NULL-MYTHS: ["A HOUSE NAMED DEATH"] (SUB-MARINER #41-42, 1971)

 As I've mentioned from time to time, I don't generally do "null-myth" reviews just for ordinary junky comics. A comics-story has to be particularly bad to earn such a review, and not just in terms of having bad verisimilitude, but bad mythicity/artifice as well. Even given these self-imposed strictures, I find it amazing that I haven't managed to savage more than one of the many works of Gerry Conway up till now. 

In the early seventies I turned 15, and I very nearly hated every comic with Conway's name on it. In retrospect, I would give him his due by saying that unlike a lot of other pros who turned out tons of undistinguished formula-work, Conway did seem to have a genius for co-creating characters with great potential-- the Punisher, the Man-Thing, Killraven-- though usually that potential was realized not by Conway but by some later raconteur. I despised most of his famed run on SPIDER-MAN, and the best that I can say of it is that he was no longer trying to be "artsy" on the title, as he was in some of his early scripts for DAREDEVIL and THE SUB-MARINER.

I take the title "A House Named Death" from the cover-copy of the second story in this SUB-MARINER two-parter. At the time of this tale, the feature was clearly losing steam, and the editors sought to give Prince Namor a new cachet by killing off his beloved (4-5 years before Gwen Stacy in SPIDER-MAN) and sending the hero off on various peripatetic adventures. "House" essentially sticks the Atlantean prince in a sci-fi Gothic. One night, the prince is flying along, minding his own business, when some guy on the ground zaps Namor so that he falls. The mysterious guy is joined by an aged woman, and they skulk off into the darkness.

Namor wakes up on the cobblestones of a nearby small American town. where he's immediately succored by Lucille, an attractive young brunette. He apparently recovers enough that she can lead him to shelter, given that she couldn't carry him by herself-- and as it happens, Lucille's dwelling place is the house of her aunt, first given the peculiar name "Aunt Serr." Namor is weak from both his injuries and his lack of exposure to water, though no one in Conway's story, including Namor, ever thinks about his getting access to some H2O. After Lucille gives Sub-Mariner a little set-up on his circumstances, he passes out again-- and wakes up chained in a room by Aunt Serr, whom the reader recognizes as the old lady from before. Auntie relates some of her personal tragedies to Namor, about her birthing a "devil spawned monster" due to radiation exposure, and she seems to be contemplating some "unformed" master plan and thinking about using Namor to help her. The prince breaks loose but gets zapped again by Auntie's son, who is now revealed to have the body of a humanoid-shaped slab of rock.

After some more fights and histrionics, Auntie shows Namor the mechanism she'd used to cement her hold on the locals, which she has also used to transform them into a bunch of multiform monsters, though we don't find this out until Part 2. At the end of Part 1, Auntie reveals that she's used her machine on her niece, causing Lucille to transform into a hot energy-girl, whom Auntie wants to be the bride of her monstrous son. Lucille, who in this form is totally under Auntie's mental control, zaps Namor for the cliffhanger ending. 

Possibly Auntie and her rockhead son think Namor's dead, for Part 2 begins with him recovering in the wilderness, where the villains desposited him. Conway tosses in an oddball erudite reference to the Spartan custom of abandoning deformed infants in the wild, yet he can't find time to note that the rain falling upon Namor's form, courtesy of artist George Tuska, must be restoring the prince's strength. Sub-Mariner wanders into town, and, after another gratuitous fight-scene, meets the town's residents, whom have all been made into monsters by the woman who wants her freakish son to have a town of freaks to cohabit with (though there's no indication that "Rock" ever does so). Soon Namor meets the rest of the townfolk, who bear Aunt Serr no good will for their fate.

The only thing Namor learns from the freak-people is that they claim that Aunt Serr has no niece, which may mean that none of them have ever laid eyes on Lucille (despite the fact that she was first seen traipsing around their town in her human-looking form). Namor can't comprehend this mystery, so he makes a frontal assault on Auntie's house again, and once more gets knocked for a loop by Lucille's powers.

 For anyone who may've come in late to the story, Auntie soliloquizes once more about her plans to mate Lucille with her son, and she makes a loose implication that she may have created Lucille from some artificial process, as she threatens the energy-girl: "Do as I say, you silly fool-- lest I return you to the dissipator." Possibly Conway meant to imply that this was the same device by which Aunt Serr transformed normal humans into monsters, though if so then the "dissipator" must be one of the more all-purpose multi-tasking machines ever depicted in Marvel Comics. Namor recovers just as Big Rock Serr comes in, and as they fight again, the townspeople sneak into Auntie's lab and blow everything up. Lucille, still for some strange reason more attracted to Namor's biceps than to Big Rock's literal "boulder shoulders," finally turns on Aunt Serr, blasting the old lady and then using her power to send Sub-Mariner careening out of the house, saving him from being consumed in the conflagration.

The one amusing thing I noticed on this reading of the "House" tale is that Aunt Serr's name is almost certainly meant to be a pun on the word "answer." But like everything else in the story, this wordplay is inconsummate since even the reader who "gets it" can have no strong idea what it references. Aunt Serr may believe that her mad course is the only "answer" to her dilemma, and Conway gives her a few lines in which she waxes Nietzchean: "No man is free... Only by succumbing to the will of the universe-- of those greater than themselves-- can they find true freedom." But it's a clumsy moral at best.

The verisimilitude blunders throughout the story are considerable, but those affecting the mythicity are far worse. Conway might have penned the story of a woman who felt her personal creativity cursed by the uncaring fates, and who decides to mutate all the "norms" in order to make them share her misery. The subplot about "how do you handle the problem of Lucille's origin" goes absolutely nowhere, and Conway further undercuts his own narrative by working in a bunch of irrelevant ongoing subplots, one of which is meant to cross-promote events transpiring in Conway's continuity for DAREDEVIL. In the annals of out-of-control stories in the medium of comics, "A House Named Death" deserves some sort of retroactive Golden Raspberry at least.