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.     

THE READING RHEUM: THE TEMPEST (1611)

 I only "reviewed" one other Shakespeare play in THE TOILS OF TROILUS, but THE TEMPEST is without a doubt a more important, both as Shakespeare's last important play and a last flowering of the fantasy-genre before the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, as I discussed in this essay:   

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.

I don't retract this analysis, but the world of European theater may not have nearly as much of a cutoff in terms of metaphenomenal works as the chivalric romance did. Certainly Shakespeare seemed to go his own way and was generally popular even if many currents in European lit were leaning towards more naturalistic/isophenomenal concepts. Before 1600, WS's most important metaphenomenal work was A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, while after 1600 we see such classics with fantastic content as HAMLET, KING LEAR (perhaps arguable), MACBETH and finally TEMPEST. Still, after Shakespeare, other authors of the 1600s are not very imaginatively impressive until we reach Milton's PARADISE LOST in 1667, when the Renaissance is over and the Enlightenment is in full bloom.

My strongest take-away from this reading of TEMPEST is that though I'm perpetually amazed by the four mythopoeic characters of the play-- Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban-- all of the other characters, including the indispensable groom-figure Ferdinand, are thoroughly unimaginative. Since WS was notable for infusing even very minor characters with strong moments of humanity, the paucity of wit in the drunk clowns Trinculo and Stephano is amazing. I can't help considering that WS was so deeply invested in the four characters of his "magical island" that he simply couldn't spare any attention for the quotidian types. And there's a special irony in this, since the theme of TEMPEST is all about leaving behind the worlds of magic-- even good magic-- in order to rejoin the domain of ordinary mortals. 

More to come...          

TRAILER THOUGHTS

 Last year the only superhero movies I saw in theaters were SUPERMAN and FANTASTIC FOUR, not because I thought they were likely to be great movies but because those franchises are two of the most important in Comic Book Land. I've passed on theatrical screenings of other superhero movies of the Big Two-- BRAVE NEW WORLD, THUNDERBOLTS, SUPERGIRL-- but now that I've seen both the DOOMSDAY trailer and a few breakdowns of said trailer, I'm a little pumped to see this one in the theater.

I have no doubt that DOOMSDAY will be an unwieldly melange of maybe ten-twenty plotlines from both MCU feature films and TV shows. But in one way, this could be a good thing.

Way back in 1985, I gave a negative review to Marvel Comics' SECRET WARS, which was probably as banal as DOOMSDAY *might* be-- and for similar reasons, because writer Jim Shooter also dumped together a bunch of unrelated plotlines, none of which proved to have lasting emotional resonance (with the possible exception of Spider-Man's Black Costume). DOOMSDAY will also lead into the MCU's version of SECRET WARS the following year, so it seems a safe bet that *someone* in the DOOMSDAY production team looked at how Shooter had handled the juggling of about forty super-characters. I don't even know if Hollywood types care about SECRET WARS having been a big moneymaker in its day, mostly with toy-buying kids and hardcore readers. All the Hollywood people *might* care about is finding some way to make all these characters work together enough to make a respectable profit.

So both DOOMSDAY and its next-year sequel probably won't be any better than Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS. 

But you know what DOOMSDAY will be better than?

ANY SUPERHERO FILM WITH EXPLICIT POLITICAL CONTENT.

A big splashy multi-crossover film will be concerned almost exclusively with saving multiple universes, and thus there *should* be no time to devote to political pontification.

And-- *that's a good thing.*

Besides, DOOMSDAY/WARS may kill off the Simu Liu version of Shang-Chi, whose existence I regard as a travesty of the original. That alone would make even the most tedious farrago more palatable.