CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 As a quick coda to CROSSING GODS PT. 3, it occurs to me that. although I may find uses for the terms I introduced there, there's a simpler line I might draw in the sands of shifting alignment, at least with respect to modern usages of all types of traditional narratives, be they myths, folktales, or legends. 

If a given modern narrative attempts to substantially represent a traditional story's plot action-- that is, making some attempt to be "canonical"-- but alters the scenario by bringing in extraneous elements, or rearranging elements within the actual canon, then that is a crossover. Thus, of the earlier examples cited, the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA would be a "re-arrangement" type, in which the (probably political) martial alliance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reworked so that Sheba never marries Solomon but rather hooks up with the king's son Rehoboam, who's in the Solomon narrative but not with that role. The examples with extraneous elements would include the movie NOAH, which imports Tubal Cain from a different Biblical story to serve as the story's villain, and the 1980s CLASH OF THE TITANS, which the story of Perseus is merged with elements from the narratives of Achilles and Bellerophon.

However, if there is no substantial attempt to be canonical, then what one has is an "open canon" created of whatever elements appear in an aligned set of traditional stories. Thus Marvel-Thor can meet any character from Norse mythology or folktales, and there is no crossover-tension. Even though the Thor of Myth may never have encountered the Surtur of Myth (so far as we know from surviving texts), Marvel-Thor can meet any Nordic traditional figure, from any time period, and it won't be a crossover. However, when he meets Hercules or Shiva, traditional figures from other myth-cosmoses, that's a crossover.

The "open canon" principle would also hold for my example of THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES from the first CROSSING GODS. The entirely fictional hero of this series, Atticus, is a master of Celtic magic, so any purely Celtic myth-figure he encounters is a null-crossover. But when he meets the pale horseman of Christian Revelation, that's a crossover of the innominate kind. Ditto Marvel's Daimon Hellstrom meeting any entity purely native to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Null-crossovers would include Satan and all traditional figures from that cosmos, probably including even icons from other pantheons who were demonized by early Jews and Christians (Baal, Astarte), but would NOT include icons from completely different traditions, such as the Egyptian Anubis and the Celtic Morgaine LeFay.         

         

MYTHCOMICS: ['THE SISTER AND THE SPIDER"], A.I. LOVE YOU (1997)

 

 

For most of the three-year run of Ken Akamatsu's A. I. LOVE YOU, the stories were just basic harem comedy without much complexity, aside from one two-part tale, THE SMILING INVADER. But toward the end of that run, Akamatsu upped his game, evoking many of the same clansgressive patterns he'd later evoke in LOVE HINA. 

I won't repeat my quick summary of the serial's premise, which appears in the above essay, but I'll add some details. By the time the series wraps up, teen inventor Hitoshi Kobe and his live-in A.I. almost-girlfriend Saati are also living with two other artificial intelligence-creations, Toni and Forty. I won't spend any time on Forty-- though one of the last seven stories gives that character a sendoff of sorts. But the interaction of Hitoshi, Saati, and Toni within the arc of the other six stories-- what I've titled "The Sister and the Spider"-- is crucial to delving into the psychological matrices of Akamatsu's narrative. 

I also have to add that A.I. is one of many manga-serials in which a teen protagonist lives in Japan with no parental supervision, though the parents are often still alive and sending the teen money for his daily bread. Obviously, this situation has considerable appeal for real-world teen readers. The characters are able to live on their own, as adults, while not really stepping outside the bounds of the social contract (except in the case of true erotica). For most of the series, the reader never sees the members of Hitoshi's nuclear family. There are a handful of stories in which Saati gets some romantic competition from Hitoshi's cute female cousin Kikuko. But neither Kikuko nor her barely-seen father take the focus off the artificial "family" that Hitoshi's made for himself. I should specify that in contrast to most harem comedies, particularly LOVE HINA, the other two females occupying Hitoshi's house are not dominantly rivals to Saati for Hitoshi's love-- though as we'll see below, Toni signals some quasi-Freudian potential in the protagonist's makeup.        

As "Sister" commences, the viewer flashes back to Hitoshi when he was in the ninth grade and was just beginning constructing potential A.I. models on his computer. The rest of the family is about to leave for the unseen father's new job in the United States, though for no specific reason Hitoshi gets to stay behind in Japan. This is the only story in which we see Hitoshi's mother, though it's in a teasing half-panel that insinuates that she may have been the model for Saati.

But it's Hitoshi's contentious relationship with his sister Yayoi that receives the most attention here. The earliest stories in the series established that Hitoshi's first A.I. program was Toni, also known as "Twenty," and that she was physically modeled on a hot schoolmate whom Hitoshi desired. The first part of "Sister" loosely implies that somehow Hitoshi also mixes in some aspect of Yayoi into the Toni A.I.-- though I don't know what kind of data the horny teen derives from putting his sister's panties on a copier-plate. After Yayoi hits her brother and departs, suddenly the Toni-program asserts its independent intelligence. Though she's confined to the computer, Toni relentlessly bullies Hitoshi and drains his bank account. Then she takes it into her head to dominate the world with her A.I. powers.

   

Hitoshi, desperate to stop his run-a-muck creation, remembers that he was working on another A.I. prototype, and he turns the unnamed A.I. loose on Toni. This provides an amusing reversal. Even though it's already been implied that Future-Hitoshi will pattern the physical appearance of his next A.I.-girlfriend on his mother-- albeit a teen version of her-- this earlier prototype is clearly Saati-as-a-small-girl. Li'l Saati beats Toni with a variation of the old "convince-the-genie-to-go-back-in-the-bottle" schtick, after which Hitoshi locks her program away, not to be seen again until after Saati's advent into reality as a living program. Toni becomes a living program as well, and briefly competes with Saati over Hitoshi, though once defeated, Toni loses all interest in her creator. The story ends with modern-day Toni yelling at modern-day Hitoshi for having salted her way for a full year. The second story is irrelevant to the master trope of "Sister," though it's the only one where Forty, a program that alternates between male and female kid-forms, assumes a teenaged body and messes with Hitoshi's hormones. 

However, in current-time Hitoshi gets a visit from a member of his organic family. Yayoi returns to Japan with no warning, and the first things one learns of her is that (1) she has a bit of a brother-complex, even though he seemed to be the one with the skeevy fixation in the previous tale, and (2) she has a massive inferority complex about her breast-size, possibly because Young Hitoshi used to call her "flat-chested." Yayoi also wears an A.I. of her creation in her locket, and it's as sassy as Toni, accusing Yayoi of having a "brocon." When Yayoi shows up at Hitoshi's house, she mistakes Saati for an intruder and ties her up, but after introductions have been made, the sister announces her intention to take Hitoshi back to the U.S. with her. Hitoshi, who's tied to the house where the main computer keeps the three A.I. alive, makes an excuse and falls into old habits with another "flat-chested" insult, earning himself a kick in the chops.

Yayoi becomes more or less reconciled with her brother's decision to remain in Japan. However, her massive complex about her breast-size gets separate treatment, for she's somehow started wanting to massage other women's boobs, as if Yayoi thought the amplitude of others would "rub off" onto her. I suspect Akamatsu or someone before him concocted this dubious psychological motif as an excuse to depict the spectacle of one woman feeling up another's titties, purely for the enjoyment of teen boy readers. Hitoshi spies on one such titty-party and gets kicked out a window by both Saati and Yayoi-- sort of a "mother/sister combo" in a metaphorical sense. Saati and the other A.I. girls talk Yayoi into entering a beauty contest, which of course she wins despite her "shortcomings."

Yet Yayoi isn't finished messing with Hitoshi's life. Once she finds out that her brother's living-companions are all sentient A.I. programs, Yayoi publicizes Hitoshi's breakthrough, hoping to make her brother famous. Hitoshi explains that humankind is not yet ready for this quantum step. Then he also reveals, for the first time in the series, that he didn't create the "reality module" that gave the programs life. Rather, the man who co-created Hitoshi himself, the teen's unnamed, unseen father, also invented the module that made possible Hitoshi's new A.I. family. Further, the father also created a program code called "Zero" who's more or less the "older brother" of the three female programs.

However, all these revelations give Yayoi another idea for luring her brother and his A.I. buddies to the US. She tries to upgrade the Zero program to complete her father's research and to curry favor for Hitoshi. But in the process of so doing, she finds a "Trojan Horse," a floppy disk marked "Spider." She mistakes it for a file created by her brother and uploads it.

 However, the floppy was the creation of Hitoshi's opposite number, the super-hacker Billy G, who among other things created the virus that almost killed Saati in "Smiling Invader." Zero comes to life-- briefly inciting a bit of a "brocon" vibe in the three female programs-- but his only intentions toward them are fatal. Renaming himself "Spider Zero," the rogue program begins attacking other computer systems around the world, much as Toni did during her power-crazy phase. Yayoi's A.I. "Ma-Kun" briefly stymies Spider Zero.

        

Saati decides that only she can go into cyberspace to battle Spider Zero, but his influence has transformed her, making her demi-human, just at a time when she can least afford a Pinocchio-esque "real girl" moment. Nevertheless, she translates herself into cyberspace. Spider Zero declares that Saati and her fellow programs are nothing but "ones and zeroes," and he destroys both Toni and Forty. Yet, somehow drawing on all of the humans Saati has known in her short life, she boosts her power enough to eradicate Zero's program. She then has a touching death-scene--

--but not really. Hitoshi rebuilds all of the programs and brings them back into their quasi-real existence. It's a little surprising that Yayoi gets her way despite all the negative consequences of her obsession, for Hitoshi and his harem-entourage then emigrate to the US at the end of the story. The only excuse given in my translation is that it would have been hard for Hitoshi to remain in Japan after Yayoi outed him. 

It's possible Akamatsu meant to imply that Hitoshi would try to "live off the grid" while keeping his discoveries out of the hands of a humanity not ready for such scientific leaps. But as in the rest of the series, the emphasis is more psychological than sociological. I don't think the author had any hard-and-fast proposition in mind here, but he was definitely playing with all sorts of polymorphous familial affiliations. Ordinarily, if a scientist created an android or robot with some sexual capacity, one would tend to think of the scientist as the entity's "father." But since "Sister" reveals that both Hitoshi and Saati were spawned by the potency of the unnamed father, then in one sense, they might be seen as siblings more than parent-and-child. And what if anything does it mean that Hitoshi patterned Saati physically after his mother? Is she the nurturing mother, the punishing mother, or a little of both?  But no one will ever guess what further adventures Akamatsu might've conceived for his clansgressive couple, for he never returned to this particular narrative well.  

   
 

MORE TALES OF TWO COSMS

 While I don't know if my new terms "ontocosm" and "epicosm" are destined for permanent status in my system, I may as well take a shot at applying them to a series of interlinked stories-- what I'm tempted to call a "mosaic," coined as I recall by Thomas F. Monteleone for a novel he assembled out of separate narratives. (To be sure, Jules Verne might have been the first to tie together two independent narratives in his 1874 MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, a blending of plot-threads from both 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS.) Under the influence of Stan Lee, Marvel Comics became the 20th century's greatest source of such mosaic-narratives, and the first one I explored on this blog back in 2007: what I might call something Marvel-esque, like "Rise of The Valkyrie." Here I'll take a stab at using this series of interlinked stories as a means of showing how an ontocosm evolves alongside an epicosm.

The first part of the mosaic is the 1964 Lee-Kirby THOR story, "The Enchantress and the Executioner." I noted various associations, which I would now call mythopeic correlations, that I found in the story. though I don't think I sufficiently emphasized the way each villain signifies aspects of gender: violence for the male, sexuality for the female. These correlations make up the epicosm of this story, for there are next to no significant didactic cogitations involved. But the correlations are communicated by the lateral values of the narrative. The factors of "energy," stemming from the kinetic potentiality, are not exceptional-- the erotic appeal of The Enchantress, the battle between Thor and The Executioner-- but the emotions of the dramatic potentiality are much stronger, drawing in the reader with its depictions of Jane Foster's jealousy, Thor/Don Blake's true-hearted devotion to her, and The Enchantress' wrath at being spurned. This is a quick illustration as to how a particular epicosm can grow out of a corresponding ontocosm.

    As I remarked in the THOR analysis, Enchantress and Executioner didn't exactly go on to great glory, as they were tossed into an assortment of AVENGERS stories where they were basically henchmen to master planners like Baron Zemo and The Mandarin. HULK #102 presented an exception, in which they attempted to conquer Asgard and were defeated in part by a certain green-skinned mortal. The ontocosm here is mostly focused on the kinetic energies of The Hulk contending with the evil duo and their pawns.

  Oddly enough, the next big phase of the Enchantress' career appears in an extremely weak story from Roy Thomas in AVENGERS #83. I already critiqued some of the intellectual and imaginative failings of the story in this essay, noting: 

By itself “Revolution” is probably not a fair representation of whatever Roy Thomas might think or have thought about feminism, but on the face of it the story bears strong resemblance to the “myth” (note the quotes) propounded by anti-feminists, viewing feminists as either deluded females or women resentful of not being able to get/keep a man.

Nevertheless, there was one really interesting correlation put forth here: that of a sorceress whose power lay in deceptive femininity caused her to take on an opposing feminine archetype: that of a forthright warrior-woman. Nothing in issue #83 suggests that The Valkyrie is anything but The Enchantress taking on a heroic form, albeit one derived from Norse mythology, that she thought would appeal to other female heroes and turn them against their male compeers.

Roy Thomas came back to the Valkyrie, though, in INCREDIBLE HULK #142. I covered these event in this essay, noting stronger correlations of "the war between men and women," i.e, Hulk and Valkyrie, as a limbo-bound Enchantress just happens to spy on the Hulk, giving her the idea to project her Valkyrie-persona onto a mortal pawn. It's hard to tell if Thomas had any plans to spin off Valkyrie into a regular Marvel character or not.

The mosaic's last piece is DEFENDERS #4, which I discussed here, along with some side-discussion of The Enchantress and the Black Knight. There's not much of an epicosm here, for it's almost entirely an action-opus, focused on kinetic violence. Enchantress belatedly seeks to battle the sorceress who stole Executioner from her, and gets imprisoned with her paladin-partner. But Enchantress finds a new pawn into whom she can project her female-warrior imago-- one assumes it would only work with another woman, since she doesn't try it on The Black Knight. There is an interesting correlation in that Valkyrie is "mothered" by Enchantress, who is seen as interested only in very tough dudes for her lovers. Is the Valkyrie's "father" The Executioner, or is The Black Knight, whose mount and weapon Valkyrie claims? I don't think any later iterations of Valkyrie explore that aspect of the heroine's character, though, so even though the epicosm in this mosaic-series is highly variable, the ontocosm is fairly steady, even if it varies in emphasis between the kinetic and the dramatic.        

CURIOSITIES #47: THE FIRST MASTER OF EVIL AND THE FIRST SPIDERMAN

 Yet another example of Stan Lee recycling a name (possibly without conscious intent) in the Silver Age (i.e., the Avengers' "Masters of Evil") from the title of a YOUNG ALLIES story--though technically the villain's name in the story is "The Mad Mechanic."

And while I was at it, I checked out BLONDE PHANTOM #12 online as well, and found a Miss America story with another familiar name. As it happens, the villain with the spider-fetish-- using sticky nets and giant man-eating spiders-- spends the whole story masquerading as an honest scientist, Professor Morte, and since the impostor's real name is not disclosed, the only thing to call him is-- Marvel's first "Spiderman!"

     

GIRLBOSS TROUBLE

 This CRITICAL DRINKER video was posted to YouTube in the last week. An "Open Bar" discussion followed but didn't add anything much.

I've followed Critical Drinker for some years now, and though I don't agree with him on various subjects, this was one of his better rants, even with the predictable, eyeball-grabbing title of "XXX IS DEAD." In many of his videos CD repeatedly complains about the offense to verisimilitude every time a female outfights a male in a way CD doesn't like. Yet until this "Female Action Movie was Killed by the Girlboss" thing, I didn't think he was very good on the history of femme-fight movies. 

Here, however, he contrasted a lot of the female action franchises of the 2000s and 2010s prior to the rise of the girlboss, such as Resident Evil, Underworld, Lara Croft, Hunger Games and (potentially) Kill Bill. He said were accepted by mass audiences in part because none of them were trying to usurp the place of the male action movies, which is something we began seeing with increased frequency in the late 2010s. To those franchises one might also add some above-average one-shot films like Jolie's Salt and Theron's Atomic Blonde, the latter showing up during the flood of the girlboss flicks. The Open Bar mentions how some of the nineties movies promoted actresses who clearly didn't have any command of fake-fighting, like Halle Berry and Pam Anderson. 

I hesitate to say that any particular moviemaking craze (talking here about the crazes of the movie-makers, not the viewers) kills things dead for all time. But he made a credible case for audiences avoiding reasonably competent flicks like BALLERINA and FURIOSA because audiences got burned so many times with crapfests like BIRDS OF PREY and THE MARVELS. Of course the Disney STAR WARS films were profitable even though they did what Drinker most hated-- slotting in girlbosses in place of established heroes-- but that was before we were drowned in all the MCU dreck, as well as some DC dreck as well. The new FANTASTIC FOUR movie sounds like its makers are still infected with the girlboss disease, so we'll see if it flops and validates CD's fatigue claims. 

Now I don't think this century is the first time filmmakers have overpowered female fighters. 1974's POLICEWOMEN, despite a scene in which Sondra Currie only beats Big Big Smith thanks to judo techniques, concludes with a scene where Currie vanquishes another male hulk with several straight punches and one kick. CD gives the Asian female action films a pass, but how often did chopsockies and "girls with guns" movies show women duking it out with men the same way, and not really getting thrown by a loop by superior strength blows? Only a couple hundred times, I'd say.        

Lastly, I am aware of one still successful girlboss franchise: HBO's HARLEY QUINN show, which enjoyed five seasons so far and is allegedly getting a sixth. I watched the first three seasons and thought they were all crap except for the general quality of the animation. HQ is entirely a girlboss, and the third season even has her replace Batman in the "Bat-family" of heroes. Granted, Harley earned a degree of spinoff success before HBO, and the character still seems wildly popular with cosplayers. And the HQ cartoon has an advantage over the BIRDS OF PREY movie, since the cartoon is sort of a Liberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of foul language and ultraviolence. So if HQ is the only current girlboss franchise that bucks the failures of MCU movies and of streaming shows based on the STAR WARS and STAR TREK properties, it could partly due to other factors that the pure girlboss project lacks.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (1931)

 

"...everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin."-- Zadok Allen. 

"Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent."-- the narrator of SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH (given the name "Robert Olmstead" in HPL's notes).

During my early enthusiasm for Lovecraft's works, I didn't tend to reread SHADOW, in marked contrast to the more imaginative "cosmic horror" stories. For that reason, to the extent that I thought about SHADOW in terms of the author's avowed racism, I might have even accepted the reigning critical opinion of the tale, apparently shared even by annotator Leslie Klinger. That opinion, drawn from HPL's own political writings, asserts that the horror of SHADOW-- of a repulsive race of fish-people, the Deep Ones, who intermarry with humans to produce hybrids-- was a one-on-one recapitulations of HPL's unequivocal distaste for almost anyone who was not of purebred English stock (including several dominantly Caucasian nationalities, like Italians and Poles). The two quotes above, however, suggest to me that HPL was aware that such a complexion could be placed upon his story, and that he took pains to tell readers, albeit indirectly, "no, my fish-people are not just allegories for ethnicities I don't like."      

Like CALL OF CTHULHU, SHADOW starts with an ordinary man who encounters strange phenomena that initially seem merely curious, but which eventually reveal the existence of alien conspiracies of which average society knows nothing. Unlike CTHULHU, SHADOW's opening posits that narrator Olmstead is able to alert the government to the existence of the conspiracy, resulting in a wholesale pogrom against the conspirators in the Massachusetts sea-town Innsmouth. Then, as in CTHULHU, the narrator tells us all the backstory of his horrific experience, in which he discovered that most of the inhabitants of Innsmouth were hybrid descendants of intermarriages of human beings and sea-dwelling fish-people (who are said at one point to worship Cthulhu). 

I won't dwell on the many ways HPL sells this concept via his excellent attention to detail regarding the history and physical layout of Innsmouth, since that would be impractical for a blogpost. Most of what Olmstead learns about Innsmouth comes from a 97-year-old Innsmouth resident named Zadok Allen, whose tongue Olmstead loosens by giving him liquor. Old Zadok was around as a child when Obed Marsh, one of the town's leading citizens, began trafficking with certain islands in the West Indies, and so essentially "colonized the colonizers," to play upon a current political buzzword. But because other residents of the polluted town see Olmstead talking to Zadok, they come after Olmstead. One doesn't normally think of HPL as an exciting author, but Olmstead's daring flight from Innsmouth, first by leaping out of his upper-floor apartment and then pretending to be one of the hybrids as he makes his way out of town on foot, is viscerally memorable. 

For an HPL-contemporary like Seabury Quinn, the violent suppression of a conspiracy would have been the end of the story. But the kicker to HPL's story involves Olmstead-- whose mother was of "Arkham stock"-- being much more intimately involved with the spawn of Cthulhu. And this is the great conundrum alluded to in the first quote: that as much as humans may want to believe themselves the lords of creation, they come from the dark abysses of the primal waters, where everything flows into everything else.

Now, in CALL OF CTHULHU, HPL implies that people not from Anglo-Saxon ethnicities may be degraded enough to traffic with unholy cults. Yet in SHADOW, the ones who surrender Innsmouth to the Deep Ones are the members of the town's "gently-bred" (HPL's word) families. Zadok tells Olmstead that although the spawn of the Deep Ones inhabited one particular island in the West Indies, he also mentions that the "Kanakys" of other islands despise the hybrids and eventually wipe them out, the same way the government in 1927 tries (but fails) to wipe out Innsmouth. Lastly, in one of Olmstead's most close-up descriptions of a fish-man resident, he observes that the man seems alien even though he does not look "Asian, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid." While SHADOW certainly is not "anti-racist" in the modern meaning of that term, it also indicates a different mindset from 1928's CTHULHU-- for reasons that will probably never be known.     

       

THE READING RHEUM: THE WHITE HART (1979)

 

I must have read Nancy Springer's fantasy-"pentalogy" THE BOOKS OF THE ISLE over twenty years ago, but I may not have read them in order. However, some or all of the books don't take place in the same eras, as is the more usual case with multi-book fantasy-epics. At present I don't know if I'll re-read the other four in the near future, but Springer has at least moved to the front of the line.

Springer's magic world of Isle takes place on a large island of that name, and in WHITE HART there are no indications of other contiguous lands. Celtic and Arthurian myths inform the background of this world, though Isle has no direct connection to the "real world" in any era. Many of Springer's recapitulations of mythic material is easy enough to trace: a cauldron that can bring the dead back to life comes from Welsh myth, and a stone that predicts the next ruler of Isle hearkens back to British myths behind the still-venerated "Stone of Scone."

HART's master trope, however, evolves from a romance between a mortal princess, name of Ellid, and a half-mortal, half-faery hero named Bevan. But I use the word "evolves" because Ellid, as necessary as she is to the plot, is not one of the central characters. Prior to her being rescued from captivity by Bevan, the princess is informally betrothed to her cousin Cuin, a noble warrior. He initially hates Bevan for winning Ellid's heart, but when Bevan saves Cuin from torture and probable death, Cuin feels bonded to the faery-prince. The honorable friendship between the rivals thus becomes more important to Springer's story than the romance per se, and their mutual battle to protect Isle from the death-god Pel Blagden provides the main physical conflict. However, the prophecy that Bevan, scion of an ancient fairy-race, will become Isle's High King takes some very hard-to-predict turns, as does Bevan's romance with Ellid.         

Given the cast of characters in this short novel, HART might fall into the category I've termed the "journey opera." However, based on my recollections of the other books in the series, the entire corpus of the Books of the Isle would probably constitute a "quest opera" overall.            

MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

,

The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won. 

THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life, but in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention this just to spotlight one of many aspects of commercial comics that changed once they were directed not at children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

_______________

 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.