All American comics-anthologies, or at least those within my not-inconsiderable experience, sell to their public by offering stories with “twist endings.” Because writers concentrate on coming up with fresh “gotchas” to impress readers, often they don’t manage to exercise their myth-making faculties as well. Of the stand-alone stories I’ve reviewed as fully concrescent mythcomics, Bruce Jones’ “The Maiden and the Dragon” stands as an exception to this tendency. Like other tales scripted by Jones during this period, this narrative relies upon a surprise at the end. However, the twist evolves from a synthesis of two disparate myth-tropes: that of a monarch dividing a bequest between several offspring, and that of a maiden being menaced by a ravening dragon—a synthesis not unlike the one in the story reviewed here.
The Silver Age anthologies of DC Comics, given the company’s editorial insistence upon delivering simple gimmick-tales, don’t furnish an inviting terrain for myth. Nevertheless, an exception to this tendency appears in an uncredited story in HOUSE OF MYSTERY #135. GCDB attributes the artwork to George Roussos but has no record of the author. I speculate that it may have been Arnold Drake, and so when speaking of the writer will term him “Maybe-Drake.”
The writer of the “Ixar” story certainly did a little more research than one sees in the average DC tale, both in terms of an accurate setting and of significant myth-tropes. I’ll descant on the tropes after summarizing the story. As for the details of verisimilitude, these relate to the author’s choice of the Greek Cyclades Islands as his setting. The most pertinent aspects of the Islands here are that (a) two of the isles are or were volcanic in nature, and (b) the area has a strong repute for exotic statuary, given that the islands were originally inhabited by a pre-Minoan culture.
Certainly Maybe-Drake starts the story by focusing on the volcanic nature of his unnamed island-setting in the Cyclades, stating that the “remote island” is occupied by “a village and a volcano.” The villagers believe that the volcano is held in check by Ixar, a giant green-skinned deity who “though blind, possessed amazing strength, and could easily hold back the volcano’s terrible fury.” (At present I’ve found no mythic correlations for the name Ixar, though it bears some resemblance to “Ixion,” the name of a Greek transgressor against the gods.)
Page two expands upon Ixar’s mythology by revealing that he’s a biune deity, for on his head stands a human-sized entity. This “lesser god” is named Optar, which is unquestionably derived from the Greek “optikos,” meaning roughly “that which sees or is seen.” Optar, Maybe-Drake tells us, possessed sight that “could peer beyond the stars,” though he “yearned for strength such as Ixar’s.” Thus, the two deities joined with one another: “Ixar became Optar’s strength, Optar became Ixar’s sight, and they served each other well.” Two thousand years prior to present time, the villagers honored the biune deity with the tallest statue on the island, roughly along the lines of the famed Colossus of Rhodes. However, a “new and jealous king decreed that his statue should stand above all others.” This proved an act of hubris comparable to the (non-canonical) fall of the Tower of Babel, for Ixar-Optar releases the volcano and buries the king’s city in ash and lava. In contemporary times, a humble village has taken the place of the impious city, and though the village is sustained by mining gold from the earth, the island’s greatest wealth is its history.
Three archaeologists—Stanton, Frazure and Duncan, all speaking in American speech patterns—have the luck to unearth a statue from the island’s earth, a statue which attentive readers will recognize as Optar. On the day when the scientists plan to subject Optar to carbon-dating, Stanton goes missing—and suddenly, mighty Ixar, with Optar still perched on his head, rises from the concealing earth. The hulking statue stalks toward the village, and the residents fear that he seeks to destroy everyone in response to the archaeological meddling. However, the blind green giant then saves some citizens from falling masonry.
Duncan and Frazure cannot reconcile the reality of the “incredible stone duo” in terms of science, and when the duo departs, Stanton suddenly shows up and asserts that everyone must have been the victim of mass hypnosis. Out of nowhere the two stone deities show up again, as if summoned by Stanton’s skepticism, and attack a local train that carries gold from the mine. Optar even reveals a new talent, blasting the train with a ray from his eyes. The deities stalk off again, and the villagers blame Stanton. Frazure absents himself during these goings-on but comes back to reveal the results of his own private research. He reveals the secret of Ixar-Optar: it’s a robot created by an alien race in order to gather data on the Earthlings of archaic times, apparently built to take the place of the colossal statue. The aliens died long ago in the same volcanic cataclysm supposedly unleashed by a king’s impiety, but the explorers left behind a laboratory filled with explanatory notes, conveniently written in ancient Aegean hieroglyphics. Frazure also deduces that Stanton found the lab first and acquired a device with which he controlled the robot and made it attack the train, so that he Stanton could later collect the gold. Stanton is implicitly arrested, and the islanders get a “tourist attraction” in the form of the deactivated robot.
The paltry detective plot is garbage and the three scientists are nothing characters, but Ixar-Optar is an engaging conflation of two intertwined traditions of archaic Greece. One tradition stems from the myth-corpus of Hephaestus the Blacksmith-God, not infrequently pictured as living inside volcanoes due to his association with fire. As for the other two major aspects of the artificial deity’s nature—his tremendous strength and his blindness—Maybe-Drake certainly borrowed these from the legend of Orion, who is connected to Hephaestus in this following myth:
According to the oldest version, he was the son of the god Poseidon and Euryale, daughter of King Minos of Crete. Thanks to his father, Orion had the ability to walk on water, which is how he reached the island of Chios. There, after drinking too much, he made sexual advances to Merope, the daughter of the local king. King Oenopion had him blinded and removed from the island. Blind Orion reached the island of Lemnos, which was the place where god Hephaestus had his forge. Helped by Hephaestus and his servant Cedalion, Orion reached the East where the sun god Helios restored his eyesight.
It would seem obvious that the forge-god’s apprentice Cedalion—who has no other associations beyond the Orion corpus—is the inspiration for Optar, a smaller being who provides the “eyes” for a blind giant. The writer of the story imagines the robot Optar as functioning atop Ixar’s head as an “aerial,” which in 1963 would probably have elicited mental comparisons to the “rabbit ears” of early televisions. One thing Maybe-Drake doesn’t trouble to explain is why this “aerial” has a destruct-beam built into his gaze. Weren’t the alien robot-builders supposed to be peaceful investigators? But the eye-beam elaboration—unnecessary in a plot-sense, given that giant Ixar could have just kicked the gold-train into the sea—suggests that the writer was having fun with the story to some extent, by imagining a deity with a thunderbolt gaze. (It’s of some relevance that in archaic times Zeus himself was sometimes pictured as casting lightning from his eyes, though I would not assert that Maybe-Drake must have known of this obscure tradition.) Hampered as “Ixar” is by DC editors’ affection for bland gimmickry, the story does show that a few rare flowers can grow even in the most unpromising soil.
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