Saturday, November 25, 2023

MYTHCOMICS: "I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH" (STRANGE WORLDS #1, 1958)

I went into a lot of detail in this essay about the importance "philosophical SF" had on both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1950s, prior to their contributions to "The Marvel Superhero Universe." Thus it behooves me to provide at least one example of such a story from the period following Kirby's return to the company.

Since the title STRANGE WORLDS only lasted five issues, from 1958 to 1959, it was relatively easy to read all five in quest of mythcomics with a philosophical slant. Now, I never claimed that every story at Atlas/Marvel was in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke (any more than was true of the celebrated EC SF-line). Of the fifteen or so comics stories in STRANGE WORLDS, most of them are "gotcha" stories in which some fool or criminal gets his destined comeuppance, or the opposite, in which some steadfast character's travails are validated, if only in the viewpoint of the reader. But LAST not only has a philosophical bent, it also manages to breathe new life into what's often considered one of prose science fiction's hoariest cliches.




After the first two panels, most of the story is related by the "last man" in flashback, though by his own testimony he will continue alongside what is implicitly "the last woman." The flashback establishes that this Future-Earth has banished the majority of human ills, but has remained hemmed in by biological constraints, since humans still only live eighty years or so. But then a report from a space-mission brings back biological data on the planet Xernes. On Xernes, the atmosphere  will allow humans to endure for five hundred years. This immediately fills almost all human beings with a passion to emigrate, to leave a qualified paradise for a garden where the grass seems much greener.




I'll mention in advance that the emigrants never suffer, to the reader's knowledge, any dire "gotcha" fate. As far as the reader knows, all of the emigrants are wildly successful in reaching Xernes, settling the planet and living extended lives, with absolutely no consequences. Such a gotcha, in my opinion, would have diluted the author's philosophical question: is it right for people to desert the "cultures that were born out of the pain and suffering of countless millions of people?" The Last Man doesn't go into detail about why he considers the emigrants "ungrateful, greedy fools." But he avers to the Last Woman that the two of them will manage to build an "even better world" even without all those greedy souls; a world that implicitly will be marked by the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors.

As noted above, there are a number of science fiction stories which end with a man and woman of some futuristic civilization traversing space and becoming stranded on some Edenic alien world, with the big revelation that the man's name is Adam and the woman's Eve, with the clear implication that the "alien" world is really "our" Earth. Usually this trope is simply a bland attempt to recast an archaic myth into science-fiction terms, and some iterations, like the 1966 WOMEN OF THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, are content to use the situation with characters not named Adam and Eve. At most the point is to present the reader with a conclusion that suggests the continuity of the human species in a paradisical environment, wherein Adam and Eve will be fecund and multiply.

Fecundity, however, is not the point in LAST, but rather, continuity between the labors of the past and the labors of the future. Whatever the original intent of those who first told the story of Genesis, the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden has usually carried a tragic note. Because the first two human beings disobeyed God, they were cast out of Paradise and forced to labor for their bread, and Eve, who may or may not have been able to bear children in Eden, became the first woman to know the pains of childbirth. The broad implication of Judeo-Christian myth is that through future obedience to God, mortals have a chance at some "Paradise Regained," if only in some afterlife.

LAST, however, anticipates a contrarian reading of the Story of the Fall along roughly the same lines as the 1967 STAR TREK episode "The Apple." This story also validates the virtues of hard work and the necessity to bear children in response to limited lifespans (though to be sure the STRANGE WORLDS author does not bring up the question of restoring the population except in the most general sense). But since the TREK narrative deals with a genuinely alien race, that tale cannot address the question of a continuity with earlier, hardier cultures. 

LAST interestingly takes both God and The Serpent out of the picture. All that exists is the temptation of Planet Xernes, which takes the place of the Tree of Life in Genesis. Clearly the world of The Last Man is one in which humankind has never been in Eden at all, but has from the start pulled itself up by its bootstraps, and after centuries of suffering, has finally rejected violence and endorsed reason. But whereas all the children of Adam and Eve in the Bible have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the human beings in LAST *are* given a comparable choice-- not in terms of being free from labor, but in terms of being able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor for five times the normal human span. The story's author does not quite say that shorter lifespans force humans to take more risks and to live life more fully. But I think that's implied, and it was certainly a familiar enough theme in 1950s prose SF.

While the penciller of LAST is unquestionably Don Heck, I've been circumspect about the writer because the story bears no writer's credit. Stan Lee usually signed any story he fully wrote, so it's possible that either (a) he had nothing to do with this tale, or (b) that he supplied a basic idea to a writer who completed the actual plot and dialogue. GCD also notes that LAST was used as a template for two other "Adam and Eve" anthology-stories with altered plots, and of those two, Lee DID write and sign one. It's my opinion that writers usually find it easiest to swipe from themselves rather than others because their own earlier works always encode the writers' own story-priorities. In any case, there are also a handful of other Lee works that stress the necessity for risk and conflict, most notably THE ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER. So in my mind, I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a prime example of Lee himself using, or at least signing off on, the use of science fiction for philosophical reflection.


ADDENDUM: I neglected to note that the title contains a mythic irony not present in all similar Adam-Eve SF-tales, since this version of Adam is at once "the last man" and "the first man" on Earth. "The last shall be first," indeed.

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