CURIOSITIES: KIRBY'S 2001

 In my recent review of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I wondered about the alleged Nietzschean inspirations of the Kubrick-Clarke script, particularly with respect to the ending, wherein astronaut Bowman is transformed into a sort of superman-- or maybe "super-fetus." Because Kubrick's film utilized so little exposition, though, it's tough to figure out what's going on with Bowman when he transforms. Does he incarnate the Nietzschean idea of "self-overcoming?" I wasn't able to find an online copy of the final 2001 script, which I believe Kubrick changed a lot during the movie's production. The novelization by Kubrick's co-writer Arthur C. Clarke does include a lot of mental exposition by Bowman when he transforms. However, Clarke's description of the process is pretty vague. Novel-Bowman doesn't behold a monolith in his fantasy-bedroom. He goes to sleep and feels like "something invaded his mind," though one can only assume that his alien controllers have triggered this process. He experiences a vision of time flowing backward, and as he re-experiences old memories, he regresses to the super-fetus. Then, as Bowman-Fetus transitions into outer space, he then sees the Jupiter monolith. But Clarke never directly says that the aliens have transformed Bowman, though he may have assumed that all readers would make that assumption.                                                             

  I then gave a quick look to Jack Kirby's 1976 adaptation of 2001. Obviously Kirby had seen the film by then, as he duplicates the scenario of the bedroom-monolith, among many other scenes. Maverick that he was, Kirby diverges from the film in many ways too, sometimes just out of personal preference. According to one online source, Kirby also borrows elements from the Clarke novelization as well, one example being that Kirby has the primeval ape-men hunt Clarke's warthogs, rather than Kubrick's tapirs. But though I doubt Kirby ever read much if any Nietzsche-- it's in the conclusion of the 2001 adaptation that I found the most Nietschean statement about Bowman's transformation. To be sure, the first part of the "explanation" is jumbled, as a Kirby Kaption says, "What is the end or beginning to something that has known neither-- mortally is a condition of man." I can only assume Kirby meant to write "mortality," because the following sentence is, "And he must be taught to surmount it..." That's all the internal monologuing Kirby gives us before the monolith begins its transforming process, but the whole ideal of "surmounting death" bears comparison to Nietzsche's idea of "self-overcoming." Then, in the last few pages, Kirby totally dispenses with the endings of both Kubrick and Clarke, claiming that the Star Child is "the first of many new ones," implying that the monolith is programmed to transform other humans into a race of super-psychics. It's kind of a wacky take on both movie and novelization, but I must admit-- it's Kwintessential Kirby!                                           

QUICK ARABESQUE TURNS

 When I initially wrote my first essay on the artistic differences between "grotesques" and "arabesques" in the Golden Age BATMAN comics, I didn't recall that anyone else had made any similar arguments. But I have come across a couple of observations that loosely parallel mine.                                                                               

 The earliest I've come across is a foreword by Max Allan Collins to BATMAN ARCHIVES 2, which collected the Bat-stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #51-70 and which was published in 1991. Collins doesn't use my word "grotesque" of course, but he speaks of how "in the dark world of the Batman, crime did pay," which is the reason a vigilante was necessary, and he also mentions how the narration boxes convey a "dark, ominous mood." The earliest example Collins finds of a brighter figure is Robin, who debuts in DETECTIVE COMICS #38 (1940), though the writer speaks of The Penguin's debut in DETECTIVE #58 (December 1941) as a "turning point." Collins further asserts that as Jerry Robinson became more dominant on the Bat-comics, the stories lost much of the "noir look" of the early Kane period and emphasized more "humor elements."                           

Rik Worth advances a slightly similar argument in the pages of his 2021 THE CREATORS OF BATMAN, his biographical study of the intertwined lives of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Worth substantially agrees that Bob Kane preferred the noir-look of his early stories but claims that it was artist Dick Sprang who "made Gotham a much brighter and more colorful place." Worth does not source his claim about Kane's preferences and his book does not study in detail the feature's artistic developments any more than this post does. Still, it's interesting that when Sprang produced his first full-fledged Bat-tales for BATMAN #19 (Oct-Nov 1943), one of the three Sprang stories places Batman and Robin in an extravagant fantasy-setting foreign to the world of noir: having the heroes chase down U-Boat Nazis into the sunken city of Atlantis.                                                           

  My nominee for "Batman's first arabesque" precedes the debut of Robin, though. In the first six issues of DETECTIVE COMICS, the Dark Knight contends with ordinary crooks (and in these stories it's Batman who is the grotesque), with the mad scientist Doctor Death (two appearances, with Death getting deformed in the second tale), and with the vampiric Monk, whose two stories pile on lots of Gothic grotesquerie. However, in DC #33, following a two-page origin of Batman (whose script is sometimes attributed to Bill Finger), the ten-page main story concerns a villain who, while obscure today, abandons the reigning spookiness for a duel of science-fiction weaponry. This foe was Carl Kruger, a mad scientist with a Napoleon complex, and I for one find nothing Gothic about him.                                                                                                       

  This ten-pager, "Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom," was written by Gardner Fox while the art is theoretically by both Bob Kane and Sheldon Moldoff. "Dirigible" stands in the tradition of both prose SF-stories of futuristic warfare and movie serials about villains with death-rays. Kruger unleashes a dirigible on Gotham City, causing mass havoc with something like a disintegrator beam. Batman meets science with science, inventing a chemical that immunizes his Bat-plane against the beam before the hero rams the dirigible with his craft. One page later, Kruger's plane crashes to Earth after Batman gasses the villain, and Gotham is saved from its first apocalyptic threat. I am not claiming that Carl Kruger is a particularly memorable villain. However, he's much more of a colorful fantasy-figure than his immediate predecessor in mad science, Doctor Death. Thus, in my book Kruger's blue-and-red attire by itself makes him Batman's first arabesque evildoer, and thus the figurative ancestor to all other variegated villains, from the Penguin onward. It's slightly appropriate that Sheldon Moldoff drew the character, for in later years he would become famous (or infamous) for drawing most of the really wacky Bat-foes in the creative era I've termed "Candyland Batman."  

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1914)

 

I never read the entire Pellucidar series back in the day, and frankly didn't remember much about the books I did read. But given that Pellucidar might be deemed ERB's third best-known series-concept and given that I enjoyed 1929's TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, I got hold of the entire series. Whether I get them all read and reviewed here is anyone's guess.  (Quick illustration note: pleasant though Roy Krenkel's cover-painting is, no one in CORE rides dinosaurs, though it's possible that something similar happens in later books.)                                                                                                     

The Pellucidar series resembles that of ERB's second-best-known series-concept: the Mars books, which had one really famous hero but also devoted one-shot stories to other protagonists on Mars. Yet CORE's main hero David Innes is not nearly as evocative as John Carter or Tarzan. Innes is something of a cypher even compared to some of ERB's more obscure characters. The young hero makes it financially possible for scientist Abner Perry to design the drilling-machine, "The Iron Mole," that burrows down beneath Earth's crust and finds a totally independent pocket-world with dinosaurs, cavepeople, and its own independent light-source. I don't think even in 1914 most readers believed in the possibility of a "hollow earth," but there's something enormously evocative about the idea of digging down into the earth-globe and finding a whole world therein. Additionally, the natives of Pellucidar supposedly doesn't experience linear time as do residents of the surface world. ERB doesn't really develop this notion, and all I can say is that the author had some attraction to the idea of characters being able to escape "time's winged chariot, hurrying near."                                                                                                         

The Pellucidar books also resemble the Mars books in that the hero falls in love with a native woman of this savage world and thus becomes fired with the desire to remake the domain into a place of higher civilization. However, ERB takes an odd approach to his standard formula. While in captivity of slavers, Innes encounters, and promptly offends, the hyperbolically named maiden "Dian the Beautiful." Then Dian disappears from most of the first two-thirds of the book. She finally reappears in the last third, gives Innes a hard time for a couple of chapters, and then true love asserts itself. Like Innes, Dian's not much more than a sketch of a formula-character. Her main function in the plot is that from the first she's being pursued by a hulking warrior, the Biblically-named "Jubal the Ugly," whom Innes must defeat in single combat at the conclusion. The fight's the best action in the novel, and ERB even gives it a patina of the old "civilization defeats savagery" trope.                                               

   If there's any concept into which ERB did invest a lot of thought, though, it's that of Pellucidar's master race, the Mahars. These intelligent pterandons command a race of gorilla-men, the Sagoths, who capture human slaves and turn them over to the Mahars for scientific experimentation and, more often than not, for eating. ERB worked more than a few commentaries on omophagia into his stories, and in all likelihood the Mahars represent his best example of man-eating monsters. He even makes the point that to the Mahars, humans are no more than the beasts that humans themselves consume-- though that rationale doesn't make the creatures any less horrific.                                                                                                     

   All of ERB's books are episodic, but CORE seems particularly so, as very few of Innes' adventures add up to much in terms of emotional impact. ERB also doesn't come up with any compelling society except that of the Mahars, though many modern readers will be offended by the first society Innes encounters: tree-dwelling humanoids with tails, who bear a strong resemblance to the Negroes of the surface world. I have seen ERB use Black characters as the butts of jokes, not least in the first TARZAN novel, but I didn't glean any particular agenda this time. Innes gets carried around by the Black tree-dwellers for a while, but they don't do anything malicious or stupid. Then Innes is captured by Sagoth slavers, and the tailed tree-dwellers aren't seen again in CORE. ERB is justly famous for his studied ignorance of his era's evolutionary theories, though he often used his version of evolution to explain a lot of his fantastic creations. I'm not sure the writer was even aware of the distinction between the major primate groups of monkeys and apes: that the former usually have tails and the latter never do. I theorize that for ERB it was a jape to put tails on humanoids who were not related to monkeys in the least, but who acted like humans in having dwellings and domesticated animals. Seven years later, in the book TARZAN THE TERRIBLE the jungle-lord visits a different prehistoric land, Pal-Ul-Don, and there he meets two groups of tailed (but not tree-dwelling) humanoids, one white and one black. My guess that the tree-dwellers of CORE were just a one-off may be confirmed if, as I suspect, that particular society makes no further appearances in the Pellucidar book-series.  

NEAR MYTHS: FLAME OF RECCA PTS 1-156 (1995-96?)

 

I might never have reviewed even the first 156 parts of FLAME OF RECCA had I not wanted to compare the manga to its 1997 anime series, which review will appear separately on my movie-blog. Based on my early reading of the manga by one Nobuyuki Anzai, I didn't think there was much to say about it. It seemed a decent if unexceptional shonen manga of the mid-nineties, though I have the impression that it's not remembered much these days. I think Anzai followed the template set by Akira Toriyama's late eighties DRAGONBALL Z, in which the protagonist was a bit of a dummy yet one with amazing martial prowess, who became the moral center of a group of similar good-hearted champions. Anzai doesn't emphasize martial arts as much as Toriyama did, for his dopey protagonist Recca and his friends all utilize specialized talismans, "madogu," which endow them with super-powers like those of American costumed heroes.                                                                 

 Thus far, the only major distinction I've discovered in RECCA is its take on the roles of the main hero and his opposite number. Manga (including DRAGONBALL) has no shortage of heroes who earnestly defend their bosom friends while their villains are obsessed loners motivated only by the desire for power. Anzai does come up with a novel twist on this theme. Recca, though he's a teen who's been raised in the 20th century, was actually born in a ninja cult during the 16th century. When the cult gets wiped out, Recca's mother sends her infant son forward in time, where the baby is fortunate enough to be raised by a poor but virtuous "father." However, Recca's older half-brother Kurei, raised by his mother to trample upon the weak, attempts to kill Recca, but gets caught up in the time-spell. Kurei too gets catapulted to the 20th century, but he gets adopted by a nasty gang-boss who will eventually propel all of his agents, including Kurei, against the champions following Recca. Like many DRAGONBALL imitators, RECCA structures a lot of its action around tournament-competitions, the better to supply fans with plenty of wild action scenarios. And toward the end of the tournament-plotline, Recca squares off against Kurei both philosophically as well as physically. First, we have Kurei, expousing the belief that the strong alone matter.                                                         

                                                                       

And then there's Recca, expousing the belief that connections to one's circle of family and friends are paramount.                                  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                

It's possible that some later episodes of RECCA might develop these opposing philosophies. But failing that, the rest of the series probably only earns status as a "near myth."  

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE GRIM HUNT" assorted Spider-Man comics (2010)

 

This post is more of a notation than a proper review. I only picked up GRIM HUNT from a local library because I noticed that, though its main plot concerned the return of Kraven the Hunter from the undiscovered country, a subplot dealt with an alliance between the prophetess Madame Web and at least two Spider-Women. None of the HUNT narrative bears any strong resemblance to the storyline of Sony Pictures' recent flop MADAME WEB. But since the subplot about the "Spider-Clan" precedes the action of HUNT, it's possible that either this arc, or another like it, gave the Sony scripters the idea that Marvel's "school for spiders" concept could be converted into a "girl power" movie.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Ironically, the subplot could have made a better film than the upscale Lifetime movie that Sony came out with. Every fan knows that Marvel Comics began to come out with assorted "spider-women" to protect and/or enhance the franchise created by Spider-Man. That's one reason I'm not giving HUNT a proper review: it's referencing all sorts of continuity-based developments that I'd have to research over many assorted SPIDER-MAN comics. In any case, as far as the origin-stories of characters like "Arana" and "the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman" are concerned, the heroines' resemblance to Spider-Man is mere coincidence. Someone-- I might assume the dominant writer of HUNT, Joe Kelly-- elevated the coincidence to the level of a metaphysical possibility, that all of Marvel's Spider-people are bound within a "web" of influences. Madame Web asserts the existence of this intertwinement, while Peter Parker and the other Spider-people are more skeptical. This sort of metaphysical uncertainty might have been produced a better dramatic arc for a movie about spider-heroines, even one that was obliged to erase Spider-Man from the (literal) picture.                                                                                                                                                                                                      Then there's the main plotline about the rebirth of Kraven the Hunter. I was loosely aware that, following the demise of the villain in the 1987 continuity "Kraven's Last Hunt," other pretenders to his throne had popped up, at least one of whom was Kraven's son. By 2010, there's a whole family of Kravniofs, all of whom quarrel with one another over their patrimony but who are united in the quest to bring down their nemesis, "The Spyder"-- also sort of a symbolic representation of all the spider-people, I think. Joe Kelly's definitely a much better SPIDER-MAN writer than most of the people who followed in the wake of Stan Lee, but I can't really judge this HUNT without having seen more of the surrounding terrain.                                                                                                                                    

THE FALSE RATIONALE OF "FOUND ART"

 Here's another one of my comments I'm preserving from a forum-post in case I'm moved to build on it later.                                                     

(1) I haven't read too much on the evolution and justifications of pop art. By sheer chance the other day, I happened to listen to a podcast arguing for a connection between the dadaism of the 1920s and the pop art of the fifties and sixties, in which the expert used Duchamp as an example of the former and Warhol as an example of the latter. I did seem to remember something about the use of "found art" in dada, and a quick search came up with an interesting quote from the first guy: 'In a few words, Marcel Duchamp aptly summarizes the work of this movement: “…an ordinary object could be elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of the artist”.' So absent any further info, I'm going to guess that's a fair representation of the rationale of guys like Lichtenstein too. (2) I'm not personally wild about the rationale of "found art," but like anything else there could be good and bad examples thereof. I do not consider any popular art in any medium to qualify as "found art," however, for reasons I won't enlarge upon for now. (3) I don't consider the quality of any popular artworks defined by whether or not they are owned by a corporation. If Tony Abruzzo did an impressive illustration for DC's SECRET HEARTS romance comic, then it's an impressive illustration, regardless of whether Lichtenstein changed the image for his swipe or what his rationale for using the art may be. (4) I will agree that artists like Russ Heath have little justification to be torqued at seeing their art-panels excerpted in this manner. While there may be particular examples these days of comic book original art that may fetch high prices, there's also a lot of low-level art that would never reach that level in the comics market, much less be prized in the context of gallery art. The original art of guys like Heath and Abruzzo, done for formula comics, isn't "found art" in my opinion, but it's also not that impressive compared to the heights of better art done by other comics-artists. The context that Lichtenstein and others place on popular art in the new context of "pop art" is part of the concept that makes the gallery art exceptionally valuable, whether I personally validate that rationale or not. Anyway, good debate on the subject of swipes in this context.         

MYTHCOMICS: "SCOURGE OF THE SKELETAL RIDERS" (TEEN TITANS #37, 1972)

 

As I stated in my previous post, I only revisited the 1966-73 TEEN TITANS comics-run because I wanted to cross-compare one of the stories with one of the TITANS cartoons of the 2000s. I had no expectations of finding a concrescent mythcomic in any of those 43 issues. Even though TEEN TITANS went through three distinct marketing phases, most of the stories were written by longtime DC journeyman Bob Haney, which didn't make for great variety. Like most of the people writing for comics in those days, Haney turned out a huge volume of tales, usually predicated on some wild premise that would theoretically grab the fancies of juvenile readers. Much like Robert Kanigher, Haney's ideas weren't always logical, though he was capable of producing tight plots around them. I considered all of his TITANS tales to do no more than time-killers, and I certainly did not expect to find any mythicity in a story from the title's least impressive phase, what I called "Spooky Titans." During this period, BTW, the heroes-- four costumed crusaders and two non-costumed-- were being sent on assorted assignments by a grey-haired eminence named Mister Jupiter, who I believe largely disappeared from DC continuity after the first TITANS series perished.                                 

 

To my great surprise, the routinely titled story "Scourge of the Skeletal Riders" started off with the heroes having a close encounter with a mystery that's never entirely solved. On their way to finish an assignment for Mister Jupiter, the Titans crack up their camper, rendering it undriveable. The only sign of civilization is a "weird old shack," where an unnamed blacksmith plies his trade. Though he speaks in an archaic fashion, he accepts the job of fixing the vehicle, but only after he finishes shoeing four lively-looking horses. The blacksmith hints darkly of some danger if he doesn't finish the shoeing on time, but the Titans are focused on their mission. They leave the camper behind and catch a ride to their destination (no roadside assistance back in 1972). Once reaching their home base, the Titans learn that their next assignment is to look for a famous teenaged photographer, Grady Dawes, who went missing in a country torn by civil war. The Titans all claim to have been well acquainted with Grady, though it's axiomatic that the character never appeared before this.                                                                                     

      

So off go the Titans to war-torn "Ranistan," pledging not to get involved in the conflict while looking for their friend. For a time I thought "Scourge" might be one of the many "anti-war" stories DC was producing in this time-period. However, though the heroes do get involved, they only seek to prevent loss of life on both sides, and the nature of the quarrel is never specified. And their first hint of something unusual is that Kid Flash seeks to warn a troop of soldiers from being attacked. A rider on a red steed overtakes the hero despite his super-speed and stuns him, so that the troop gets slaughtered.                                                                                         

Though the previous incident involved the Titans trying to save soldiers of the current regime, they seek out a rebel stronghold, looking for info on Grady. They try to liberate stores of food for starving rebels, but another weird horseman appears, beats down the heroes, and sets the food on fire. The Titans then continue their journey, with Robin playing skeptic when the psychic Lilith theorizes that they are been opposed by the legendary Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the first two riders having been War and Famine.                                                               

    The Teen Wonder is duly converted, though, for their next mission is to deliver a vital serum to mountain tribes. Plague, who naturally wants more suffering from disease, booby-traps the heroes, and though all the good guys survive, the serum is destroyed.                               

   

Naturally, there's one more Horseman to encounter: Death. The heroes are on the way to the fortress where Grady's being held for ransom, but on the way, they see "a rider on a pale horse" menacing two refugees with a scythe. Kid Flash rescues the refugees and exults in having beaten Death. However, when they get to the fortress, they learn that Death has already been there, and that the pale rider tricked Grady into getting killed. Mister Jupiter tries to assuage the despondent heroes' feelings by saying they won a "small victory" by saving the refugees (without mentioning that the heroes failed at their other three efforts). However, Haney explicitly states that Death only menaced the refugees to delay the Titans before they could reach Grady, so if they hadn't been there, the refugees would not been threatened. So this is one of the few superhero stories of the period in which the heroes have no success whatsoever in their endeavors.                                                                                              

As a capper for this dolorous downturn, the Titans return to America to get their camper. The blacksmith and his smithy have been replaced by a car repairman and his modern-day shop, and he professes not to have done any blacksmithing for decades. There is an old smithy there, but clearly this exists only so that Haney can close out the story with a "what is reality" schtick. Yet the framing narrative of the "fairyland blacksmith" confers some extra mythicity on what could have been just another spook-tale. The Four Horsemen clearly don't set up the encounter, for they have no trouble overcoming the mortal champions at every turn. The blacksmith assumes the role of a prophet of doom, casting a minatory shadow over the heroes, as if to say, "You can win a lot of battles, but against fate, even Titans strive in vain." 

TITANIC NEAR-MYTHS AND CURIOSITIES

 I wasn't expecting to write more than a quickie piece on DC's first TEEN TITANS title, which lasted (not counting three try-out stories) from issue #1 in 1966 through issue #43 in 1973. And this is still only a selective view at best, at that.                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

      

What prompted me to revisit this moldy oldie from my youth was my having reviewed all five seasons of Cartoon Network's TEEN TITANS teleseries. In this post, I evaluated the mythicity of the fifth-season episode "Revved Up" as "good," stating: 


'In the 1960s TITANS comic, the writer introduced a villain with the improbable name of "Ding Dong Daddy," who executed crimes with the help of specially rigged vehicles. This was a rare (for the time) shout-out to a cartoon character outside the boundaries of four-color comic books: the artistic persona of Earl "Big Daddy" Roth, a caricaturist renowned for weird monsters driving fast cars. REVVED UP introduces the animated Ding Dong as a guy who somehow gets hold of a secret treasure owned by the Teen Wonder himself. When Robin and the other Titans try to reacquire the mysterious item, Ding Dong compels them to participate in a car-race-- and Cyborg, who dearly loves his T-car, is more than happy to oblige.'                                                                                                                     I didn't adequately explain why I thought the episode had better than average mythicity, but it later occurred to me that I'd implied that the mere use of the imagery of the artist Roth and some of his caricatures alone conferred mythicity. I could have corrected the language of the post, and no one would have noticed but me, but I thought I could expand on my thoughts better in an ARCHIVE post. What I was trying to get across was that the images of "Big Daddy" Roth and his creations were not mythic in themselves but only accrued sociological mythicity as representations of the "car culture" of the time. I felt "Revved Up" tapped into some of the same sense of humans' fascination with high-velocity vehicles. That fascination comes across by the way the Titans, Ding Dong Daddy and other malefactors cpme up with inventive car-creations, albeit with a certain degree of reflection about how cars work in the first place. (Without that reflection, "Revved Up" wouldn't possess any more mythicity than an episode of WACKY RACES.)                                                                                                       

So much for the TITANS cartoon episode, but what about the original comic book, to which the cartoon occasionally paid homage? In the title's seven-year-run, it was comprised of three periods: "Wacky Titans" (the one all the fans joke about for its un-coolness), "Relevant Titans" (wherein some of the heroes put aside their costumes and tried to have more "street-level" adventures), and "Spooky Titans" (wherein the heroes reassumed their costumes but tended to get involved in markedly supernatural difficulties). Ding Dong Daddy appears in the third issue of the "Wacky Period," but it's one of the better issues on which writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy collaborated. There's still a lot of bad "hip" dialogue that made the Wacky Period so celebrated for its nuttiness, but the plot's not that different from one of Bill Finger's Golden Age tales about Batman and Robin trying to keep young boys on the straight and narrow.                                                                                                 

  The story opens when an automated car robs a bank in Gotham City and escapes the Dynamic Duo, managing even to outmaneuver the Batmobile. By dumb luck, a governmental education committee asks the Teen Titans to investigate a high incidence of dropout high-schoolers, right in River City (OK, not really). From typical teen Danny, the heroes learn that many local teens are deserting school thanks to the high pay they earn at Ding Dong Daddy's car shop. Ding Dong is a crook of course-- he must be, since he's contributing to the delinquency of minors-- but Haney doesn't bother describing what sort of business the villain's using as his cover for his nefarious activities-- like, does he repair vehicles, or does he sell both cars and motorcycles of his own personal design? What he really does in his crime-career is to design other vehicles, like the bank-robbery buggy in Gotham, to pull off automated robberies. It's the sort of crime-career that only makes sense in the world of superheroes and their "pattern villains."                                                                                     

One might expect that once the Titans pay a call on Ding Dong, he might just quell his criminal activities and lay low. Instead, the superheroes' advent functions like a thrown gauntlet, and he sends forth three different gimmick-vehicles to confuse and confound the Titans. When Robin spies on the "Hot Rod Hive," Ding Dong sics thugs on the Boy Wonder and puts him in a death trap-- the sort of thing that practically begs a visit from the local constabulary.             

                                                

Instead, the Titans respond with a flanking attack, masquerading as ordinary bike-riders and talking Danny into getting them jobs at the Hive. The heroes don't do a really good job of staying undercover, since they use their special powers to stomp some nasty bikers who have nothing to do with the main story. (Note the bizarre headgear Nick Cardy gives to the bad bikers.) What's to keep any dropout loyal to Ding Dong from exposing the Titans to the villain?                         

                                                                                                                                              

  Nevertheless, the subterfuge works, in large part because the wig-wearing Wonder Girl distracts the maker of crime-cars by shaking her moneymaker for him in private. In jig time the heroes are able to expose Ding Dong's criminal nature to his student-employees, who are duly aghast at being involved in felonious doings. Ding Dong unleashes one last gimmick on the heroes-- a killer gas pump, of all things-- and then River City can go back to the status quo. I don't believe Ding Dong appeared again until the cartoon show, but he's a decent enough pattern-criminal, given a little novelty by the Roth caricature and by the fact that there aren't that many vehicle-themed villains.                                                                                                       

As I said, I'm not going to attempt an overview of even one of the TITANS periods, but I will note a few other curiosities in the Wacky Years. Beast Boy, who was a vital member of the super-group in the 1980s, only got one guest-appearance in the 1966-73 run, when he tried to join the Titans in issue #6. The main story's not very good, and the art by Bill Molno is subpar, but the page I reprint above does show writer Haney seeking to emulate a little of Marvel's "misunderstood hero" trope, which was on fuller display in DOOM PATROL, where the animal-imitating teen originated.  For good measure, the letters column for the issue contains one letter of no particular consequence from future pro Mark Evanier. Also, a continuity-minded fan asked the editors of TITANS if Wonder Girl would get phased out since she'd been written out of the WONDER WOMAN series by Robert Kanigher, which event I addressed here. The TITANS editors did not respond to the continuity confusion.     

                                                                                           
Finally, just for grins, here's a page from the first appearance of the Mad Mod, who got more than a little exposure on the TEEN TITANS cartoon show. Haney and Cardy introduced the character, whose raison d'etre had more to do with fashion-gimmicks than with mind-control-- and who was apparently Cockney, since he had the habit of dropping his "H's." Though I rather doubt that any Brit of any linguistic division went as far as Haney's depiction, since Mad Mod even laughs without the use of the "H-sound," going, "'Aw, 'Aw" or occasionally "'Ar, 'Ar."  

THE READING RHEUM: CHILDREN OF TIME (2015)

 

Unlike the majority of 21st century science fiction and fantasy, Adrian Tchaikovsky's CHILDREN OF TIME is a very good read, which always keeps readers intrigued in terms of what's at stake for all of the characters and for the imperiled sets of species they represent. The book was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though I don't plan to read them, as I think more "children" wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     In the far future, though humankind has pioneered space and established a small handful of colonies on terraformed worlds, factional differences between political groups have almost decimated the population. This exigency breeds two separate but intersecting reactions. The first reaction is a scientific project is established orbiting a terraformed planet, with the intention of breeding a new race of human beings. The project-head, Doctor Avrana Kern, essentially wants to play "God of Evolution" by sending to the planet a nanovirus that will promote rapid evolutionary advancement in the subjects of Kern's experiment, a troop of monkeys that will become a new race, one able to facilitate human colonization. (To be sure, Kern has a god-complex and becomes more invested in her creations than in any plans for colonization.) Much later in Earth-history, a spaceship departs from Earth. The ship and its cargo of mostly coldsleeping passengers plans to colonize that same terraformed world, unaware of Kern's project.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Bad things happen aboard the satellite: everyone dies and so do the payload of monkeys as they're sent to "Kern's World." But Kern herself survives in the form of a computer simulation, albeit one with mangled memories. And the nanovirus finds other species in which to flourish-- mostly arthropods for whatever reasons. And the foremost advanced beings are a race of intelligent spiders. Inevitably, the book leads to a face-off between the humans, desperate for survival on a new world, and the spiders, intent on protecting their own territory-- though Tchaikovsky works things so as to promote a non-combative rapprochement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          The mythicity here is entirely cosmological in nature, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates the biology of Earth-spiders to describe the way these ET-spiders progress to a state of high intelligence and culture-- even working in a small sociological motif with regard to "male liberation" within the arachnids' matriarchal background. In fact, aside from Doctor Kern, none of the humans are any more mythic than the spiders, except as collective groups. I might even designate the two groups as subsumed by the world they inhabit, the same way that (in my system) "The Planet of the Apes" connotes the totality of apes and humans who occupy that domain.                                                                                                                                                                                   

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."