ADULTERATED COMICS

 I was about to write a comment to this post on Rip Jagger's Dojo but decided to make that comment into a whole post here. The respondent to Rip's post asked the question as to whether it might not have been counter-productive for the early adult collectors of Golden Age comics to focus so much upon the very elements that anti-comics pundit Frederic Wertham vilified: elements like "cross dressing" and "injuries to the eye."                                                                                                 

As far as Wertham was concerned, such things were adult material that did not belong in comic books aimed at children. One might say that the introduction of such elements "adulterated" the pure state of material aimed at innocents, going by the dictionary definition:                                                                                                                         ADULTERATE: "render (something) poorer in quality by adding another substance, typically an inferior one"                                                                                                                            Now, I've provided an ample number of posts here to demonstrate that the purity Wertham defined was "purely" in his own imagination, and, by extension, in the imaginations of the parents and teachers who either got on board with Wertham or, in some cases, anticipated his jeremiad. What interests me here is the question raised: did adult readers of comic books in any way "adulterate" their own reputations by making commodities of the very things that Wertham considered pernicious influences?                     

                                                                                                              The short answer to that question is "no, because the Overstreet Price Guide didn't begin until 1970, and by that time, 'normies' had already formed their generally negative opinions of comics-nerds by that time." Since I became a hardcore comics-fan in the mid-1960s, I kept a pretty good weather-eye on "normie culture's" attitude toward comic books, and I don't think that even in the 1970s non-fans were aware of collectors looking for Werthamite trigger-points. Remember that although sustained comics-fandom in the U.S. started in the very early 1960s with the activities of Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, not until 1965 did John Q. Public even become aware of grown men (and a few women) collecting and reading old comic books. The first convention for comic book collectors appeared in New York in 1965, the same year that Jules Feiffer's THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES was published. At most there had been some earlier Sunday-supplement essays about the weird adult comics-readers, but for most of those writers, the Wertham Crusade was yesterday's news. Even after the surprise of the "Bat-fad" the next year-- which certainly did not validate comic books in the eyes of sixties adults, however much it influenced later generations-- normies just didn't know much about adult comics-readers.                                                                                                                                                                   In subsequent decades others attempted to revive anti-comics  crusades, but I don't remember anyone making an issue of perverted collectors obsessed by gouged eyes and spanking scenes. At most I recall that a few comics-fans didn't approve of listing such trigger-scenes. But as the subculture got further and further away from Wertham, I think such triggers lost a lot of their appeal.                                                                                                                                    And what was the appeal for those who did look for such pernicious influences, whether or not the comics-creators had intended the scenes to be transgressive? I don't rule out collectors with particular fetishes, of course. But I think that for most adult readers, they commodified the supposedly salacious scenes as a way of mocking Frederic Wertham's screed. The very things he inveighed against, as the practices of sinful adults taking advantage of innocent children, became selling-points for comics-dealers. "Step right up and see the naughty cross-dressing Wonder Woman villain!" In my view, it's on the same level as the sinful sights of your basic carnival, which are "innocent" on a level that Frederic Wertham would never have understood.                 

THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931/1936)

 

This is my third reading of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, though it's my first time checking out Leslie Klinger's annotated version. Klinger also specifies that the text was taken from HPL's manuscript, whereas my earlier readings were probably based on the altered text from the ASTOUNDING publication. However, none of the corrections or annotations changed my view of MOUNTAINS: that it's an extremely important example of Mythos world-building, but that as a story MOUNTAINS feels rather inert.             

 In earlier reviews I've commented on the extraordinary power HPL could convey through his meticulous descriptions of landscapes, most often those of his native New England. He definitely moved out of his comfort zone to describe the barren wastelands of the Antarctic terrain, and since I'm sure he never traveled to either that continent or to any comparable terrain, he must have depended heavily upon travel writers' descriptions. Many of his descriptions of Antarctica rate among his best. However, despite this level of excellence, these frozen wastes have the disadvantage that they host no human tribes or settlements. This was ideal for painting a picture of all the various extraterrestrial beings that once inhabited Earth. But Antarctica doesn't carry the same associations in human culture, so HPL wasn't able to play to that particular strength in this story.               

 It occurred to me that structurally MOUNTAINS is not that different from 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. In that short story, two dilettantes, making "terrible researches into the unknown," descend into a forbidding sepulcher, with the result that one man disappears and the other lives to tell the tale. In MOUNTAINS, a whole scientific research team ventures into the antipodean wastes and stumbles across a labyrinthine city. They find preserved alien corpses that are originally called "Elder Things," which is what I will continue to call them. (HPL most frequently calls them "the Old Ones," but I deem that confusing given his use elsewhere of "Great Old Ones" for another species of foreign entity.) Despite the other researchers in the party, only two humans survive the expedition's encounter with the horrors left behind by the Elder Things, and one of the two goes insane. Aside from the narrator Dyer, at least two named characters have strong familiarity with the rudiments of the Mythos, which made it a lot easier for HPL to lay out his large-scale worldbuilding project.                                             

I think my somewhat negative reaction to MOUNTAINS stems from HPL's approach to the Elder Things. These aliens are not godlike entities like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but a race of scientific investigators not totally like the modern-day humans examining their remains. HPL's "Outer Ones," the stars of THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, were also simply ETs with advanced science. However, in WHISPERER the aliens are still very mysterious in terms of their aims and motives. Dyer and others are able to decipher much of the far-removed history of the Elder Things, and the result is that the Things lose any semblance of mystery. One of the last horrors Dyer witnesses is a "shoggoth," a leftover slave-entity once mastered by the deceased Things, and many readers have liked this particular menace. But for me the effect of telling me pretty much everything about the vanished scientists and their living tools dispersed any potential for what HPL himself called "cosmic horror." So, while I appreciate the author having laid out a grand scheme of various creatures whose powers dwarf those of pitiful humans, MOUNTAINS didn't resonate with me.                                                 

  It is interesting that the Elder Things have two major prehistorical encounters with other inhabitants of the Mythos. One of those groups are WHISPERER's Outer Ones, who I tend to call "the Fungi from Yuggoth," again because "Outer Ones" sounds too much like "Great Old Ones." I absolutely refuse to call them "Mi-Go" as Klinger does, just because Dyer idly uses that Tibetan word to allege that the Fungi were once mistaken from Tibet's "abominable snowmen." Sorry, HPL, no way do I believe that any human ever saw your crab-like creatures, whether winged or wingless, and imagined them to resemble the hairy men of the Himalayas. The other major opponents of the Things are "the spawn of Cthulhu," whom the Things manage to drive out of Antarctica. All this condensed history is very useful for fans of the Mythos, but since these encounters are only being written about long after they occurred, they only register in my system as "null-crossovers." I suppose if a big-screen movie version of MOUNTAINS had come to pass, such a film would have had to show these cosmic wars on screen, and THOSE would have counted as crossovers, as they became part of the ongoing narrative. A point that concerns only me, to be sure.                 
          

THE READING RHEUM: BACK TO THE STONE AGE (1937)

 With this 1937 installment of the Pellucidar series, Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be getting tired of his own tried-and-true formula. STONE is a direct sequel to TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE , though none of the main characters appear in this book except in flashback. (The main hero does encounter David Innes toward the end of the story though, so STONE is like the previous book a crossover.) At the end of that tale, Von Horst, a crewman from Tarzan's dirigible, gets separated from his group and has to wander Pellucidar, avoiding nasty beasts and nastier tribes, and of course finding romance. In my review of the Tarzan installment, I remarked that probably the only reason ERB made the crew German back in 1929 was because his readers would have assumed that Germans had the greatest expertise with dirigibles. Although ERB had devoted two earlier Tarzan novels to having the ape-man fight Germans in Africa, possibly the author meant to let bygones be bygones. However, by the time ERB published the novel, the Nazi movement in Von Horst's country had gained full sway, and for that reason Von Horst may be the only German national to be the hero of an American novel during the rise of fascism.                                                                                                               

  Anyway, one of Von Horst's first exploits in Pellucidar involves his getting captured by a giant pterodactyl that injects paralyzing poison into victims and takes them back to its aerie for later consumption. In the monster's den, the hero manages to escape with two members of different tribes, one a noble savage, the other a sneaky traitor who betrays the other two. However, though the bad savage gets Von Horst imprisoned by the savage's cannibalistic people, the gallant German also encounters another captive, La-Ja, who will be his romantic interest for the rest of the novel. Though she's feistier than many ERB heroines, she's also seemingly less sensible. As Von Horst liberates a group of deserving types from the cannibals, La-Ja refuses to take orders from the hero. In a rare departure from Burroughsian chivalry, he's forced to clout her unconscious to save her life. For most of the rest of the novel, she scorns Von Horst and refuses his aid as she makes her way back to her own domain-- and the lovelorn man can't help from following her about and protecting her. La-Ja does redeem herself at times in that she comes to Von Horst's defense when push comes to shove, but her constant raillery gets a little boring at times.                                                                   

  ERB's inventiveness with exotic tribes also becomes strained here. There are bison-men, who have bison-like features and habits, and mammoth-men, who are humans who tame and ride mammoths. A separate strain of the first Pellucidar book's Black Monkey-Men appear, made distinct from the earlier group in that these humanoids have tusks and are yet another tribe of cannibals. Von Horst also encounters a second group of tusked cannibals, the Gorbuses, who are all deathly white. One curious detail: the only Gorbus with whom Von Horst speaks seems to recognize a few English words, but ERB never explains this, nor the Gorbuses' imperfect memories of some terrible murder they committed, which they think resulted in their miserable existence in Pellucidar. Some critics think ERB flirted with a metaphysical conceit here, hinting that the Gorbuses were really condemned souls in freakish bodies, rather than the usual biological anomalies. In any case, all of these tribes feel half-baked, as if ERB was just marking time.            

  The rocky road to romance for Von Horst and La-Ja also has a rote feel to it, in marked contrast to the well-conceived pairing seen in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR. But it's during Von Horst's sojourn with the Mammoth-Men that ERB offers a rare window on female sadism. For involved reasons, the hero can only escape captivity with the help of an ugly cavewoman named Grum. By the traditions of Grum's tribe, she can force the object of her desire, a big guy named Horg, to marry her if she gets a male champion to defeat Horg in battle. Von Horst duly beats down Horg, and after the warrior is unconscious, Grum both hits and kicks him, telling Von Horst she plans to hold the whip hand in the marriage. Von Horst muses that he's known civilized women who cherished the same desire for marital supremacy, though I'm not sure the author ever depicted any female character of such rapacity.     

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PROFESSOR AND THE PIXIE" (OUT OF THE NIGHT #17, 1954)

OUT OF THE NIGHT was an ACQ title that lasted 17 issues from 1952 to 1954. I'd mentioned in an earlier essay that I'd read very few of that company's offerings from the 1940s and 1950s, so I decided I'd finally sample NIGHT because it was a short run, and because it ended right before the Comics Code became a force for publishers to reckon with. Issue #17 is dated October 1954, which means that it was probably on newsstands two or three months previous, probably the summer before the Code was instituted in September of that year. What I found from this brief survey was that, in contrast to the ACG scripts of the 1960s, OUT OF THE NIGHT published a fair sampling of creepy stories (mostly written by head editor Richard Hughes), albeit including none of the gore favored by other pre-Code publishers. In contrast to the absolutely scare-less "horror" titles of DC Comics of the early 1950s, at least the OOTN stories allowed the monsters to win roughly half the time. Since the only two Hughes stories I'd reviewed on this site were in the nature of Thorne Smith romances, I wondered if Hughes had allowed himself to tap darker currents when he was providing most of the "straight" horror stories. What I found, though, was mostly adequate formula terror, with none of the deeper resonances that make a mythcomic, and in OOTN at least, the only story that qualified for my criteria was-- a Thorne Smith type of fantasy.                                           

    This story, which I'll abbreviate as "Pixie," is a good example of how a mythcomic can portray psychological symbolism even though none of the characters possess anything like a simulated personal psychology. We open at a girls' college, Smathers by name, as the pipe-smoking Professor Dobbins seeks to ignore the lovelorn glances of his students. Hughes wastes no time on whatever past interactions Dobbins may have had with the fair sex; all we know is that he doesn't want to truck with adoring females. Based on the cinematic screwball comedies that probably influenced Hughes, Dobbins is probably supposed to be a normal healthy male who's cut himself off from real romance like the Cary Grant character in BRINGING UP BABY. He does nothing to invite the attentions of yet another adoring female, this one a pixie from the spirit world, but the reader is from the first page ready to see Dobbins taken down a peg.                                                                                                              

The Pixie doesn't even specify that she was looking for Dobbins in particular when she got her boss, "The Sublime Creep," to send her to Earth hunting a mortal husband. She just has her "spirit beam" trained on Smathers College so that she can blend in with all the female students, because it goes without saying that an all-girl college is the perfect place to hunt for men. Since the Pixie never makes any attempt to play student, I suppose readers should assume that once she caught sight of Dobbins, love at first sight prevailed. Dobbins does not reciprocate and wants the Pixie to go away so that he can get back to the fascination of grading papers. Just as the dean is about to walk in on their tete-a-tete, the Pixie tells Dobbins how to banish her. The dean doesn't see the Pixie, but he does see the level-headed young man acting the fool.                                                         

    

For once, though, the stuffy character's embarrassment isn't the only reason to bring about a threat to his pecuniary fortunes. Apparently even though Dean Crabtree is the only one who sees Dobbins playing Napoleon, the dean's loose-mouthed enough that both the faculty and the student bodies all find out that he's become addle-pated-- though the primary reason for his dismissal is that Smathers College is out of money. Dobbins blames his ill fortune on the Pixie, and when her spirit beam manifests in his office that night, he becomes aggressive, planning to "hustle [the Pixie] right back to the Sublime Creep." The reader is spared from seeing him attempt to do this when a fanged demon, implicitly male, pops up and socks him.    

                                                     

Dobbins tries to escape via his upper-story window, but when the female students try to come to his rescue, he makes the odd decision to face the monster rather than create an "uproar." He returns just in time to see the Pixie show up and banish Fangface, claiming that his advent was just a mistake from the Sublime Creep's central dispatching.                                                                                            

The Pixie then confesses that she did have something to do with convincing the whole school that the prof was bonkers, purely to get him away from the temptation of other women. Dobbins still shows no sign of succumbing to her unearthly beauty, and he doesn't even look particularly sad when she vanishes again. However, he doesn't do himself any favors with the dean by telling him that he wasn't trying to jump out of the window to his death; he was just avoiding "a monster." Regardless, the female students hold a demonstration to keep Dobbins on staff, and it must be a slow news-day, since the place is "cluttered with reporters" covering this collegiate protest.                 

                   

On the third (consecutive?) night, Dobbins does seem to get a little concerned that if the Pixie doesn't join with him, she might get assigned to some other suitor. For her part, the angelic apparition shows up at the girls' dormitory, where a chance phrase from a student gives the Pixie an idea. She calls upon the Sublime Creep to send a bunch of spirits to the campus, which then possess (one assumes temporarily) the other glamorous student bodies, turning them all into ugly beasts. (This touch actually seems a better marker of feminine, rather than masculine, psychology.) Lickety-split, some news station decides to buy exclusive rights to the demonstration-story from the college, and Smathers is immediately saved from penury. The Pixie's more or less unselfish gesture causes the stuffy professor to fall for her, and their romantic coupling is ensured. I did find myself wondering less at any of the mythcomics' plot holes than at what kind of "defense job" a de-winged mythical entity thought she could seek in 1954. Now, if she had said she planned to get a job with the Comics Code Authority-- that would have made perfect sense.                                                                     

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

 In Part 3 of this essay-series, I asserted that the characters Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne were better defined through their collective statures, as members of the Avengers team, than through whatever individual stature they had accrued in their original stint as the bonded ensemble they comprised in the original "Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp" feature. This statement went in contradiction to the more general rule that when members of either inclusive or semi-inclusive ensembles had sustained their own features, as did other Avengers like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, then their individual stature was of paramount importance.                                                                                 

 Now, inclusive teams need not always be as expansive as the Avengers, for there have also been inclusive teams where publishers united just two heroes under the same banner. The best-known is that of the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, but though this pairing became famous, the two heroes not only retained their individual stature from prior to the shared banner, they enjoyed individual serials afterward that added to their stature in both the quantitative and qualitative senses. But with some characters, it's hard to judge whether their individual or collective stature is greater in isolation or in tandem-- and such is the case with Power Man and Iron Fist.                                                                                                     

 As individual features, both Power Man and Iron Fist lasted somewhere between two and three years before both were threatened with cancellation. Aside from a few stories written by Don McGregor, almost all of the Power Man stories are at best just adequate formula, though still better than most of the tales in the oeuvre of the "Giant-Man/Wasp" feature.                                              

Iron Fist's solo career was roughly the same, though the character's title benefited from work by Chris Claremont and John Byrne during their salad days, including the debut of the villainous Saber-Tooth, who eventually became a major X-Men adversary. Presumably the two creators enjoyed Iron Fist enough to pitch the idea of merging his failing book with Power Man's failing book. However, Byrne was gone after the debut issue, and Claremont only stayed a few more issues. However, in issue #56 the title's assistant editor Mary Jo Duffy took over as writer and kept the title going for another three years. Though the title lasted until #125 (1986), my general impression is that the Duffy years made the team most viable and produced the most memorable stories-- although most of these, too, were also just adequate formula, like the stories in the individual titles. I cannot claim, as I did with my examples of Pym and Van Dyne, that the collective stature of Power Man or Iron Fist in their ensemble excelled whatever individual stature they had in their individual-focused features.                                           

   Further, after the original POWER MAN AND IRON FIST was cancelled in 1986, the two characters continued to appear in both solo-featured serials and in revivals of their ensemble. My scant impression is that most of these manifestations were of even less consequence than the most meretricious junk from the earlier runs. However, there is one aspect of the Luke Cage-Danny Rand ensemble that makes their collective status more significant than that of their individual adventures-- and that is the idea of taking these two exemplars of Marvel Comics responding to 1970s cultural trends-- blaxploitation for Cage, martial arts for Rand-- and creating an ensemble in which those cultural aspects played off one another in a salt-and-pepper combination. The "Netflix Marvel" serials built some of their concepts around that ensemble, and while I don't view those tv shows as supervening the comics themselves, they do at least verify that non-comics professionals found the ensemble-idea appealing for their narratives. I suppose I would have to say that the ideal of that combination, even if it has never quite been fully realized by any single story or group of stories, makes me feel that the ensemble of Cage-and-Rand gives both of them more stature collectively than they have ever possessed individually. Unless there are tons of great individual Power Man or Iron Fist stories of which I'm unaware, I would tend to say that they form a bonded ensemble, in contrast to the semi-bonded one seen in the short-lived GREEN LANTERN-GREEN ARROW feature.  

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 I devoted one essay in this series to "external alignment," defined thusly: 'This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.' I then followed it up with another essay, which defined "internal alignment" as "substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos." However, in re-reading my other essays on the topic of "alignment," I see that the essay I wrote just before these two, COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5, also dealt with two forms of alignment, both of which might subsume the external and internal formulations.                                       

  One example I gave of internal alignment was that of the 2014 film NOAH. I remarked that this film took place in the "Noah cosmos," but that it reached into some loosely allied Biblical narratives to flesh out the cinematic storyline: narratives such as the story of Tubal-Cain, which is not directly involved in the tale of Noah. I did not mention that the film also played off of alternate Noah-stories like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which is probably the movie's source of its "rock-giants." These two borrowings bring me to explore my description of "static alignment" in Part Five of COSMIC ALIGNMENT. In that essay, I used the Joker as an element of the "Batman cosmos" that is always aligned with Batman, no matter how many other "other-universe" characters the Joker may encounter.                                                                                           

Now, there are various narratives, whether stand-alone or serial in nature, that relate fictional stories of archaic myth-characters meeting, even though they never met in archaic stories. The archaic Hercules never met a lot of the Greek figures encountered by, say, the televised Hercules of the LEGENDARY JOURNEYS teleseries, such as the above-seen monster Echidna. But in my view, even the modern-day version of Hercules remains in a static alignment with nearly all Greek mythology, just as the modern-day Noah is in a static alignment with all Biblical mythology. The only way in which the alignment is bent, though not broken, is when an element strongly aligned with another icon-cosmos is imported into a given narrative. The rock-giants of NOAH aren't in the Old Testament text, but they are in the Book of Enoch, so the two iterations of the Deluge Story can blend with no crossover-vibe. But Tubal-Cain, though he's a distant Hebrew ancestor like Noah, properly belongs to the narrative of Cain, and so a static type of crossover ensues.                                       

                           

              

                                       

     The opposite of the "static alignment" was the "dynamic alignment." My main aim in forming this concept was to describe cases in which a particular "Sub" was not firmly bonded to the cosmos in which it first appeared, so that it could successfully migrate into other cosmoses. My examples there were super-villains like Thanos and the Cobra-Hyde team, which did not remain firmly associated with the hero-cosmos in which each originally appeared, to wit, Iron Man for Thanos, Thor for Cobra-Hyde. This also applies to the examples given in the "external alignment" argument: certain elements in a given culture's stories can be seen as dynamic in that they can and do move from one sub-cosmos to another. For example, one may posit that the Greek monsters called "Cyclopes" start out as smith-servants to Zeus, King of the Gods, crafting the heaven-lord's fatal thunderbolts. Arguably later, the poet Homer reworks these traditional figures into a race of cannibalistic giants who live apart from humankind and become menaces within the cosmos of the hero Odysseus.                                                                                                                         

                                                                             This transitive property of certain myth-figures transfers to their entirely fictional (and thus nominative) iterations. Thus Marvel Comics' Thor can meet pretty much any figure within Norse mythology-- say, the fire-god Surtur-- and it doesn't matter that Archaic Thor never crossed paths with Archaic Surtur.  This is the same intertextuality that keeps the NOAH movie's intermingling of elements from both Old Testament and apocryphal sources from meriting the crossover-vibe. The "static crossover" might still be possible if Marvel-Thor is constellated with another major figure of Nordic myth, like Roy Thomas' attempt to meld the legend of Marvel-Thor with that of Seigfried. But there's no intertextuality between Norse myth and Hindu myth, as per my example of Marvel-Thor meeting Marvel-Shiva. Thus, an encounter between any version of Thor and any version of Shiva is a dynamic one and parallels the sort of dynamic crossover one finds whenever a villan with a static default to a particular cosmos interacts with some other cosmos (The Joker hassles Superman, for example).                                                                                   

                                                                                      I felt I should be more specific on this subject also with reference to purely nominative fictional characters who are aligned with archaic mythologies, such as Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman simply encounters a beast from Greek mythology without its "own story," such as the Chimera or the Hydra, then that's not a crossover. But if she meets a character from Greek myth that has been the "star" of his own narrative, such as Heracles, then that's a static crossover-- while if she meets myths or legends from outside the sphere of Greek myth, then that's a dynamic crossover.

MYTHCOMICS: "ROBIN DIES AT DAWN" (BATMAN #156, 1963)

 

There might not be a lot of subjects on which long-time Batman-fans agree, but almost all seem united in despising the Caped Crusader's "alien period" of roughly 1958-1964, largely under the influence of editor Jack Schiff. Schiff, who was not personally a fan of the science fiction genre, didn't rely only upon pitting the hero against weird ETs. I noted in my essay PARADIGM SCHIFF that he also introduced more costumed villains in Batman's post-Code adventures, possibly in order to downplay the Wertham-created stigma of "crime comics." Batman's alien invaders were also probably Schiff's attempt to emulate the financial success of the Superman books under fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger, who increased the frequency of sci-fi elements in the Man of Steel's stories around the same time. However, though Batman had encountered alien threats sporadically during the Golden Age, few if any fans embraced the importation of so many extraterrestrials into a Bat-cosmos that was usually comparatively mundane. Yet one Schiff-story proved the exception to all that fan-hostility.                               

Before launching into the contents of said story, the Bill Finger/Sheldon Moldoff opus ROBIN DIES AT DAWN, I should note that writer Finger almost certainly took inspiration from the debut episode of CBS's TWILIGHT ZONE series, first airing in 1959. The Rod Serling script for the debut story, "Where is Everybody?", depicted a solitary man wandering about a deserted town, freaking out at the total absence of other people while equally concerned at not being able to remember his own identity. The Big Reveal is that the man is an astronaut trainee who has hallucinated his experiences in the empty town after having been confined for many hours to an isolation booth. Finger utilizes the same basic notion of a government experiment, meant to train astronauts in resisting the rigors of loneliness, but takes that basic idea in a direction specific to Batman's mythos.                                                                   

 Like the protagonist of the TWILIGHT ZONE tale, Batman experiences a sudden shift into a world he does not recognize. Unlike the trainee, Batman remembers everything about himself, but he has no clue as to who brought him to this place, or why that entity deprived him of his weapons. As with the other protagonist, everything Batman perceives is a hallucination conjured from his own mind due to being isolated from human contact. But instead of seeing an Earthly world bereft of people, the crusader imagines himself on a night-shrouded alien world, where he encounters only beasts, mutated plants, and one huge symbol of the world's past habitation.   

  Batman finds a deserted city as does the ZONE protagonist, but not only does he find no sentient life, he's attacked by a mutant plant. Unable to free himself, he wishes that his boon companion Robin would render aid, and in marked contrast to the ZONE story, the object of Batman's desire for companionship does materialize and frees the senior hero. The two heroes walk around a bit-- if they compare notes on their respective advents, we don't hear it-- but Batman feels even more acutely the surveillance of some unseen intelligence. The sun dawns, but this only presages a new horror, as the duo stumble across a four-armed idol that comes to life and pursues them.                                                                                         

Unable to fight such a threat, the heroes hope to maneuver the giant into falling into a chasm. It's Robin's idea to provoke the colossus into a rash attack, and the Boy Wonder's ploy succeeds-- but at the cost of his own life. Finger's caption implies the irony that the dawning sun, so often associated with life and human activity, bears witness to Batman's "terrible catastrophe." There had been various Batman stories in which the hero had become enraged when criminals injured or threatened Batman's young partner. But this seems to be the first in which Robin suffers from the fact that Batman called upon his partner for succor-- making it the first time Robin's injury can be seen as directly Batman's fault. There is nothing remotely like this "survivor guilt" in the Rod Serling story.                              

Batman continues to experience the feeling of being watched, and this feeling manifests in a four-footed alien beast with huge eyes that glow yet possess no pupils. It's just when Batman is about to give up on life that the scientists behind the isolation-experiment terminate the hero's torment. As in Serling, the whole test has been to gauge how well even a superb specimen like Batman can cope with the demon of loneliness, all in some dubious service to the space program. But the consequences of the experiment have yet to play out.                                                                                                            

It's while Batman and Robin undertake a nighttime attack upon a band of thieves, the Gorilla Gang that Batman experiences a new hallucination, and in trying to prevent Robin's death a second time, the hero almost kills both of them. 

On yet another night, history repeats itself: this time, Batman re-experiences a sense of sacrificial guilt and almost lets himself be run down by a car he associates with the glow-eyed monster of his nightmare. Now that the psychosis has occurred twice, Batman concludes that he must now hang up his cowl, for he can no longer function in a crimefighting partnership that endangers him, his ward or both of them.                                                                                         

  Ironically, it's these small-timers in the gorilla-suits who make possible Batman's continued career. They capture Robin and send Batman a message that they're going to execute the Boy Wonder at dawn. Batman's mad detective skills show that he can still suss out clues that take him to the gangsters' hideout, and Finger teases readers one last time with the possibility of a Bat-blackout.                     

 But a true threat to Robin's life activates Batman's "reality principle," and provides a shock to his system that permanently erases the effects of the deprivation-test. It can be fairly said, too, that Batman's return to a protective parental status-- where he's the one who does the rescuing of his junior partner--also banishes what may be seen as fears of inadequacy. And so this time, when the sun dawns, it's to banish nightmares, rather than to reveal them.  

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.