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.          

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 2

 As I said in Part 1, in this and succeeding installments I'm examining Atlas' first SF-anthology, JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, for examples of SF-stories that display at least as much characterization as the SF-stories in EC's WEIRD SCIENCE. The WEIRD SCIENCE tales are not masterpieces of "thinking man's SF" any more than are the stories of the Atlas title, but in the first three issues-- numbered 36-38-- there's a mix of both simplistic "gosh-wow" space opera and somewhat more reflective storylines. After those three issues, JIUW began new numbering in 1951, starting with issue 4 and concluding with issue 59 in 1957.       

JIUW 36

 "The Strange Car" (art Russ Heath) -- car thief steals wrong car; "gets religion" after he saves Earth.

"Prisoner of Time" (art Sol Brodsky) -- space-conqueror meets ironic fate due to misunderstanding how time works.

"The End of the Earth" (art Vern Henkel) -- two alien races intend to rescue the people of Earth, Through a misunderstanding, both rescuers abjure giving aid, but the story ends on a message of self-reliance.

JIUW #38

"The Last Man" (Don Rico/Dave Berg) -- man dreams that he's destined to be the last survivor of devastating atomic war.

"The Metal Monsters" (art Pete Tumlinson) -- rebellious apostate correctly predicts that Earth will suffer for becoming too dependent on their robot protectors.

My tentative conclusion is that these reflective tropes anticipate many of those that would appear sporadically throughout 1950s SF comics from Atlas, particularly those of the late fifties that Marvel tended to reprint in the 1960s and 1970s.  

1950: THE NEXUS OF MARVEL "REALISM" PT. 1

 In my 2023 essay THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION, I said in part: 

...comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I now feel that the term "philosophy-SF" is misleading, especially in terms of gauging how the tropes of science fiction, even those communicated mostly through SF-films, influenced early Marvel. The term doesn't quite capture the essence of "What Made Sixties Marvel Successful." There are Marvel stories from the 1960s that had varying degrees of philosophical significance, but philosophy was not a constant factor in Marvels rise to success, as one might say that philosophy was important to the fiction of Robert Heinlein (who was, incidentally, one of the contributors to the groundbreaking Hollywood SF-film DESTINATION MOON). The two factors in Marvel's meteoric sixties success were (1) the concept of a vast, intertwined universe of genre-heroes, and (2) the sincere attempt to give all these heroes and their villains at least a modicum of characterization. 

Now, of these two factors, the idea of a comics-company using a "shared universe" was not derived from any other medium or genre, since Marvel, in its 1940s incarnation of "Timely Comics," had already played around with heroes meeting each other, as had other publishers of the period. But the second factor, that of characterization, may owe a substantial debt to advances in the way SF in various media used the same factor, beginning ten years before the advent of the Marvel Age of Comics. 

I mentioned above that in America prose science fiction received a boost in terms of sophisticated treatments when the MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION was launched in 1949, and the same is true of its competitor GALAXY MAGAZINE, launched in 1950. I assume both magazines sought to monetize the public's growing awareness of "space-age" technology, just as producer George Pal did with DESTINATION MOON, followed by many more raconteurs throughout the 1950s decade. And I would assume something similar influenced the way three comics-companies launched science-fiction anthology-titles in that same pivotal year of 1950.

EC Comics-- WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY, June 1950

DC Comics-- STRANGE ADVENTURES, August 1950

Atlas (formerly Timely) Comics-- JOURNEY INTO UNKNOWN WORLDS, September 1950.    

Of these three companies, DC made no major inroads in using multifaceted characters; STRANGE ADVENTURES remained in the 1940s mode of gosh-wow SF. William Gaines, though, sought to produce more deeply textured SF-stories, even if he had to swipe from the best authors, such as Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, to accomplish that feat. But what of JOURNEY, the first SF-anthology comic published by Timely/Atlas/Marvel? Which side of the characterization fence does it fall upon?

"To be continued" in Part 2...       

 

                   

 

SLAVE WAGES PT. 3

 I found myself revisiting this two-part essay, particularly the second part, after reading these two sentences from Dinesh D'Souza's AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

The D'Souza book does not explore in depth the nature of any "lust for power," Augustinian or otherwise, but aligns any desires for dominion with what he terms "the ethic of conquest," which depends on the use of non-consensual force. This ethic is contrasted with the ethic D'Souza champions, which might be termed an "ethic of commerce," in that D'Souza argues for commerce as the exercise of consensual interactions between assorted parties. And I may explore this thesis further in another essay, but here I want to contrast this one Augustinian assertion with what I wrote in the 2021 essay.

To sum up, I considered various reasons as to the etiology of slavery in antiquity. Reasons included the "eff you rationale" (where the people you're "effing" are rival tribes, by subjugating captives of those tribes), the potential for ransom, and the motive of economic security.

Now, however, I think I oversimplified. I do believe that most if not all cultures regarded the keeping of slaves as a form of personal wealth. And not all slaves are necessarily of enemy tribes or of different races, given that Leviticus mentions that ancient Jews kept other Jews as slaves. Slavery may have evolved as a retaliatory practice during tribal conflicts, but plainly once the practice got going, tribe-members were as vulnerable as outsiders to becoming enslaved, whether for economic or other reasons.

While my "eff you rationale" was conceived purely in terms of Tribe X wanting to enjoy the upper hand over Tribe Y, the rationale may apply in the more general sense of Human X wanting the upper hand over Human Y, irrespective of tribal allegiances. Though I have not read, nor am likely to read, any Augustine, his idea of the *libido dominandi* might be consonant with what I mean by "upper hand"-- though even that may not speak to the full nature of homo sapiens. From some quickie readings online, I see that Augustine's solution for man's domineering nature is "love of God," and that's not precisely a solution for me. In a future essay I may explore this line of thought in concert with earlier posts on the writings of Fukuyama. But with respect only to the etiology of slavery, it's feasible to see both "an ethic of conquest" and an "ethic of commerce" playing equal roles.                 

THE READING RHEUM: AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER (2014)

 

I've had only a nodding acquaintance with the life and works of Dinesh D'Souza. I knew that after he wrote a negative book about on Barack Obama, New York prosecutors, possibly doing the will of the Obama administration, charged D'Souza with illegal campaign contributions. The eight months D'Souza spent in a low-security prison may have been good for his career in that both his books and documentary films have become popular with right-leaning audiences. Over the years, I read a few D'Souza essays and liked some ideas but thought he sometimes resorted to sophisms (like the well-worn "the Democrats were the party of slavery," which is broadly true but misleading).

AMERICA-- IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT HER contains a few sophisms, but its theme statement provides a solid philosophical response to the Left's condemnation of the United States as irretrievably evil and imperialist. D'Souza marshals an impressive roster of intellectuals and academics-- including Marx, DeToqueville, James Madison, Adam Smith, and many of the 20th-century radicals, whose justifications of their hatred of America lay bare their dubious motivations, as well as their insidious influence upon Leftist politics. From these diverse voices D'Souza articulates his thesis: that America was unique in championing entrepreneurship as no country had before or has since. 

Further, D'Souza connects good entrepreneurship with the quality Adam Smith, conceiver of the market's "invisible hand," called "empathy:"

...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.

Now neither Smith nor D'Souza denied that the entrepreneur is motivated by what Smith termed "self-interest." But D'Souza asserts that such self-interest manifests in the maintenance of commerce, and because commerce is generally consensual, it stands in marked contrast to the ethic of conquest that dominated all older cultures:

The impulse to conquest comes from what Augustine termed the libido dominandi, the lust for power. This powerful passion included not merely the desire for goods but also for slaves and concubines.

To buttress this argument, D'Souza even quotes the 12th-century Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun (albeit in paraphrase), to the effect in his time violent conquest was deemed more honorable than the tradecraft of merchants, because conquest was more overt in its purpose to exploit others. But D'Souza's thesis persuasively argues that the ethic of conquest has been transcended by the actions of the colonists of early America, made up largely of either merchants or immigrants who aspired to be merchants.

I won't cover in detail the ways in which D'Souza exposes the grievance-based methods by which Leftist radicals have sought to tar the United States with the sins of the past. But he throws considerable doubt upon the motives of politicians like Obama and Hilary Clinton, and even if all of D'Souza's charges don't stick, it's a relief to find some of these sacred cows gored (so to speak).

One last comment: this 2014 book mentioned the fact that Obama was going to pass the Presidential torch to Hilary, which was correct. D'Souza thus makes no mention of the Presidential gamechanger Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy in June 2015. But it's fitting that Trump, whatever his faults, should arise to oppose the shame-dependent Left, not least because Trump is also-- an entrepreneur.         

    

    

          

CURIOSITIES: A CHILDISH PUN

 At maybe age 9 or 10 I came with the same lame pun seen in this late forties funny-animal comic, EGBERT, which was presumably written by a grown person.

 

MYTHCOMICS: ["A BRILLIANT CAREER"] DICK TRACY (1945-46)

 

In the 1960s, a familiar support-character in the DICK TRACY strip was Diet Smith, whose wealth and resources shepherded Tracy and his police department into Chester Gould's thoroughly bizarre vision of the Space Age-- a period that many TRACY fans might prefer to forget. But in the late 1940s, the year Smith was introduced, the millionaire magnate was best known for bestowing on Tracy his best-known technological gizmo: the 2-way wrist radio.

Now even in 1945 Gould could have easily made Smith both a captain of industry and a genius inventor, like the later Tony Stark, so that any device he gave to Tracy was his own creation. Or Gould might have modeled Smith after Harold Gray's Daddy Warbucks, whose plants could turn out war-weapons with no reference to the R&D process. Instead, though, the arc I've titled A BRILLIANT CAREER focuses upon the true creator of the wrist-radio, the blind genius named Brilliant, whose short and tumultuous career owed much to Diet Smith, though one of the two never knows their true connection.              

As it happens, the storyline for Smith also re-introduced a character whom Gould seemed to have consigned to a grisly death in October 1945: language-mangling comical hillbilly B.O. Plenty. Gould brought Plenty back into the strip and put him to work on Diet Smith's estate, and though the wild-bearded farmer doesn't play a big dramatic role in CAREER, he would go to become much more of a regular fixture in the 1950s than his employer.

In any case, Smith, whose nickname clearly refers to the mild food he eats, due to ulcers brought on by his hard-driving work-schedule, contacts Tracy. Smith's long-time business partner, whom Smith regarded as a brother (though the dead man never gets a proper name), has perished in an isolated room, strangled to death by an unknown assailant. However, Plenty stumbles across a clue: an experimental wristwatch-radio apparently dropped by the murderer. Smith relates that the dead partner was in charge of the division working on the secret project. Tracy interviews the radio division's research team, and the employee "Miss Irma" claims, perhaps imprudently, to have invented the watch. Tracy suggests her involvement in the crime, prompting this exchange:

SMITH: "Why, Irma's devoted to our company. She's been legally compensated for all discoveries while in our employ. She's quite happy."

TRACY: "Are you SURE she's happy?"

This is the closest that Gould-- who was himself a toiler in the fields owned by a great syndicate-- comes to admitting that such a laborer might feel himself (or herself) short-changed. And Tracy's instincts are correct in that Irma did feel short-changed, which presumably led her to murder Smith's partner for vague reasons. Apparently Irma believed she could remain Smith's employee and brazen things out, but when Tracy implicates her, she gets her husband Herman to spring her free using another of her inventions, "the atom light."

Except Irma and Herman are far bigger thieves than even a robber-baron like Smith. Irma's teenaged son Brilliant-- whom she accidentally blinded in a sort of reverse-Oedipal motif-- created both the atom light and the wrist-radio. (Though Brilliant has no idea that his mother's using one of his inventions for crime, it's somewhat appropriate that even a saintly kid like Brilliant might want to deprive others of sight. if only on a subconscious level.) Irma and Herman, now on the run, then get the not-so-brilliant idea to mass-produce the atom light for sale to foreign powers. Brilliant informs his adoptive father that they can only make more devices with a supply of lithium. Herman, knowing that Smith's factory has such a supply, uses the atom light to try ripping off the shipment. However, Smith's guards kill Herman.

Irma, never a master planner, then goes off the deep end. She infiltrates Smith's estate, and in a scene perhaps more indebted to Agamemnon than to Oedipus, she shoots Smith in his bath and then kills herself.

   

The Oedipal pattern does come forth, though, for even after Brilliant has been told how his parents used him, he like his mother decides that Smith is responsible for all his sufferings. At the hospital where Smith is recovering from his wounds, Brilliant invades what he thinks is the industrialist's room and attempts to kill his parents' murderer. However, hardboiled Tracy has read Brilliant like a book, and he plays a game of "blind man's bluff," allowing Brilliant to fire into an empty bed. Once Brilliant has purged his demons, he expresses contrition. He accepts Smith's offer to be the chief of research at Smith's facility. In private, the industrialist says that he wants Brilliant to become "my boy," though in this story we don't see the formation of filial bonds. But readers almost surely accepted that Smith could only be an improvement over Irma and her husband with the sound-alike name.

Gould could have left things that way for the run of the strip. For roughly the next two years, Smith and Brilliant presented other inventions to the city police, though none became as iconic as the wrist-radio. However, in 1948 Brilliant incorporated his "atom light" into "a television burglar alarm," and this was deemed such a threat to organized crime that a racketeer, Big Frost, tried to kill Diet Smith and did murder Brilliant.    

And it's at the point where Tracy ramps up the search for Brilliant's killer that Diet Smith drops the Oedipal bomb. Brilliant was his natural son by Irma, to whom Smith was married for a time. Thus the Oedipal slaying of the true father in defense of the false one was averted, though Smith's secretiveness may have cost him some points with readers. Yet even after Brilliant became the epitome of the loyal son, it seems Gould wanted the dramatic payoff, but without any complications to the strip's status quo. So Brilliant becomes one of the TRACY strip's many casualties, and in future I suspect nothing more is said about the creative personnel behind Diet Smith Industries.    
           
      

MYTHCOMICS: THE INCAL (1980-88)

 

“What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” -- HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2.

"So much beauty in the center of a world full of garbage."-- Deepo, THE INCAL, Book 3.

THE INCAL, written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and rendered by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, was serialized from 1980 to 1988 in METAL HURLANT magazine, and to date it remains both a popular and critically-celebrated franchise. Yet, for all the phantasmagorical content put forth by Jodorowsky and Moebius, the six volumes present a knotty problem. The rambling storyline is replete with all sorts of symbolism involving the Tarot, the four elements, and a dichotomous object that seems to be the son of the creator-god. Yet Jodorowsky seems inordinately preoccupied with the narrative role occupied by viewpoint character John DiFool, who's as far as one can get from god or angel, but seems to fit the status of "quintessence of dust" pretty well. Thus, with apologies to Milton, I boil down the master trope of THE INCAL to Jodorowsky "justifying the ways of dust to gods and angels."

  Jodorowsky introduced John DiFool, resident of your basic space-opera Earth, the way many PIs are introduced in 20th-century detective fiction. The hero starts out pursuing some mundane or even sordid job and rapidly gets mixed up in matters far beyond his usual experience. A crucial difference, though, is that though a Philip Marlowe usually proves equal to any task that challenges him, John DiFool mostly survives by dumb luck. And where Marlowe possesses a charm for the fair sex, DiFool is purposely given a homely face, so that any women who cross his path are drawn less to his looks than to things like money or power.

  As DiFool narrates to an attentive prostitute, he acquired a strange glowing triangle-- later dubbed "The Luminous Incal"-- from an alien, and no sooner does he return to his apartment than other ferocious beings come looking for his prize. (His pet bird Deepo is probably a callback to the white winged mount who appeared in Moebius' ARZACH stories.) DiFool conceals the Incal by swallowing it, though in the beginning he's motivated only the possibility of profit. 

  

Soon DiFool learns he's out of his league when he's taken prisoner by Earth's utterly corrupt Prezident, but the power of the Incal saves him, as well as conferring the power of speech upon Deepo. On the downside, The Incal starts talking as well, and it drafts the unwilling detective into a quest to find its other half, The Black Incal, in the forbidden realm of Technocity. There it just so happens that the Techno Priest cult has tapped the negative energies of the Black Incal to create a universe-ending threat, "Shadow Eggs," which will unleash a "Great Darkness" that Jodorowsky never explains.

Meanwhile, a professional assassin, the Metabaron, is forced to track down DiFool and his metaphysical companion by Tanatah, who kidnaps the Metabaron's adopted son Solune (Sol + Lune) in order to force the assassin to do her will. It's no coincidence that the tough-as-nails Metabaron fits the standard hero-archetype far more than does John DiFool.

DiFool does acquire the Black Incal, but he gives it away to a beautiful woman riding a giant rat after she kills a Technopriest menacing the detective. Calling herself Animah, she leaves DiFool behind, so that he and Deepo are taken prisoner by the Metabaron. The assassin tries to get back his son from Tanatah, but she takes the Luminous Incal from DiFool and prepares to kill all her prisoners. However, the forces of the Prezident attack Tanatah's stronghold. She makes common cause with her enemies and they hightail it.

Tanatah reveals that she and Animah are both sisters and former guardians of the two Incals, but Tanatah gave the Black Incal to the Technopriests for some vague reason. Since Animah has the Luminous Incal now, Tanatah decides they must all joorney to the center of the planet, an immense garbage dump where Animah and her giant rats live. (Incidentally, Animah is Solune's mother but hls father's identity will be revealed later.) One of the Prezident's murder-machines follows the fugitives to the garbage-world but DiFool and Animah unite the power of the two Incals and destroy the craft.

  

The seven companions journey to the plane of some metaphysical guardians called "Arhats" (a Buddhist term for a seeker who has achieved nirvana). The Arhats in turn convey the travelers to "the heart of the interior sun," where all seven are transfigured, and Solune in particular assumes a half-light, half-dark ritual. It's during this ritual, designed to unite the two Incals, that Animah drops a bomb: that she masqueraded as a prostitute to gather DiFool's seed. because his genetic material was the only one that could birth a unique child such as Solune-- who, BTW, becomes a disembodied intelligence. However, now that the Incals have merged, DiFool becomes peevish at having been used as everyone's pawn.

Now, at this point a lot of space-opera writers would concentrate on the surviving menace of the Shadow Eggs and the Great Darkness they represent. Suffice to say that Jodorowsky and Moebius go off on a lot of tangents not germane to the main plot (particularly various "bread and circuses" satires that become tiresome after a while). The next *consequential* subplot involves DiFool having to spread his unique genetic material into an alien queen, Barbariah. who makes herself look like Animah. The upshot of this subplot is that the detective sires a planet of people who look like him.

Skipping over lots of beautifully rendered filler material, Solune finally confronts the Darkness, whatever it is, and destroys its medium, though not its power. Solune determines that the Darkness can be banished if all humans in the universe participate in a shared "theta dream," which among other things forces DiFool to seek out the world of humanoids he sired on Barbariah. Once all the humans are dreaming in concert, the seven companions must channel the theta energy against the Darkness-- and their efforts cause all but DiFool to sacrifice their lives.      

      

After all these wonder-working tropes, almost the only thing Jodorowsky didn't do was to have his reluctant hero meet God-- so he does. Creator-god Orh informs DiFool that he uses his only begotten son, The Incal, to bring forth "the seed of the new creation." As for DiFool, he's not yet elevated enough to join any new orders, so back he goes to the point where his story began-- taking a big fall that may lead to death, or to enlightenment.

But even if one could not read of DiFool's fate in the sequel FINAL INCAL, most readers would find it unlikely that the recalcitrant reprobate would ever sing any cosmic kumbayas. Clearly Jodorowsky wanted DiFool to represent the unrefined nature of humankind-- though he's certainly far from the only inhabitant of his far-future world who's moved only by egotism and concupiscence. Yet Jodorowsky also imbues the detective with some strange genetic vigor, making him, the arrant fool, the only person who can give birth to Solune, who's something of a humanized Incal, making the Fool the father of the Savior. Despite the suggestions of the her's special destiny, overall there's a strain of Hamlet-esque pessimism in THE INCAL. Jodorowsky may have meant to suggest that for all the metaphysical beauties human beings can conjure forth, they remain composed of dust, and all their infinite faculties will not keep them from returning to dust.