is more concerned with bringing about the end of Bad Norman rule and the return of Richard's just reign (in fiction, at least), so Ivanhoe's activity and resonance pervades the novel as no other character's qualities do.
The last set of terms I want to interpolate are the concepts of "base iconicity" and "elevated iconicity" as elaborated in the February essay COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4. Ivanhoe and all of his subordinate characters were defined as having only "base iconicity" because the novel is a monadic work, wherein even characters drawn from history (King Richard) and from legend (Robin Hood) exist in fixed conditions, not capable, as serials are, of being influenced by the quantitative form of escalation.
The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them as support-characters to Ivanhoe. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.
Serials thus can have their eminent qualities enhanced according to qualitative or quantitative escalation. With regard to the quantitative form, I gave a couple of examples of subordinate characters who graduated to ELEVATED ICONICITY simply because they appeared twice rather than once. Two appearances does not confer any qualitative mojo; it just means that some storyteller thought he could enthrall an audience with Character X by dint of repeating him/her--in this case, Olga the Cossack Queen in the third season of BATMAN '66. From the quantitative view, Olga rates a bit more highly than other one-shot villains.
At the same time, though monadic characters like those of IVANHOE cannot be elevated quantitatively (because they only appear once in the medium of their creation), the activity-and-resonance of all monadic characters may be elevated qualitatively going by the reception they receive from an audience. I took pains to emphasize, in the essay EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:
A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.
Yet, it's not impossible for a one-shot icon in a serial format to also attain qualitative eminence, even for a subordinate icon. Thua in the INTERORDINATION essay, I cited the example of the Batman villain "Death-Man." As much as any icon within a monadic work, Death-Man was meant to be used once, and despite the fact that many fans of the time liked him, no one revived the precise character within the corpus of Batman comics. My conclusion was that though it was rare for a subordinate character in a serial work to attain "durability" despite only appearing once, Death-Man was one such character. In my next essay, I'll take an attitude not unlike that of Nancy Springer, and examine a work where the subordinate icons seem more important, even though none of them possess stature.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
