THE READING RHEUM: THE TEMPEST (1611)

 I only "reviewed" one other Shakespeare play in THE TOILS OF TROILUS, but THE TEMPEST is without a doubt a more important, both as Shakespeare's last important play and a last flowering of the fantasy-genre before the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, as I discussed in this essay:   

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.

I don't retract this analysis, but the world of European theater may not have nearly as much of a cutoff in terms of metaphenomenal works as the chivalric romance did. Certainly Shakespeare seemed to go his own way and was generally popular even if many currents in European lit were leaning towards more naturalistic/isophenomenal concepts. Before 1600, WS's most important metaphenomenal work was A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, while after 1600 we see such classics with fantastic content as HAMLET, KING LEAR (perhaps arguable), MACBETH and finally TEMPEST. Still, after Shakespeare, other authors of the 1600s are not very imaginatively impressive until we reach Milton's PARADISE LOST in 1667, when the Renaissance is over and the Enlightenment is in full bloom.

My strongest take-away from this reading of TEMPEST is that though I'm perpetually amazed by the four mythopoeic characters of the play-- Prospero, Miranda, Ariel and Caliban-- all of the other characters, including the indispensable groom-figure Ferdinand, are thoroughly unimaginative. Since WS was notable for infusing even very minor characters with strong moments of humanity, the paucity of wit in the drunk clowns Trinculo and Stephano is amazing. I can't help considering that WS was so deeply invested in the four characters of his "magical island" that he simply couldn't spare any attention for the quotidian types. And there's a special irony in this, since the theme of TEMPEST is all about leaving behind the worlds of magic-- even good magic-- in order to rejoin the domain of ordinary mortals. 

More to come...          

TRAILER THOUGHTS

 Last year the only superhero movies I saw in theaters were SUPERMAN and FANTASTIC FOUR, not because I thought they were likely to be great movies but because those franchises are two of the most important in Comic Book Land. I've passed on theatrical screenings of other superhero movies of the Big Two-- BRAVE NEW WORLD, THUNDERBOLTS, SUPERGIRL-- but now that I've seen both the DOOMSDAY trailer and a few breakdowns of said trailer, I'm a little pumped to see this one in the theater.

I have no doubt that DOOMSDAY will be an unwieldly melange of maybe ten-twenty plotlines from both MCU feature films and TV shows. But in one way, this could be a good thing.

Way back in 1985, I gave a negative review to Marvel Comics' SECRET WARS, which was probably as banal as DOOMSDAY *might* be-- and for similar reasons, because writer Jim Shooter also dumped together a bunch of unrelated plotlines, none of which proved to have lasting emotional resonance (with the possible exception of Spider-Man's Black Costume). DOOMSDAY will also lead into the MCU's version of SECRET WARS the following year, so it seems a safe bet that *someone* in the DOOMSDAY production team looked at how Shooter had handled the juggling of about forty super-characters. I don't even know if Hollywood types care about SECRET WARS having been a big moneymaker in its day, mostly with toy-buying kids and hardcore readers. All the Hollywood people *might* care about is finding some way to make all these characters work together enough to make a respectable profit.

So both DOOMSDAY and its next-year sequel probably won't be any better than Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS. 

But you know what DOOMSDAY will be better than?

ANY SUPERHERO FILM WITH EXPLICIT POLITICAL CONTENT.

A big splashy multi-crossover film will be concerned almost exclusively with saving multiple universes, and thus there *should* be no time to devote to political pontification.

And-- *that's a good thing.*

Besides, DOOMSDAY/WARS may kill off the Simu Liu version of Shang-Chi, whose existence I regard as a travesty of the original. That alone would make even the most tedious farrago more palatable.    

       

   

OBJECTIVE POWER, SUBJECTIVE POTENCY

 I ended ACTIVITY AND RESONANCE, MEET POWER AND POTENCY with the following sentence: 'A future essay will explore the possible linkages between the concepts of "power" and of the marvelous phenomenality.' I may have, over the past month, given the subject such scrutiny that whatever I would have written in June only partly resembles this essay.

Some correlation between the dyad "activity/resonance" and that of "objectivity/subjectivity" was probably inevitable. I haven't written about the latter topic in recent years as I did in this blog's early years, nor about the related opposition, "cognitive/affective." In 2020's NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT.  3, I indicated that I wasn't quite persuaded by Whitehead to abandon the "objective/subjective" distinction. I did, however, stump for intersubjectivity as a sort of societal "middle ground," wherein subjective opinions on constructs like literature and religion, operating through masses of individuals, wreak effects just as "objective" as (say) the tree that falls in the forest but makes no sound because no one's there to hear it.

In the aforementioned ACTIVITY AND RESONANCE essay, I said '"activity" subsists in characters DOING certain things; "resonance" subsists in characters BEING certain things.' My current answer to the question of the relation between the concepts of "power" and of the marvelous phenomenality is as follows: the marvelous phenomenality is the mirror-image of the naturalistic phenomenality with which all (or nearly all) sentient individuals live. In marvelous fiction, elves and spaceships are as objective as kitchen sinks and toilets in naturalistic fiction, and so all such phenomena are manifestations of objective power. Uncanny fiction, as I've mentioned before, is an amphibian phenomenality, responsive to the other two domains in differing degrees. ranging from "active" to "passive" as specified in the ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES series. Thus the uncanny domain is dominantly associated with potency, which only becomes relevant through the intersubjectivity of resonance.

One of the major uncanny tropes, that of "freakish flesh," provides some apposite examples. Many comics-fans, to whom the adjective "super" connotes only the marvelous, would not regard the criminals of DICK TRACY as "super-villains," because in terms of power most of them are just ordinary men or women. However, some have a "potency" based in the repugnance of their physical appearance, as with Littleface, Flattop, The Mole, The Brow, BB Eyes, Pruneface and Mrs. Pruneface. One gangster, Mumbles, stands out from the crowd due to sound rather than sight: his peculiar way of running all his words together confers passive potency on him as well. The same standard applies to the crooks with physical tics: Itchy, Laffy and Shaky. Of the malcontents pictured, only two are exceptions to passive potency. The first exception is Influence, a fiend whose abilities with hypnotism register as "active potency," partly because he wears uncanny gadgets: contact lenses that amplify his mesmeric stare.  And the second exception, Shoulders, is merely an example of naturalistic potency. His having slightly-broader shoulders than average might help him stand out in a crowd, but there's no sense of *strangeness* about a man having broad shoulders.

         

 

DIDACTIC DOWNSIZING

 This may be a minor categorizing matter even to me, but if nothing else it's another excuse to explore a recurring question: how do the two "vertical values," the didactic and mythic potentialities, sometimes come into conflict?

In 2015 I wrote:

these examples raise another point: are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing" story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)? -- REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, PT. 1.

This essay didn't concern the potentialities, much less the even later concepts of "ontocosm and epicosm," but the subject of "big events" showed up in a 2025 essay that did include such matters:

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong vertical elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the cowboy-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing. -- A TALE OF TWO COSMS.

Now I'd say that I was incorrect to attribute, in the COSMS essay, my favoring of "landmark" crossover stories to lateral values-- even "potential" ones. If I've celebrated THE GAMBLER: LUCK OFTHE DRAW as a landmark crossover, while admitting that its lateral values are not that great-- then there must be some other factor that made me celebrate it alongside "To Become an Avenger," which did have such lateral values.           

So, while reconsidering the origins of my own take on "landmark stories," I happened to think of the REFLECTIONS essay, in which I was to some extent opposed to celebrating so-so "landmark stories" (Joker's first appearance) over better-crafted tales ("The Joker's Millions"). Why did I do in one essay what I faulted my "opponent" for doing? Well, because a liking for landmarks comprises an intellectual shorthand. "First Joker story," "first and only mega-crossover of TV westerns"-- these are quick ways of assigning didactic value to a particular story in terms of "making a breakthrough." Such a prioritizing is not exactly "wrong," because it also relates to the way the populace often judges stories. It's simply a very limited form of didactic thinking that can be incorporated into a wider perspective.           

 

EXCITING REACTIONS! REACTIVE EXCITEMENT! PT. 2

 I wrote the previous essay in this series back in April, but of course in the meantime I've been applying the "excitant/reactant" dyad to various other narratives. In the April essay I deliberately chose very simple examples of the dyad between Prime icon and assorted Sub icons by focusing on Japanese kaiju films. Here I want to discourse on a more involved narrative, which includes not just a "protagonist" amd "antagonist" but also assorted icons who may be aligned to either entity or may have no clear alignment to either.

My choice this time is Roger Corman's 1957 horror-movie THE UNDEAD. Within a tidy 75 minutes of screen-time, the script by Charles B Griffith and Mark Hanna offers a variegated cast of characters, beginning with the three who occupy the film's frame-story: the psychic researcher Quintus, his patient Diana Love, and Quintus' mentor.

My review noted that UNDEAD was "spiritually" indebted to the prose bestseller THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY, and this is never clearer than in the frame-story, wherein Quintus takes the part of the delver into the unknown by hypnotizing prostitute Diana Love into experiencing her previous life in another time and place. I stress that the bare bones of this frame story COULD have been expanded into a full narrative, wherein Quintus as the experimenter was the excitant and Diana the reactant. though either could have become the Prime icon depending on the narrative emphasis. Indeed, two other reincarnation dramas of the same period show opposing emphases. In SPELL OF THE HYPNOTIST, the psychiatrist uses his hypnosis-talents to play detective, actually invalidating the reactant-icon's claim to reincarnation. In THE SHE CREATURE, the vengeful researcher Lombardi functions as the excitant, calling up the titular creature from the vasty deep to occupy the body of his reactant-subject, a modern young woman. But it's the woman, in her dual identity as modern innocent and primeval monster, who drives the narrative. (I should note that CREATURE also includes a bevy of secondary reactants, mostly opposed to Lombardi's goals though at least one becomes the mad doctor's ally by not taking his threat seriously.)

So, back to UNDEAD. Once the true, internal story gets going-- that of Diana's "former life," Elizabethan-era Helene-- it becomes evident that the innocent Helene is both reactant and Prime Icon, while the witch Livia, who frames Helene with a spurious charge of Satanic sorcery. is both excitant and Sub Icon. Although Helene spends most of the film fleeing from pillar to post, in the end she sacrifices her life for the sake of the temporal order. (That's my version of the confusing rationale supplied by Griffith and Hanna.) Her reaction to the evil fate assigned her by the murderous Livia is the crux of the story, in marked contrast to the majority of witch-stories, where the actions of the sorceress, whether malign or benign, are usually the narrative focus. 

Helene and Livia both perish, though in the far future Diana Love somehow gains a new lease on life thanks to Helene's sacrifice. As for Quintus, his importance in the main narrative devolves to that of being an ally to Helene. The transplanted researcher saves Helene's swain Pendragon from selling his soul to Livia's dark lord, and as a result Pendragon dispenses rough justice by killing Livia. Quintus, like many other scientists who get wrapped up in their experiments, forgets that he's dependent on the "psychic hotline" he set up between Diana and Helene, and once Helene dies, Quintus can't return to the 20th century-- much to the amusement of Livia's horn-headed patron.

Though evil scores two wins in THE UNDEAD. the conclusion is meant to reassure the viewer that Helene's sacrifice tips the scales toward the preservation of an orderly, and thus good, cosmos. Though as I said the writers don't really provide a good explanation for that order, it now occurs to me that they COULD have said that in the original timeline Helene dies and Pendragon still kills Livia and then marries someone else-- and thus Helene, in sacrificing herself, preserves the temporal progeny of Pendragon's other wife. But such details probably would have doubled UNDEAD's sparse run-time.              

CURIOSITIES: "SWEET LITTLE FOURTEEN"

 Now this one makes AMERICAN SHOTACON looks "normie" by comparison. I've mentioned that I usually don't read online humor comics issue by issue but skip around to see what I might click on randomly. Which is how I stumbled across issue 345 of ARCHIE'S GIRLS BETTY AND VERONICA, and found this:

 

 

 

I don't think I was reading any ARCHIE comics in the early 1970s, so I didn't know that there was a story in which Veronica had a little-girl cousin named Pamela, who created some mischief and then fell in love with Jughead. But GCD established as much for me, after I was thunderstruck by the bizarre 1986 follow-up to the 1972 story: "Sweet Little Fourteen."

I mean, I would never have blinked an eye had the story dealt with a SIXTEEN-year old girl who intruded on the territory of Betty, Veronica and their similarly ageless teen buddies. But the writer goes out of her way not to just state that Pamela is now a well-developed fourteen, but that both Archie and Reggie keep salivating over Pamela even AFTER they've been told she's nowhere close to legal.

My only guess as to why such a story would appear in a squeaky-clean ARCHIE title is that (1) someone in editorial was asleep at the wheel, AND (2) that the 1986 writer was exorcising some demons, maybe regarding some bf with freaky tastes.   

MYTHCOMICS" "SNOW WHITE AND THE DEADLY DWARFS" (VAMPIRELLA #39, 1975)

 

Once or twice, I've stated that I believe that the crafting of concrescent mythcomics is a democratic talent. It doesn't appear only in the works of whatever persons are deemed "the Greats" of the medium. That said, raconteurs who produce a lot of material to sustain themselves as professionals may not always do their best work in the best-known features. For instance, both Gerry Conway and Len Wein had long tenures on the SPIDER-MAN title, but neither of them produced much of anything with a strong symbolic discourse. Each also labored in the world of the horror genre, though, and so I did find that they did rather better in that bailiwick. Steve Skeates is another writer whose contributions to superhero titles I found ordinary, but I recently came across this 1975 story. Since I usually don't read that many Warren horrors, I credit the oddball title "Snow White and the Deadly Dwarfs" with drawing me into this story Skeates co-authored with one Gerry Boudreau-- though the Esteban Maroto art held some appeal as well.     

The first two pages of this six-page effort establish that beautiful Myra Banner possesses an unexplained antipathy toward the outside world. Her backstory mentions that she did desert her "hortus conclusus" briefly to attend college at the Pennsylvania-based Swarthmore, where she was given the nickname "Snow White" as a comment on her reluctance to surrender her virginity, even to her nominal boyfriend Warren. Yet even Warren didn't believe that she lived with seven little bearded men, who seemed vaguely menacing though they never spoke to her nor interacted with her. 

Warren, for his part, has been extraordinarily patient, since he's continued to date her for three years after they both graduated college. He journeys to her fusty mansion to appeal to her once more, while to herself Myra wonders "what it was [about her body] that made those filthy men want to touch it." This minor detail makes an interesting contrast with the traditional Snow White story, in that the reader always knows that Snow is the "fairest in the land" even though the heroine herself is not aware of her burgeoning attractiveness.

     

The short tale proceeds to its climax as quickly as Warren attempts to argue his case, kissing Myra for the first time ever. Instead of Myra being awakened from a state of death by "true love's kiss," the kiss causes Myra to feel the need of protection-- and for the first time, the dwarfs speak, promising Myra their protection as they stab Warren to death. However, it's no great surprise that the dwarfs turn out to be projections of Myra's mind, and she's the one who really slays Warren to guard her purity.

The SNOW WHITE story in its best-known version has little to do with sexual fear, but it does center upon the young girl's need of a male protector. Most stories barely mention the father who inflicts on Snow the wrath of an irate stepmother, but in the standard tale, the seven dwarfs are manifestly unable to keep Snow from being killed, as the queen almost succeeds twice before apparently offing Snow on the third try. What the writers did here was to eliminate female fear of other females and to put Myra in between competing male protectors-- a contest which Warren manifestly loses. The traditional Snow is also a symbol of feminine purity, which makes her a willing prize for her prince charming. But here, though Myra considers that Warren endangered her sexual purity, she's also unwilling to accept her responsibility for violence, deflecting it onto "little men" who, despite their masculine nature, will never do anything to Myra but  to keep her in the state of isolation she desires.

One additional myth-trope appears in the eminent character's name. The last name "Banner" originally meant "one who carries a banner," as in wartime-- meaning someone who champions a cause. And while the name "Myra" may have two or three possible origins, the most relevant speculation is that it began as an anagram for "Mary." I hardly need mention the association of THAT name with the concept of feminine inviolability.    

         

 
     

MYTHCOMICS: "PLAYTHINGS OF PERIL" (SUPERMAN #44, 1947)

 

I've made no secret of my exasperation with most Golden Age SUPERMAN stories, despite their being under the creative control of the two men who originated the hero and so jump-started the costumed hero craze. After the inspired story of the Man of Steel's beginnings on Krypton, Siegel, Shuster and their various uncredited collaborators treated Superman like just another job, requiring no more effort than simple junk like "Federal Men" or "Slam Bradley." Admittedly, the majority of DC heroes weren't much better. But even though there might not be a ton of concrescent mythcomics at DC or at any other Golden Age company, I can find a lot more "near-myths" in the more popular features-- BATMAN, WONDER WOMAN, JUSTICE SOCIETY-- and a prevalence of near-myths, more than full myths, indicates that the comics-makers were engaged with creating inventive fantasies with which to grab the attention of kid-buyers.

But I finally found a concrescent SUPERMAN myth, albeit one published in the same year that Siegel and Shuster lost their contract with DC Comics, though the creators' names are cited on the first page of "Playthings." Fans identified the true authors as writer Don Cameron (who also co-created the story's villain) and artist Ira Yarbrough (who may have worked from roughs created by Shuster, though there's no record of even that contribution).

The first story-page establishes that "Playthings" will deal in part with economic hardship. To his credit, Jerry Siegel did a fair number of such tales, with the first appearing in ACTION COMICS #3, but those I've read I've found a trifle sappy. Cameron shows a harder edge. When Clark Kent and Lois Lane call upon the public to send help to the indigent of Metropolis, Clark notes that they aren't getting much response from the wealthy, who "sometimes need urging." And for once, Superman's foe the Toyman is on the same wavelength, though he wants to use the stinginess of the rich to enrich himself. Toyman approaches several businessmen with publicity schemes involving his fabulous toys: schemes for which the magnates pay nothing while they get a reputation for philanthropy. Toyman's remark is apposite: "They're all alike, these rich businessmen! Show them how to get something for nothing and they're happy!"

Toyman's game is yet another riff on the Trojan Horse: he hides cameras and microphones in the toys in order to glean info, and he also rigs the toys to malfunction so the rich guys will summon Toyman to repair the mechanisms. During the villain's first heist, the Man of Steel shows up. Since Toyman's weapons couldn't hurt the hero, the crook has to distract Superman with threats to human life, and, more amusingly, a company's tax records (!) 

 Superman foils Toyman's thefts, but when the hero makes a direct appeal to the charitable nature of the assembled businessmen, they turn a deaf ear. The rejoinder "I won't donate a penny to failures" is implicitly an indictment to all of them. Superman, however, promises that they'll soon learn the error of their ways.

   Just as Toyman realized that he could pull off crimes by using the magnates' desire for positive publicity, Superman figures out that he can compel ethical behavior with the threat of negative publicity. Ironically, about thirty years later, this is exactly how Siegel and Shuster were able to get pensions and credit lines out of stingy DC: by threatening to give bad publicity to the upcoming SUPERMAN movie. As for Toyman, the crusader lures him out of hiding by using another effigy to mock the reprobate for being in his "second childhood." Yet Superman doesn't give his foe adequate credit. Without Toyman's greed, the Man of Steel would have had no club to hold over the heads of the rich men, to make them correct a problem that required use of capital rather than super-powers. It's refreshing that at no time does the audience see the businessmen soften their hearts; they end up paying a hefty price for seeking free publicity, but at the end of the story they're still acquisitive greedheads. The end scene, in which the slums of the financially afflicted are consumed in "the greatest bonfire in the history of Metropolis" is particularly effective, giving the dissemination of bounty a touch of ritualism.

Jerry Siegel probably had no creative input into Cameron's story, except in the sense that Siegel first articulated the idea of the Herculean hero playing the role of a trickster, using satire and deception to make foolish mortals do the right thing.       

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE SUPER-FOES FROM PLANET X" (WORLD'S FINEST #96, 1958)

 

I've written elsewhere about how science fiction content increased in the "Superman Family" books of the late 1950s, but I confess I usually wasn't factoring in the WORLD'S FINEST comic, which began co-starring Batman and Robin with Superman. starting in 1954. I can't see how this feature could have been ruled by the alleged dictum to make the SUPERMAN titles resemble the 1952-58 ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, though I may be prejudiced in that I saw heavy SF-content in the reprints I saw in my youth. Only a thorough study of the feature during the 1950s would answer the question one way or the other.

The only credited editor on WF 96 is Whitney Ellsworth, though the real work may have been any of his subordinates, such as Jack Schiff, who in these same years had been persuaded to insert more aliens into his two BATMAN titles. Most of these Bat-tales are not well regarded. But what didn't work well in the chronicles of the Dynamic Duo had often charming results for the "World's Finest" team, particularly thanks to the combined talents of writer Edmond Hamilton and artist Dick Sprang. 

Hamilton, one of the great space-opera writers of SF's Golden Age, outdid himself in "Super-Foes" with colorful alien monsters to test the united talents of Dynamic Duo and Man of Steel. Three times a disembodied voice warns the heroes of extraterrestrial menaces, starting with the "Solar Sponge."

On Batman's advice, Superman overloads the Sponge with amplified solar power. Then the voice warns of the menace of The Storm Top. a colossal whirligig that can whip up sea-tempests.

  The heroes send the Top spinning off into space (hope it doesn't land on J'onn J'onzz's Mars, or something). The voice then directs the good guys to a third locale, where they meet The Crawler, an insect that can make humans shrink with its antenna-vibrations.

  Once again, even in miniscule forms, teamwork vanquishes the ornery arthropod. Then the voice summons the heroes to yet another locale, where, after a little more trouble, they learn what's going on-- though it doesn't make a lot of sense when read by an adult.

So the sentients of Planet X lost the power to repair many of the machines with which they'd defended themselves from their world's natural predators. Ok, the message about not becoming too dependent on technology is okay, but the delivery needed some work. What Hamilton proposes is that despite the Xians' lack of overall knowledge, they conveniently retain the knowledge of how to operate one of their starships and to load it with specimens of Planet X predators for the Earth-heroes to overcome. The aliens' rationale for setting up the creature-fights is almost a recapitulation of the WORLD'S FINEST team's raison d'etre: having been given graphic examples of how nonpowered and super-powered heroes work together, the Xians claim they'll train themselves like Batman and Robin while having their robots perform super-feats. Of course, the real reason for the complicated deception was to intrigue the reader. And even at my current age, I found myself intrigued with the question of who started the trope of "hoax perpetrated by well-meaning types rather than thieves/murderers." But that's a question for another essay.         

PRIDE GOETH BEFORE A NATION

 Yesterday the United States passed its 250th anniversary. Since I probably will not be around for the 300th one, this is my last opportunity to discuss the question of what makes the nation special within an anniversary-context.

Many years ago, someone asked me if I was, as the song lyric goes, "proud to be an American." I recollect that at the time I was probably infected with some of the Liberal guilt-complex, so thinking about "The Indians" and "The Slaves" made outright pride difficult. Yet even then, I think I was aware that the nations that preceded America-- both in the Old Worlds of Asia and Europe, and in the pre-Columbian tribes of the "New World"-- had bloodied their hands so deeply in unjustifiable suffering that by comparison American hands  barely have more than red stains on their fingernails.

The culture of guilt-- which only APPEARS to be the polar opposite of pride-- has resulted in many recent clickbait articles on the subject of the 250th anniversary. The general gist of the articles seems to be "Conservatives are proud to be Americans, Liberals are not." A recent speech by New York Mayor Mandami takes a more cunning strategy, seeking to redefine American pride in terms of fighting entrenched power.

The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel — the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.  

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal. America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.  

 

The problem with this simplistic "fight the power" ethic is that it says nothing about what it means if this nation, or any nation, acquires power, or any particular reason to use power in the manner Liberals approve of. For instance, if many Liberals think that the nation should have "open borders" while Conservatives disagree, then Mandami's logic is that the only possible reason for opposing Liberal permissiveness must be that old devil Racism. 

That's why I stated that guilt only appeared to be the polar opposite of pride. Mandami doesn't feel the weight of the collective guilt he seeks to foist upon his listeners; he's given himself exculpation by pretending to be one of The Elect. He doesn't want to be proud of the whole America, which like all other tribes and nations includes both dark sins, often undertaken for survival, and examples of far-sighted illumination. He's proud only of being an American Liberal, and any sins he commits are justified by the battle against entrenched interests. The idea that some Liberal causes become entrenched interests-- and that they would thus engender resentment and opposition-- would never occur to Mandami, though such opposition entirely fits with his cant that "nothing is fixed into place."

Today, though I'm still wary of the misuses of both patriotism and anti-patriotism, I'd say that no tribe or nation without the basic pride of self-survival: the pride that says, "We deserve to exist." Proverbs says that "pride goeth before destruction," but I believe the writer opposed the sort of pride in which individuals set themselves against the good of the people, which is symbolized as the will of God. Anti-patriots like Mandami don't ever care about the overall good of the people, and while a super-patriot like Trump may not care about people as such, he *may* be more likely to act in the interest of the nation as a whole.

In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, "The pride of the peacock is the glory of God." This is the self-assertiveness of all natural living things, even in creatures incapable of justifying their existences. When White settlers bought Black slaves from Muslim slave-dealers and used these slaves to carve a nation out of the wilderness, I can cavil as well as anyone that the decision was morally wrong. But I didn't live with the difficulties of frontier life, and I don't know absolutely that those slaveholders weren't partly justified in desiring to control a work force that couldn't pick up and leave when it pleased. My current answer to that long-ago question is that I am proud of the concatenation of wills, good and bad, that it took to make this country, and that I am also proud that the USA has done more than good than bad than most if not all of their predecessors.                    

             

THE READING RHEUM: FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953)

 

I liked most of Ray Bradbury's early works in my younger years. but on subsequent re-readings, certain works have struck me as somewhat precious and/or pretentious. For instance, I reread SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES a while back, but I found the novel too much "a thing or shreds and patches" for my taste. I even thought the 1983 film felt more coherent.

I didn't have that problem with FAHRENHEIT 451. Because the book is one of Bradbury's most popular works, there are ample articles talking about how the author wove together elements from several earlier narratives, abortive or otherwise. Yet even the few elements that didn't seem to work that well, such as the mechanical Hound at the fire station, were subsumed by the strength of the master trope: firemen who set fires.

In one commentary, Bradbury described 451 as a romance between not male and female, but between readers and their reading-materials. That's probably why there's no hint of an erotic relationship between the main character, book-burning fireman Guy Montag, and his wife Mildred, or between Montag and "the other woman" in his life, Clarisse McClellan. Both Guy and Mildred have been effectively neutered by their future-world culture: by a world that insists on the blandest possible entertainment. Mildred has fully embraced that escape from life's harsh realities, which is certainly one reason they have no children (though I don't remember small kids even making any appearances in 451). When Guy meets Clarisse, she kindles in him not romance but his submerged desire to be a father to such a vivacious young thing. Clarisse incarnates all the uncertainties of natural life, the things that the future-world represses. But since her primary importance is to force Guy to embrace incertitude in the form of reading materials, Bradbury writers Clarisse out of the novel in such a way that Guy never truly knows what happened to her.

Two other characters take over from Clarisse. Fire Captain Beatty projects the possibility that he may be covertly sympathetic to Guy's forbidden love affair with books, though this turns out to be an illusion. An older intellectual, Faber, is able to succor Guy to a new level of covert disobedience, but he too fades from the latter half of 451. In the justifiably famous conclusion, Guy finds his way to a community of people who memorize books, in a sense returning humankind to the oral tradition. Bradbury may have thought that Guy's pursuers might eventually discommode the book-commune, for on the last page Bradbury throws in a nuclear war that conveniently eradicates the repressive culture but leaves the commune free to rebuild.

Bradbury's poetic diction is never better than it is in 451, and anyone who loves reading will feel the passion the author brings to the seemingly endless possibilities of human art.                   

    

TEXTURE THOUGHTS

I just reread Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 and noticed an interesting correlation between one of Bradbury's justifications of books that "have quality" and a similar observation originated by Henry James and repeated, with some alterations, by Raymond Durgnat.  Here's the Bradbury quote:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”

Now, in my 2017 essay COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1, I linked to the James essay, but chose not to reprint the relevant section. That's because the James essay-- which *in theory* Bradbury might have read, though I find that unlikely-- wasn't as germane to my ongoing topic re: literary mythopoesis as Durgnat's reading of James, which I repeat below:

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

l find it very interesting that both authors utilized the metaphor of "texture," almost certainly with an awareness of the word's similarity to "text." Durgnat correctly asserts that what most literary critics value is "the texture of lived experience." Bradbury extends the metaphor to the texture of human flesh, finding "pores" and "features" in good fiction. It's not hard to imagine what sort of authors Bradbury finds mediocre, since 451 is replete with examples of superficial art. He's not quite so pellucid regarding what sort of authors "rape [life] and leave her for the flies," but that seems a side-point since RB's future society doesn't want violent/transgressive art any more than thoughtful art.

There's some irony that Bradbury, a science fiction author (of sorts) comes very close to championing mimesis as a primary virtue for literature. Arguably in other sections of 451 Bradbury places more emphasis on the different propositions that different authors produce with their very different readings of "lived experience." Indeed, Montag's foe Captain Beatty expresses frustration that the books "don't agree with each other."

Durgnat's essay, probably written about ten years later, is more sophisticated. Durgnat shows an awareness that details, while important, don't yield meaning in themselves, or critics wouldn't feel the need to "synopsize" the motives of Hamlet, whose procrastinating nature Durgnat compares to Li'l Abner. In some ways Durgnat's essay loosely foresees a later generation's fascination with *tropes,* which in essence are summaries of literary plots and character actions. Bradbury certainly USES tropes in his fiction, but I doubt that he understood their significance as literary values.            

    

MARVEL COMICS: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT THEM PT 2

 

In Part 1, I credited Stan Lee with founding Marvel Comics. This does not mean that I think he created every Marvel character or even necessarily oversaw every development during his period of peak creativity from roughly 1961 to 1972. But I consider the opposite position-- that either Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko did everything and that Lee just took the credit-- to be utterly moronic. The slightly more nuanced view that Lee allowed Kirby and Ditko to maximize their creativity while he just kibitzed a little isn't much better. But it does at least touch on an important truth, one that impacts on how Lee's Marvel saved the comics industry from going the way of an extinct phenomenon like the Big Little Book (a comparison advanced by Big Name Fan Dwight Decker in the pages of AMAZING HEROES). 

Stan Lee as a writer did not possess the raw creativity of Kirby or Ditko, but in some cases his creative instincts were better than theirs and of anyone else in his employ. He was an editor first and a writer second, but since it's an editor's job to oversee a company's offerings to its customer base, that meant that he always had to see the Big Picture. And his oversight, starting with FANTASTIC FOUR #1 in 1961, can be summed up in one word: connectivity, "the state of being connected." 

In most of my earlier writings on Early Marvel, I've asserted that there were two factors that made Marvel appealing across several generations to fans of all ages. Factor One was that of continuity, the notion that all the Marvel characters existed in the same world and could all potentially interact with one another, even if some encounters might require traversing time, or space, or both. Factor Two was that of deeper characterization, at least for the superhero genre in comics.

Now, I would see those two factors as manifestations of one phenomenon, that of connectivity. Continuity as practiced by Stan Lee might be described as "outer connectivity:" the physical interactions brought about by assorted superbeings occupying the same world. This might range from various heroes just popping up in one another's features to detailed histories about (say) how ex-Nazi Baron Strucker launched terrorist cabals like Hydra and AIM. (Curiously, this history was first set forth in the ultra-obscure Marvel war-title CAPTAIN SAVAGE AND HIS LEATHERNECK RAIDERS.)  

Factor Two, that of more detailed characterization, may be fairly termed "inner connectivity." This was a much more radical innovation for comics, for the broad tendency in all genre-comics was to subordinate character to plot. There were a few exceptions-- the Golden Age BATMAN comics, the occasional contretemps between the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, and the better-conceived EC short stories. But at 1960s Marvel, it became de rigeur for creators to keep the characters consistent-- which is a more commonplace way of saying that all the characters' traits connected with one another logically.    

Quick example: by the time of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #3, the Spider-Man readership was aware of the way the hero's character shaped up. Everything about Peter Parker stemmed logically from his history as a put-upon nerd: his insecurities, his sardonic sense of humor, and his occasional flareups of bad temper. The main story of the Annual concerns the Avengers deciding to nominate Spider-Man for membership, though once they agree to do so, they have to find him to inform of the honor. Lee could have chosen any of six heroes to stumble across Spidey, but the editor chose Thor, who as an alpha male best contrasted with Parker. In a sequence lasting only about two pages, the arachnid adventurer hits all of his consistent tropes. First Spider-Man gets a trifle quarrelsome when Thor asserts that candidates must be tested, then he gets insecure about the ramifications, and finally he seeks to defuse the pressure with the humorous line, "Come up for air, helmet head." Thor for his part holds up his end by being slightly pushy but still coming off as ultimately fair-minded. This story shows Lee's genius at the art of "inner connectivity" with respect not only to the main hero and his avenging guest-stars, but also to his support-characters and the added attraction of The Incredible Hulk.      

Even at a time when Marvel Comics was limited as to how many titles their distributor would accept, the company's most popular titles started cutting in on DC's action. Further, Marvel's characters had an archetypal quality not seen in comic books since the decline of the Golden Age in the 1940s, and thus many characters remained evergreen for future generations, or even became received more sophisticated treatment by later raconteurs (Frank Miller on DAREDEVIL, Chris Claremont on X-MEN). Marvel's success story was that of the scrappy underdog who wins the day, and thus even people who weren't hardcore comics-nerds understood the rudiments of Marvel's new standard and of some of the more appealing characters. 

The perennial attractiveness of Marvel Connectivity forced DC and other companies to attempt to cope with the audience's new expectations. This resulted in a more dynamic direct market, which resulted in both small-press successes and major, adult-themed releases from the big companies, not least WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Keeping genre-comics viable may not have lightened the hearts of elitists like Gary Groth, but the survival of comics ensured that by the 1990s and 2000s Hollywood finally invested major money in adaptations of comic book properties. Thus more artists, even those that hated Stan Lee (paging *Alan Moore*) reaped the benefits of Lee's entrepreneurial skills. The medium of comic books may still perish, but if that happens, said medium will have reached a point of superior vantage from where it was in 1961.              

        

MARVEL COMICS: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT THEM PT 1

 My essay's title references the title of Dinesh D'Souza's 2014 political-philosophy book AMERICA: IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER, but the resemblance goes deeper than that. 

In this book D'Souza, who immigrated from India to the U.S. in his youth, seeks to articulate a reasoned argument in support of American exceptionalism. Rather than depending upon self-aggrandizing patriotic bromides-- "we're freer than anyone else," "we're more generous than anyone else"-- D'Souza follows the historian Alexis de Toqueville in finding America's uniqueness in its entrepreneurial spirit. In D'Souza's view, all the nations of the Earth-- including the native tribes who originally occupied the territories of "The New World"-- were governed principally by an "ethic of conquest." The strongest tribe or nation prospered by non-consensual force of arms, and the winners not only wrote the history, they often considered their victories a mark of divine favor. America, however, was the only nation of the New World to fully invest in the entrepreneurial spirit.

...entrepreneurs created demand by introducing a product that no one asked for, but millions of people wanted once it was available. I call this "extreme empathy" because it's a case of entrepreneurs providing for the wants of consumers before consumers even know what they want. -- Chapter 10.

What D'Souza proposes as the antithesis to the ethic of conquest might best be termed an "ethic of commerce," though D'Souza does not advance this term. The commerce-ethic serves the self-interest of the entrepreneur as much the ethic of conquest serves that of the conqueror. However, the entrepreneur can only prosper by empathetically anticipating the wants of customers, and by persuading them to give him their business, consensually.

One may cavil at this or that aspect of D'Souza's thesis, but I believe he's on solid ground with regard to the element that sets the United States apart from other nations. Fundamentally the country's foremost virtue lay in being founded either by merchants or immigrants who wanted to become merchants, leading to an emphasis upon consensus over conquest. And that leads me to the man who saved the medium of comic books with his relentless promotion of his company's unique products.

Imagine a world where Stan Lee quits the company founded by his cousin-by-marriage Martin Goodman and never brings together a diverse of writers and artists-- some great, some mediocre-- to form the Marvel Universe. Lee himself might have faded into obscurity-- but the comics-medium might have followed him within another 10-15 years.

Some things would have remained the same, without Marvel. The "DC Big Three" who had survived the Golden Age-- Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman-- would have stayed the course. Yet by the late 1950s, DC Comics, the premiere publisher of funnybooks, would still have had mediocre sales on their westerns and SF-books, and the editors still would have sought to goose sales by launching new versions of the company's 1940s superheroes. So The Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League would have appeared in that world just as they did in this one. The new heroes, juxtaposed against the staid "Big Three," would have still galvanized the nascent comic-book fandom. And one of the defining events of the sixties, the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, still would have driven the nation temporarily Bat-mad for a couple of years. 

Various publishers would still have jumped on the superhero bandwagon in that same period. But Martin Goodman might not have been one of them. Without Stan Lee to run the funnybooks on a shoestring budget, the publisher probably would have shuttered his comics division to concentrate on his line of "sweat mags."

Yet without Marvel, DC probably would have stayed locked in the creative attitudes of the 1950s. A few of DC's more oddball creations might have still appeared, such as Robert Kanigher's METAL MEN. But without FANTASTIC FOUR shaking things up, does any DC editor okay DOOM PATROL? Carmine Infantino might still have ascended to the position of editorial director in 1967, and he might have suggested that DC invest more heavily in horror in case the superheroes flamed out, just as they had at the end of the 1940s. Yet without Marvel as competition, maybe Infantino gets overruled by the people who liked to play things safe. And so the fans don't get Gothic Batman or SWAMP THING, much less the later "British Invasion" of US comics. 

Worse, in a comics-world where the dominant creative voices would have been Gardner Fox and Robert Kanigher, comics would have remained rather dull, and so comics fandom might have foundered. Everyone loves a battle between opponents of equal stature, and if all the other history stays the same, none of DC's other 1960s competitors had a chance in hell. Charlton, Tower Action, imprints like Mighty Comics and Harvey Thrillers-- they all had to terminate their superhero lines within a few years. Warren Magazines introduced a smattering of heroes in their black-and-white publications, but that company's base was horror, and arguably they profited only because most of the other companies avoided the genre. In our world generations of comics fans took pleasure in the combative question "Marvel or DC?" and that was because the healthy competition forced entrepreneurs in both bailiwicks to exert themselves, trying to anticipate what comics fans would buy.     

Without that crucial competitive spirit, are there enough enthusiastic fans to support a Direct Market in its 1970s infancy? If the DM turns belly-up in its early years, that puts all surviving comics-companies at the tender mercies of traditional distributors. And so maybe by the 1980s, DC is the Last Comics-Company in the U.S., eking out an existence publishing Superman reprint books.

Fortunately, in our world Stan Lee did not quit. Taking at face value his statements on the origins of the Marvel superhero line, it's obvious that he had no thought of becoming the nemesis of the monolithic DC comics. He was bored with his job and wanted to have some fun with the superhero genre that he'd enjoyed as a young man. He may have not expected that the titles he launched with raconteurs like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Larry Lieber would outlast the decade, and indeed, characters like Ant-Man and the Hulk initially did not set the comics-reading world on fire. But Lee was not just a "pitchman" as so many ignorant fans have claimed. He was a creative entrepreneur, and the Hulk eventually did catch fire because Lee kept sending the model back to the shop for improvements. Lee and his collaborators broadly followed DC's example of reviving old heroes. But because they had a different approach to costumed heroes-- an approach that would never have been realized except under the aegis of a creative managing editor-- they formed a mythology that ran counter to DC's. That approach eventually convinced all comics-readers that a world without Marvel Comics was all but unimaginable.

As to what made the approach seem new and different-- see Part 2.         

 

     

    

  

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 3

 Well, when I announced this project early today, I assumed it would take me through the next day at very least to scan through the fifty-plus issues of JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, the first "Timely-Atlas" SF-anthology series, even if I was only stopping to read the stories with strong SF-content. However, I found that JIUW had two phases, only one of which is relevant to my project.

JIUW Phase One consists of just three issues. The first issue, #36 (Sept 1950), picks up the numbering of an Atlas teen-humor comic, and two more issues follow in Dec 1950 and Feb 1951. All three have space-opera covers and contain a mix of both "gosh-wow" and "thoughtful" SF. 

JIUW Phase Two picks up in April 1951 with a new numbering, starting with issue 4 for no apparent reason, but the covers begin emphasizing horror, as shown by the supernaturally-themed "Train to Nowhere." I read about 20 issues of Phase Two and in my opinion all the stories with SF-content were horror-themed. That makes them the affective opposite of "gosh-wow" in that such stories emphasize the excitements of the grotesque rather than the sublimity of heroic triumph. Then, just to make sure that there was no major shift in Phase Two down the line, I chose a few random issues to survey, and got the sense that horror still held sway by the time JIUW Phase Two ended with issue 59 in 1957. (I assume that all the terror-tales published after the Code were "horror in name only.")

Now, both phases were edited from start to finish by Stan Lee. Since JIUW appeared on stands a few months after EC's WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, and since Lee's boss Martin Goodman was notorious for imitating perceived trends, Goodman may have told Lee to turn a SF-book like the EC titles. But the EC SF-titles did not sell as well as their horror-books, and Goodman may have ordered a quick shift to horror for JIUW once Phase One didn't sell well enough. All this means that only those first three issues of JIUW, covered in Part 2, focused upon "thoughtful SF," though I did stumble across a rare example of same in "The Faceless Man" (JIUW #51, 1956), by writer Carl Wessel and artist Steve Ditko:

            

I did have another observation from my partial survey of JIUW Phase Two: those horror-stories I did read were bad. Atlas Comics did publish some decent if rarely exceptional horror in the 1950s, but I have the strong sense that Stan Lee, unlike William Gaines and Al Feldstein, didn't really care that much about horror, even when he wrote terror-tales himself. By contrast, I see him coming back to "thoughtful SF" again and again, even in the last days of Marvel's anthology-comics in the early 1960s. Additionally, Lee showed little interest in the "gosh-wow" SF that so strongly moved Julie Schwartz. (Schwartz's STRANGE ADVENTURES, of the three titles launched in 1950, lasted through the early 1970s and so was the most successful title.)    

My current hypothesis, then, is that though Lee enjoyed writing and/or editing "thoughtful SF," he couldn't make that SF-subcategory sell well. But I think that he, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were able to channel the reflective attitude found in "thoughtful SF" tropes into superhero-tropes, with obvious success. And that's what helped give the Marvel Universe fantasy-verse a veneer of realistic character-values.