THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

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

                                                     

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

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

                   

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

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

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

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

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

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

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

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 I devoted one essay in this series to "external alignment," defined thusly: 'This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.' I then followed it up with another essay, which defined "internal alignment" as "substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos." However, in re-reading my other essays on the topic of "alignment," I see that the essay I wrote just before these two, COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5, also dealt with two forms of alignment, both of which might subsume the external and internal formulations.                                       

  One example I gave of internal alignment was that of the 2014 film NOAH. I remarked that this film took place in the "Noah cosmos," but that it reached into some loosely allied Biblical narratives to flesh out the cinematic storyline: narratives such as the story of Tubal-Cain, which is not directly involved in the tale of Noah. I did not mention that the film also played off of alternate Noah-stories like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which is probably the movie's source of its "rock-giants." These two borrowings bring me to explore my description of "static alignment" in Part Five of COSMIC ALIGNMENT. In that essay, I used the Joker as an element of the "Batman cosmos" that is always aligned with Batman, no matter how many other "other-universe" characters the Joker may encounter.                                                                                           

Now, there are various narratives, whether stand-alone or serial in nature, that relate fictional stories of archaic myth-characters meeting, even though they never met in archaic stories. The archaic Hercules never met a lot of the Greek figures encountered by, say, the televised Hercules of the LEGENDARY JOURNEYS teleseries, such as the above-seen monster Echidna. But in my view, even the modern-day version of Hercules remains in a static alignment with nearly all Greek mythology, just as the modern-day Noah is in a static alignment with all Biblical mythology. The only way in which the alignment is bent, though not broken, is when an element strongly aligned with another icon-cosmos is imported into a given narrative. The rock-giants of NOAH aren't in the Old Testament text, but they are in the Book of Enoch, so the two iterations of the Deluge Story can blend with no crossover-vibe. But Tubal-Cain, though he's a distant Hebrew ancestor like Noah, properly belongs to the narrative of Cain, and so a static type of crossover ensues.                                       

                           

              

                                       

     The opposite of the "static alignment" was the "dynamic alignment." My main aim in forming this concept was to describe cases in which a particular "Sub" was not firmly bonded to the cosmos in which it first appeared, so that it could successfully migrate into other cosmoses. My examples there were super-villains like Thanos and the Cobra-Hyde team, which did not remain firmly associated with the hero-cosmos in which each originally appeared, to wit, Iron Man for Thanos, Thor for Cobra-Hyde. This also applies to the examples given in the "external alignment" argument: certain elements in a given culture's stories can be seen as dynamic in that they can and do move from one sub-cosmos to another. For example, one may posit that the Greek monsters called "Cyclopes" start out as smith-servants to Zeus, King of the Gods, crafting the heaven-lord's fatal thunderbolts. Arguably later, the poet Homer reworks these traditional figures into a race of cannibalistic giants who live apart from humankind and become menaces within the cosmos of the hero Odysseus.                                                                                                                         

                                                                             This transitive property of certain myth-figures transfers to their entirely fictional (and thus nominative) iterations. Thus Marvel Comics' Thor can meet pretty much any figure within Norse mythology-- say, the fire-god Surtur-- and it doesn't matter that Archaic Thor never crossed paths with Archaic Surtur.  This is the same intertextuality that keeps the NOAH movie's intermingling of elements from both Old Testament and apocryphal sources from meriting the crossover-vibe. The "static crossover" might still be possible if Marvel-Thor is constellated with another major figure of Nordic myth, like Roy Thomas' attempt to meld the legend of Marvel-Thor with that of Seigfried. But there's no intertextuality between Norse myth and Hindu myth, as per my example of Marvel-Thor meeting Marvel-Shiva. Thus, an encounter between any version of Thor and any version of Shiva is a dynamic one and parallels the sort of dynamic crossover one finds whenever a villan with a static default to a particular cosmos interacts with some other cosmos (The Joker hassles Superman, for example).                                                                                   

                                                                                      I felt I should be more specific on this subject also with reference to purely nominative fictional characters who are aligned with archaic mythologies, such as Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman simply encounters a beast from Greek mythology without its "own story," such as the Chimera or the Hydra, then that's not a crossover. But if she meets a character from Greek myth that has been the "star" of his own narrative, such as Heracles, then that's a static crossover-- while if she meets myths or legends from outside the sphere of Greek myth, then that's a dynamic crossover.