NEAR-MYTHS: "WILD THINGS," "TIME UPON A ONCE" (SWAMP THING #65-87 (1987-89)

 

My proximate reason for re-reading Rick Veitch's 23-issue run on the artist's run on the regular SWAMP THING was to remind myself of the setup for the conclusion of Veitch's storylines. As Veitch himself observed, that conclusion became the medium's most famous "unfinished story," since DC refused to publish Veitch's conclusion, resulting in his refusal to work with DC Comics again. DC for its part simply enlisted another raconteur to finish the Veitch storyline and went on publishing SWAMP THING comics. But now, after 30-plus years, DC decided to publish the Veitch conclusion, with the storyline unaltered though of course new art had to be produced and paid for. It's my intention to review this storyline in the next few days in a separate essay.

DC's moratorium on the conclusion did not prevent the company from packaging the Veitch SWAMP THING run-- as well as some ancillary materials I did not examine for this essay-- in three hardbound volumes, respectively titled "Wild Things," "Synchronicity," and "Time Upon a Once." Whatever the reasons for these divisions, I'd say the 23 issues break down into two distinct plotlines, and the titles "Wild Things" and "Time Upon a Once" are as good as any to denote those two stories.

Of the two, "Time" is easier to discuss, and the more pleasurable, so I'll deal with that one first-- even though it's the part that was left without a proper conclusion until recently. According to this interview, Veitch anticipated that DC's 1988 summer crossover event, INVASION, would oblige him to orient the SWAMP THING feature upon the "invading alien hordes" storyline. Instead, Veitch devoted two issues to setting up the contrivance that before the aliens could invade, they had to get rid of Swamp Thing due to his plant-based powers. So the aliens send the spirit of the muck-monster careening down the corridors of time-- which also gave the author the chance to revisit an assortment of DC characters set in other time-periods. As Veitch said:

“I figured if I got Swamp Thing off the planet and out of our time zone, then Swamp Thing comics could just be about that and they wouldn’t have to be a part of whatever that crossover was. The other aspect of the time-travel sequence was there were a few DC characters at the time who hadn’t been staked out by various creative people who wanted to retcon them. The richest vein of available characters were all in the past. The cowboys and the cavemen and the gladiators and the knights and all of that kind of stuff. I was really attracted to that, that I’d have that in my little sandbox and be able to play with all of them.”

Here's how the crossovers broke down.

#82-- ST interacts with DC's most famous war-hero Sergeant Rock in the closing years of WWII, as well as with an earlier incarnation of ST's enduring enemy Anton Arcane. With minor appearances by the Unknown Soldier and (in modern times) Jason Woodrue in his regrettable NEW GUARDIANS phase.

#83-- ST flashes back to WWI, and to the Germany of Hans Von Hammer of ENEMY ACE fame. He also meets a younger Arcane, who's been diddling his sister and almost kills his mother. 

#84-- ST takes a back seat to his girlfriend Abby as she deals with her dying husband Matt Cable, and also manages to host crossovers with Adam Strange, Morpheus and John Constantine.

#85-- It's "Go West, Young Thing," as Swampy is enslaved by a Native American wizard, and becomes entwined with such luminaries as Jonah Hex, Bat Lash, Johnny Thunder and his wife Madame .44, Hawk Son of Tomahawk, Firehair, El Diablo, and that short-lived savage superhero, Super Chief. Also, The Demon makes a cameo.

#86-- My favorite of the bunch. as ST jaunts back to revolutionary times, and meets DC's long running frontier paladin, Tomahawk. There's also another encounter with The Demon, and with the once and future Batcave, complete with a giant bat--which gets more or less explained in the ensuing issue.

        

#87-- Swampy witnesses the Fall of Camelot, as well as interacting with Merlin, his demon Etrigan, the villainous Morgaine LeFey, and the Shining Knight. A couple of background figures look like Prince Valiant and Hal Foster's version of the knight Gawain. The issue ends with the Shining Knight in modern times, informing Abigail of his interaction with the time-dispersed swamp-spirit, and then swearing to locate Swampy again-- at which point the tale ends.  

So "Time Upon a Once" is a great read, with the story being told backwards as the monster-hero keeps getting flung further back. It's fun but there's no epistemological pattern uniting the continuity, just playing in the DC sandbox.

"Wild Things" is harder to suss out. Given that Alan Moore changed the parameters of the SWAMP THING feature by importing a wealth of metaphysical concepts, Veitch was a good choice to follow Moore, since Veitch was at least equally invested in mystical matters as his English colleague. Veitch pencils many fascinating visuals depicting ST's journeys into the higher realms. Yet though I appreciated the intent, I found a lot of Veitch's design-work static. Just as a brief personal comparison, six years before Veitch's ST run, I remember being mesmerized by Marshall Rogers' vivid rendition of the DOCTOR STRANGE cosmology.

The title "Wild Things" references the storyline's main conceit: that due to ST's absence from Earth during an extended Alan Moore arc, Earth's plant-consciousness "The Green" generates a new spirit destined to merge with a dying human and to become a new Swamp Thing. ST would like to give up being Earth's elemental protector and let the "new guy" take over, but for some reason all the candidates prove inadequate and just die without hosting the new swamp-spirit-- and this repetitiousness drains whatever mythic grandeur might have informed the proceedings. On top of that, ST and Abigail get the idea to let "the Sprout" inhabit the body of Abby's unborn child, at which point they stop talking about the matter of the new Thing having to die violently. My overall feeling is that Veitch let the story's complexities get away from him.

Lastly, while Moore was no shrinking violet about his Liberal beliefs during his ST run, Veitch was twice as heavy-handed. I even remember being turned off by Veitch's political asides even though I was dominantly Liberal in the 1980s). The nadir of this virtue signaling appeared when Veitch took the old character of Roy Raymond (a know-it-all 1950s TV detective) and turned him into a conservative douche who got trapped for several issues in a car being driven by a mindless New Swamp Thing clone. There are certainly some weak moments in the Alan Moore, but as a reader I felt that he had a better control of the overall narrative.  But I must admit, at his worst Veitch's follow-up was better than 90% of similar follow-ups. 

     

ONCE AGAIN-- ALAN MOORE, UNMOORED

Last month, thanks to the auspices of the British weekly THE OBSERVER, Alan Moore once again bestowed upon a panting public his thoughts on comic books and one particular comic book personality-- though he's been retired from the medium for close to seven years. The OBSERVER piece is just the usual potpourri of Moore's grievances and floggings for his latest non-comics book, with one exception.

Two-thirds of the way through the short interview, the questioner decides that, having encouraged Moore to offer his hot takes on politics and the comics industry, he simply must ask about Moore's opinion about Frank Miller. Surprise, surprise-- Moore's negative assessment has not changed since 2011, when the two creators expressed opposing opinions of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And then, over the next 15 years, Moore continued to pillory Miller, who became Moore's third favorite whipping-boy, right behind DC Comics and Margaret Thatcher.

Miller for his part has done little to keep up his part of the feud, barely if at all commenting upon Moore or his works. 

My own "feud" with Moore concerns not a defense of Miller but a condemnation of the meretricious nature of Moore's comments. In the interview Moore only says that Miller's one of the things about the comics industry he finds embarrassing, but he obviously still harbors the same knee-jerk opinions he proffered during the genesis of the feud, when he called Miller's work misogynistic, homophobic and fascist. 

Now, Moore MIGHT be able to articulate those opinions into real discourse. since he's done so passably well at times in full-fledged articles, or in debate, as seen his extended metaphysical argument with Dave Sim in the pages of CEREBUS #217. However, when Moore confines himself to lame brickbats, he sounds a good deal worse than a "grumpy old man," which is the most frequent characterization I've seen of him. Rather, he sounds like some triggered moron a la Joy Reid.

I don't think Alan Moore's a moron, but he sure seems to enjoy playing the triggered fool for the sake of sound bite interviews. If he has something substantive to say about Miller or anything else, superficial rants are not the way to express those thoughts. But if he's really just whipping out barbs because that's what potential readers expect, he's in no position to critique anyone else.     

MOORE ON LOVECRAFT

 

Over the past few days I've been reading three intertwined Alan Moore comics he devoted to HP Lovecraft. Like the LEAGUE books different chapters occur in different eras. The first two, entitled THE COURTYARD and NEONOMICON, didn't strike me as very ambitious, being content to quote a lot of HPL names but not making much of a story out of them.

The third part, entitled PROVIDENCE, is much more venturesome, though at bottom I think it fails my acid test as far as incarnating its own literary myth. If one has read PROMETHEA, one will recognize Moore treating the mythology of Lovecraft as he treated Western occultism in the previous comic, trying to concoct a master narrative that unites a lot of different cultural/literary phenomena. In PROVIDENCE, he starts in 1919 with a Jewish author named Robert Blake (obviously named after for the protagonist of "Haunter in the Dark," who was in turn named for Robert Bloch). Moore has a theme much like PROMETHEA-- the nature of the real world's indebtedness to dreams and fictions-- only the fantasies of HPL, and a few fellow travelers, are the source of the breakdown between objective and subjective. Moore doesn't have Blake encounter the Usual Suspects like the Great Old Ones or the Innsmouth natives, but obscurities like The Terrible Old Man and The Thing on the Doorstep.

Is it good? Well, in the sense of holding my interest, yes. The art is very restrained, which sometimes works to enhance some of the ghastly horror-pieces. It's very talky, like PROMETHEA, but though I could see Moore's "voice" informing everything, I was interested to see how he handled both the mythology and its creator. I have seen Moore get rather smug and mannered when adapting characters he didn't like, as with James Bond in LEAGUE. However, he's generally fair to Lovecraft, who appears as a character in the story-- much fairer than the yutz who wrote LOVECRAFT COUNTRY. (That name pops up in the last couple issues of PROVIDENCE but I'm not sure Moore was referring to the bad novel or to some slang term that preceded the novel.) And since HPL played a lot of continuity games himself, Moore's extensions aren't objectionable on that level. But at times the daunting research Moore put into PROVIDENCE serves no purpose greater than spotting continuity-points, like some of Roy Thomas' more involved exercises. 

My verdict is that I can't give it my highest recommendation. But anyone who likes both HPL and Moore will probably like this.       

MYTHCOMICS" "THE ANATOMY LESSON" (SWAMP THING #21-24, 1984)

 

In 1984 Alan Moore and Steve Bissette had only barely started working on DC's SWAMP THING comic, which wasn't precisely setting sales records. With issue #21, they began a four-part story which I've given the collective title of "The Anatomy Lesson," after the first installment. I won't comment on any of the ongoing subplots that had been set up in earlier issues and that would bear fruit (so to speak) in future issues, but will concentrate on the main plot, involving the character of Jason Woodrue, first introduced in a 1962 ATOM story, reviewed here.   

To be sure, this was not the Woodrue of the 1960s, an unremarkable-looking scientist in a lab coat. In the 1970s Woodrue became something of a forerunner of the "eco-terrorist" trope, transforming himself into a plant-human hybrid who called himself The Floronic Man. In this guise he championed the cause of the plant world against that of humanity, so that he came into conflict with heroes like the Justice League. In this story, Woodrue has been liberated from prison by General Sunderland, head of your basic evil corporation. Sunderland's forces had captured their frequent nemesis the Swamp Thing, and so the economical overlord wants Woodrue to suss out the swamp-monster's nature, to learn if there's any way the company can profit from the "bio-restorative formula" that made scientist Alec Holland into a muck-encrusted creature. Woodrue subjects the swamp monster's body to various anatomical analyses, and soon reveals the payoff that would change the course of the SWAMP THING series from then on. Swamp Thing is not a human being transformed into a humanoid made of plant matter, but an actual plant that consumed the dead body of Alec Holland, preserving his memories in a new organic form. When Sunderland dispenses with Woodrue's services, implying the scientist will be sent back to the jug, Woodrue releases Swamp Thing from captivity, and also makes sure the creature learns his true nature-- which does not result in happy times for Sunderland.         

Somehow Swamp Thing manages to make his way back to his de facto home in the Florida swamps, and Woodrue follows. Swampy's friends Abigail and Matt find their old ally when he's succumbed to existential despair, losing the will to think himself human, so that his body begins merging with the vegetable growths of the swampland. But Woodrue has not followed out of mere curiosity.

                                                                          

 

Because the former Alec Holland's confused mind wanders in a limbo between plant and animal life, Woodrue somehow taps into Swampy's mind and uses it as a gateway into "The Green," a sort of collective unconscious for plant life (and one of those expansive concepts that I imagine Alan Moore regrets selling to DC Comics). Once there, Woodrue experiences a vast communion with many if not all of the plants on Earth. He becomes convinced that they are telling him to avenge their mistreatment by eradicating all animal life.                                                                                                            

Whereas the old Woodrue tried to conquer the Earth with a bunch of gimcrack plant-weapons, the Floronic Man comes up with a new tactic (which is not to say that he doesn't still take control of vegetable life and make it do things that real plants cannot do). He causes the plants to flood the Earth's atmosphere with oyxgen, which will eventually bring about the destruction of all animal life. Woodrue's old foes the Justice League can't figure out what to do. Luckily for them, the creature that thought it was Alec Holland has also been in communion with The Green, and he arises from his torpor to intervene.                                                                                                        

 

Although the two chlorophyll-critters exchange a few blows, Swamp Thing conquers The Floronic Man with simple logic regarding the ecocystem: get rid of all the animals, and where do plants get their carbon dioxide? Woodrue loses contact with The Green and suffers from what Swampy tellingly calls a "fall from grace." The Justice League find Woodrue as a babbling idiot and take him into custody, having no idea of what forces saved their (literal) bacon. Thirty years later, I'm still impressed with the power of this denouement, and how subtly the plants' oxygen threat foreshadowed the peril plants would then suffer from the ruined ecosystem.                                                 

   

As for Swamp Thing, he gets a new lease on life, learning that it is much easier being green than moping around for decades about a human identity that he was never going to recover (without ending the franchise, that is). Not every story in the Moore-Bissette SWAMP THING run possesses the quality of ANATOMY LESSON. But LESSON isn't just a good story. It's also one of the few "origin-revisions" in comic books that doesn't just content itself with the brash statement that "everything you knew is wrong," but taps a deep well of emotion and mythopoetic imagery to make the new dispensation thoroughly compelling. 

SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

 ...just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”-- STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS.

I wrote COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE partly because I knew I was about to re-screen and evaluate the Zach Snyder WATCHMEN after having re-read the Moore-Gibbons source novel. I wanted to forge a methodology regarding how an adaptation of a work generates its own "molecular assemblages" in response to those of the original work. 

I imagine that other narratologists have made the same attempt, at least amid the capacious ranks of film theorists. But as I've commented elsewhere on this blog, many modern analysts tend to speak of the meaning of the work in purely intellectual terms, because educational systems taught many if not all of them to use an intellectual approach in assessing what I term "vertical values." I've followed Jung in separating these values into a didactic potentiality, which is focused on proving a work-oriented theoretical point, and a mythopoeic potentiality, which allows a playful flow between symbolic representations, just to see what comes of their interactions. 

In FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, I put forth three works that contrasted in terms of those potentialities-- one wherein the didactic was functionally the only value, one wherein the mythopoeic was the only value, and one in which the didactic and mythopoeic intertwined. But even in the last of the three, I stressed that in "Origin of the Silver Surfer" the mythopoeic potentiality predominated over the didactic one:

 So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

I addressed a similar dichotomy in my 2015 review of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I started out saying--

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

 In my conclusion I admitted that WATCHMEN possessed strong didactic tendencies--

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. 

But I also concluded that WATCHMEN was dominated by a multi-level symbolic discourse, exemplified in part by Moore's use of syzygy-patterns throughout the art and text. So, even though Alan Moore would abominate any work of his being placed on the same level as a Stan Lee work, WATCHMEN and the Surfer origin are both excellent works dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality.

Now, in the first part of COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE, I gave an example of a secondary work that adapted a mythopoeically complex primary work. I allowed that Rider Haggard's novel SHE was of such complexity that no feature film of standard length could adapt Haggard's interwoven tropes. All adaptations of SHE have to compress the novel into a cinematic narrative, but the 1925 movie was able to choose a "molecular assemblage" from the novel that conveyed at least some of the symbolic discourse of Haggard.

Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN probably intended to do so with respect to the original graphic novel. However, most of Snyder's renderings of Moore's symbolic representations, be they syzygies or other abstractions, are extremely mediocre. So I ended up grading the movie as only "fair" in mythicity because I felt that it ended up stressing all the didactic and political tropes from Moore's script, all of which boil down to "Nasty Conservatives Ruin Everything For All Humanity." This may be why Snyder adumbrates Rorschach's origin story. I mentioned in the review that Moore's portrait of Rorschach is a mixed one, but the one in the WATCHMEN movie is not. Snyder captures none of the Nietzschean ambiguities of the chapter "The Abyss Gazes Also," which might disprove the view of at least one critic who judged Snyder a disciple of Nietzsche.

So in my view Snyder did the exact opposite in his WATCHMEN adaptation than did the writer (and maybe the two directors) of the 1925 SHE. When Snyder compressed the WATCHMEN graphic novel, he gave prominence to all the didactic narrative tropes, minimizing whatever the presence of the mythopoeic ones. The closest he got to myth was in his reworking of the story's conclusion, in that Snyder jettisoned Moore's "alien menace" concept and made Doctor Manhattan the great enemy against whom the world unites. But there weren't enough reinforcing tropes to give that myth-kernel any deep resonance, and so the WATCHMEN movie feels as preachy as one of the preachier Moore stories. 

Now, all of the above assumes the situation that the primary work is superior in some discourse to the adaptation. The opposite is also possible. But that would require further discussion in a separate essay.

NEAR MYTHS: THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 1999 (1999-2003)

Though I gave higher mythicity ratings to two later iterations in the LEAGUE franchise, BLACK DOSSIER and the last third of CENTURY, I must admit that the first two episodes of the series, featuring both the formation and dissolution of this 19th-century "Justice League," are the most fun to revisit. 

The main reason for the greater fun quotient is almost certainly that in these stories Alan Moore was far more focused giving the reader the thrill of adventure rather than the Olympian perspective of satire. Moore and O'Neill still work in a sizable number of cross-references involving both fiction-history and real history, but herein there's no unwieldy attempt to weave together a couple hundred such quotations into a super-pastiche, possibly the most ambitious crossover of all fiction. Here the creators of LEAGUE concentrated on charting the interpersonal relationships of the five protagonists: Allen Quatermain of KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Mina Murray of DRACULA, Edward Hyde of DR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Captain Nemo of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, and The Invisible Man of the Wells novel of the same name. There's such a rich tapestry of dramatic interactions that in this work alone, Moore effectively usurps the title of "Master of Melodrama" from its preceding title-holder, and so wins the coveted award of "The New Stan Lee."

 

I joke, of course. Though I would consider such a title  complimentary, it would direly insult Alan Moore to be considered like Stan Lee in any way, since he's made it clear (particularly in the final pages of TEMPEST) that he holds nothing but contempt for the late Marvel writer-editor. And of course there are many differences between the dramaturgical strategies of both Lee and Moore. Yet the give-and-take between the often quarrelsome "Gentlemen" resembles nothing in comic strips or books-- not Caniff, not Eisner, not Kurtzman-- so much as it resembles the trailblazing "heroes with problems" mindset of Stan the Man. It's possible that Moore had some notion of deconstructing Marvel Comics, as he had in the "1963" series from 1993. If so, Moore was spectacularly unsuccessful, and for that many readers can be profoundly grateful.

LEAGUE does approach myth-status insofar as it crystallizes Moore and O'Neill's often contradictory feelings about their native country. On one hand, the United Kingdom was, if not the womb from which modern popular culture was born, the midwife to its creation, and this is reflected in the fact that four of the five Gentlemen were created by UK subjects, with Nemo standing as the lone representative of La Belle France. On the other hand, from the 17th century through the 19th, the UK was also a major player in the spread of imperialism, and LEAGUE's creators constantly remind the reader that they should never forget the jingoism and material exploitation that stemmed from the British Empire. And yet the quintet of heroes, despite their uneasy alliance to the Empire, never fall into the trap of being spokespersons for sociopolitical causes. Nemo is the great rebel who finds himself helping the Empire because he wanted adventure in his life once more. Quatermain is more or less dragooned into espionage by the officious Miss Murray, which ends up being a prelude to their erotic encounters. Monstrous Mister Hyde largely subsumes his alter ego Jekyll but evinces a more profound form of humanity than the good doctor did, while The Invisible Man betrays his comrades in order to forge his own empire.

   

The creators choose the opponents just as deftly, and also from the pages of British fiction-writers. The first six-part adventure unites the Gentlemen against two master criminals vying for power, Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty and a devil-doctor who is clearly supposed to be Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu (but whose name is still trademarked and so can't be casually invoked even for pastiche purposes). The second six-parter, which chronicles the dissolution of the unstable team, is arguably even better as the Gentlemen cross swords with the heat-rays of H.G. Wells' Martians. Some of the dramatic turns are all the more impressive given that Moore has testified (in an interview for Jess Nevins' A BLAZING WORLD) that he did not have a long-term plan for both sequences. He suggested a future conflict between Hyde and Invisible Griffin in Book One before he even knew how said conflict would play out in Book Two. Mina Murray, the former victim of Dracula, bore the wounds of the vampire's brutal assaults on her throat, and this visual depiction later dovetailed impressively with certain parts of Allen Quatermain's backstory as elucidated by original creator Rider Haggard.

There are a few dozen "guest-stars." Some are preludes to more famous figures of later eras, such as the unscrupulous Campion Bond, whose perfidy prefigures Moore's trashing of his descendant James later on. But most of the guests are icons from famous fictional works, with even a few American ones, like Auguste Dupin and John Carter, making the cut. In the later volumes I could complain of Moore and O'Neill's treatment of Ian Fleming's Bond, and even more, of their maltreatment of Haggard's She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. But in GENTLEMEN 1999, I found their every choice note-perfect, just as I found that O'Neill's art captured the mythic vraisemblance of the Victorian era. 

I should note that crossovers, like popular fiction, really took off in the 19th century, with Scott's IVANHOE ringing in as one of the first, combining its fictional hero's exploits to those of Robin Hood. Haggard and Verne each wrote one famous crossover, with the former having Quatermain meet She, while the latter revived Nemo to encounter the castaways of the Mysterious Island. But GENTLEMEN 1999 is definitely one of the greatest pastiches, even if it's arguable that the "super-pastiche" of later years may turn out to be just as overburdened as... 

(Yes, I will say it...)

...THE MARVEL UNIVERSE!!!!

NEAR MYTHS: LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: TEMPEST (2018-19)

I put off reading the final collaboration of Alan Moore and Kevin O"Neill on LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN in part because of the extraordinary un-evenness of CENTURY, which managed to shuttle from very bad to very good without any sense of transition. That said, a part of me wanted TEMPEST to be as good as the third part of CENTURY, if not BLACK DOSSIER.

However, this was also the project with which Moore and O'Neill purported to end their careers in comics (though O'Neill actually worked in the medium a little longer). I suspected that TEMPEST would wrap up the LOEG universe much the same way Moore concluded the PROMETHEA series, of which I wrote:

One of the myth-images that Moore invokes most frequently is that of the Biblical “Whore of Babylon,” though naturally the author turns the Christian connotations around, so the “whore” is just the other side of the “virgin” coin, and both are seen more as vehicles through which the energy of the Godhead manifests. Indeed, in some vague manner Promethea is also consubstantial with the Great Whore, in that both are supposed to bring the world to an end. Moore attempts to give his heroine this myth-status without delivering anything but an “apocalypse deferred,” which might seem fairly original if the author hadn’t used a similar trope at the end of his SWAMP THING run.

Given the above sentiments, one might think I'd welcome Moore committing to an actual apocalypse, in which he and O'Neill decisively "let it all come down" for not one but two fictional planets, Earth and Mars. But one would be wrong, for the simple reason that Alan Moore is much better at creating worlds than destroying them. 

Since the final book is named TEMPEST, and since the Moore-O'Neill version of Prospero stands behind the scenes pulling various strings, it was to be expected that the writer would abjure all the "rough magic" he used to create his world. This too he also did after the conclusion of an apocalyptic SWAMP THING run, where Moore, after a major crossover of DC's magical heroes, then spent pages lecturing his readers about the importance of ordinary life. And that's what Moore does here as well. He's not infrequently expressed ambivalence about delving into the archetypes of popular fiction, even though one can't imagine him having made such a mark in American comics had he sought to emulate Harvey Pekar. So here once again, Moore follows his dive into the archetypal subconscious by a renunciation of his fictional powers. Prospero is Moore's self-insert, bringing about the destruction of Earth and Mars for ill-conceived reasons, just to provide closure. Such closure isn't technically necessary. Unlike both SWAMP THING and PROMETHEA, Moore and O'Neill could, even after their respective deaths, legally ban any further iterations of the LEAGUE property. So in my opinion the real motive was that of desiring an end to the franchise that would distinguish it from the many endlessly-proliferating serial concepts.

Earlier episodes discoursed on the 20th century's development of costumed superheroes, but in contrast to the artist's general fidelity to the many creations of prose literature, Moore and O'Neill offer nothing more than an aimless concatenation of superficial pastiches. Marsman? Electrogirl? Hard to believe we got such bland spoofs from the co-creator of WATCHMEN. All of the stuff with the superheroes is a waste of space, and because CENTURY ended with the death of Allen Quatermain, Mina Murray doesn't get a very good character arc, though a little better than that of Orlando. In compensation, Moore and O'Neill give us the resolution of BLACK DOSSIER's conflict between their versions of Emma Peel and James Bond, both of whom gain their youth in time to greet the space-age delights of 2010 and beyond. But even if I didn't dislike Moore's jaundiced take on Ian Fleming's creation, this wouldn't be enough to hold my attention.

So in the end, it's mostly about Moore and O'Neill using their loose plot as an excuse for as many crossovers and references as they can fit in. And no one can accuse them of skimping. Some characters are named outright, like the Thinking Machine and Stardust the Super Wizard, while Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty are worked into the continuity once more for this last hurrah. Many other characters just make unidentified cameos: the Beagle Boys, Tower Comics' Iron Maiden, a gorilla with a bandolier (probably Monsieur Mallah) and a house that seems to be "Usher II" from the Ray Bradbury story of that name. All of these O'Neill renders in his unique style, but I didn't get the sense that their parts contributed to a greater whole, as I did with BLACK DOSSIER.

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

And I would be remiss not to comment that Alan Moore's tired anti-Stan Lee jeremiad is on display in a "funny" sequence riffing on a sequence from the Silver Age wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm. The tiresome joke didn't make me mad, and I might even examine its presumptions in a separate essay. But I will end by saying that it shows Moore's animus toward the very "century" in which he was born, toward his inability to make the world work the way he wants-- to which his fantasy-impulse is, of course, to blow it all away.

THE INFORMAL POSTULATE

 As I started the prologue of the 2007 film criticism book HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY, I encountered this justification of the book's premise:

Many viewers have observed that Alfred Hitchcock focuses on ideas in the construction of his films. The French director-critics Claude Chabrol and Eric Roemer... claimed that each of his classic films is based on a sort of "formal postulate."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of Hitchcock's signature works are "idea-centered," but it's certainly fair to say that certain ones, particularly ROPE and VERTIGO, have a sort of ordered intellectual approach that I tend to line up with what I've termed "the didactic potentiality." However, I don't see so much focus on ideas in such films as 1943's SHADOW OF A DOUBT or 1960's PSYCHO. To invoke my own terminology once again, the latter two seem to belong to the mythopoeic potentiality, in that the films focus more on correlations than cogitations.

But I can understand the editors of the Hitchcock book seeking to draw parallels between the popular productions of the director and the high-toned cogitations of philosophy. In fact, even though I don't agree with Chabrol and Roemer, I'm glad that they advanced the term "formal postulate," because this fits in with the rational discursiveness of the didactic potentiality. In contrast, works heavily invested in the mythopoeic potentiality might be said to be more concerned with "informal postulates." This notion reminds me not only of my own notion of "half-truths," but also the way film-critic Raymond Durgnat summarized the appeal of the Frankenstein Monster terms of symbolic oppositions:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

But when one wishes to convince others that a given work, medium or genre deserves respect, it's a lot easier to persuade an audience using the idea of formal postulates than informal ones. Informal postulates communicate, "I think this hidden complexity is there,"  while formal postulates make it sound as though the complexity is there for anyone to see. 

I also encountered this preference, possibly expressed on an unconscious level, when I finished Jess Nevins' interview with Alan Moore in the 2004 concordance A BLAZING WORLD. On page 254, one reads Moore claiming that his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series is predicated, at least in part, in "pulling down the barriers between High Literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that." Makes Moore sound like he's kissing-cousins with Durgnat's advocacy of "the poetry in pulp," right? But then on page 267 he advances this lofty sentiment:

Art is not about reassuring people. We don't read Art to be reassured, we read Art to be challenged and to challenge our assumptions and to maybe extend our ideas in certain areas, which you really can't do without challenging them.

No poetry here, despite the fact that Moore has produced some of the most resonant poetic-pulp in the annals of the comics medium. This "formal postulate" rather sounds a lot like what Northrop Frye wrote of those critics he called "Iliad critics" with respect to their idea of literature's purpose:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

Without repeating myself too much, I've also noted that Frye's two breeds of critic, "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics," seem to line up, respectively. with the mythoi of drama and irony for the first and with comedy and adventure for the second. One might agree with Moore that the former mythoi emphasize the challenging of assumptions, but if so, that would only be because those mythoi depend on putting their characters in deeply conflicted situations. In contrast, it's evident that a great deal of comedy and adventure does offer a kind of "reassurance," though maybe not in the way Moore imagines that reaction. That reassurance might be better compared to Tolkien's concept of "consolation."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(I note in passing that in the course of the interview Moore expresses a distaste for Tolkien's signature work in the context of complaining about "big, stupid clashes between good and evil.")

In conclusion, I realize that to some extent the preference for intellectual directness over intuitional indirectness is an individual one. However, knowing that does not make me amend my preferences in any way.

ADDENDUM: I thought I might expand further on the "formal/informal" dichotomy accidentally implied by the editors of HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY. However, upon re-reading my own CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS, I see that I included a reference to Whitehead's concept of "prehensions and apprehensions," glossed by another writer's assertion that the former focuses upon "soulful understanding" (aligned in my system to the mythopoeic potentiality), while  the latter focuses "intellectual understanding" (aligned in my system to the didactic potentiality). That's probably enough expatiation on the "formal/informal" dichotomy for now.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." Nietzsche's definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE END OF MISTY MAGIC LAND"], TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2 (2006)

NOTE: There is no particular title to the "Little Margie" story appearing in TOMORROW STORIES SPECIAL #2; I have imposed one for clarity's sake. 

The complicated background of this story merits enumeration. (1) Alan Moore collaborated with J.H. Williams III on the series PROMETHEA for Moore's imprint America's Best Comics. The title character is a multi-faceted entity from "The Immateria," a land of pure imagination, and thus Promethea has existed in various independent fictional incarnations. (2) In one such incarnation, the heroine is a tutelary figure in a comic strip, "Little Margie in Misty Magic Land," where Promethea guides the little girl Margie through a host of fantasy-realms, the two women accompanied only by a comedy-relief "China boy." (3) "Margie" was Moore's pastiche on Windsor McCay's 1905 comic strip, "Little Nemo in Slumberland," whose installments were full Sunday page comics with no individual titles-- which is why there were no titles when Alan Moore and Eric Shanower created a full "Nemo" pastiche for AMERICA'S BEST COMICS SPECIAL #1 (2001), and no titles for this second and last pastiche from TOMORROW STORIES, executed by Shanower and Moore's colleague Steve ("no relation") Moore. 

Alan Moore's pastiche was pleasant but not particularly well organized. Since Steve Moore probably scripted his tale knowing that the days for America's Best were numbered, he provided a final "Little Margie" story that effectively concludes not only the character's series but also her childhood.

It's a common enough trope that as humans grow older they began to lose the imaginative freedom of their juvenile years, and Steve Moore (henceforth the only "Moore" I'll reference) practically broadcasts this theme on the first page of "End." (He also shows himself the equal of Promethea's creator in coming up with torturous puns, like the above "Prophetta Doom.")

Once Margie, her guide Promethea and comic-relief Chinky have received suggestions of a danger to Misty Magic Land, they seek to learn the danger's source. It does not take long for them to receive the first intimation from a clockwise individual named Thomas Tick-Tock, who discerns that Margie herself may be the problem, since she is a mortal who does not belong to the magical world, yet has not aged in nineteen years. "Perhaps I have not aged because I did not want to," muses Margie, "but should I have wanted to?" Promethea tries to lighten Margie's mood by taking her to the Chuckling Orchard, but Margie remains morose. 

The girls have better luck in the Menagerie of Moods-- but only briefly, for after some brief cheer, Margie falls into first depression, and then conceives race hatred for Chinky (encouraged by a mood-creature in a red Ku Klux Klan robe). 

Then Promethea moves to a deeper theme, though not one with much resonance for childhood: showing Margie how lack of emotional control results in the Horror of War. Margie flees the spectres of war, and it's at this point that Chinky diverges from Margie's of him, renouncing his role as "funny foreigner" and returning to his own realm, a fantasy-China realm.

The exit of the male presence in Margie's world leads her to a fairground, where she enjoys her first kiss with what looks to be Little Nemo himself. She quarrels with Promethea, acting as if the goddess is a controlling mother, and with that, Margie begins to age as she would in the real world, growing out of Misty Magic Land. So the danger to the dream-realm has always been Margie's attunement to it, and this is the last of the author's "Margie" stories, because, as she tells her own little girl, she's lost her connection to her juvenile self, and no longer has any stories to tell.