THE READING RHEUM: "THE FESTIVAL" (1922/1924)

Though there are no Mythos-references in "The Festival," it comes off as a better Mythos-story than "Nyarlathotep," from which "Festival" borrows its trope of "accursed city full of demon spawn." The city in this case is Kingsport, which had been used in a previous non-Mythos tale, "The Terrible Old Man," and would be used again in future HPL stories. 

Whereas the narrator in "Nyarlathotep" is just a floating eyeball, the narrator of "Festival" has a rough reason for going to Kingsport, having been summoned by "the fathers." This is apparently a reference to the narrator's family, though the reader never meets any of those relations. The narrator knows that he's going to participate in some obscure "festival" that takes place in the Christmas season, but that is supposed to be a celebration of much older, forbidden rites. Conveniently, he knows this but not any details of the celebration, so one might assume that he was there only as a child before moving elsewhere. That said, the narrator only encounters two discrete unnamed characters, while the rest of the celebrants are just a faceless mass, the same as the hapless crowd in "Nyarlathotep," except that the city's denizens are apparently aware of the other worlds with which they commune.

Prior to the festival itself, the narrator drops references that suggest that his people may have come from the race of ocean-dwelling humanoids that assumed human form. HPL would later use this trope to greater effect in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," but the Innsmouth residents are more overtly piscine in appearance. The payoff of "Festival" is an extremely imaginative Mythos-version of a witches' sabbath. and despite the narrator's having witnessed these unholy mysteries, he survives. After recovering in a hospital he goes to Kingsport again, but now it's just an ordinary city. He gets off pretty easy to many HPL protagonists, past and future.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE HOUND" (1922/1924)

 

"The Hound" takes double honors as the first story to mention that the lore-filled compendium The Necronomicon, and as the first story HPL placed with the premiere horror-magazine of the 1930s, WEIRD TALES. But for all that, it's a fairly ordinary story of supernatural vengeance.

"Hound" follows the template of "Randolph Carter" but improves somewhat on the motivations of the transgressors. In "Carter," the unnamed narrator and his named accomplice simply want to research forbidden lore, which leads to the accomplice's demise and the narrator's implication in that death. In "Hound," the unnamed narrator and his accomplice, one 'St. John," are consumed with a morbid love of transgressing upon gravesites, liberating "trophies" for their private domicile. The two are so in love with their aestheticized form of necrophilia-- compared to the perversions of the 19th century Decadent writers-- that their house is redolent of a fragrance that smells like rotting corpses. Naturally HPL does not allude to any sexual thrills that the transgressors gain from violating the resting places of the dead, but modern readers won't be able to read their crimes as having any other possible interpretation.

The partners in crime make the mistake of plundering the grave of an unnamed "ghoul" buried in Holland, and they rip off a talisman with the image of a hound on it. As they leave they hear the baying of a distant hound. Some spectre follows them to England and mangles St. John to death, and the narrator becomes terrified enough to consider returning the talisman to its place of origin. But some entity, later revealed to be the spectre, steals the amulet. The narrator still goes back to Holland and once more unearths the coffin of the famous ghoul, only to find that the talisman is back in the hands of the corpse. The narrator hears the hound approach, takes time to write the story as a suicide note, and presumably succeeds at killing himself before the creature overtakes him.

The narrative drive is crippled by the silly game of "who's got the amulet," and the idea that the entity associated with the object wants to be back in the hands of the ghoul makes no sense. Maybe if the ghoul had created the amulet, the story would have hewed closer to the simple trope of a dead man wanting to "take it with him." HPL was evidently trying to meld that more traditional "unquiet dead" story with his evolving ideas on an imponderable demonology with no ties to Earth-religion. Fortunately HPL managed to find much better ways to accomplish the same ends in future narratives.

DARK ANTIPATHIES AND COLORFUL SYMPATHIES

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.-- DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, 2020.

As a prelude to some more involved meditations, I wanted to align my concepts of "the grotesque and the arabesque" (swiped from Poe, who probably swiped them from Walter Scott) with the more pervasive concepts of "antipathetic affects and sympathetic affects." My most elaborate scheme of these parallel affects appeared in 2013's TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS, though my more distant inspiration was Aristotle's terms of "terror and pity," which I found too limiting.

I didn't specify in the 2020 essay that my interpretations of "dark, fearful visual tropes" and "colorful, life-affirming visual tropes" were affects, so I do so now, going by the definition of affect I laid down in 2014's AFFECT VS. MOOD:

..."affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD.

 I will specify, though, that "dark" doesn't always signify antipathetic affects and "colorful" doesn't always signify sympathetic affects; they are merely the DOMINANT ways in which these visual tropes are utilized. As stated in DARK GROTESQUES, Batman uses the fearsome mana of a bat as a means of psyching out criminals, so he remains a heroic figure who dominantly inspires a sympathetic affect, probably closest to what I've called "fascination" (TREMENDUM). 

And though I've labeled some Bat-villains to be "arabesques," such as Penguin and Catwoman, they don't inspire, whether as subordinate or superordinate icons, pure sympathetic affects, but a mingling of the sympathetic and the antipathetic. Catwoman is the main character of CATWOMAN DEFIANT, but she's never purely an admirable hero. There's always a little bit of the villain mixed in with her most heroic acts. 

 That's enough for now on grotesques and arabesques, but referencing the original essay led me to test one of the tentative conclusions I made there. I termed a period of Batman comics from perhaps the mid-forties to the the end of the Golden Age (1955) as the "Dark Procedural" period, in contrast with the very brief period of "Gothic Batman." So I tested that analysis with a random selection of readings, from the solo BATMAN title going from 1950 to 1952. This very minor survey did not yield very many moments of Gothic morbidity, much less justifying my claim that the raconteurs still used a lot of night scenes. The one above, in which Batman struggles with a villain in a Batman outfit, and in which one of them perishes (a trifle gruesomely) is one of the few night-scenes I found, from "Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride" (BATMAN #56, 1950). 

I still found a few Gothic-isms-- a hoax about a living mummy, or one about a "haunted cellar" that drove visitors mad-- and that's more than one would find in any other DC superhero of the period. And that's because DC tried to make most of its heroes as safe and gimmicky as possible in that period, making an exception for Batman only because that feature was one of their best sellers. At any rate, there aren't enough "dark grotesque" elements to justify my calling the period "Dark Anything," so I now rename that period, "Police Procedural Batman." Penguin, Joker and Catwoman all made significant appearances in those two surveyed years, as did newbies like Killer Moth and Deadshot. But all criminals have mundane criminal motives, including their attempts to slay the Dynamic Duo, and so Batman and Robin must use police procedural methods to corral them. 

There are isolated elements of overt science-fiction, like "Lost Legion of Space" (BATMAN #67, 1951), wherein the 20th century Robin is given the chance to travel forward in time and meet the Batman and Robin of 3051. But there's nothing comparable to the outpouring of wacky, rather light-hearted alien menaces seen in the years from 1955 to 1964, which I continue to term "Candyland Batman." And just to round things out, I also maintain the term "Gothic Procedural" for nearly everything after 1964. Ever since the Julie Schwartz years, I would assert that most raconteurs have sought to emphasize either Gothic elements or Police Procedural elements, or else to combine the two in felicitous ways. The brief series based on Cartoon Network's BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD would probably be the only place where "Candyland Batman" has re-surfaced.

MYTHCOMICS: "WOMEN HOWLING AT THE MOON" (FUUSUKE, 1969)

Osamu Tezuka became widely associated, in both his own country and in others, with squeaky-clean (usually) kids' entertainment. But he had attempted more adult works even before his ASTRO BOY breakout, such as 1949's METROPOLIS. And toward the end of the 1960s, the God of Manga became increasingly involved in manga with pronounced sexual content.

FUUSUKE is a minor work, consisting of eleven installments in the life of the title character. There's no real continuity between the stories, a few of which take place back in Japan's feudal era. The only point the tales have in common is to show the hapless Fuusuke getting humiliated, like a "salaryman" version of Dagwood Bumstead. But for all Dagwood's ignominies, at least he didn't have his sexual capacities trashed. True, everything that happens in the one mythic FUUSUKE story, "Women Howling at the Moon," happens within the main character's dream. But Tezuka wasn't describing , Jules Feiffer-style, the shortcomings of one protagonist, but of the male sex generally, at least in 1969 Japan.

Fuusuke's dream imagines that Earth's hunger for the commodity of "moon rocks" following the 1969 lunar landing results in the strip-mining of Luna. Though the second panel gives us the image of the moon-rocket as penis, it's Earth's vaginas that are empowered by increased lunar radiation. (Tezuka's explanation of the moon's increased shininess oddly invokes an image associated with male aging.) Tezuka also loosely references the moon's much storied influence upon women's periods, though he doesn't sustain the allusion.

The lunar radiation has a pronounced effect on women (possibly in the rest of the world too, though Japanese life alone is spotlighted).  The females of the species become endlessly horny on full-moon nights, so much so that they not only attack their husbands, but any males they can find. To Fuusuke's immense aggravation, he seems to be the one Japanese male that none of these rapacious women will bother with. Meanwhile, women everywhere celebrate their newfound sexual freedom, just as if moonshine had taken the place of the Pill.

Though it's impossible to gauge passage of time in Fuusuke's jumbled dream-world, things swiftly escalate from isolated attacks to hordes of women attacking the police forces. Moreover, in a move that seems counter-intuitive, some females become "black widow" cannibals. Not surprisingly, Tezuka is careful not to include any references in the dream to the fate of Japanese children amid all this hullabaloo.

One of Fuusuke's comrades avers that "none of this would have happened if men hadn't become so weak." This sentiment is echoed by the ending, in which, just before the protagonist wakes up, he's being lauded as the only male immune to being ravaged, though only because of his unexplained total lack of sex appeal. Tezuka's final word is, "This is the sad dream that the most unpopular men in the world have to comfort themselves."

But this isn't the final word according to the dynamics of the story. Tezuka certainly puts a lot more effort into elaborating his sex-scenario than he needed to simply explain Fuusuke's sexual alienation-- especially since the dream doesn't really "explain" anything. 

Traditional "the fox and the grapes" rationalizations usually follow some pattern of criticizing the tastes of the opposite sex-- women are superficially attracted to money, social position, good looks or displays of macho physicality. But the Moon-Howlers display no discrimination whatever. None of the victimized men are better looking than Fuusuke, and there's nothing to mitigate the opinion of Fuusuke's friend, that all Japanese men have become weak. And what do money or social position matter, since the women aren't forcing their conquests into marriage, and at least some of those conquests end up in a cook-pot?

In the Howlers' near-total lack of discrimination, they resemble the male of the species, who constantly want sex with any available female. Western culture, in fact, compares horny men to another creature known for howling at the moon: the venerable Canis Lupus. It's just as simplistic to say "rape is only about power" as it is to say "rape is only about sex," but clearly ravishment depends upon some power differential. Does the weakness of Japanese men trigger the Moon-Howlers to assume the role of rapacious males? Tezuka doesn't precisely say this, but claiming that lunar radiation makes women want to kill and devour their mates recalls a remark attributed to Simone Weil: that male rapists physically dominating women prior to sex is comparable to a butcher "tenderizing" meat.

The reason for Fuusuke's exclusion is a joke without a punchline. He's certainly not being excluded because he's bad breeding material, because the Moon-Howlers are utterly unconcerned with breeding, There's no answer to Fuusuke's existential question in the dream as such, but there's the suggestion of a clue in Tezuka's invocation of the menstrual cycle. Accepting the generalization that the cycle can be distinguished into two main phases-- the follicular, which encourages female horniness, and the luteal, which discourages sexual responsiveness-- then the Moon-Howlers seem to enter the follicular stage whenever they stalk Japanese men. Only Fuusuke, for whatever unknown reason, shifts them into the luteal phase, in which his mere presence "switches them off." 

"Moon's" image of rapacious women finds an echo in his next-year work APOLLO'S SONG. In this more developed work, Tezuka focuses on a young male who's just the opposite of Fuusuke-- being a more traditional aggressive male-- but who is still utterly trammeled by female influences that leave him "cut off at the knees," or some similar compromise of his masculinity.

A DEMIHERO DISTINCTION

This post follows up on one made about a year and a half ago, wherein I made a point with which I no longer agree.

 Shortly after I re-defined "focal presences" as "icons" in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, I stated that in PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS that I didn't think "charisma-crossovers" occurred at all when, in a given open-ended series, subordinate icons belonging to one persona-type encountered subordinate icons belonging to another persona-type. Here was one of my examples:

...within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

One flaw in this statement, though, is that as an often-seen support character, Commissioner Gordon is as familiar a sight in the BATMAN comics as an object like the Batmobile. He belongs to what I've called "the subordinate ensemble," so naturally he does not "cross over" with subordinate icons who are only seen in a more irregular fashion. Gordon, like Alfred the Butler, might be seen as moons circling a planet called Batman-- or sometimes "Batman-and-Robin." Non-regular subordinates are more like celestial bodies that might not be big enough to be planets, but they too respond to the gravitic influence of the Bat-planet. But even if the Joker and the Penguin are seen as separate celestial bodies, when they come near one another they also issue a gravitic influence on one another-- and that intermingling of energies does qualify as a charisma-crossover.

Side-note: arguably some of these celestial bodies may increase their mass, enough to become "planets" in their own right, then they may start generating their own gravity-power on the Bat-planet as well as upon lesser celestial bodies. Catwoman, for instance, remained a "Charisma Dominant Sub" for the first fifty years of her existence, and her very rare forays into stature-territory did not change her, any more than the JOKER series made the Clown Prince into a "Stature Dominant Prime." But in 1993 Princess of Plunder acquired strong stature from a series that lasted roughly eight years, and continued to headline various projects over the past twenty-plus years. All that stature bulked her up into a "planet" with "Stature Dominant" mass, and she would be stature-dominant even when appearing as a guest-star in some other feature. End side-note.

Another inaccurate statement I made in CALLINGS was the following:

When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona.

In saying this, I was trying to suss out why demiheroes in a given series did not have "crossovers" with one another, just because, say, Flash Thompson crossed paths with J. Jonah Jameson (which I believe was a minor event that only happened one time in the Lee-Ditko years). But there was no necessity for this statement, since characters like Thompson and Jameson were already part of Spider-Man's subordinate ensemble.

Further, if it ever made sense to me to say that "monsters" and "villains" could not cross over their charisma-filled gravity-wells, that now seems entirely unnecessary. Monsters and villains are indeed very different personas, but as long as they are subordinate icons who are NOT part of the subordinate ensemble, then there's no reason that, say, if Batman crosses paths with both The Mad Hatter and Solomon Grundy, that's not a charisma-crossover. The reader recognizes both icons as "adversaries of Batman" and so their gravity-waves play off one another. Equally, in one Superman tale he encountered a "villain" of his own rogues' gallery, the Atomic Skull, and teamed up with a "monster" from the Dark Knight's domain, The Man-Bat. I would deem both Skull and Man-Bat Charisma Dominant Subs, since Man-Bat never enjoyed more than fleeting stature-roles. So the two charisma-icons definitely cross over, just as if they'd both been Superman-foes-- or even two foes belonging to some third hero's cosmos.

Now, is it possible for a "non-regular" demihero "foe" of a hero to cross over with a monster or villain? Possibly. A character from the Frank Miller series BATMAN YEAR ONE, Commissioner Loeb, only made rare appearances in the comics. But he did make recurring appearances in the first two seasons of GOTHAM. There Loeb was a menace to James Gordon but not one regular enough to belong to that show's subordinate ensemble. He would have to have had some "dynamic" relationship to a monster or villain for that to sustain any crossover-vibe, not to simply be in the same room with Riddler or that sort of thing. A brief scene from THE LONG HALLOWEEN, in which Harvey "Not Yet Two Face" Dent crosses paths with Solomon Grundy for a chapter or so could have been reworked as a stand-alone arc with such a crossover-vibe with a demihero-type. I already alluded to a "monster-demihero" crossover in CALLINGS, where Brother Power crossed paths with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters.

And that's probably enough noodling on that for now.

 

THE READING RHEUM: "THE NAMELESS CITY" (1921)

 

"The Nameless  City," while not a great story, is a key breakthrough for HPL with respect to "archaeological horror." From some of the story's allusions to his literary idol Lord Dunsany, I think it's likely that HPL realized that Dunsany had utilized tropes involving big, imposing buildings, and even though Dunsany wasn't dominantly writing horror, HPL probably made some connection between Dunsany's fantasy-use of the trope and its use in the domain of Gothic fiction, as per THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

The story's structure feels like a reworking of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but one in which a single character, this time unnamed, makes a descent into a forbidding underground domain. The narrator is an archaeologist investigating an isolated "nameless city" that seems outside the bounds of human history. He eventually finds evidence of alien beings who may have built the city, and then he narrowly escapes some barely seen horror within the darkness. In fact, the ending is a little vague about whether the narrator does survive.

Not only does Dunsany have one of his works quoted in the text, the narrator also speaks of a domain from one of HPL's Dunsanian tales, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," as if Sarnath is a real place in human history. "City" also includes HPL's first mentions of Abdul Alhazred and the famous "strange aeons" quote that will appear again in "Call of Cthulhu," though not until his next published story does HPL mention the book Abdul authored.

ANOTHER POLITICS POST

Another politics post.

________

Are there specific war crimes in the current conflict? Probably. But every offensive act seeking out to root out Hamas murderers (who would happily kill you if it profited them) is not a war crime.

Ultraliberals love to prate about "punching Nazis." Well, the reality of eliminating Nazis in the Real World is that you inevitably kill a lot of civilian Germans in the process.

Estimates of German civilians killed only by Allied strategic bombing have ranged from around 350,000 to 500,000.

If Ultraliberals had been in charge of prosecuting the war against the Third Reich, they would have insisted that no one bomb Germany because they might hit some civilians.

War is ugly and wasteful, but the one good thing about outright (non-nuclear) war is that it comes to a definite conclusion, which the losers have to accept. Muslim terrorists, unable to mount major military actions against foes with superior resources, have chosen to place their own people in the cross-hairs in order to incite humanitarian outrage. The only thing that's going to stop that vile strategy is if the Muslim people get up and throw the terrorists out. There's not much chance of that, but it would work better than indignant Ultraliberals asking Israel to just sit back and let themselves be killed to spare those poor innocent Palestinians.

ADDENDUM 4-21-24:

Are there going to be reports of bad conduct by Israelis as they seek to root out the Hamas garbage they've tolerated for a decade or so? Yes, there will be, because that happens on every side in every war. And some of the reports may be reliably validated.

That's a long way from the overreaction of American Ultraliberals, making conspiratorial claims of Israel plans for genocide. Some have tried to turn Hamas' actions back on Netanyahu, claiming that he facilitated Hamas in some way. No matter what dirty laundry is revealed for the Prime Minister, clearly Hamas has stage-managed this whole conflict to make Israel look bad, which can only happen if the Israelis kill a lot of the Palestinian people as they pursue the terrorists. It's even possible Hamas anticipated American desires for validation, and that they are allowing the Health Ministry to serve the function of useful idiots, reporting stats that are partly or basically true to distract from the fact that Hamas's endgame is to neutralize Israel's power by appealing to Liberal desires for "peace at all costs." 

It's fine if one doesn't credit Netanyahu on everything he says because he's a hard-liner. But back in August 2023 he correctly testified that Biden's pussyfooting with Iran would empower their terrorist actions. Biden's lifting of the sanction waivers means one of two things: either he's too stupid to foresee the consequences of his actions, or he doesn't care if war erupts because he likes the idea of selling massive weapons to both sides.

THE READING RHEUM: THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU (1987)

Before his passing, Cay Van Ash published this sequel to his Fu Manchu pastiche TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET. Van Ash began work on a second sequel but whatever rough draft he may have completed was lost after his death.

In my review of BAKER, I mentioned how Van Ash had interpolated that narrative into a time-frame of a few months between chapters in the Rohmer book HAND OF FU MANCHU. Van Ash's prologue-- in which he claims to be recapitulating the notes of Doctor Petrie for the adventure that follows-- insinuates that the remaining chapters of HAND, which conclude with Fu's apparent death at sea, also took place in 1914, rather than at the book's publication date of 1917. But 1917, when World War One has been grinding on for three years, is the timeline for FIRES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, Nayland Smith, who's usually a police commissioner with broad powers to pursue Fu Manchu, is inducted into the British army, and then sent to Cairo when there's news of new Devil-Doctor activity. By a fortunate coincidence, Smith's sidekick Doctor Petrie moved his practice to Cairo with his wife Karameneh, whom he liberated from Fu Manchu in HAND. However, before the novel even starts, Smith wires Petrie to send his wife away from their home, on the chance that the Doctor may reach out to harm his former slave. (Arguably, the real reason Karameneh is gone from the whole book is so that Petrie will get the chance to interact with three different beauties while the wife's away.)

The story commences by introducing Fu's new weapon, the super-scientific "fires" of the title, though arguably that device fades in importance of other concerns. Fu comes to Cairo looking for a renegade German scientist who has his own super-weapon-- and it doesn't take a lot of figuring to anticipate that this one is based in real science. However, Fu doesn't have a wealth of resources after all the defeats he suffered in 1914. He has some Arab allies and what appears to be some sort of animal-human hybrid, sort of a "rhino-man," which I guess anticipates the artificial humanoid seen in 1948's SHADOW OF FU MANCHU. In addition, Fu is also served by both of the femmes fatales from HAND, the cruel temptress Zarmi and the incomparable Fah Lo Suee.

The third "beauty" I referenced is one Greba Eltham. This minor character appeared in Rohmer's 1916 RETURN OF DR FU MANCHU, and Van Ash clearly cast her as Petrie's nurse-assistant in order to give Petrie more feminine problems, given that Greba's clearly in love with the physician. Greba ultimately finds true love elsewhere, but she gets into a cat-spat with none other than Fah Lo Suee. Rohmer never intimated that his version of Fah had any interest in Petrie, and arguably even her affection for Smith isn't established until late in the series. True, Fah doesn't love Petrie. She tries to seduce him early in the novel for the purpose of getting information, but after doing so, seems to consider that she's "staked out a claim" on him. Oddly, though, it's the hellcat Zarmi-- who like Greba only appeared in one Rohmer novel-- who *may* get further than first base with married man Petrie, according to a speculative footnote by Van Ash. Fah Lo Suee gets more scenes than the other two females, though I felt Van Ash's interpretation of her lacked some je ne sais qua.

As for the Devil-Doctor, he gets two speaking-scenes near the novel's beginning and at the end. While FIRES is just a good formula thriller with no deeper resonance, Van Ash is almost the only author who managed to duplicate the way Rohmer had the character speak, with a combination of dispassionate cruelty, sagacity, and an odd capacity for mercy. Only one film came close to the fascinating Fu-speech pattern, the serial DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, and none of the comic book iterations were any good on that score. Fu naturally appears to "die" again at novel's end. Rohmer never gave a diegetic reason as to why the Doctor went out of circulation between the years 1917 (not counting a flashback cameo appearance in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION) and 1928 (which is the year in which Van Ash's prologue claims the Doctor returned). FIRES was not that novel, but perhaps there's some chance it may still be written by someone, someday.

THE READING RHEUM: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

NEAR-MYTHS: " PARTS OF THE HOLE," (DAREDEVIL V. 2, #9-15, 2011)

I only reread the introductory sequence for the Marvel character Echo because of the MCU teleseries, to re-familiarize myself with the template.

Back in the day I bought some odd issues of the original sequence, but wasn't exactly inspired to follow the whole story. Some of Joe Quesada's art was nice, but the concept-- principally executed by Quesada and KABUKI writer-artist David Mack, with some fill-in assists from two other raconteurs-- seemed too much like a superficial effort to introduce an "Elektra Lite." Echo, a deaf woman of Cheyenne ancestry, possesses what I guess is a mutant ability to instantly emulate any fighting-skill she sees, combining aspects of Marvel's villain Taskmaster and the autistic heroine "Zen" from the 2008 CHOCOLATE.

Mack and Quesada fill their seven-issue tale with lots of bizarre, Sienkiewicz-style imagery (probably inspired by the example of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN) and lots of decompression-style, pseudo-literary voyages into the heads of Matt "Daredevil" Murdock, Echo, and Kingpin, the nasty villain who sets a potential heroine against a real hero. It doesn't help Echo's reputation that Kingpin gulls the young woman-- to whom Kingpin's been something of a surrogate father-- by giving her doctored evidence that the Man of Fear killed her birth-parent. What, Echo just accepts one piece of evidence as to the hero's turpitude, and seems blithely unaware of Daredevil's numerous years of crimefighting? And, from what Mack and Quesada tell readers, she doesn't even need Kingpin to give her a compelling reason as to why a costumed hero would slay Echo's father-- though Kingpin himself was in partnership with said individual. For me, I downgrade this arc not just because Mack and Quesada indulge in this hoary "frame the hero" trope, but because they're so bad at it.

Echo's tragic past and her various musings are just as tedious and derivative as her motivation for fighting the hero, and her Native American heritage is tossed off in some jejune gibberish about learning "the devil's medicine." Given that Echo is a sexy femme fatale, she soon becomes another love-interest for the main character. However, unlike Elektra, Echo doesn't know Daredevil's civilian ID (though Kingpin does, and curiously neglects to tender that intelligence). So she ends up dating lawyer Matt, and they have some long "date-cute" interactions, though these too seem very dependent on a lot of "blind dating the deaf" tropes. Then, at first opportunity she dons a sexy outfit and gets into fights with the sightless crusader.

The fights are decent, though nothing that would ever make Frank Miller look over his shoulder. But in keeping with the fashionable decompression approach, any tension generated by the action is dispersed by loads and loads of banal wool-gathering in the heads of Murdock and Kingpin about their early years-- all of which had been done better by previous raconteurs on the title. "Hole" takes place shortly after Murdock's first great love Karen Page has died-- not sure if it was for the first time or not-- but the only good thing that comes of this touch is a weird but rather funny joke about how masturbation leads to blindness. And speaking of blindness, Echo does get the chance to take an ironic revenge upon her "bad father," so at least Mack and Quesada provided that much resolution before the character became absorbed into the Marvel continuum.

I also re-visited this introductory arc due to my interest in Native American figures in pop culture. I suspect, given the way the MCU distorts most of its adaptation-material, that reading the arc won't really yield much insight into the streaming show. But such are the sacrifices I make.

"CHALLENGE OF THE GIANT FIREFLIES," MYSTERY IN SPACE #67, 1961)

 

"Challenge of the Giant Fireflies" is not one of writer Gardner Fox's better titles, though he might have emphasized the incredible insects just because big fireflies looked neat on a comic-book cover. The true challenge for hero Adam Strange is a race of fire-creatures who supposedly live in the sun of Adam's solar system, and the big bugs are just the champion's means of "fighting fire with fire."

Adam's regularly scheduled sojourn to the alien world of Rann (and to his beloved Alanna) gets delayed when the means of his cosmic traversal, the Zeta-beam hits a solar prominence and temporarily carries a fire-creature from the sun to Rann. Parenthetically, Alanna mentions that for once, Rann's scientists solved another crisis without input from the Earthman, as a plague of big fireflies presented a danger but were largely quelled by weapons that extinguish the insects' fiery tails. Fortunately for the Rannians, this doesn't kill the bugs, but only eliminates their ability to create conflagrations. Fox skirts the fact that the bioluminescence of the real insects doesn't give off heat, though maybe the mutation of the little bugs into big ones changes that biological aspect.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "Sun-Beings" is that they don't have any desire to conquer or destroy Rann. They're utterly unaware of other worlds until the Zeta-beam snatched one of their number and temporarily deposits him on Rann. The effect wears off and the first Sun-Being goes back where he came from, but because he gained the power of sight on Rann, he talks his kindred into traversing the gulfs of space back to that world. (Bloody lucky they don't just decide to visit the third planet from their domain.) The Sun-Beings' only motive seems to be curiosity, and they presumably don't even understand that they're a danger to the residents. 

Though not a scientist himself, Adam knows his high school science and determines that they can put out the fire-aliens with carbon dioxide. And then the survival of the giant fireflies proves fortunate, so that the Rannians can ride the heat-resistant critters into battle and spray the Sun-Beings into extinction-- except for one, whom Adam allows to escape to make sure its brethren stay in their own solar courtyard. (Again, nothing about Fox's scenario keeps the Sun-Beings from visiting other worlds in the DC Universe.)

Naive as the story may be in some particulars, I find that Fox and artist Carmine Infantino are having some good myth-making fun with the phenomenon of fire, not unlike the way Windsor McCay did with cold phenomena in LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE. The deviations from actual science don't lessen the mythic discourse, for as I've frequently written, the truths of myth are strong precisely because they are "half-truths."

DONWGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE

 I devoted some attention in REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2  to differences in the ways sadism-scenarios are used respectively in accomodation narratives and confrontation narratives, noting how in the former the consequences were almost never as dire as in the latter, as per all the Poe and Sade examples referenced in the first part. And another way of approaching these distinctions is by incorporating a dichotomy I came across in some forgotten book on comedy: that of "downgrading" vs. "degrading." 

Usually, when we think of "sadism"-- particularly because of the stories written by the man for whom the syndrome was named-- we think of people trying to degrade others by nullifying their will, abusing their bodies, minds, or both together. This is also the motive of what I'd term "pure sadism," which is not connected to such gains as learning enemy information or the location of hidden treasure. This is usually, though not universally, characteristic of sadism-acts in "confrontation narratives."

But "accomodation narratives" are usually about "downgrading," not degrading. Downgrading does not destroy the will of the one subjected to it, but rather alters it, seeking to purge parts of the will that the character does not recognize as disadvantageous. In Part 2 my foremost example was that of Raku Ichijo in NISEKOI, who, if I correctly interpret his creator's wishes, needs a little pain and humiliation to get him out of his romantic comfort-zone.

That said, not all serials are structured like NISEKOI, with a beginning, middle, and end. The open-ended teleseries BEWITCHED begins as an accomodation narrative concerning the difficulties of a young married couple-- one an ordinary, somewhat priggish mortal, the other a witch with supernatural powers. The first three episodes of the show merely set up some basic tropes of the situation. But the fourth episode, reviewed here, established the most fundamental trope that dominated most of the episodes, which might be formulated: Uptight Husband Tries to Restrain Wife's Identity and Her Relatives Make Him Pay For It.

This segment of my review recapitulates the main action between the mortal husband Darrin Stevens and his wife's mother-in-law Endora, whom he encounters for the first time in this episode.

When Darrin and Endora meet that evening, it's mutual hate at first sight. Darrin wants no interactions with Samantha's weird family, and Endora threatens to turn Darrin into an artichoke. This is one of the very few Endora episodes wherein Endora does NOT wreak some magical alteration on her son-in-law's helpless mortal body, and it's probably the first in which Samantha asserts that she can't do anything to cancel the spells of another witch. To the extent that Endora represents Samantha's  own rebelliousness, one might regard this claim as Samantha's tacit consent to tolerate the comical acts of violence her mother perpetrates upon Darrin. Indeed, it occurred to me for the first time that every time Endora or any other witch changes the way Darrin looks or acts, Darrin gets some part of his own identity erased, even as he repeatedly insists that his wife must.

Endora is hardly the only witch-spawn who gives Darrin trouble over the eight seasons of the show. Yet she is the only character who's more than a "guest star," given that actress Agnes Moorehead shared principal co-billing with those playing Darrin and Samantha, even for episodes in which her character did not appear. The sadistic acts that Endora and her brood perpetrate upon the helpless Darrin are fundamentally harmless and frivolous, and they're usually directed at "downgrading" his assumptions of absolute authority. 

Yet in marked contrast to the example of Raku Ichijo, Darrin never learns from any of his victimizations. Occasionally he might show a moment of relative tolerance, but by the next episode he's back to shouting and demanding and thus inviting yet another humiliating spell. And to some extent Endora, to the extent she has any consistency, enjoys tormenting her son-in-law so much that she invents the most tenuous logic to give herself the excuse. I suspect that as the showrunners approached the eighth and last season, no one thought for a moment of wrapping up the series by forging some stable rapprochement between Darrin and Endora-- and indeed, the very last episode is just a remake of a Season Two tale, with Endora playing another prank on Darrin and his workaday world. The showrunners knew they were doing simple done-in-one stories that always went back to the original status quo. And it should be said that the status quo allows Darrin to look like a successful professional to the outside world, all his eccentricities swiftly forgotten. But the audience at least sees that he brings some of his humiliations upon himself, and that was apparently enough to grant the series long life. 

It's of course possible for "degrading sadism" to appear in comedies, usually directed at minor characters in whom the audience has no investment, like the suckup Brice in 1988's SCROOGED. And a fair number of "serious" adventure-stories concern men or women being martially trained, and often these include trainers who seem to be perpetrating sadistic acts on their students, though the rationale is usually "what doesn't kill them makes them stronger." Thus the Jackie Chan character in his breakout film DRUNKEN MASTER keeps dodging the painful rigors of training, but eventually buckles down and endures all the downgrading torments needed to improve his kung fu and to triumph over an enemy.

Still, "degrading" is more associated with the "serious" mythoi, and "downgrading" with the "ludicrous" ones.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE REPETITION

 A qualification to my definition of repetition here: because as I said that repeated scenarios for this type of fictional sadism took place in separate time-frames, it's not strictly necessary to show more than one such scenario to establish that it either represents one in a series of past repetitions, or one that will continue in like wise in the future.

Regarding past repetitions, domestic thrillers are so replete with examples that I feel no need to provide any here. The moment a husband-character seems to wield disproportionate power over his better half, the viewer doesn't have to SEE anything; it's assumed that there have been any number of sadistic acts of one toward the other. Usually the wife-character is entirely reasonable, in order to underscore that the husband's desire for control is outside the bounds of matrimonial give-and-take. At the same time, some thrillers will confine themselves to one real-time act of sadism, which stands as a synecdoche for all past actions.

As a means of expressing a pattern of action for the future, the following "gag splash panel" should serve.

The mostly forgotten backup humor-series STELLA THE STARLET appeared in various issues of a teen-humor magazine from Ace Publications, HAP HAZARD. Except for this gag-splash from HH #18, there's not that much about STELLA worth remembering.

In truth, the gag-splash barely has anything to do with the main story. In the principal tale, Alonzo, the short-statured agent to glamorous actress Stella, seeks to overcome various pitfalls in order to propose to his client, with predictable comic results. The two characters never get to the altar in the main tale, but in the gag-splash the artist (said to be Sol Brodsky of later Marvel fame) added a clever reversal on a couple of marriage-tropes. In the background, all the female guests are smiling confidently, while all the male ones are openly weeping. And Alonzo is shocked to note that that his stautesque bride has brought not just a bridal bouquet, but a bridal rolling-pin. There's no overt suggestion that the "real" Stella of the series wants not to get laid but to lay into her boyfriend with repetitions of sadistic violence. But in the world of the gag-splash, it's not just the actress, but implicitly all women, who desire to lead guys to the altar in order to cudgel them into submission. So in a sense, the gag-splash represents both once and future sadisms.

CLAW CONSIDERATIONS

 On THE TOM BREVOORT EXPERIENCE, the question was raised as to why Atlas Comics had published four issues of THE YELLOW CLAW in 1956, and whether it was a response to the same-year appearance of a syndicated teleseries, THE ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. My response follows.

_______

Since Martin Goodman was far more known for jumping on trends than was Stan Lee, I would concur that YELLOW CLAW probably had its genesis from Goodman hearing news about the syndicated series ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, since the cover date for YELLOW CLAW #1 was October 1956, that issue probably hit stands at least two months before the first episode of ADVENTURES aired in September ’56. The comic book outlasted the series (not counting reruns), published into early 1957 some time after ADVENTURES broadcast its last new episode back in November.

Now, what might have boosted the Fu Manchu TV show? One short novelette with Fu Manchu had been published in 1952– I don’t recall where– but it didn’t see book publication in Rohmer’s lifetime, only getting collected by Daw in 1973 with three ultra-short uncollected Fu stories in WRATH OF FU MANCHU. For most readers, Fu’s last novel had been in 1947 or 1948, and the next to last full novel would show up one year after the series appeared, in 1957– UNLESS that novel got serialized in periodical form somewhere first. A lot of Fu novels were serialized before book publication, but I’ve no evidence that happened with the 1957 novel. Still, the news of a new novel with the devil-doctor might have sparked the TV show, though, as with the comic, it’s hard to coat-tail on a phenomenon if your imitation comes out FIRST.

There might have been an uptick in Asian villains in pop media of the early fifties thanks to the Korean War, but I’m not aware of any major influential challengers to the legacy of the devil doctor– EXCEPT for Sax Rohmer’s second best known character, Sumuru. She had first appeared in a late forties radio serial, but according to one online review, Rohmer’s five novelizations of the character’s exploits did very well for paperback publisher Gold Medal in the early fifties:

Sax Rohmer’s Nude in Mink (released as Sins of Sumuru in the UK) was published in May 1950. It was Gold Medal’s seventh overall title, and their third fiction novel. Like the Fu Manchu series, it featured a series villain, Sumuru, that was molded to be a female version of her male predecessor. In the first two months, Nude in Mink went through three printings—at 200,000 copies per print run (assuming it followed Gold Medal’s usual publishing pattern), that means 600,000 copies in just 60 days. According to The Page of Fu Manchu, it would go through another printing in October 1950, followed by a fifth printing in October 1951 and then a sixth in July 1953. Not bad for a novel that was salvaged from a BBC radio serial from 1945–1946. It would also spawn several sequels: Sumuru (1951), The Fire Goddess (1952), Return of Sumuru (1954), and Sinister Madonna (1956)

http://www.pulp-serenade.com/2020/08/nude-in-mink-by-sax-rohmer-1950.html

I don’t know exactly how “Asian” Sumuru is since I’ve read only one of the novels, but her success might have sparked Rohmer to execute his last few Fu-stories, and that might have convinced TV producers that there was gold in them thar Asian mastermind hills. And of course in the mid to late fifties, syndicated TV was coming out with a lot of pulpy adaptations– Sheena, Jungle Jim, Flash Gordon– so Fu Manchu fit into that overall spirit of pulp-revival.

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 2

 All of the examples of prolongation and repetition discussed in Part 1 were dominated by a relatively serious tone, which meant that in every scenario the sadist and his victim were radically opposed into a "winner" and a "loser." But this pattern of oppugnancy breaks down somewhat in the more ludicrous mythoi, where "accomodation narratives" might in theory outnumber "confrontation narratives."

In this near-myth analysis, I took issue with Gershon Legman's claim that all teenage comedy comics were just filled to the brim with young women panting with desire to harm/humiliate fathers and boyfriends. But to test his theory fairly, I scanned all of the adventures of an Archie Comics teen-heroine, Ginger Snapp, lasting from the middle forties through the early fifties. I did find some examples of the heroine Ginger occasionally visiting quasi-sadistic humiliations on either her father or her boyfriend, but there weren't enough of them for GINGER to support Legman's faulty thesis. Thus the few stories that existed in this venue fit my category of "prolongation," because the sadism-scenarios are confined to particular issues and don't reinforce one another.

The one story I analyzed, "Nightmare," was interesting because the victim's humiliation stems largely from his reactions to the titular series-star, not from overt deeds by Ginger. The story's action proceeds from Ginger's old man Mister Snapp. She asks him for money for a baseball uniform, but he, playing the "heavy father," wants to make her prove her devotion to the sport. He embarrasses himself by trying to keep up with the young folk, and then his daughter, only indirectly the author of his torments, beans him with a baseball by accident. Snapp then experiences a dream in which his daughter goes out of her way to clobber him with a giant bat, and he goes through other prolonged sufferings until he wakes up. So in his mind at least, Snapp is the "loser" and Ginger "the winner," though the only way in which the real Ginger torments him is just by the fact of being younger and healthier than her dad. This would be "exothelic prolongation" in that the reader feels humorous antipathy for Snapp, given that he becomes victimized by his own illusions.

I've written much more frequently on this blog about other serials, particularly in Japanese manga, in which sadism-scenarios recur frequently, so that all of the relevant features-- LOVE HINA, MAYO CHIKI, URUSEI YATSURA, and NISEKOI-- partake of the pattern of repetition. Often the accomodation narrative is focused on a male who keeps offending the woman, or women, who attract him, and getting clobbered by them for his transgressions. 

I examined a few key texts of NISEKOI in TENDER LOVING SADISM PT 2.  In contrast to GINGER, there were a lot of sadism-scenarios in the ongoing series, but "The Promise" is of special interest because it established that Raku, the male lead of the series, wants to live a life free of violence, and nurtures a yen for a similarly mild-mannered young classmate, Kosaki. But the manga-god controlling Raku's fate wants him to reach an accomodation with the less predictable aspects of life (or so I believe). Thus his potential new love Chitoge comes into Raku's life like a March lion. Chitoge is always "the sadist" in that she wallops Raku for the least infraction, even if she regrets her temper later on. But unlike "serious victims," Raku benefits from this "endothelic repetition" torment because it makes him stronger and more resilient. Arguably, Chitoge's aggressiveness, and that of her servant Tsugumi, even spreads to two other women in Raku's "harem," Kosaki and Marika, who don't normally beat on him. In "Transformation," it's comically implied that all four of them get drunk and "have their way" with the helpless male, though conveniently Raku's memory edits out whatever happened. After all, there's just so much "accomodating" an ordinary guy can do in that kind of situation. (And to be sure, all four females are substantially seen as "good girls," so the reader doesn't really think they molested him in any significant manner, and is mostly amused by the possibility that they could have done so.)