EXCESSIVELY DENSE TRANSACTIONS

 

The author who achieves excellence in one or more of the four potentialities does so because he/she becomes engaged enough with the material to DESIRE to give it a density, a thoroughness, that seems to be like that of lived experience. The creator of a poor work, within whichever potentiality one judges the work by, has no desire, or next to none, to convey investment in the material to his audience. The creator of a fair work has some desire, but only up to a point. It's only the creator of a good work who's totally invested with respect to at least one potentiality.-- DENSITY=EXCESS.

I came across the notion of correlating my James-derived concept of "density of specification" with an observation from 1920s philosopher Martin Buber while halfway through a re-read of Robert Pirsig's 1974 philosophical reminiscence ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE.  By the book's halfway point, Pirsig was attempting to define "Quality." Since the author shows throughout the book that he's familiar with the Greek philosophical tradition, I speculate that Pirsig took a fair amount of influence from the Greeks' tendency to embody concepts as essences-- "Truth," "Beauty," and so on. I'm not partial to this tradition. As seen in my self-quote above, I tend to speak more of discrete "qualities," though one could still argue that I am "essentializing" by, for instance, associating all kinetic effects with a category called "kineticism."

Now, when I spoke of authorial desire, I didn't engage with the source of that desire, because said sources can vary. The paradigm with which all readers are familiar is the one that Karl Marx simplistically called a "cash nexus." The desire to be remunerated when one "sings for one's supper" is close to being universal, both in canonical and non-canonical art. The few exceptions would be authors like Kafka, who write what they want to write and may not even want many, if any, readers, much less their remuneration. However, the difference between Kafka and most other authors may be more apparent than real. The commonality with all authors is that in order to say what they want to say, they must imagine an "ideal reader," someone who will "get" what the author wants to say.

Superficial critics tend to oppose "artistic" and "non-artistic" authors by imagining that the first type of author doesn't pander to an audience, but just says what he wants to say. This is nonsense, given that many inferior "artists" are capable of imitating other artists, or of anticipating what he thinks influential critics want him to say. But even the superior "artists" cannot help but create in their own minds an ideal reader, by whom they measure whether or not they're communicating what they want to say. This process is identical with that of even the most commercial authors. Charlie Hack cannot really commune with the huge majority of readers he wants to reach in order to make lots of money. Charlie can only conjure up an imaginary ideal reader, whom he Charlie *thinks* will respond positively to a certain number of imitative scenarios.

Now in my 2010 essay SLASHIN' MARX, I used Martin Buber as a corrective to Marx, who speaks of making one-to-one exchanges-- "love for love, trust for trust"-- as a rhetorical device to stigmatize the capitalist exchanges of goods for money. I pegged this as false idealism and quoted Buber's superior conceptions of "I and Thou" and "I and it:"

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.

To me, the "I=it" relationship characterizes the baseline of all forms of exchange, not just those of capitalism.  If I want a milkshake, I go to a restaurant that serves them and I pay for a milkshake. I am an "it" to the restaurant-owner and he is an "it" to me. That doesn't mean that either of us is incapable of believing that the other one MAY BE a "Thou" within some "Thou" relationship. It's simply that the limited nature of our interaction makes only the "I=it" exchange possible.

Now, even within the span of "commercial art," there can be variables in terms of what different authors offer their readers, and different valuations by those readers. Say that I am (as I once was) a comic-book buyer in the early 1970s, when the average magazine cost twenty cents. I see two new comics, one written by Steve Englehart and the other by Bill Mantlo. From previous experience, I think the former writes better characters than the latter, and if that's my priority, I choose the Englehart book. That would be my take on a specific type of "quality"-- that of dramatic excellence, within a specific context-- and I experience that excellence as the idea that Englehart's characters are more densely realized.

Now, I might end up buying a bad Englehart comic, and I might later learn that the Mantlo comic I passed on was actually better. But even though both comics cost the same, Englehart has conveyed the sense of giving me more for my money-- which may cause me to spend more money. overall, on Englehart's comics, both good and bad.

I can know nothing of the personal lives of either author. But if I believe Englehart is the dominantly better author, then it's because he has in mind an "ideal reader," for whom he writes "more densely," possibly (though not necessarily) because he responds in his own reading-experiences to other authors who share his priorities. So even though my monetary exchange with Englehart's comic-book publishers is no greater than another exchange with those of Mantlo, the first author has treated me as a "Thou"-- even though he does know me in the least-- while the second author has still treated me as an "It." Both judgments would be purely subjective interpretations at base, though if a substantial number of buyers share the same opinion, then both interpretations would become *intersubjective* for at least a specific span of time.                   

FREEDOM W/O RESTRAINT= TYRANNY

 My title is a play on the familiar phrase "Power without restraint is tyranny." A quick search attributes the phrase to Samuel Adams, but I'm thinking of a need for similar restraint with respect to the American power of free speech, which this week was propelled into public attention once more by comedian Dave Chappelle. I won't repeat Chappelle's denigration of Kirk here, because the remarks have "gone viral," though they're neither good comedy nor political analysis. But I will note that when quizzed about his take-no-prisoners comedy, Chappelle has framed his priority as a devotion to free speech.

Now, there is no national legislation requiring restraint of free speech under well-defined circumstances. At most there is a cultural consensus usually framed as a misquote of Oliver Wendell Holmes, along the lines of "don't shout fire in a crowded theater," and that general principle has resulted in many local laws against disorderly conduct. Specific laws also allow the charging of persons who encourage violence in what seems a non-rhetorical manner. But what about people who simply say, sans irony as Chappelle did, that they are glad that X, a victim of violence, is dead? 

Probably there will never be either federal or state statures against this form of unrestrained, and arguably pointless, speech. However, businesses in this country are free to terminate "at will" employees who utter such remarks. From this site:

“The First Amendment does not apply in private workplaces to protect employees’ speech,” said Andrew Kragie, an attorney who specializes in employment and labor law at Maynard Nexsen. “It actually does protect employers’ right to make decisions about employees, based on employees’ speech.”

When Charlie Kirk was murdered in September 2025, many US workers found that their employers did not react well to posts on social media celebrating the death of the alleged "racist." This site names a number of incidents of employee termination for the celebration of Kirk's murder, enforced by such companies as Microsoft, Delta Airlines, Nasdaq, Office Depot, MSNBC, and the Washington Post. It's entirely possible that the persons carrying out these discharges might have cared nothing about anything but covering their own asses, in case some dipstick making such a comment turned violent in the workplace, which incident would then rebound on management.

Despite social media's aggravating the long history of the human need for scapegoating, the responses of these companies may the closest American society comes to a cultural consensus, to the effect that endorsing the results of violence constitutes a threat to public safety, even if it's not a crime in and of itself.

Now, no one believes that Dave Chappelle is going to turn out to be the creepy guy who plays First Person Shooter with his fellow workers. I've long considered Chappelle a "hate comic," who frequently encourages race hatred-- sometimes with the screen of humor, sometimes (as with these Kirk remarks) without any such screen. But that's not illegal, and Chappelle, currently one of the country's most successful standup comics, is not going to pay any price like the ignoramuses who lost their jobs for the sake of doing a superiority dance. As I write this, an unconfirmed rumor asserts that Sony may have cut Chappelle from the cast of the impending GROWNUPS 3, a role which was basically an extended cameo. I'm sure many consumers will cease patronizing the comedian, but many will continue to attend his performances, curious about what he'll say next. I'm sure that Chappelle's pretense of reluctance to dis Kirk-- made, of course, in numerous separate performances-- was easily overcome as he contemplated a new level of notoriety.

Shifting to the personal, I don't know that I've ever felt better because someone whose politics I disliked had died, whether from violence or from natural causes. Neither type of death counts as "one less for their side," though that seems to be the faux logic involved. I showed how, in my essay-series KEEPING VS SHARING, the political stances we call "liberalism" and "conservatism" are intrinsic to the human species and have always been so. I'll confess that I've fantasized about seeing actual murderers, ranging from Osama bin Ladin to Tyler Robinson, being killed outright, and I can laugh, albeit bitterly, at the picture of (say) Osama being shot to death as he goes to get Slim Jims from his fridge. But I don't have any delusions that the deaths of crazies will keep other crazies in line.

One might think, in conclusion, that the fact that we all die someday might discourage so much simplistic scapegoating, Someday Dave Chappelle will die, and even if he's not called on the carpet in the afterlife, what has he accomplished in this world by disrespecting a murdered man whose politics he disagreed with?                  

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION PT. 2

 "Jack wanted to create all-new books [for Marvel] ... Jack discovered over the years that the only way he ever bettered himself at any comic book company was by creating something new that was a hit. You never got any big raises if you raised the sales of an existing comic by 10%. He wanted to create new books. hoping that one of them would catch on, and then he could get more money, more prestige, more power, more clout."-- Mark Evanier, COMIC-CON remarks quoted in "1976-78: Kirby's Last Stand at Marvel," podcast TALES FROM MY SPINNER RACK.

This essay is not so much a sequel as an addendum to the original SEEDS, which dealt with the irony of how (a) Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created a new standard for superhero comic books in the sixties, and how (b) Kirby was "destroyed" (in an economic sense) by his inability to meet that standard. Despite Kirby's having claimed to have been the driving creative force of the partnership, he was unable to duplicate the sales-successes of his collaborations with Lee-- or with Joe Simon in the 1940s-- once he was the sole writer and artist of nearly all his subsequent projects. The Evanier quote above establishes the rough logic Kirby formulated for all of his post-1960s projects. However, I have some problems with that logic.

The first problem is that Kirby had only very minimal success launching new comic book features when he himself provided both art and writing, though he clearly believed the opposite. In later years, Kirby spoke of Joe Simon the same way as he did Stan Lee: as having had little to do with the creative process. In an interview discussing the Golden Age invention of Captain America, Kirby managed to omit the fact that Joe Simon had already designed the hero before the two artists met and decided to become partners. In the same interview, Kirby implied that Simon was mostly involved in the business end of the partnership and that he Kirby handled most of the creative work. Not surprisingly, Simon said the opposite, claiming he "would never let Kirby write." Regardless of who did what, CAPTAIN AMERICA was indubitably the duo's first success. Yet within a year, Simon and Kirby began working on the sly for DC, ostensibly because they believed Timely publisher Martin Goodman was ripping them off. Goodman fired the duo and then hired other raconteurs to work on CAPTAIN AMERICA, because Timely owned that property absolutely.

The team had more longevity at DC, enjoying roughly six-seven years of gainful employment. This is probably the period Kirby most remembered as a time when he and Simon had the "clout" to do what they pleased, thanks to four successful features. To be sure, though, only two of the features were totally original-- THE BOY COMMANDOS and THE NEWSBOY LEGION-- while the other two were "in-name-only" continuations of two established characters owned by DC: MANHUNTER and SANDMAN. But after their DC years, the team only created one other successful franchise: giving the publisher Crestwood the first romance comic book, YOUNG ROMANCE. After that, all of their other efforts failed for one reason or another, which may have led to the breakup of the partnership in 1955. (The duo crossed creative paths a few more times afterward, notably on Archie Comics' THE FLY, but these efforts would also prove largely marginal in impact.)  

Kirby became a freelance artist, though as far as I can tell, he only rarely dialogued his own stories. Most of the Kirby projects of the 1950s also failed to enjoy great success, with the exception of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, a series launched in 1957 and which lasted, under other hands, into the early 1970s. Kirby did collaborate with writer Dave Wood on these stories, though going by the only surviving description of the Wood-Kirby relationship (from the aforementioned Evanier), Kirby discussed prospective stories with the writer, then did whatever he wanted and left Wood to fill in any gaps. Fans will never know, however, if Kirby could have continued on that title indefinitely for, as I and others have discussed, the artist butted heads with DC editor Jack Schiff. Kirby had to leave that company for the only game in town: Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics. Said company was rechristened "Marvel" within about five years of Kirby coming to work under editor Stan Lee on a regular basis.

Many fans and pros (the latter group including enfant terrible Alan Moore) have accused Stan Lee of being a credit hog. But while Lee probably took more than his fair share of credit, no one was more "hoggy" than the King. I boiled down the unique nature of the creative matrix of Marvel's three most prominent creators of the 1960s, with reference to their taking partial inspiration from SF-movies of the 1950s:

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

 

Even if one admits that Kirby did the heavy lifting in the relationship, and that Stan Lee was probably a pill to work for on this or that occasion, Kirby's denial that Lee had any creative input seems not a little ridiculous, given how different Kirby's Marvel work was from anything else he'd done in his career. And yet, I might consider that Kirby's next move to be a tacit admission of his influence from Lee.

THOR was perhaps not one of the more "thoughtful" books on which Lee and Kirby collaborated, though the Asgardian adventurer's feature had its moments. Yet Kirby had many ideas in mind when he jumped ship-- some of which he'd hoped to execute in a purely editorial capacity-- the King's second tenure at DC Comics led off in 1971 with a "tetralogy" of open-ended titles, the "Fourth World" books, three of which arguably followed the "THOR example." Those three titles were entirely new, and the fourth was DC's long-running JIMMY OLSEN title. I don't entirely dismiss the King's dominant narrative as to how he came to include the red-headed reporter in his new Kirby-verse. However, I think there were two more compelling reasons. 

From a business perspective, it was a very Marvel-esque move to link the three new serials with one established feature-- one which gave Kirby an excuse to make regular use of DC's flagship character thanks to the Man of Steel's ties to Olsen. The second reason for the OLSEN tie-in might have been more nostalgic, since Kirby more or less inducted Olsen into the New Newsboy Legion (a.k.a. the sons of the original 1940s characters). As noted before, the original Legion was one of the big Sinion & Kirby successes of the Golden Age, which was also the period when the two partners were able to do pretty much anything they wanted because their features sold well.

Kirby's JIMMY OLSEN usually consisted of pure gangbusters action. However, the three "THOR books" involved a wide-ranging struggle between a planet of "good gods" and one of "bad gods," and Kirby definitely tried to provide "thoughtful content" about the interactions of puny mortals caught up in this "god-war." I would need several essays for me to evaluate when Kirby succeeded and when he failed in his aims, so I won't address that subject. In any case, the Fourth World underperformed on newsstands and by early 1974 all the books were gone. The tetralogy's interconnectedness, a strategy that may have been Kirby's attempt to duplicate the appeal of "Marvel continuity," did little to sell the titles to 1970s readers. 

After the Fourth World failure, none of Kirby's writer-artist works, either for Marvel or DC, were "hits" that would have empowered Kirby with those companies. At best, KAMANDI was a modest sales performer, sticking around even after Kirby returned to Marvel for the second and last time in 1975. Kirby's post-tetralogy serials began emphasizing gangbusters action most of the time. Kirby still injected thoughtful moments into this or that story, but there weren't enough to suit the fans of the time, many of whom had internalized the "Marvel standard." 

Love or hate Stan Lee, he understood how to make such emotional moments seem internally consistent within a series context, without stinting on the audience's expectations for exciting action. Because for most of his career Jack Kirby had arguably received storytelling guidance from partners and/or editors-- even if he did not remember such input later-- he never developed such dramaturgical instincts and was never able to catch up with the standard he had co-created. That doesn't mean that all of that later work is without value, simply because it was not financially successful. Thanks to many fans and creators who appreciated what Kirby sought to accomplish with the Fourth World, that Kirby-continuity in particular has become an integral part of the DC Universe.  

As things shook out, Kirby managed to live out the remainder of his life without his finances being entirely dependent on "the Big Two." Many fans agreed with Kirby that he had done everything, and I suppose he was entitled to that ardent fandom, because he was immensely creative in a period when a lot of creators got by on minimum effort. And from a comics-criticism POV, the fact that Kirby had the chance to show his stuff as a solo act demonstrated both his creative strengths and weaknesses, and helps clarify, for many critics, why his collaborative works remain his standout accomplishments.

                              

     

     

NULL-MYTHS: THE "NEMO'S DAUGHTER" TRILOGY (2013-15)

 The basic problem with TEMPEST is that it doesn't really depict the development of pop culture icons the way the first two volumes did. Possibly no one could manage to cope with the astounding proliferation of such icons not only in comic books and strips, but also in movies and television as well. Thus Moore and O'Neill just stuck in whatever characters caught their interest, be it a version of 1904 comic-strip obscurity Hugo Hercules or Grandpa Munster. There's some fun to be had with such freewheeling association, but they didn't manage to make a myth this time. -- NEAR MYTHS: LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: TEMPEST (2018-19)

Moore and O'Neill finished the three NEMO stories in between the three-part CENTURY sequence (2012) and the big finale of TEMPEST (2018-19). These 2013-15 stories are structured just like CENTURY, where the protagonists were seen in three separate periods of their lives. In the case of NEMO, the sole protagonist is Janni Dakkar, daughter of the late Captain Nemo, who now captains the Nautilus along with a collection of fellow pirates. Janni is seen in three ages of her life-- first roughly in the early 20th century, then during a faux version of World War II, and then in her extreme age, in the 1970s.

I didn't examine the Janni character in my CENTURY review, but she was key to what I called "a long and pointless homage to Bertolt Brecht." In that section of the story, Nemo's daughter pettishly runs off from her family, takes a job in a low-class London slum, gets raped, and brings back her pirate clan to take bloody vengeance on dozens of people who did not rape her. Murray and Orlando just stand around as witnesses to the chaos, and Alan Moore comes close to suggesting that the "reality" of the Brecht world makes all the fantasy-characters look pallid and ineffectual. But the basic irresponsibility of Janni soured me on her character. I read the first of the NEMO trilogy years ago, and nothing about it changed my mind.

BLACK DOSSIER made Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain immortal by dipping into another mythos from Quatermain's creator Rider Haggard: the mythos of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. Moore changed the SHE-story to say that the immortal queen got her immortality from a mystic pool rather than from a Flame of Life, but Ayesha herself did not come onto stage until HEART OF ICE. For reasons that remain obscure, Moore conceived a hate for Ayesha, tearing down the outstanding character Rider Haggard created, and making the queen Janni's opponent (in one way or another) for all three segments of the trilogy. The character assassination of Haggard's most influential icon is worse than a similar hit job by Moore on James Bond, because at least Moore made clear his reasons for hating Bond.

Janni Dakkar entirely initiates hostilities by having the Nautilus waylay a ship which is carrying the possessions of Ayesha, currently deposed from her empire in Africa. Ayesha's only reaction to the theft is that when her consort fails to give his life to fight the pirates, Ayesha kills him by biting his throat. However, because Ayesha is the guest of magnate Charles Foster Kane, Kane hires three American scientists to track down Janni. The scientists are adult versions of three famous "boy inventors" whose stories flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not knowing of the pursuit, Janni decides to take her submarine to Antarctica to follow up on her late father's expedition there, and that's where the inventors overtake Janni and her crew. Fortunately for Janni, she's able to lure the Americans into the clutches of some leftover boogiemen from HPL's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (with one or two touches from Poe's ARTHUR GORDON PYM).

Though the pointless disparagement of Ayesha is HEART's worst sin, Moore extends no better treatment to the former "boy inventors:" Frank Reade Jr, Jack Wright and Tom Swift-- though Moore spells the last name "Swyfte," possibly not being sure that the name was public domain. Given that Janni is a thief, the pursuers would ordinarily have the moral high ground in chasing her down-- so Moore has to imply that all three are nasty White racists. Given that the "boy inventor" stories were the first serials devoted to SF-concepts, Moore and O'Neill's misuse of them indicates their waning interest in the history of popular culture.

 ROSES OF BERLIN takes place roughly twenty years later, and although Janni Dakkar's no longer a pirate, she does prey on the German ships under the command of the dictator "Adenoid Hynkle." This leads to German forces shooting down an airship allied to the Nautilus, and the apparent abduction of Janni's daughter. Janni and her crew invade Berlin, a futuristic domain constructed by such famous fiends as Rotwang, Caligari, and Mabuse (although Mabuse for some reason is a good guy). Yet when Janni comes face to face with the evil at the heart of Nazism, the real villain is not Hynckle, but-- She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed? The third story later reveals why Ayesha became an ally of Hynkle, thanks to his mastery, through the late Rotwang, of mechanical humans. In fact, Moore implies that the original "Futura" android is still around. Janni gets to duel with Ayesha, and of course I was frustrated that my girl didn't win. At least Ayesha doesn't seem a half-wit as in the previous installment.

In RIVER OF GHOSTS, an eighty-year-old Janni voyages to a part of the Amazon which includes both Conan Doyle's Lost World and the Black Lagoon, where it's revealed that the Creature was not the last of his breed. There she finds a mammoth conspiracy of leftover Nazis, who are also, for no good reason, manufacturing robot duplicates of the late Ayesha. Moore's sentimentality for his own derivative creation is muted by his lack of feeling for the creations of others, and perhaps the biggest proof of the sheer randomness of Moore and O'Neill is that one of the Nazi scientists is--

--wait for it--

DOCTOR (blankety blank) GOLDFOOT! Maybe O'Neill just wanted to draw Vincent Price? 

The first three LEAGUE volumes are great entertainment, but from then on, the creators of this pastiche-verse lost all ability to stay on point. But now I've read the last of the LEAGUEs, and I'm glad no one's likely to revive any of the principals, least of all the irritating Janni Dakkar.  

                                    
           

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE DOOM FROM DIMENSION AQUA" (AQUAMAN #11, 1963)

 

Considering that the DC feature AQUAMAN spent about twenty years as an unmemorable backup feature, the series made fairly rapid progress once someone at DC made the decision to give the Sea King his own title. I have no info as to how this came about, but George Kashdan was the editor for much of the run. The original team on the book-- usually full-length stories, rather than two or three shorter tales-- was writer/editor Jack Miller and artist Nick Cardy. Cardy stayed with the book for most of its run, but Miller was replaced by Bob Haney with issue #25. Most of the stories prior to Haney are forgettable too, but in issues #1, Jack Miller introduced first a mediocre character who indirectly spawned a more important one in issue #11.

Possibly seeking a gimmick to help burn up pages for the Sea King's first full-length adventure, the opening story introduces Aquaman and Aqualad to a "water sprite" named Quisp. Though the imp is good-hearted-- he comes to Aquaman to alert the hero of the alien fire-troll menace-- he's also supposed to be given to minor pranks, sort of like a less aggressive Mxyzptlk. The one thing to note about Quisp in his first five adventures-- scattered across the first ten issues-- is that his powers are very generalized, even though one of his main tricks-- which his successor would inherit-- was to weave gouts of water into solid objects, to strike or seize enemies. DC featured Quisp on three covers, but by issue #10, the sales on AQUAMAN may not have been that impressive-- hence, a new supporting character was needed. 

 

The title speaks of a "Dimension Aqua," though that name's never used: maybe the editor thought it sounded too much like the star's name. Aquaman and Aqualad encounter the shapely sea-witch Mera apparently creating havoc on the high seas with what would later be called "hard water powers." Her powers suddenly disappear, for reasons that will help extend the story into a long chase scene. Mera tells the duo that she was a queen in her own dimension, but was forced to flee a usurper, name of Leron. Then Leron and a handful of henchmen show up, and they're out to capture Mera and anyone with her.

Aquaman counters by summoning his water sprite buddy Quisp (how is not explained) to make Leron think that he Aquaman has hard-water powers. (Why not just have Quisp fight Leron's team openly?) Aquaman then asks the imp to summon more of his people to help Mera regain her queendom, but when Quisp leaves, Leron sees him and knocks him for a loop. 

  Leron and his men then capture Mera and the Aqua-duo and take them through a gateway into Mera's unnamed domain. The villain's reason for so doing is to extort the inventor of the dimension-gate into giving Leron the secret of the invention. A very minor trivia point: the scientist's name is Xebel, but over time he would be forgotten, and some later writer applied the name "Xebel" to Mera's domain.

Aquaman summons help from local sea-life to break the three of them out, and back they go to the Seven Seas of Earth. There, Mera regains her powers, and Aquaman figures out her people's special vulnerability. (I doubt anyone ever referenced the gimmick again.) The Sea King uses that figurative kryptonite to nullify Leron and his followers so that they're taken back to Mera's world for imprisonment. Mera makes pretty clear that she'd like some closer relationship with the Aqua-dude before she leaves, and Quisp shows up too late to see her again. That's rather appropriate, since she was created to replace the sprite, while swiping the one visually interesting thing about Quisp: his powers. The imp then disappears from DC Comics for the rest of the century.

The last caption asks readers of the bimonthly book to write if they want to see Mera again. But though issue #12 is Mera-less, she re-appears in AQUAMAN #13 (Jan-Feb 1964) and never leaves for the rest of the run, marrying the Sea King in issue #18. I think there was never any question that Mera was going to be a permanent part of the ensemble as soon as she was introduced, and the editors may have even anticipated fast-tracking Aquaman into marriage. Whether they did so just to add a little more drama to a staid series, or because DC thought the series could use more sex appeal, the world will never know.

                 

THE READING RHEUM: STORMBRINGER (1965)

 

Months ago, I finished my reread of my 1965 copy of STORMBRINGER-- the one whose cover, to Moorcock's later chagrin, established the idea that Elric went around wearing a "tall, pointy hat" all the time. But it took me months to figure out how to evaluate the way Moorcock had ended his saga-- albeit leaving things open to many, many prequel tales.

As I mentioned before, I really, really liked the Elric character as he appeared in his comic-book crossover with Conan five years after this paperback's publication. But I'm not sure I was nearly as enthused with the actual prose adventures in my original readings. All I can say for certain, given that I'm speaking of readings from fifty-plus years ago, is that I don't believe I tended to reread most of Moorcock's books, whether sword-and-sorcery or science fiction, as I would reread Burroughs, Tolkien and various others. None of that is necessarily a failing of Moorcock as an author; it's just a taste thing.

However, now I found a section of STORMBRINGER that explains, to my *own* satisfaction, why I tended to pull back somewhat from the Moorcock universe somewhat, even if I liked individual works a lot. My conclusion: Moorcock doesn't like magic.

Moorcock endlessly faulted JRR Tolkien for his political leanings. Yet I find it interesting that Tolkien presented his readers with a world in which his creations, his elves and dwarves and Valar, had an intrinsic love of the world with which they interacted. and they did so by understanding its essence through magical arts.

Elric, the last son of the Melnibonean Empire (a stand-in for the declining British Empire Moorcock experienced in youth), takes no evident joy in being able to commune with wind-spirits or lizard-gods or whatever. We don't generally know what actions he took that made these astral entities his allies; they're just there at convenient moments to save the hero's butt. 

This insight more or less will dominate the review, for I didn't find the final plotlines of STORMBRINGER very interesting. Moorcock spent all of his previous Elric stories building up to this pyrrhic victory for the doomed hero, and thus the climax becomes pretty tiresome as Moorcock systematically knocks off all of Elric's support-cast prior to the hero getting killed by his own sword. The two females in his orbit suffer particularly gruesome fates, though I'd stop short of crying "women in refrigerators!" The previous cycle of Elric stories pitted the albino against a pathetically jealous sorcerer, who disappeared at the end of the cycle and I guess got finished off in some separate story. Here, the main villain doesn't have that much characterization and is nothing but a routine warlord-type. Moorcock even has Elric's companion Moonglum kill off an innocent and unoffending giant simply because an additional death makes the book even gloomier.

All that said, STORMBRINGER still possesses a high level of mythic content due to how Moorcock contextualizes the doom of Elric's realm. Early in the book, Sepiriz, one of the many pocket know-it-alls found in magical-era fantasies, tells Elric, "Chaos formed this earth and for eons, Chaos ruled. Men were created to put an end to that rule." Sepiriz tells the hero that he is, in essence, a puppet who's been manipulated by the forces of Law to end the reign of Chaos. The cost of establishing the reign of Law is that eventually the entire world will be remade so that every trace of Elric's realm is expunged.

I theorize that because Moorcock always meant to subject his fantasy-cosmos to such a Gotterdammerung, this meant that Moorcock the author might not have invested much emotional tonality into that domain and its characters. Naturally that too is a subjective judgment. Still, it explains why I thought ELRIC OF MELNIBONE was the best of the sixties novels, because it allows the sympathetic characters some illusion of hope. After that, though, it's pretty much doom and gloom all the way, and I'm not sure Moorcock captured the fatalistic resignation of Old Norse mythology as much as he may have thought he did.

I consider the beginning of the 1960s as a new era for magical-era stories in England and the US. The old era, loosely initiated by Robert E Howard's 1930s works, continued through the 1950s in spotty fashion with fantasy-stories from writers like Leiber, Vance and of course Tolkien. But only in the 1960s did fantasy become a "hot commodity" rather than an occasional curiosity. The relatively new venue of paperback publishing both introduced baby boomers to Tolkien and Howard and offered new prospects to Leiber, Vance and Moorcock. The embrace of the magical-fantasy genre in the 1960s shares some parallels with the revival of neopaganism and "wicca" in both the US and England, if not in other countries as well. And whatever one may think of such "New Age" movements from a philosophical standpoint, they embraced the language of magical fantasy in terms of venerating the natural world, whether the adherents regarded "magic" as a literal force or a symbolic construct.  

Tolkien's love of magical wonders probably contributed to his popularity with Baby Boomer readers of the sixties and seventies. But as I said, I'm not sure how deeply Moorcock's love of magic ran (even as a literary construct), or if it even existed independently of professional considerations. All that I can say is that I don't see much of it in the sixties Elric books. I'm tempted to explore the six-part "Prince Corum" saga from the same decade, but I don't know when I might find the time. Anyway, the verdict on STORMBRINGER-- good mythicity for its cosmic schema, bad mythicity for its humdrum characters.

                     

     

CURIOSITIES: THE ORIGINAL DAILY BUGLE

 There might have been some real newspaper called "The Daily Bugle" that influenced Stan Lee's choice of that name for Jonah Jameson's newspaper. But since Lee might have been involved to some degree in editing this kid-humor strip "Skinny Bones," I think this is the likeliest culprit.

  

EVALUATING EMINENCES PT. 2

 From one viable POV, most of my meditations on "base iconicity" and "elevated iconicity" in Part 1 were meant to lead to the subject of this post: to clarify that there are three types of crossover-stories, and one type of story that only superficially appears to be a crossover.

The first type involves two or more "familiar" icons, meaning icons that appeared in two or more separate venues, usually both serial in nature, available to consumers prior to the crossover. When the original Human Torch contended with the Sub-Mariner in the 1940s, both icons were familiar to the comic-buying public. Both of those characters happened to be widely popular prior to the crossover. However, the same principle prevails when a publisher launches a new series within the context of an established one, and then immediately launches the standalone series as well. One mostly forgotten launch of the Golden Age appeared in the popular feature KID ETERNITY, the main star of Quality Comics' title HIT COMICS. The Kid had barely been introduced himself when his creators had him encounter two humorous ladies of larceny, Her Highness and Silk. Almost immediately after that, Her Highness and Silk got their own backup feature in the HIT title, where they survived for the remainder of the title's run. Their guest-shot in the Kid's feature might have made no difference, but even that early in the history of superhero comics, creators understood the appeal of advance publicity.

The second type of crossover is what I've termed the "proto-crossover." A novel icon appears within the sphere of a familiar icon's world, but the novel icon does not get a featured venue right away. As long as such a venue does eventuate within (as a rough measure) five years, then all of the novel icon's previous appearances are retroactively crossovers, looking back on the icon in terms of his/her/its history. The guiding example here is Marvel's Black Panther, who only received a regular venue in the title THE AVENGERS, four or five years after the character debuted in the FANTASTIC FOUR comic. 

Usually, there is some authorial intent to launch the novel icon in a starring venue. Yet this doesn't always happen. The history of television is replete with "back-door pilots" in which a producer sought to use a regular episode of an established series to debut one or more icons in the hope of selling said icons to networks. When no separate venue comes to pass, the novel icons just remain Subs within the established series and nothing more. However, audience intent can take the place of authorial intent. When the creators of Hillman Comics' feature SKY WOLF introduced a muck-monster named The Heap, those creators meant the creature to be a one-shot opponent. But the readers wanted to see more of The Heap, and so he got a backup series in the same magazine publishing SKY WOLF.

In both of these forms, all of the characters start out with basal iconicity but then attain elevated iconicity if they even appear in two serial adventures. Their iconicity is elevated by the quantitative form of escalation whether the stories possess any standout quality or not. Most serial icons require more than two adventures to deserve qualitative escalation, though Wally Wood's WIZARD KING duology is a noteworthy exception.

The next type is purely monadic and therefore not capable of having its status being altered by quantitative escalation. Walter Scott wrote one story of his knight Ivanhoe, and Ivanhoe's novelty becomes a crossover only by dint of his association with a previously established icon, in this case, Robin Hood. As I've said in earlier essays, other historical figures in IVANHOE do not have iconic status, but Robin of Loxley does because he had attained the status of a legend long before Scott wrote IVANHOE. Yet here is a point I never elaborated before. The only way a monadic icon like Ivanhoe can be one-half of a crossover-dyad is if he does, in his sole appearance, merit a high level of qualitative escalation-- which Ivanhoe, apart from his association with Robin Hood, does.

The fourth form-- the one that only looks like a crossover-- is a monadic work in which an established icon-- whether entirely fictional or based in history but given legendary status-- meets a novel icon lacking any claim to qualitative escalation. For instance, even though Billy the Kid was a real historical personage, he's become the stuff of legend due to many fictional iterations of his persona. So anytime the Kid appears in any story, even one that purports to be closely based on real history, the Kid-icon carries crossover-potential-- even in a work like the 1970 feature film CHISUM. Though this film, dealing with the Lincoln County Cattle Wars, includes historical personages other than Billy the Kid, none of the other figures possess legendary status. As for the novel icon of the movie (and, I assume, of the prose source material), he possesses only base iconicity, and so cannot function against Billy the Kid in a crossover-matrix. The fictional cattle baron John Chisum has no special distinctions that would indicate elevated iconicity. The character is not only nowhere close to the qualitative level of Scott's Ivanhoe, he's not even close to some of the better characters essayed by actor John Wayne, such as Quirt (ANGEL AND THE BADMAN) Evans or Ethan (THE SEARCHERS) Edwards. Had either of those monadic luminaries happened to have crossed paths with a legendary Western character, *that* might have been a crossover. But John Chisum is just another routine placeholder, undoubtedly selected for film adaptation because it was the sort of character John Wayne could play in his sleep. 

This line of thought occurred to me in part because of multi-character crossovers like the 1948 oater RETURN OF THE BAD MEN. This film was a crossover because of the "team-up" of several famous outlaws-- but the eminent icon of the story, Vance Cordell, is just one of the many stolid and unremarkable heroes played by Randolph Scott. Cordell and Chisum are novel monadic icons, but they lack any special qualities that would give them elevated iconicity. It's not impossible that there might be a western-themed monad that associates an outstanding eminent icon and some legendary figure, paralleling the model of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. But at the moment, nothing occurs to me.

ADDENDUM: I may as well mention that Scott's LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL is like CHISUM in that the narrative includes a number of nugatory historical figures fictionalized for Scott's poem. But none of these characters, not even the Scottish scholar who gets morphed into a sorcerer, merit legendary status either.

                    

             

EVALUATING EMINENCES PT. 1

 I've introduced a panoply of new terms this year, and so I'm going to try to coordinate them better, starting with one literary work: Walter Scott's IVANHOE. This novel bears a number of distinctions in general literary history, having fomented the genre of the historical novel, as well as being one of the few Scott novels that educated people remember fairly well. Within my own critical system, it also bears other distinctions.

After two centuries in which European and American literature produced no significant combative works, IVANHOE was the first truly popular work of that type, even though, as I've discussed, Scott's long poem LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL occupies "pride of place." IVANHOE seems to be the first important work of crossover-fiction of the "Modern Era," given Scott's usage of the legendary hero Robin Hood within the narrative of the totally fictional hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe. And the novel was central to my discussion of "centricity" in this 2018 essay, even though the term centricity has become somewhat subsumed by the term "eminence." But before I procced to the topic of elevating eminences, I'll detail the substance of the IVANHOE novel with attention to my new narrative terms "excitant" and "reactant."

The novel's setting is 12th-century England. Prince John sits the throne, representing the obnoxious Norman lords who came from France and took control of the country from the earlier occupants, the Anglo-Saxon populace. Not all of the Normans are bad guys, though. The noble protagonist faces disinheritance by his Anglo-Saxon father for Ivanhoe's loyalty to King Richard, even though Richard left John on the throne so that he the King wanted to go off and fight in the Crusades. That said, the "bad Normans" are the "excitants" of the story; they create the conflict with which Ivanhoe must deal. Historically, the Normans will remain in power, and so the only thing Ivanhoe, the "reactant," can do to fix the situation is to help the good Norman king Richard regain the throne. Ivanhoe cannot defeat all bad Normans, but he can defeat one of their foremost paladins, Sir Brian-- even though Brian's defeat also comes about due to other factors as well.

Now, one of my main concerns in the 2018 "centricity" essay was to dispute the claim made by Nancy Springer: that she did not consider Ivanhoe the book's "real hero," because despite being the "common thread" binding all the other characters into Scott's pattern, he had "no personality." I responded in part:

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own.

What I called "color" probably corresponds with what Springer deems "personality," even I don't find Ivanhoe as colorless as she did. Springer preferred characters with more pronounced character traits, but I don't deem that to be the defining factor of what makes a particular icon centric/eminent. This year I defined all forms of eminence, superordinate and subordinate, in terms of the dual factors of activity and resonance:

I advanced my new concept that iconicity, the nature of fictional icons, stemmed from two factors: activity, what the icons do, and resonance, what the icons represent. By extension this means that whatever icon or icons are superordinate to the other icons are so judged in terms of "eminent activity," "eminent resonance," or a combination of the two.

In Ivanhoe's case, his superordinate eminence stems from both activity (he's an admirably strong warrior) and resonance (he's a tolerant square-shooter, treating the Jews Isaac and Rebecca decently when many of his contemporaries see them as victims to be exploited). If IVANHOE has been more of a pure romance-tale revolving around the forbidden liaison of a Christian knight and a Jewish female, then Rebecca could have shared Ivanhoe's eminence, as Romeo and Juliet are equal eminences in the Shakespeare play. But Scott is more concerned with bringing about the end of Bad Norman rule and the return of Richard's just reign (in fiction, at least), so Ivanhoe's activity and resonance pervades the novel as no other character's qualities do.   

The last set of terms I want to interpolate are the concepts of "base iconicity" and "elevated iconicity" as elaborated in the February essay COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4. Ivanhoe and all of his subordinate characters were defined as having at very least a default value of "base iconicity" because the novel is a monadic work, wherein even characters drawn from history (King Richard) and from legend (Robin Hood) exist in fixed conditions, not capable, as serials are, of being influenced by the quantitative form of escalation.

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them as support-characters to Ivanhoe. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY. 

Serials thus can have their eminent qualities enhanced according to qualitative or quantitative escalation. With regard to the quantitative form, I gave a couple of examples of subordinate characters who graduated to ELEVATED ICONICITY simply because they appeared twice rather than once. Two appearances does not confer any qualitative mojo; it just means that some storyteller thought he could enthrall an audience with Character X by dint of repeating him/her--in this case, Olga the Cossack Queen in the third season of BATMAN '66. From the quantitative view, Olga rates a bit more highly than other one-shot villains.

At the same time, though monadic characters like those of IVANHOE cannot be elevated quantitatively (because they only appear once in the medium of their creation), the activity-and-resonance of all monadic characters may be elevated qualitatively going by the reception they receive from an audience. I took pains to emphasize, in the essay EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:

A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Yet, it's not impossible for a one-shot icon in a serial format to also attain qualitative eminence, even for a subordinate icon. Thua in the INTERORDINATION essay, I cited the example of the Batman villain "Death-Man." As much as any icon within a monadic work, Death-Man was meant to be used once, and despite the fact that many fans of the time liked him, no one revived the precise character within the corpus of Batman comics. My conclusion was that though it was rare for a subordinate character in a serial work to attain "durability" despite only appearing once, Death-Man was one such character. In my next essay, I'll take an attitude not unlike that of Nancy Springer and examine a work where the subordinate icons may *seem* more important, even though none of them possess stature.  

MYTHCOMICS: "TURNABOUT" (WEIRD TERROR #7, 1953)

 

"Turnabout"-- the only concrescent story I found in the entire run of Comic Media's WEIRD TERROR title-- is a turnabout in both an intrinsic and extrinsic sense. The writer's name is lost to the ages, but the art is credited to a fellow who signed himself as "Tewks."

 

The splash panel indicates that if Tewks did not write the story, he composed this panel with an eye to the final page's Big Reveal. Despite the superimposed image of a woman's lips and heavy-lashed eye, there's no woman in the first six pages of "Turnabout." The opening caption tracks better, for by the second page it's evident that racer Walt Barker has something of a Frankensteinian relationship with his car, initially addressed as "Pete." Barker doesn't construct his auto out of disparate parts-- though that would have been a nice touch-- but in order to make Pete faster, Barker gives him a brain. Barker also mentions that he was thrown out of "the academy" and called crazy. So far, given Barker's experience with rogue racers, it looks like the tale will follow the usual pattern of a scientist unleashing a horror to take revenge on persecutors, only to fall victim to his own creation. On page 4 the car comes to life to defend its creator against the rowdies, so one might fairly assume that we're going to have a visit from one of the ancestors of Stephen King's CHRISTINE.

 Well, the writer satisfies one of his readers' most likely expectations, killing the rowdies when they come back to assault Barker and his creation. But here's also where the tale takes a weird turn: Pete has already become so hostile toward the evildoers that he's learned a skill the Frankenstein Monster never mastered: the ability to propagate his species, by creating another intelligent car like himself.

But now we're six pages into this seven-page story, and the writer has precious little time to set up his "turnabout." So a caption tells us that the monster car manages to become a scientist in its own right. Pete, now called "Peter Engine," whips up a stand-alone city called Motorcadia, presumably populated by intelligent cars, and shielded from human interference, possibly by the standard force field. The humans make peace with the robot city, and in two more years, Barker gets an invitation from his "son" to visit the "wonder city." The script also mentions that Barker has somehow upgraded himself from car-racer to "chief scientist of robatomics." One might think Barker would keep his innovations secret from humanity, given that he's fathered a new competitor for the human race.

And what does Peter Engine want to show his creator? Why, that Peter has outstripped him, in that now he's able to create, and market, lissome human females "with all accessories." The story stops short of suggesting that humans will become dependent upon Peter's creations. One might assume that such a fate is implied, though, in the closing line, "Nowadays, when monsters are created, they don't kill you; they SELL you."

                  

NULL-MYTHS: DEADPOOL TEAM-UP #1-5 (2024)

 

This five-issue mini-series is one of the most entertaining null-myths I've reviewed here-- and it's purportedly a complete project by Rob Liefled!

I've only read bits and pieces of Liefeld's oeuvre, but the Image star always churned out lots of big splashy panels with minimal narrative content. But here, Liefeld's placing in his co-creation Deadpool into a comics-form that really needs minimal narrative content: the "team-up book." 

Most team-up books exist just to juxtapose the brief interaction of two or more icons, who have little to no effect on one another's lives. Liefeld starts TEAM-UP off like most such crossover-stories, whipping up some paper-thin reason for main star Deadpool to interact with his first co-star: Ral Dorn, a super-obscure support-character from a 1980s FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL (though Ral was also associated in that story with ongoing FF-monster Dragon Man). But once that shaky framework has been established, Liefeld throws continuity-consistency out the window and bombards "the Merc with a Mouth" with guest-stars who pop in and out of the narrative so readily, the effect is slightly surrealistic. There is, for instance, no attention to matters like, "what was Cable doing before he decided to involve himself in Deadpool's affairs?" Characters like the now obscure Shatterstar get no explanation of who they are or what they're about, and a few better-known types, like Hercules and Doc Samson, only appear for a page or two.

That said, Liefeld did pick some oddball continuities from which to draw. When I saw that the guest list included Crystar-- a character from a failed toy line, one of many who got his own Marvel comic during Jim Shooter's editorial tenure-- I thought Liefeld might be unearthing the crystal warrior, having determined that his copyright from the Remco Toys had lapsed. But it turns out that Crystar returned to Marvel Comics in a 2015 series, based loosely on the 1970s magical-fantasy concept WEIRDWORLD. Consider me educated.

No one will find any stunning examples of graphic art; it's just lots of panels of fantasy-icons slugging each other. The two-page fight between Wolverine and Lady Deadpool is probably the best battle, as well as satisfying fans who want *A* Wolverine-Deadpool fight any time the two characters share panel-space.    

NULL-MYTHS: RECONSTRUCTION (FF #544-550, 2007-2008)

 I don't know what the overall scheme was for the clusterfubar known as CIVIL WAR: THE INITIATIVE, aside from finding another means of monetizing the CIVIL WAR. But for writer Dwayne McDuffie, the seven issues of FANTASTIC FOUR's part in this farrago seem to have been his excuse to recycle familiar FF-tropes with some minor new touches.

Though these issues are given the umbrella title RECONSTRUCTION, they're three separate stories loosely associated by (a) Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman take a "second honeymoon" break from the team, and (b) Black Panther and his relatively new wife Storm substitute for them.

RECONSTRUCTION is a pleasingly slick routine, with McDuffie supplying many wry one-liners and Paul Pelletier providing glamorous art. But the first is a "cosmic" story in which the New FF tries to save a living planet, name of "Epoch," from Galactus, which is little more than a redo of an old THOR idea with the Silver Surfer guest starring. The third story is an even more rushed idea involving the entity Eternity, who's "dying" from what might be called cosmic antibodies. Both stories are wrapped up with deus ex machina solutions. Oh, and Doc Strange guests.

The middle story shows McDuffie more in his normal vein, as the Frightful Four sets a series of traps for the New FF. Actually, this time the Frightful group is a quintet, including usual suspects Wizard, Trapster, Titania, Hydro-Man, and relative newcomer Klaw. Efficient if unremarkable superhero fare, with the odd decision to make the Wizard into Doctor Doom in one sense: that he hates Reed Richards for being the superior intellect.

The middle story's also a source of interest in that it seems to foreground a trend that took off in the 2010s: Marvel's attempt to play down the X-Men, because the film rights to the merry mutants were owned by 20th-Century Fox. In one possibly coincidental line, the Wizard mocks Storm and the Panther as "C-listers." Maybe that was just meant to be standard villain-snark, but it's hard to believe that any character in the Marvel Universe would have regarded any X-MEN member as a C-lister. The Panther, yes, if a villain deemed him just a costumed athlete. But Storm and the other X's were highly visible "in-Universe," if not nearly as popular with average citizens as the Fantastic Four.

True, the Marvel Cinematic Universe only launched with IRON MAN in 2008, the final year of this short McDuffie arc. It probably took a few years for Marvel (or Disney) to decide that when the comics hyped the still-popular X-MEN, they were actually publicizing properties that made money for Fox, not for Disney. But if the Wizard's putdown of an X-Woman was just coincidence, rather than a harbinger of things to come in the 2010s, it's still the most interesting thing about this arc.      

VERTICALLY CHALLENGED

 

In 2012 I blogged an essay entitled VERTICALLY CHALLENGING, but it bears little in common with the subject of this essay except for using the ideas of "vertical meaning" and "lateral meaning," derived from my reading of Aldous Huxley. 

This is not a proper review of Jodi Picoult's NINETEEN MINUTES, but is more my attempt to grapple with its "vertically challenged" nature. By that I mean that while it's not possible for an organized work of fiction to lack all vertical meaning, MINUTES focuses so thoroughly upon the journalistic minutiae of its narrative that there's barely any vertical meaning beyond a truism like "do as you would done by."

A Picoult interview in the back of the book informs the reader that she undertook the story-- dealing with a school shooting in a fictional New Hampshire high school-- because her own children had to cope with bullying. The main character of MINUTES is student Peter Houghton, who's been relentlessly victimized for years by thoughtless classmates. The novel starts after Peter has sought revenge by killing students, but Picoult shuttles across her timeline, showing quick cuts of his experiences and those of other townsfolk within his orbit. In the end, Peter is quite logically convicted for his crimes, but Picoult works in a surprise or two to increase narrative tension.

Still, to use my alternate terms for the two meaning-forms, Picoult concentrates almost exclusively on "what things happen" as opposed to "how things happen." Because I usually read both considerable amounts of canonical literature and metaphenomenal fiction, I haven't encountered quite so exclusive a focus upon lateral meaning, which I defined here thusly:      

 I think the "literal meaning" is not something that looms "over" the poem, as a dialectical theme can be descried 'from above." The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened."

To be sure, there have been many similar isophenomenal works in which one could not easily draw out a vertical meaning. Earlier this year I reread Hemingway's THE SUN ALSO RISES, and the most I can say is that all the disparate events in the lives of Hemingway's characters suggest a leveling of the previous era's certainties about life's meaning-- even if Hemingway had no countervailing meaning to promote.

MINUTES, though, doesn't have any reference to history outside the years prior to the book's publication in 2007. Because of that limitation, I find it hard to deem MINUTES to qualify as canonical literature, though it's too well done to deem it no more than simple "melodrama" along the lines of, say, PEYTON PLACE.

Though MINUTES doesn't possess a vertical meaning that might grant it the sheen of literature, it's a well-wrought drama about a sociological problem. Years after its initial publication, the book's was banned from over thirty school districts in the 2022-23 semester, apparently over some very brief sexual depictions. Since most school boards will not testify as to their reasons for banning, one can only speculate on those reasons. MINUTES is not a sex-book, but it's possible that it got swept up in general bans of more intentionally provocative works, such as the 2019 graphic novel GENDER QUEER. An alternative reason might be that MINUTES is fairly critical of the fictional school system that allows Peter to be bullied for years, and that might be a depiction that many real-world school systems might not like to have in their school libraries.