When I pulled out the first issue of TALES OF THE BEANWORLD, I wasn't consciously seeking a parallel to last week's mythcomic. Nevertheless, the parallel is there: both "Planet Story" and "The Legend of Pop! Pop! Pop!" spin fantasies about how a race of sentient beings exist in perfect harmony with their ecology, only to have that ecology disrupted. In "Planet Story," the mood is that of tragedy: the sentient beings choose to depart Paradise, needing no serpent to tempt them. In the BEANWORLD story, the mood is heroic, as well as more typical of ecology-oriented stories today, in which a figurative "serpent" doesn't just tempt the inhabitants of Paradise, but seeks to invade their world and destroy their equilibrium.
The first non-fanzine issue of the comic is accompanied by writer-artist Larry Marder's brief "history of the Beanworld." Marder asserts that he first began doing loose and inconsistent cartoon-sketches of his characters-- most of whom look like humanized beans, with arms,legs, hair and eyes (but no mouths)-- before finally deciding to publish them in a fanzine. To flesh out the cosmology of the Beams, Marder says that he "read myths, anthropology books and religious tracts," and so to some extent the Bean-universe is underscored by concepts about how human beings organize their own myths.
Like a 1930s animated cartoon, Beanworld sports minimal background designs. The cynosure of this bean-dimension is a gigantic tree known as "Grandma'pa," and the Beans are first seen congregating beneath the tree's bisexual (self-fertilizing?) branches. The Beans have no secondary sexual characteristics and most of them are defined by male pronouns, though their toolmaker, the whimsically named Professor Garbanzo, is designed as female late in the story. Most of the Beans are coded as male by their activity as "chow sol'jers," who are armed with big forks (sometimes called pluckin' wands), and their leader is implicitly male as well, the even more whimsically named "Mister Spook."
The Beans have gathered beneath Grandma'pa to witness an event important to their very lives: the spawning of a single seed, known as a "sprout-butt," which falls off the tree with a single "pop" sound. Though all of them are ready to catch the sprout-butt on their forks, only Mister Spook succeeds. Once this is done, the chow sol'jers are ready to depart on a raiding-mission to one of the other Four Realities.
Whereas Beanworld slightly resembles Earth in at least having a grassy sward of ground, the next reality, that of the Hoi Polloi, is more like one of the free-floating cosmoses one would see in "Doctor Strange" comics. As in Beanworld, there's just one species in this world: the Hoi Polloi, who look like disembodied heads (albeit with mouths!), except that each head has just one arm, complete with a gloved hand, growing out of it. The Hoi Polloi spend all of their time gambling with a "stony substance" called chow, though they never eat the stuff, nor are seen to eat anything at all. However, it's soon borne out that the Beans do need chow for their sustenance, hence their raiding-parties to the world of the Hoi Polloi.
As soon as the Beans enter the proximity of the one-armed heads, the Hoi Polloi become defensive. Each group of Hoi Polloi, perhaps twelve at a time, proceed to "circle the wagons," each head extending an arm to grab onto another head, and that one onto another, and so on. In the center of each circle, the heads guard the stony chow from the invaders. However, the Hoi Polloi can't defend themselves from direct attacks by the forks of the chow sol'jers. As the forks inflict superficial wounds, the rings break apart, and the chow sol'jers use their forks to scoop up bits of chow. Once they have a full load, these raiding Beans zoom back to Beanworld, where they will boil the stony chow into a soup that they can absorb with their bodies (perhaps necessary since they seem to have no oral cavities). However, before Mister Spook leaves, he tosses a compensatory gift to the particular ring his soldiers have robbed: the sprout-butt. Immediately that group of Hoi Polloi forms a ring around the seed, nurturing it with looks of quasi-maternal love, and in moments the seed is transformed into yet more stony chow.
If Marder had stopped with this depiction of cartoon-critter life, this part of the narrative would comprise a mythcomic on its own. Clearly the author was seeking to create a fantasy based in the idea of symbiotic life-forms, where two species benefit one another, even if one species' actions isn't committed with the other species' full permission. It may be that Marder was also familiar with a particular anthropological idea about the evolution of human trading. In ORIGINS OF THE SACRED, writer Dudley Young suggests that the earliest instances of trade may have started as counterfeit "raiding-parties," where there was the appearance of one group taking from another but the tacit understanding that the second group received something in compensation.
But Marder, as I noted earlier, did not stop there. Some time after the Beans of Beanworld have enjoyed soaking up their chow, Professor Garbanzo asks the heroic Mister Spook to rummage around the Four Realities for "spare parts." Having done so, the Bean-leader happens to visit the world of the Hoi Polloi. He's aghast to see that several of the Hoi Polloi have been both killed and reduced to skeletal masses, and one of the dying creatures tells Spook that the invaders only wanted him and his fellows dead, showing no interest in their chow-currency. When Spook hears a mysterious "pop pop pop" sound (hence the story's title), he hides, and thus gets a look at the invaders. Known only "whip-skinners," the invaders look much like beans but have four arms and carry whips. They skin the now dead witness to their attack and take the skin to their invasion-craft, which looks like a giant corn-cob. Still watching from hiding, Spook also sees their leader, "the Clone Commander," and learns from conversation that the invaders are out to ruthlessly plunder the environment without giving anything back.
Given how much time I've spent on recounting the involved layers of Marder's quixotic universe, I'll forego examining in detail the way in which Spook defeats this foul threat to the Beanworld's balanced ecology. I'll confine myself to mentioning that when Spook returns to his home, he consults with Garbanzo, and, in common with the archetypal practices of shamans, she summons otherworldly help by communing with the Beans' "god" Grandma'pa. The venerable tree delivers a weapon designed to play havoc with the ruthless hierarchical organization of the whip-skinners and their leader, forcing them to abort their mission and destroy themselves. Marder does hint about other enemies that may arise from the Dimension of Mass Exploitation (my term), but as far as the Beans and the Hoi Polloi are concerned, a terrible evil has been dispersed. The Hoi Polloi allow Spook and his soldiers to take all the chow they can carry back to their own domain, after which the one-armed heads began keening for their lost brethren. The narrative ends with the Beans feasting on chow-stew, though it goes without saying that other conflicts would await the intrepid Mister Spook in future issues.
In closing, though, I can't help but mention that "hoi polloi," according to Merriam-Webster, is one of those odd terms that has come to be used for two mutually contradictory designations:
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