NEAR-MYTHS: THE CAPTAIN HUNTER CHRONICLE (OUR FIGHTING FORCES #99-105, 1966-67)

I had not planned to honor Veterans' Day with a post on an old war comic-- assuming "honor" is the proper word-- but it just so happened that a few days before Vets' Day, I came across a comics-essay mentioned that one of the first, if not the first, comics titles to take place during the Vietnam War was this very short-lived feature. So, after I read all seven appearances of this feature, I decided to devote a post to DC Comics' first Vietnam-based feature.

I don't think the Vietnam conflict had become hugely unpopular with the American public in 1966. Nevertheless, this feature seems to have taken an odd path compared to DC's other war-books featuring continuing characters. For one thing, the hero, Green Beret Phil Hunter, is almost entirely a loner, one who comes to the aid of other American soldiers but is no longer a member of the armed forces. Though Hunter's tour of duty is up and he has refused to re-enlist, he declines to return to the U.S. Captain Hunter has a Rambo-like mission: to find his lost twin brother Nick, a serviceman who went missing in Vietnam. The U.S. government seems totally okay with Hunter not only retaining custody of his uniform and combat gear, but with pursuing his lone-wolf mission with no oversight. Inevitably he ends up fighting endless supplies of hostile Vietnamese, generally termed "Charlies."

Some war comics have reflected on the ethics and politics of wartime encounters, but even if HUNTER had lasted three times its seven issues, I don't think its creators would have had anything to say about Vietnam. Robert Kanigher, who's credited with scripting all but two stories, probably conceived the basic setup, since it's marked with his over-the-top sentimentality and formulaic tendencies. Hunter is largely a superman, more often seen wading into a half-dozen opponents and thrashing them with his fists, rather than simply shooing them down. Kanigher was sometimes capable of conjuring up some decent pulp poetry, but HUNTER is one of his hack-serials, driven by the very mediocre gimmick that Phil Hunter believes that he has a psychic link with his twin, guiding him to his lost brother. I don't get the sense that Kanigher was very invested in the narrative, which may be the reason why he wrapped up the series in issue #105, wherein Phil does find and rescue his brother Nick. But just in case Hunter's adventures grabbed a few readers, the last story also promotes the exploits of the twins' WWII-serving father Lieutenant Hunter-- and this Hunter's Nazi-busting activities with his team, "Hunter's Hellcats," enjoyed a much longer run than HUNTER.

While Kanigher had no interest in engaging with the politics or culture of Vietnam, he did include one support-character who qualifies as a near-myth. This was Lu Lin, a curvaceous Vietnamese femme who volunteered to lead Hunter wherever he wished to go in Vietnam, to repay him for having saved her life. For most of the narrative, Hunter is suspicious of this inscrutable Oriental, and constantly wonders if she's an agent of the Vietcong, planning to lead him into a fatal trap. Hunter also forms the annoying habit of referring to Lu Lin as a "kewpie doll," and I suspect that this was his deflection from the expression "china doll"-- which even Kanigher may've realized would not track with an Asian who was not Chinese.

Lu Lin's lack of emotion and fatalism really bug Hunter, and a few times he kisses her just to see if he'll get a reaction-- which he does not. Lu Lin is thus of a piece with many pop-cultural depictions of Asians, at once half-condescending and half-admiring, and I would not be surprised if Kanigher modeled the character on figures like Milt Caniff's Dragon Lady. There's also a slight vibe of the conqueror-trope-- kill the male soldiers and then sleep with their women-- though neither romance nor genuine sexual actions are even implied. Indeed, in the final story, Lu Lin-- though she proves herself loyal to Hunter in every tale-- simply disappears from the story with no farewell, remaining as unknowable as in her first appearance. Because I think Kanigher liked the trope of "the woman whose nature is her mystery," I think Lu Lin taps ever so slightly into that myth-trope, and gives the HUNTER strip a slight distinction beyond being DC's first serial venture into the Vietnam Conflict. 

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.-- MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals...-- SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2.

In an earlier essay today, I mentioned that as a kid reading newspaper comics in the 1960s I took notice as to how violent Chic Young's BLONDIE strip was. I also observed a concomitant level of mayhem in original comic-book stories of the time-- with almost all of the brutality aimed at Dagwood, the Goat of the World. Over fifty years later, I've continued to touch on the strip's unusual psychology on blog-pieces here, despite being fully aware that BLONDIE is far from one of the great comic strips. But I haven't had occasion to mention that I might have got a little help from the "devil" in my title, Gershon Legman.

In or near 1965, a family member, knowing that I liked the strip PEANUTS, gave me an issue of Time Magazine because it contained an uncredited article about Charles Schulz and his creation. Oddly enough, though nothing the author wrote about Schulz was all that illuminating, he decided to contrast the good-heartedness of PEANUTS with the darker manifestations of early comic strips, and with that in mind the writer quoted a passage from Legman's 1949 LOVE AND DEATH. From 1949 until his death in 1999, I don't believe Legman ever again turned his attention to comic books or strips, but the unbilled writer was evidently a fan of those 1949 observations.

Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."-- THE COMICS: GOOD GRIEF.

I won't dwell long on arguments that Legman himself tossed out in a willy-nilly fashion, but I want to establish that when he made these remarks, Legman was not stating that early comics like BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS were what the Time author called "offering a distorted, often brutalized form of life." Since Legman was in those days at least a nominal Freudian, he would have found it inevitable that the adults reading the comic strips-- and Legman does explicitly state that the comic strips are aimed only at adults-- should project "fantasy attacks" on "real frustrations," the latter being the "hell of other people." Legman only goes into all this detail about Young's BLONDIE and Dirks' KIDS, which supposedly conclude by returning the adult reader to the status quo for one reason. Legman wants to contrast such "status quo" entertainments with the overweening sadistic content of children's comic books, which as far as he's concerned do NOT return the reader to the status quo of relative realism but allow the kids to indulge in "the Oedipean dream of strength."

Legman's argument is littered with dopey ad hominem arguments and logical inconsistencies, and his contrast of comic strips and comic books is nonsense. (Despite his having excoriated teen humor books in the same essay, he somehow managed not to notice how often such stories also returned their protagonists to the same "status quo" experienced by the Katzenjammer Kids.) 

I like to imagine that even the ten-year-old me would have perceived how nonsensical his argument about BLONDIE was, because in the actual Young strip Blondie was never subservient to Dagwood. After he got beat up by his boss or his neighbor, or even (very rarely) by Blondie herself, she would tend his wounds, but one could rationalize that this was necessary because Dagwood was the breadwinner. She was almost always the boss in the relationship, with only occasional exceptions where Dagwood got his way by yelling and stomping his feet. So Legman clearly did not read BLONDIE very closely. And yet, he did home in on the fact that Dagwood was "degraded daily," and I never forgot that he had shown me one hidden cultural aspect of what most readers dismissed as forgettable trash.   

Parenthetically, in the same article where he favors BLONDIE's relative realism over the unrestricted fantasy of the superheroes, Legman nevertheless conflates the two, stating, "[Wonder Woman] is straight Wunschprojektion for the envious female-- Blondie with a bullwhip..." In the next paragraph Legman claims that the Amazon "lynches her spate of criminals" (even though Wonder Woman's villains were rarely even slain, as was the case with many other comic book features) and that she "humiliates and big-sisters all the other males in the strip" (which overlooks the fact that the heroine was not indulging in humiliation for its own sake, but attempting to convert recalcitrant men to her doctrine of feminine "loving-kindness.") If anything, Blondie has far more claim to being in the mode of Sade than Wonder Woman and her lasso ever has had.

But still, I give Legman his due for having a good instinct-- once in a while.

MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963)

 

In my overview of Chic Young's BLONDIE comic strip series-- parts of which were sometimes reworked for newsstand comic books-- I took pains to emphasize that Young had a special talent for formulating certain repeated gags that took on almost folkloric status. I observed that most of these gags were articulated in the BLONDIE strip after 1933, when the feature changed its focus from "young rich guy pursuing flighty young girl" to "middle-class husband constantly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous matrimony." However, one humor-trope appeared even in the pre-matrimonial years, and that was the trope I termed "the Peacemans and the Bickersons."

This trope isn't exclusive to married couples. One can find the Bard himself plowing that particular field with the two couples in 1599's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which follows the travails of two non-married couples are depicted. Hero and Leander fit the bill as "Peacemans," for under normal circumstances they appear to be entirely lovey-dovey. Benedick and Beatrice, though, are "the Bickersons," expressing their deep affection by sniping at each other. It's a fair assumption that for Elizabethan audiences, the Peacemans supplied an idealized vision of romantic love, but the Bickersons were the fun couple to watch, even though they only battled verbally.

This dynamic continued through most popular romantic comedies throughout the 20th century, with a secondary romantic couple being contentious with each other while the primary couple was depicted more "seriously." And as I also observed in the overview, Blondie and Dagwood were, on the face of things, "the Peacemans," because they weren't repeatedly shown fighting with one another, verbally or physically, while other couples filled the role of "the Bickersons." Further, one reason it wasn't necessary for Chic Young to focus on fights between Blondie and Dagwood was because Dagwood was constantly being tormented in one way or another by almost everyone he encountered. Young's infusion of frequent slapstick into the Bumsteads' middle-class world ensured that Dagwood was almost always the Goat. His endless sufferings-- mostly from sources outside the home, but occasionally also from Blondie, his kids or his pets-- were the source of the strip's successful humor.

That's what gives the strip I call "Ringside Blondie" the heft of a psychological myth; that of Chic Young expanding on the context of a familiar repeated gag by taking it in a relatively new direction. "Ringside" is almost certainly an earlier twelve-panel Sunday comic strip by Young, reworked for Harvey's publication in a comic book format, so I'm glad to have found an example of Young himself playing with his tropes, in contrast to the earlier BLONDIE mythcomic I examined here. 

In effect, "Ringside" gives Dagwood the chance to be the chance to be on the inside looking out, enjoying the spectacle of another male being tormented. In the first four panels, Blondie scolds Dagwood for openly watching a neighbor-couple, the Flizbys, having a "battle royale." Dagwood notices that Blondie herself peeks at the ongoing fracas before pulling down the window-shade, but she makes a lame excuse that doesn't fool the reader. She'll shortly show herself to be a hypocrite, for she takes just as much pleasure as Dagwood viewing someone else's marital troubles despite saying that it's wrong.

I'll note at this point that no one reading this strip would confuse any of these married martial battles with real spousal abuse. That's why, on the second page, Dagwood keeps remarking on how hard Mrs. Flizby is hitting her husband: "She must've taking boxing lessons when she was young." This sort of remark adds what Northrop Frye called "the protective wall of play," making clear that this is a comedic setup, in which no one is really harmed.

Anyway, Dagwood just goes back to scoping out the neighbors' fight. Once again, Blondie makes moralistic pronouncements while sneaking more than a peek this time. Dagwood acquires binoculars from his son Alexander and stations himself on a balcony to get a better look. Blondie shows up, scolds him again, but somehow ends up using the binocs herself. (Even Daisy the dog gets in on the scopophilia.) Then the pugilistic Mrs. Flizby shows up and sarcastically suggests that both nosy neighbors ought to come over and watch the fight close up. Blondie refuses, claiming she's "insulted," while Dagwood is only too happy to have a ringside seat, peacefully smoking a pipe as if he were watching a TV show. 

This is a rare departure for Chic Young in that Dagwood isn't the Goat for once, except in a very minor way: his son charges him for renting the binocs, and Dagwood accepts the condition. Blondie scolds Dagwood, but she's the main source of humor since she won't admit her nosiness as Dagwood does, and even pretends to be offended when she's correctly called out for her intrusive curiosity. Dagwood pays no real price for satisfying his curiosity, though the spectacle he gets to watch is still that of a male humiliation, as the beleaguered Mr. Flizby is clearly getting the worst of it. But in the more frequent altercations in which Herb Woodley or Mr. Dithers get clobbered by their termagant wives, sometimes the violence would spill over onto Dagwood-- but never, significantly, onto Blondie. This time Dagwood is as insulated from the violence as the readers of the comic strip. 

SOME BASICS OF BLONDIE

I'm entitling "some basics" rather than "The Basics" because I'm not writing a distanced, Wikipedia-style article about the comic strip/comic book BLONDIE, but about particular aspects of it that are relevant to my critical system. And if I weren't setting up a mythcomics-essay on the subject, I might not delve into all this ancient comics-history.

I'll start out by stating that I'm aware that even to younger comics-fans with some interest in the medium's history, BLONDIE isn't exactly a hot topic. For at least the past 20 years, the daily strip has been exceedingly dull, with gags as mediocre as the worst sitcoms. And I can't claim that the original run of creator Chic Young, from 1930 to 1973 (when Young passed away), marked the strip as a major breakthrough in humor features. Young's distinction is that though he wasn't doing anything transformative in his limited sphere of domestic comedy, he built up a trove of running jokes that, over time, illuminated some interesting aspects of American culture. He did so in contrast to newspaper strips that some critics would find superior in artistry, like Cliff Sterrett's POLLY AND HER PALS or Frank King's GASOLINE ALLEY. It wasn't that there was anything startlingly original about the couple dozen running gags that became associated with Young's BLONDIE in its heyday-- Dagwood crashes into the mailman on his way to work, Dagwood makes himself colossal sandwiches. It was that Young kept variations of these jokes running for so long that they assumed an almost folkloric status, a shorthand for the ordeals of married, middle-class life.

Yet for the first four years of the BLONDIE strip's existence-- collected in the hardbound book seen above-- the narrative barely touched on any of the tropes that made the later version of the strip world-renowned. 

Young broke into the world of syndicated comics in the 1920s. He specialized in what some have called "pretty girl strips." It may not be total coincidence that Young's first strip premiered in 1921, one year after the United States instituted universal suffrage-- though there had been many manifestations of the phenomenon of "The New Woman" during the previous twenty years. One of the most famous was that of "the flapper," usually seen as an independent young woman of means, and one who felt free to date men without making firm commitments. Some flappers were even known for adopting quasi-masculine fashion statements, like mannish clothes or bobbed hairstyles. This description seems appropriate to Young's third pretty-girl strip, DUMB DORA, which was his greatest success up to that point. Young used the relative success of DORA to launch BLONDIE, of which he had some if not total ownership. 

BLONDIE began in September 1930. In some ways it was much like DORA, depending on gags in which the female protagonist would stun her listeners with some display of quixotic feminine logic. However, the above collection notes in its intro that Young expressly distanced his new heroine Blondie from the earlier flappers by making her more hyper-feminine in her attire. His most constant beau was also introduced in the first strip: Dagwood, an empty-headed young heir to a wealthy family. The two were passionately in love but their marriage was opposed by Dagwood's rich parents, who deemed Blondie a gold digger.

For four years the strip followed this rather tepid pattern, without becoming more than a modest success. I surveyed all of the daily strips collected in the cited tome, and less than twenty of the nine hundred or so entries ended with any sort of slapstick, in contrast to the dominant pattern of verbal jokes.

One of the few interesting exceptions-- for which I have no illustrations-- was a pair of strips from June 19 and 20, 1931. In these strips, Blondie and Dagwood are considering how they will survive on a limited income if they marry. So, executing a trope I'll call "the Peacemans vs. the Bickersons," they seek out other couples, only to find all of them violently quarreling with one another. The first strip shows a married couple arguing about money in front of the young lovers, and as the latter couple leave, the reader sees the husband getting clubbed by his wife. The second strip shows two more encounters in which the couples are verbally arguing all the time. Blondie tells Dagwood that not all married people fight, and she uses Dagwood's own parents as an example of marital bliss. So of course, they walk in on a scene in which the elder Mrs. Bumstead is threatening to crown her hubby with a vase, while he's haplessly climbing a curtain to get away from her. This "Peacemans vs. Bickersons" trope would be one Young returned to again and again. On the face of things, Blondie and Dagwood were "Peacemans" who did not physically fight each other, while others-- their neighbors the Woodleys, and Dagwood's boss and his wife-- were "Bickersons" constantly having violent quarrels, usually with the wife hitting her husband with vases or other bludgeons. More on this trope in my mythcomic-post.

In 1933, Young was encouraged by his syndicate editor to make over the strip into a middle-class marriage strip, jettisoning the whole format of "young rich guy dating a lower-class girl." Dagwood's parents disinherited him and never to my knowledge appeared again, even in comic book originals not produced by Young. And as others before me have observed, Blondie morphed away from an air-headed young woman. She became a sensible homemaker, able to manage a household of kids and dogs-- though she still showed some of her old frivolousness in yet another repeated joke-trope: constantly spending Dagwood's hard-earned money on new apparel. 

Dagwood, who wasn't the brightest bulb to begin with, became the Goat of the World. This was one of the psychologically significant tropes that I believe made BLONDIE widely popular in many countries: the trope of the wage-earning male as the constant target of abuse from everyone. When he wasn't under physical attack by his most familiar nemeses-- neighbor Herb Woodley and boss Julius Dithers-- he was frequently assaulted by total strangers. As I pointed out above, slapstick was rarely a big feature of the first four years of the strip, and there wasn't even a lot of verbal humiliation for Dagwood in particular,

Amusingly, when Blondie and Dagwood did marry, the wedding sequence contained the following humiliation for Dagwood:

However, a few strips later-- for which I have no illustration-- is even more apposite. Immediately after the wedding vows, Blondie warns Dagwood that they ought not to leave the church through the front door, as well-wishers will pelt them with rice and old shoes. Dagwood scoffs at this and opens the front door, only to get hit in the face with a thrown shoe. I don't imagine Chic Young immediately shifted into slapstick gags right away, and even in the BLONDIE in the 1960s-- the period with which I grew up-- there was never a total absence of verbal humor, wherein Blondie would confound Dagwood with feminine anti-logic. But the BLONDIE comic books-- which included both original stories and reworkings of comic strips-- are replete with images of Dagwood's physical torments. For instance:

Even when I was reading BLONDIE as a kid, I didn't think it was an exceptional strip. But I was impressed by the intensity of the slapstick violence in the series, whether the violence resulted from Dagwood doing stupid things or his neighbors or family leading him into dangerous situations. In contrast to fans who represent BLONDIE as being a success for depicting the stalwart love between the titular wife and her spouse, I think that the strip retained its popularity for most of its history because it allowed its audience to dally in "sadism of the casual kind."

But that's a separate essay in itself.

DOMME COMS

Regarding my new term in the title, it came about when I encountered TV Tropes using the abbreviation "Dom Com" as shorthand for "domestic comedy." I've been aware of the term "domestic comedy" since I first began reading about fictional genres, and everyone's heard the term "Rom Com" that became popular in the 1990s. But when I read "Dom Com," I responded with my own "Domme Com."

Now, there are a lot of serial comedies in which two or more characters contend in small ways but end up making up, like the classic I LOVE LUCY. This is the basic aesthetic of what I've called the "accomodation narrative." But any comedy, self-contained or serial, that emphasizes an ongoing imbalance of power would broadly qualify as a Domme Com. I'll concentrate here on heterosexual entanglements, though I'll touch briefly on other possible combinations.

(1) The primary type that I've examined here I'll call "The Delectable Domme." Such stories feature a female Domme constantly exerting her power over a male Subbe (a spelling I'll toss in to distinguish the term in my mind from my other use of "Sub.") Examples I've covered over the years include, with assorted variations, include URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, NISEKOI, and NAGATORO. Usually these are one-on-one encounters, though various support characters may irregularly torment the male protagonist to provide variety.

(2) A second type, "The Deflected Domme," forswears any power-imbalance between the two main hetero characters, but one or more support-characters exert power over one of the main ones. Said support-characters are not necessarily limited to being of a gender opposite to that of the Subbe. For instance, relations between Darrin and Samantha on BEWITCHED are usually pacific and balanced. But many of Samantha's witchy relations intrude on the couple's marital bliss to torment Darrin, usually with minor, annoying transformations. In keeping with countless mother-in-law jokes, Endora is the main Domme, but it may be no coincidence that Samantha's lookalike cousin Serena is the next most frequent female tormentor. Yet Darrin also frequently gets "subbe-jected" to humiliation by his father-in-law and by Endora's brother Arthur, so male Dommes are seen there as well.

(3) I'll term the third type "The World is His Domme," in that there's a Subbe character who's constantly the butt of torments from nearly everyone, male and female, with whom he comes in contact. In the teleseries ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, Costello's character is sometimes given bad treatment by Abbott. But Abbott is in no way Costello's main tormentor; he's just one of many, male and female.

(4) Finally, I'll term the fourth type "Queen of the Tormenting World," because the Subbe suffers from any number of diverse torments from separate sources, like the Costello character-- but the Subbe suffers all these torments largely because he's become tied to a Domme female. The comic strip BLONDIE, which I'll be examining in future essays, is one where husband Dagwood has become the target of everyone in his circle-- neighbors, bosses, cops, pesky salesmen-- specifically because he's married to a dominant spouse. Blondie, for her part, sometimes appears to be an accommodating spouse like Samantha Stevens. But close examination shows that on a semi-regular basis Blondie exerts power over Dagwood, either overtly bullying him in one way or another or humiliating him with acts of "innocent sadism." (Example: Blondie moves a ladder while Dagwood's working on the roof of their house; after Dagwood falls to the ground, Blondie seems unaware of having wrought harm.) 

A second "Queen" example I've often discussed here is MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. In this show Peg Bundy barely makes any bones about tormenting husband Al. Al, unlike Dagwood, responds with insults, but his impotent responses merely underline that he's just as much under Peg's thumb as Dagwood is under Blondie's. MARRIED offers an unusual variation in that the husband-wife couple is mirrored by the relationship of their teenaged kids. Bud, in contrast to the Al-Peg dynamic, occasionally does manage to degrade Kelly because she unlike her mother is stupid. Nevertheless, the majority of their battles validate Kelly, if only because of her dumb luck, so it's pretty obvious that the sibling relationship was designed to mirror that of the married couple.

Next up: Chic Young's not-so-innocent sadist.

NEAR-MYTHS: BATMAN ETERNAL (2014-15)

I'd read some decent reviews of this 2014-15 series, though I've the impression that most of the "big changes" instituted by ETERNAL proved nugatory.

The involved plot, orchestrated mostly by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV, doesn't bear a lot of close examination. It's a big, noisy Bat-soap opera, with the city of Gotham once more under siege by both ordinary criminals and super-crooks. Yet ETERNAL qualifies as a "near-myth" by virtue of its attempt to rework two previous celebrated multi-issue storylines, respectively 1996's LONG HALLOWEEN and 2003's HUSH. From HALLOWEEN, Snyder and Tynion took the idea of a foundational conflict between the mobsters and the costumed freaks, while from HUSH the writers emulated the mystery of a Master Manipulator who somehow marshals most of Batman's major foes against him. I don't think Snyder and Tynion managed to weave a tight master-trope as HALLOWEEN did, and the "hidden mastermind" schtick in ETERNALis put off for so long with red herrings that I for one lost interest in the Big Reveal.

Some myth-kernels of interest:

Contrary to some theories that Catwoman's estranged father might be venerable mob-boss Carmine Falcone, ETERNAL reveals that her true "bad dad" is a different mobster, introduced here for the first time, name of Rex Calabrese. Despite an acrimonious relationship, Calabrese eventually talks Selina into becoming a new Gotham crime-boss-- which I imagine did not last long.

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl is more or less in mourning for Dick Grayson, since I believe this is the period when he was supposed to be in a temporary state of death. Yet she apparently has some sort of tentative interaction with "second Robin" Jason Todd, reborn in the form of Red Hood, which is sort of like dating the first Robin's symbolic sibling. It's a nice touch when, thanks to the Mad Hatter's connivance, Batgirl fights Hood under the impression he's the Joker, who's a bugaboo for both characters.

Spoilers works out her daddy issues the same way Catwoman does.

And the eighties version of Alfred's daughter, Julia Pennyworth, is reborn in a new form. apparently a POC of some sort, though her racial makeup was not expounded in ETERNAL. She becomes part of the Bat-team but I don't know if she eventually got a costume or what.

And Batman pretty much remains Batman. So it's a good lively read, but nothing transformative.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

Then in WW #122 (1961), Kanigher apparently was overcome with the desire to emulate the "Superbaby" stories that occasionally appeared in DC's SUPERBOY feature, and introduced "Wonder Woman as an older toddler," Wonder Tot. Bullish on the idea, before he got any reader-reaction, in #124 he introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though not without having solo stories of her own. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. And only the first co-starring appearance of Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl in #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, after which the crossover-vibe would be subsumed by the vibe of the bonded ensemble.

CURIOSITIES #39: "WHO'S AFRAID OF A DUMB BUNNY?"

 Apparently, Dan Jergens was back in 2015, because when he wrote a chapter of his BAT-MITE series, he guest-starred The Inferior Five-- consisting of The Blimp, Awkwardman, White Feather, Merryman, and...

TOUGH BUNNY?????

So Jergens was too politically correct to call her "Dumb Bunny," for fear some noodge would say he was marginalizing women or the like. Yet the character he calls "Tough Bunny" is still as dopey as the original "Dumb Bunny." So he's still willing to tell jokes about dumb women, but he just won't say the WORDS "dumb bunny." 

Plus which, even the corny humor of the original INFERIOR FIVE was funnier than anything Jergens wrote in this dreckfest.

So glad I didn't spend any money on this one.

 

MORE MORE NAMOR

 I've been having a good conversation with Sub-Mariner fan "John" in the comments for this 2017 post, so I thought I'd dish out a few more observations on Marvel's waterlogged warrior.

One thing I didn't mention in my 2017 essay is that from time to time I go searching through the SUB-MARINER comics of the forties and fifties, looking for stories that fit my specialized category of "mythcomics." What I've found so far as mostly decent formula stories with really fine Bill Everett art. This isn't a knock against the Golden Age version of the character. Dozens of long-lived characters were better served by their art than by their plots or characterization. Everett's SUB-MARINER is in my view on the same level as Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN; great to look at, but not that much story-wise.

Still, there were some interesting twists here and there. In issue #38 of the second SUB-MARINER series (February 1955), Everett apparently felt that other people's stories had taken his once-popular character and powered him down too much. So his solution in "The Sub-Mariner Strikes" was to "re-power" Namor with the idea of restoring his superman-status. After he's restored to his former status, the Emperor announces that he wants to launch a new war of conquest against the surface-dwellers-- a war that never gets off the ground, aside from the one task he gives Namor: to dispose of an air-breather ship. Namor ends up sparing the humans' lives, though not without regrets, since they act like assholes to him. No further suggestions of aggression by Namor's people take place in the ensuing stories, so perhaps the editors decided that they wanted Everett to confine himself to done-in-one tales.

Then in issue #40-- three issues away from the title's cancellation-- Everett wrote and drew "The Sub-Mariner and the Icebergs," a tale which might have provided some tropes that Stan Lee used in his 1960s revision of Namor's origin.

An American fleet of ships intrudes upon the arctic oceans where Namor's sub-mariners live. Namor immediately believes the flotilla is an invasion force and uses his people's tech to surround the ships with icebergs. In self-defense the ships' leader orders the icebergs dynamited, which causes some destruction of the sea-dwellers' nearby city-- which recalls the mission of Captain McKenzie in the Marvel Origin. Everett then has the Emperor send Namora to sabotage the ships, which resembles the way Namor's mother Princess Fen infiltrates McKenzie's ship with some idea of spying on the humans. (How she was going to spy with her blue skin hanging out was never explained.) 

Namora is captured and held hostage, which forces Namor to talk turkey with the captain of the flotilla. He claims to be the head of a scientific expedition looking for uranium-- and though this isn't necessarily a venture without ANY military applications, it proves true that the humans aren't intentionally encroaching on the sub-mariners. 

Namor accepts the humans' pledge of peace, but his evil cousin Byrrah tries to re-incite hostilities. However, before he can do so, the humans inform Namor that his own interference with the icebergs has triggered an unstoppable seismic reaction that will destroy the sub-mariners' city. Over Byrrah's protests, Namor evacuates his people-- and sure enough, the city is destroyed by a seaquake. The story ends with a plea for peace and a touch of tragedy as the subsea people seek to rebuild "their shattered empire." In FANTASTIC FOUR #4, Stan Lee may have remembered "Icebergs" when he had Atlantis destroyed by nuclear tests and its people scattered, though only a few more Sub-Mariner stories transpired before Namor was reunited with his people once again.

THE READING RHEUM: DON RODRIGUEZ, CHRONICLES OF SHADOW VALLEY (1922)

Except for readers who have a desire to understand the many historical permutations of what I call "the magical fantasy" genre, most people are acquainted with the early 20th-century writer Lord Dunsany in terms of his being an influence on two better-known authors, Lovecraft and Tolkien. The only widely distributed paperback editions of Dunsany's work were six works reprinted releases under the Ballantine fantasy imprint in the early 1970s.

I read most of the Dunsany paperbacks many years ago, except for DON RODRIGUEZ, the author's first published novel. I had enjoyed most of the works in the Ballantine series, both short stories and two other fantasy-novels, so I expected to find the same virtues in RODRIGUEZ as I'd found in the others.

But this first novel is not only devoid of Dunsany's signature use of exalting language, it's written in a tiresome, pseudo-archaic dialect that never uses one word when ten can be fit in. Here's a sample from the first chapter:

Now there were no wars at that time so far as was known in Spain, but that old lord's eldest son, regarding those last words of his father as a commandment, determined then and there in that dim, vast chamber to gird his legacy to him and seek for the wars, wherever the wars might be, so soon as the obsequies of the sepulture were ended. And of those obsequies I tell not here, for they are fully told in the Black Books of Spain, and the deeds of that old lord's youth are told in the Golden Stories. The Book of Maidens mentions him, and again we read of him in Gardens of Spain.

Far worse is the fact that almost nothing of consequence happens in RODRIGUEZ. The titular don is a young man disinherited by his dying father back in the days of medieval Spain. He goes forth to make his own way, planning to acquire both a wife and a castle, not necessarily in that order. This might sound like a good setup for adventure, but Dunsany almost seems to be trying NOT to describe anything exciting. The most engrossing event occurs early in the novel, when the young Don rents quarters in an inn. The evil innkeeper, borrowing a schtick from the stories of Theseus, plans to kill the Don when he sleeps that night and steal all of his possessions. A servant warns the Don, who sets up a trap for the innkeeper and kills him. 

The Don then agrees to let the servant who warned him become his servant, even though the impecunious nobleman doesn't have a lot of money. Then the two wander about getting involved in various paltry events-- talking with a sorcerer who shows them visions of past and future wars, liberating another nobleman from some officious policemen. After the duo go through various unexciting events, the Don eventually makes a contact who initially seems supernatural, but is not, and that individual sets the Don up with a castle, so that he can marry a woman he's conveniently fallen in love with.

The near-total lack of romance and adventure might make one suspect that Dunsany had some notion of emulating satirical works like those of Cervantes or Voltaire. But there's no satire here, and I'm almost at a loss to figure out what Dunsany was trying to accomplish.

The closest clue I can find appears in an online observation about Dunsany's historical significance to the fantasy-genre.

Lord Dunsany's first novel, "Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley conveys its young disinherited protagonist through a fantasized Spain, gifting him with a Sancho Panza companion, good luck with magicians, and a castle" [The Encyclopedia of Fantasy]. It is a landmark tale for Dunsany, beginning his move from the otherworldly short stories for which his reputation is justly famous to novels, such as the follow-up The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Charwoman's Shadow. L. Sprague de Camp has said: "Dunsany was the second writer (William Morris in the 1880s being the first) fully to exploit the possibilities of ... adventurous fantasy laid in imaginary lands, with gods, witches, spirits, and magic, like children's fairy tales but on a sophisticated adult level." But more than this, Dunsany was probably the single greatest influence on fantasy writers during the first half of the 20th century.H P Lovecraft, in early fiction, like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, imitated him, and very well.-- FANTASTIC FICTION.

It's probably quite true that in terms of "adult fantasy"-- that is, excluding juvenile-oriented authors like Baum and Barrie-- that Dunsany was picking up on a precedent established by William Morris. Morris is of extreme importance, as De Canp said, to the history of otherworldly fantasy-- but I've read and reviewed Morris' four otherworld-fantasies, and he adopted an archaic, fusty style like what Dunsany uses in RODRIGUEZ. I don't think Morris ever wrote anything as utterly dull as RODRIGUEZ. But perhaps Dunsany had some idea of emulating, not just Morris, but the episodic nature of early chivalric romances. That might explain why he was able to use his more imaginative language in his earlier short stories (which date back to the early 1900s), but for his novel Dunsany chose to follow this dull episodic model. Of his handful of later novels, I've read just two, and I remember both as having the same enchanting combination of beautiful language and engrossing magical concepts I found in the earlier short stories. But RODRIGUEZ barely qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" at all, and then only because of the hero's rather pointless encounter with the sorcerer. I saw one review claiming that the Don makes a small cameo in a 1926 Dunsany novel, THE CHARWOMAN'S SHADOW, which I remember liking and may attempt to reread for comparison's sake in the near future.