COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5

 For this term-centered post, I'll revise some of the terms I introduced in the COSMIC ALIGNMENT series, starting here, for greater specificity. I'll also limit this post to examples of the cosmoses of nominative serials.

In Part 1, I said:

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future.

This tendency I will now call "default alignment," since serials that maintain a variety of protagonist/antagonist oppositions tend to favor this default. It's a default that exists as soon as a given icon comes into being, though it's only relevant to "crossover-dynamics" when said icon has appeared more than once. 

When, as a result of quantitative or qualitative escalation, the default becomes an entrenched expectation on the part of audiences, I'll term this a "static alignment." The Joker was my example in the cited essay. He may cross swords with Superman or with Batgirl or with Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth, but he will always be thought of as a Batman villain first.

In the same essay, I mentioned two characters who appeared independently as enemies of The Mighty Thor, and then teamed up against the thunder-god: Mister Hyde and The Cobra. I suspect that since that first team-up, editor Stan Lee conceived the notion that even both villains together weren't really a match for the increasingly powerful Thor, so Lee shuttled the felonious duo over to the Daredevil feature. As I discussed in the essay, eventually both characters tended to wander around the Marvel Universe, so that it's debatable if they ended up being aligned with any single icon, or group of icons. In one essay my term for this state of affairs was "floating alignment," but I've abandoned that phrase for "dynamic alignment."

Part 1 also discussed a slightly different situation: that of Jim Starlin's character Thanos. This villain-icon first appeared in an IRON MAN story, and if he had never appeared anywhere else, then the default alignment would have made Thanos an Iron Man antagonist. But from a historical POV, it's evident that Starlin had some plans-- how definite, I do not know-- to use Thanos in some feature he would be able to write and draw continuously. Thus, Thanos became one of the major villains of both Starlin's CAPTAIN MARVEL and WARLOCK serials. This is a somewhat more constricted form of a dynamic alignment, according to my statement that I myself deem Thanos dominantly a Warlock foe these days. Thanos can still float from feature to feature, the same way as does the Hyde-Cobra team, but there's a stronger association with Warlock than with any other feature-- though not strong enough that readers automatically think of Thanos as a "Warlock villain."

Having completed this exercise, I move on to a more complicated rumination on both nominative and innominate icons.