MYTHCOMICS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK (1994-96)

 There's a certain irony that for many decades the Disney Corporation invested heavily in promulgating its version of "Americana" to the American public, through adaptations of historical events like "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" and theme-park attractions like "Frontierland." Yet, when their widespread commercial interests resulted in producing their own genuine Americana-- something with arguably deeper roots than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck-- the corporate gatekeepers treated both the creator of the work, and the creator's most ardent disciple, with something less than approbation.                                           

 I confess that though I read most of the important Carl Barks "duck books" when they were just comics that cost a dime or so, I recognized their special quality. Yet I did not become passionately devoted to the duck-world as did my rough contemporary Don Rosa. He started out simply doing fannish pastiches of Barks, but over time Rosa graduated to submitting his own art and scripts to publishers-- not to Disney, which didn't allow artists to keep original art, but to the European publisher Egmont, who kept the Disney funny-animal brand circulating overseas even when such "kids' comics" were fading from American comics shops. And his grand project, "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," was Rosa's ultimate homage to Barks. Barks had taken the originally rough character of Scrooge, in large part the epitome of the Skinflint Scot, and made him into a paean to the American success story. Rosa took the next logical step: to assemble all the data that Barks had conveyed about Scrooge in a panoply of largely discontinuous stories-- and make it into a biography that was a more organized portrait of American capitalistic triumph.                                                    

All twelve of the stories in LIFE are stand-alone stories, beginning with Scrooge's childhood in late 1800s Scotland. During these formative years, the boy becomes obsessed with making his fortune, and he keeps the first dime he ever made-- his "lucky dime," as some Barks stories called it-- as a marker of his intention to amass wealth rather than spending it.                                                                                            

One thing that distinguishes Rosa's project from simple continuity-building is that once Scrooges makes his inevitable journey to the United States to seek his fortune, Rosa exerted himself to research each historical situation in search of unique factoids, like the perils of navigating steamboats on the Great Mississippi, or a unique law about laying claims to mining property.                                                   

   

 Just like Barks, Rosa also points out both the dramatic and comedic consequences of making money, as when Young Man Scrooge finds his fair-weather friends turning away from him once he's become a man of means.                                                                                               
 

Like many fortune-hunters, Scrooge's primary relationship to the many exotic lands he visits is that of hunting for precious metals in the earth. However, on occasion the young adventurer encounters some of the metaphysical mysteries of older cultures in spite of himself, as with this Close Encounter of the Dreamtime Kind.                              

Now, in general Scrooge deals fairly with those who deal fairly with him and wreaks vengeance on those who seek to rob or swindle him. He's not the typical capitalist exploiter of the land and native cultures-- except once, when it's funny.                                                        

Rosa continues his trope of "money makes no one friends" when Scrooge returns to his native Scotland, now a millionaire. He's unquestionably arrogant about his success, but the humbler denizens of Scrooge's burg are something less than charitable. And though the above exchange was written in the early 1990s, it sounds very contemporary, with one Scot insulting the rich duck, getting insulted in turn by Scrooge, and then complaining that Scrooge is "repressin'" him.                                                                                                         

Scrooge soon returns to his adventuring ways, with his two sisters in tow (since none of his future wage-slaves, nephew Donald and Donald's own nephews, have been born yet). This time the arrogant billionaire, still focused on making more money but only through his own personal efforts, runs up against a fearsome native who's fully aware of how Scrooge means to exploit him.                                                  

This tale is also Rosa's partial rewrite of a famous Barks story, "Voodoo Hoodoo," in which the billionaire duck cheats the above-shown native chief Foola Zoola. In the Barks story, Scrooge shows no regret for his actions, but Rosa attempts to make his deviation from honest if hard-dealing labor to be a lapse in judgment-- one that Scrooge briefly regrets, only to conveniently forget about making things right.                                                                                                       

 In the final story Rosa retells the story in which the elderly, reclusive billionaire at last meets his nephew Donald and his three grandnephews, with whom he will go on to a new series of world-spanning adventures. In his notes for this story, Rosa attributes to Barks the central idea: that Scrooge's real reason for holding on to all his self-earned wealth is that every dollar, every coin is a memento of the uncompromising life he's lived. I leave it to Duckworld scholars to determine if Rosa is being overly modest on the subject. I think it's possible that Rosa is more deeply in historiography than Barks was, not least because Barks's editors may have encouraged him to avoid any topics not appropriate to children's comics-- though, because Barks was a genius, such topics made their way into the mix anyway. Incidentally, Rosa's passion for real-world history leads to the only crossover aspect of the work, apart from the final-story appearance of Donald and the nephews. As I said, all of the stories in the volume are fundamentally stand-alones, so that none of the Scottish mallard's famous foes-- Flintheart Glomgold, Soapy Slick, and the Beagle Boys-- "cross over" with one another in a given story. However, in one story Scrooge has a brief encounter with none other than the legendary Wyatt Earp. True, it's Wyatt Earp depicted as a funny animal-- but it's a charisma-type crossover all the same.      

ICONS AND IDENTIFICATION

In MY SHORTEST POST YET I sated that what I term "icons" are the parts of narrative through which readers identify with various presences in fictional narrative, and without such identificatory figures, no one would ever invest any thought or feeling into the broad plot-scenarios called "tropes." This assertion brings me back to an elaboration of my "law of identification," which I gave its first full elaboration in the 2011 essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY.                                                                                                                                                                                   Briefly, the essay addressed a speaker's failure to define fictional characters as vessels of identification, choosing to simply deem them "unreal" by a positivist philosophy. I responded by contrasting my law of identification with the "law of identity" attributed to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to wit:                                                           

"Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this: Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."                                                                   

I have sometimes wondered if, before Plato wrote down a sentence or two that Socrates may (or may not) have spoken, these respective philosophers were aware of pre-Socratic traditions, or even religious concepts, that asserted that two unalike things could be the same in some quasi-mystical fashion, and that the later philosophers were reacting against that idea in forming the rudiments of the "law of identity." Be that as it may, art, particularly in the form of literature, was already devoted to forging identification between fictional characters who did not exist and non-fictional readers/audiences who enjoyed at least a temporally fixed existence. In any event, it should be further noted that no individual's identification with a fictional character is completely identical with another reader's identification. It's only the broad process of bringing a character "to life" that is identical in all "real readers." The reader takes his cue from the expectations that the author sets up as to the "reality" of the text. But that reality can fluctuate, as noted in this essay: '"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.' By extension, this means that although in the real world, Old Gene Phillips sustains "the law of identity" with Young Gene Phillips, there is no such law governing Superboy and Superman, or Dick Grayson Robin with Dick Grayson Nightwing. The latter pairings have different end-results for their identificatory processes, even if the overall process remains the same, and so Superman can be "phase shifted" into the different identity of Superboy-- even though anyone reading the stories of either character knows that they are the same character at different age-ranges.         

THE READING RHEUM: LAND OF TERROR (1939/1944)

 When I blogged my review for SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR, I mistakenly thought that it was the next to last of the series, since the first three parts of SAVAGE were printed in magazines in 1942, while LAND OF TERROR didn't get any serializations whatever and went straight to book publication in 1944. However, I didn't note the year in which ERB is supposed to have completed TERROR, which is recorded as 1939. What may have happened is that ERB submitted TERROR to all of the usual magazines, got turned down over a period of years, and started SAVAGE in 1942 despite TERROR's failure to generate serialization income. Then, possibly due to constraints on ERB's time, he didn't finish writing the last part of SAVAGE until 1944-- and then either it didn't get submitted to magazines (about two years after the third SAVAGE-section was printed) or it just went into a safe, until getting printed very belatedly, both in AMAZING STORIES (where I first read it) and in an Ace Books publication. According to Wiki, 1944 was also the last year in which ERB produced a substantial amount of writing, his productivity naturally declining in his final six years of life. A final irony is that in my estimation, TERROR is the best of the adventures to focus only upon David Innes, and I see no good reason for the SF-magazines of the forties to have turned it down, unless the ERB brand was just getting a little "old-timey" even in that time-period.                   

   I complained in my review of the first two David Innes books that Innes seemed too much "an incarnation of Manifest Destiny" than a person. This wasn't an explicit critique of the colonial mindset that informs a lot of Burroughs works, though. My stance is that it is possible for an author to produce good literature even if the author subscribed to problematic beliefs, and though ERB has often been pilloried for his politics, often his critics make snap judgments based on incomplete knowledge. For instance, I mentioned in reviewing AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the first human species Innes encounters is that of "Black monkey-men with tails," which to many would seem a slam-dunk proof of racism. Yet late in TERROR, even though ERB again mentions the monkey-men in a stray recollection by the hero, Innes also spends a protracted period as the somewhat-unwilling guest of a tribe of "handsome" Black humans, who only spare him the fate of slavery-- which fate they usually extend to white Pellucidaran captives-- because he can teach them useful techniques. Yet if ERB were a thoroughgoing racist, could he write a somewhat satirical passage like this one:                                               

The men are monogamous and very proud of their bloodline. Under no circumstances will they mate with a white, as they consider the white race far inferior to theirs. I could never quite accustom myself to this reversal of the status of the two races from what I had always been accustomed to; but it really was not as difficult as it might appear, for I must admit that the blacks treated us with far greater toleration here than our dark-skinned races are accorded on the outer crust. Perhaps I was getting a lesson in true democracy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ERB doesn't entirely repudiate his screed about trying to advance the Stone Age world, but in the later novels he includes many more acidulous remarks comparing the violence of primitives versus that of "sophisticated" humans, like this one.                                                   

 

Silently I fitted an arrow to my bow and waited until the entire file was well within the ambush. I bent the bow and took careful aim. This was savage warfare, warfare of the Stone Age. Of course, we lacked poison gas, and we couldn't drop bombs on women and children and hospitals; but in our own primitive way we could do fairly well; and so I released my arrow, and as it sunk deep into the body of the last man in the file, I gave the signal for the Ruvan warriors to attack.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       And though TERROR is not the first novel to include such observations, it's the only one I considered to possess high-mythicity, due to establishing a strong symbolic opposition between Innes' "Yankee ingenuity" and the bizarre rules of the Earth's Core. For instance, for most of the series, ERB established that every native Pellucidaran has an innate ability to "home in" on his place of birth, no matter how far he may be from said locale. Most of the time, this concept just made it easy for the heroes to get to a given destination with the help of a native guide from said domain. But during Innes' sojourn with the Black people known as Ruvans, this becomes problematic because the Ruvans inhabit one of several "floating islands," meaning that Innes' navigation problems become extremely complicated-- all in an entertaining manner, of course.       

               

All that said, TERROR is, like all the other books in the series, very episodic, and two of the shorter episodes may owe something to ERB's 1924 TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN. In that story, the ape-man meets a tribe of hairy women who dominate their weak menfolk, and a race of humans who use technology to become as small as ants. Innes is briefly enslaved by another tribe, the hairy, man-dominating Women of Oog, but unlike Tarzan, Innes doesn't stay in the Oogians' domain long enough to reform their aberrant culture. And instead of men as small as ants, Innes also encounters ants as large as men, who hold Innes and a Ruvan tribesman prisoner. How do the embattled humans escape? Well, there's this giant ant bear, and...                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Innes and his wife Dian also remain captives of the Jukans, who are  all more or less crazy and may be a spoof of the madness of civilization. Dian doesn't get as much action here as she would in the final novel, but toward the end, when ERB was in a hurry to wrap things up neatly, she's said to have slain the man who kidnapped her before being reunited with Innes-- surely one of the few times a Burroughs heroine brought about her own rescue.    

THE READING RHEUM: SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR (1942/1944)

I've still not read all of the ERB oeuvre, but SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR definitely comes at the top of any list of "the women-led books of Edgar Rice Burroughs." It might also be the only one on the list, But Still...                                                                                                                   

By saying this, I'm not by extension agreeing with the modern idea of "equity:" that there ought to be, in boys' entertainment, just as many female heroines as there are male heroes. Burroughs wrote rousing adventures for male readers, though unlike some similar writers, he did include a fair amount of romance that could in theory appeal to female readers. I'd argue, though, that often, once ERB finished hooking up his male heroes with their romantic interests within the bonds of marriage, he sometimes didn't know what to do with them, with the obvious exception of Tarzan. So often, as in many of the serials, he would "spin off" a new hero with nominal connections to the "parent hero," and said hero would then have his own romantic arc. In the Pellucidar series, this pattern applies to both the preceding novels to SAVAGE: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR and BACK TO THE STONE AGE.                                                              

  Yet, although there is a new romantic arc in SAVAGE for young warrior Hodon (who serves in David Innes' army) and the feisty tribeswoman O-aa, technically this novel is still a David Innes novel, even though he doesn't have a major role until the latter half of the tale. Moreover, his mate Dian the Beautiful gets as much narrative emphasis as he does. Usually, even the more tempestuous ERB ladies tend to exist to test the hero's resolve. But in this novel, I would say that Innes, Dian, Hodon and O-aa share ensemble status in this novel alone.                                                                                         

Like all of the other Pellucidar novels, the story is comprised by an episodic series of "escapes from captivity" and "search and rescue missions." Thus there's no point in summarizing the incidents, though the best sequences are those in which both Dian and O-aa are forced to serve as "earthly goddesses" to superstitious city-dwellers. Unlike many ERB heroines, these Stone Age beauties are unflinchingly violent in defending themselves. When Hodon steals a kiss from O-aa mere hours after having first met her, she cuts a slit in his chest with her stone knife, and later she stabs one of her captors to death with a spear. Dian and a male warrior have a standout scene having a bloody battle against a plesiosaur, and both females prove clever in playing upon the foolish ways of civilized people. Not that Stone Age cavepeople haven't been as dotty in previous books in the series, but we just don't see many of them this time out.                                                                                                     

           
    SAVAGE also offers ERB's best comical villain. This is an old man from 1800s Connecticut, made functionally immortal by his time in Pellucidar, but because he can't remember his name after so many years, the Pellucidaran natives dub him "Ah-Gilak," meaning "old man." Sometimes ERB calls him "the old man whose name was not Dolly Dorcas," which I won't explain but which I found moderately funny. Even before landing in the Stone Age world, Ah-Gilak was forced to eat from human corpses to live, and he delivered a strong liking for the flesh of his own species. ERB gets a lot of mileage from this goofy old codger, who's only an ally out of convenience but always poses some degree of menace.                           

  Though ERB started this novel in 1942, following it in 1944 with LAND OF TERROR, the last in the series, for many years it was not fully extant. To explain, I'll content myself with linking to this excellent writeup of the novel's history and conclude by stating that SAVAGE stands as one of the best books in the series, eclipsed only by the TANAR novel. Oh, and though this is a David Innes novel, I deem it a minor crossover because it does include a brief scene with Stellara, the female mate of Tanar-- and the two of them, by my logic, exist in their own "sub-universe" rather than being part of Innes' regular cosmos.                                               

ADULTERATED COMICS

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

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

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

THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

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

                                                     

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

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

                   

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

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

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

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

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

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

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