DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3

 In January I wrote two essays under the heading DUELING DUALITIES, here and here, regarding how William James' "two forms of knowledge" probably influenced Carl Jung's four functions. The first essay is also one of those incidents where I used the words "ontology" and "epistemology" a bit incorrectly. I corrected that oversight in May of this year with A TALE OF TWO COSMS, substituting the terms "ontocosm" as "the totality of lateral values" in a work and "epicosm" as "the totality of vertical values." 

In TALE, I gave an example of two classic comics-serials in which one showed a stronger epicosm than an ontocosm, and vice versa:

Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm.  

I should qualify this, though, by stating that FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age (particularly Stan Lee's red-headed stepchild, the Pym of a Thousand Names). In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them. This may be because, IMO, The Inhumans were primarily Jack Kirby's concept, and Stan Lee never really "got" them. So, taking in the totality of lateral elements-- which are, I should reiterate, the elements through which readers most directly relate to the characters' exploits-- the FF-ontocosm is weaker than that of SPIDER-MAN. These factors may also relate to the reasons why SPIDER-MAN quickly overtook FANTASTIC FOUR as the flagship of the Marvel line, while the FF often struggled to remain relevant in the decades following the Silver Age.  

Possibly because Lee and Ditko were so focused upon melodramatic exigencies, though, there wasn't much room to focus on dialectical and mythopoeic values. Ditko's villains are "marvels" of costume design, but they don't arouse many abstract associations in comparison to Galactus, the Puppet Master, The Red Ghost, Klaw and Doctor Doom. This contrast raises the possibility that, to borrow from another set of Jamesian terms, SPIDER-MAN was focused more on "the perceptual" while FANTASTIC FOUR was focused more on "the conceptual."  More on these matters later, perhaps.