CATFIGHT AT THE P.P. CORRAL

 In my review of ONE MORE DAY, I said:

I also heard that this retcon came about because editor Joe Quesada-- who also furnished the art for DAY-- didn't like the status quo of Peter Parker being married to Mary Jane. Unlike many of DAY's critics, I didn't have strong feelings about the marriage. I found it mildly pleasing that Parker should enjoy a measure of domestic contentment, not least because the post-Silver Age Parker wasn't, in my opinion, ever likely to generate scads of romance-subplots.

What I should have said was "scads of GOOD romance-subplots." Even though I ceased keeping track of SPIDER-MAN continuity by the end of the nineties, I was aware that there had been various attempts to give Peter Parker girlfriends aside from Mary Jane Watson. I've forgotten most of them, except for the Black Cat, who was a lot of fun but not any real competition for Mary Jane, any more than any of the others.

This thought, however, did send me down a new rabbit-hole. Why did it work, the schtick of Peter having two beautiful glamour-queens courtesy of John Romita? Obviously, editor/writer Stan Lee wanted to promote the idea of "Peter the Swinger," and I was far from the only one who liked it, since SPIDER-MAN's preteen/adolescent audience embraced the change. 

To be sure, it wasn't totally out of left field. Parker started out with just one prospective girlfriend, secretary Betty Brant, but within a year or so Lee and Ditko gave Betty competition in high-school vixen Liz Allen. Throughout the Ditko years Parker dressed and talked like a square, but since he was good-looking, the idea of two pretty-but-not-glamorous girls competing for him was not far-fetched. 

However, in ASM #25 the creators decided to further tease the romance-loving readers by giving them an on-camera sample of a third source of competition. Up to that point Mary Jane Watson had only been referenced by name a few times, as the niece of Aunt May's friend. Mary Jane finally appears, but cagey Ditko doesn't allow readers to see her face. Lee's dialogue, however, established that when Betty and Liz lay eyes on her, they think she's movie-star gorgeous-- which was clearly meant to be a joke on Parker, since he had been avoiding any introduction to MJ, on the supposition that she was a dog.

The Mary Jane situation was dropped for the next year, during which time the decision was made to write out Liz and to officially kill Parker's relationship with Betty. However, both Lee and Ditko weren't intending at that point to leave their hero pining away, for at college Parker had his first encounters with Gwen Stacy. As abrasive as those encounters were, there could be little doubt that Lee and Ditko meant to promote Gwen as the new love-interest. Presumably Ditko didn't forget Mary Jane entirely, but when he quit the book in 1966, any plans he might have formed became null and void. Lee was thus responsible for resurrecting Mary Jane, partly in the knowledge that John Romita would be perfect to depict the red-haired gamine.

Surprisingly, given Lee's history with romance-humor strips like MILLIE THE MODEL, it took a long time for Gwen and MJ to become rivals, particularly in comparison to the rapid declaration of the Betty-Liz hostilities. Since Gwen's introduction, Parker hadn't dated Gwen or even asked her out, but he clearly fancied her. As for Gwen, in her less demanding moments she defended Parker against the attacks of Flash Thompson, whom she did apparently date (though one presumes he was always kept at arm's-length). Gwen seems indifferent when Parker starts dating MJ, but in issue #48 it finally becomes evident that the two girls are fully aware of one another's hot-titude, and that a subtle feminine gauntlet has been thrown.

                       

 With ASM #53 the duel begins in earnest. Gwen, despite not having pursued Parker before this, wangles an invite to accompany Parker to a science exhibit on the excuse that she's a "sci major." This may be the first and last time she or anyone else makes such a statement until the character shows up in the 2012 AMAZING SPIDER-MAN movie. Flash Thompson gets drafted during the time-period and it seems that Gwen makes him no promises about not sitting under any apple-trees with other suitors.

Once Flash is out of the way, the duel morphs into an ongoing set of skirmishes, in which it's obvious that Gwen and MJ are both warm for the same form, and they compete with assorted putdowns and catty remarks. At the same time, it's interesting that even though there was a superficial attempt to make Parker seem less square, Lee did not keep the two competitors in an endless Betty-and-Veronica dance. Even during MJ's earliest appearances, Lee took pains to show Gwen as the "good girl," while MJ was "the good times girl." That said, in the SPIDER-MAN universe neither lady would have slept with anyone out of wedlock, so both were essentially "good girls" in practice. But Gwen's affections were the "hard get," and so she got the editorial nod of preference.

In due time, though, once the feud was over and Gwen won the field, it became readily apparent that if Parker had a permanent girlfriend, that boxed in the hero romantically. And so when Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway proposed killing off Gwen Stacy, Lee-- who was no longer writing the feature anyway-- enthusiastically agreed, according to Thomas's assertions. Presumably all of them knew that this would necessitate moving Mary Jane back into romantic prominence. And though I'm no fan of the Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN overall, I must admit he did a decent job of elevating the "good times girl" into respectable sweetheart material.

Shuttling back at last to my main point, why did the Gwen-MJ competition work in its day? Certainly Parker was more charismatic than average shlub Archie Andrews, who also managed to become the quarry for two females who looked like professional models. But I find it interesting that while Lee could have tossed Gwen and MJ into competition right away, as he and Ditko had done earlier with Betty and Liz, Lee played out the rivalry for close to a year's worth of stories until it finally took shape. Was Lee just drawing things out because he'd allowed Ditko to plot the feature for the last few years of their collaboration? Lee may have wanted to take more time with the soap-operatics, particularly if it was the case that his main collaborator Romita needed more script-guidance than Ditko had. But for me at least, the rivalry of Gwen and MJ succeeds because the two females decide of their own accord to compete over Parker. They certainly did not do so in response to his propensity to be any sort of "ladies' man." As presented by Lee and Romita, at least part of their motivation is to see whose glamorous light shines more brightly.

        

MYTHCOMICS: ONE MORE DAY (2007)

 

I quit following any of the SPIDER-MAN books on the 21st century, only occasionally availing myself of the occasional public-library TPB. But I wasn't so isolated that I didn't hear the many complaints about ONE MORE DAY, a storyline which ran in three separate Spider-titles, in which Peter Parker made a deal with The Devil to save Aunt May's life, costing him his happy marriage to the love of his life, Mary Jane.

I also heard that this retcon came about because editor Joe Quesada-- who also furnished the art for DAY-- didn't like the status quo of Peter Parker being married to Mary Jane. Unlike many of DAY's critics, I didn't have strong feelings about the marriage. I found it mildly pleasing that Parker should enjoy a measure of domestic contentment, not least because the post-Silver Age Parker wasn't, in my opinion, ever likely to generate scads of romance-subplots. I doubt the retcon improved the overall quality of Spider-stories based on my spotty readings, and in any case it's rare that any retcons have been instrumental to generating higher story quality. Yet I found that DAY, by itself, found interesting ways of playing with the often-moribund mythology of Spider-Man, particularly in its usage of guilt.

               

The web-slinger's career begins with his guilt over his accidental complicity in his Uncle Ben's death. Now, because Parker revealed his true ID to the world (something to do with the elephantine "Civil War" plotline, I think), the Kingpin sends a gunman to kill Parker but fatally wounds Aunt May. While the old lady barely clings to life, Parker makes the rounds of Marvel's wonder-workers, looking for some means to stave off the Grim Reaper. He explicitly tells Doctor Strange that while he thinks he could accept his aunt's natural death, he can't accept the calamity being his fault. 

I had low expectations for the "deal with the devil" part of the story, given how cliche the trope has become over the years, and perhaps I was influenced by all the negative press DAY received. However, though I've not liked the few comics-stories I've read by J. Michael Sraczinski, his handling of the "Satanic bargain" was the most mythic aspect of DAY.    

Once Parker's at his lowest ebb, he meets a devil's envoy who seems the incarnation of innocence: a sassy little girl who knows all about his problems, critiques him for his narcissism, and runs away.

Spider-Man loses the girl but comes across a young man in glasses. He discourses on the human need for escapism in a world that doesn't allow for personal heroism. Moments later. an older man drives up in a expensive car and takes Spidey for a little ride. He too related a life-story, a life that sounds a bit like Tony Stark's. (Earlier in the sequence, Spider-Man tells Stark that to Parker Stark was "like a father.")  He ends his story--mostly that of petty revenge against the classmates who tormented him in high school-- by emphasizing how he lost the one woman he loved.

 Parker then meets a woman in an old-fashioned dress. They discuss dreams, which gives Parker the chance to reference one of pop culture's most famous retcons. She then informs Parker of a fact most readers will suspect: the two males he met are alternate-world scenarios for ways that Parker could have turned out: Parker as complete nerd and as ruthless businessman. 

All of these discussions are primers for the subject of reality's mutability, at which point the woman reveals that "she" is Mephisto. He quickly disabuses Parker of the idea that he's offering to save Aunt May in exchange for Parker's soul. He brings Mary Jane into the discussion, revealing that he wants both of them to surrender their marriage, just for the purpose of spreading more misery. Mary Jane furthers the deal, ensuring that Spider-Man's identity will once more become secret. And as the last few moments of the Pert-MJ romance count down, Mephisto sticks in the knife: the little girl Parker met was the daughter he and MJ would have had, had they not chosen to save Aunt May. 

Then reality changes. Aunt May was never shot, and Parker never had a romance with Mary Jane Watson, though she continues to exist in his world. The tale ends with Peter at a party, as the partygoers toast Harry Osborn's recovery from trauma as "A Brand New Day"-- which was used for the name of a 2008 Spider-arc. Said arc does not follow up on any of the Spider-myths from ONE MORE DAY, and though both titles were used for the two most recent SPIDER-MAN, neither film is strongly indebted to either comics-arc. Given that I didn't find BRAND NEW DAY to be more than average, I doubt ONE MORE DAY provided any great inspiration for better Spider-Man stories. But clearly, the feature remains popular even without a "Mrs. Spider-Man," so in that respect, all the protestations of MJ fans did nothing to reverse that trend.

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.              

        

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 1

RIP JAGGER'S DOJO now carries this recommendation for a book by one Richard Seves. The book concerns the fetish art of Eric Stanton, as well as the American subculture in which certain types of fetish art were promulgated, usually concentrating upon sadism, masochism, or some combination of the two. Stanton is not well known to most comics-fans even today, but during about ten years of his career, he shared a New York studio with an artist who was then reaching the apogee of his fame in the limited venue of American comic books, Steve Ditko. 

I have not read the book but will probably plan to do so some time in the future. At least one reason for me to do so is that much of my literary project on this blog is to examine art of all types from the viewpoint that most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

I don't remember encountering info on the Ditko-Stanton connection any time before the 1990s. A few quotes from Stanton appear in PURE IMAGES #1 (1990), a magazine devoted almost entirely to Greg Theakston's essay "The Birth of Spider-Man." Those quotes were purely focused on the question of what, if anything, Stanton might have contributed to the web-slinger. Most fans seemed to take the position that Ditko, well-known for taking strong moralistic stances in his essays and comics-works, probably participated very little in the quasi-legal erotic comics/artwork that Stanton produced. But the Seves book, going on Rip's review of it, seems to take the position that Ditko's contributions, if only in terms of inking artwork, were much more substantial than many fans imagined. 

 Based at least partly on the Seves book's information, Rip said:

I confess little interest in this form of kinky presentation, and at the risk of protesting too much I think like many this has perhaps caused me to overlook something quite obvious. Steve Ditko was a fetish artist. He was not as I had previously thought a colleague who helped touch up an image here and there for his studio mate who was a fetish artist, but instead he was part of an artistic team which intentionally created narratives within the confines of the fetish field. It's a bit of a surprise to find this out about a guy who despite his reclusive nature has had his work feverishly examined for decades now.

 I too don' t tend to associate Ditko with any form of fetishistic erotica. Yet I have no problem in arguing for such content, even if it's expressed on a purely subconscious level, if there's strong textual support for the argument. And that's the only way one could approach Ditko's work, because as most fans know, the artist never gave interviews and only started disseminating his memories of SPIDER-MAN's creation very late in his life, through the venue of privately printed fanzines. I've only read a few Ditko essays, usually in excerpted form, and I tend to doubt that Ditko ever discussed in any terms the increasing cultural focus on erotic art that began in the decade of the 1960s, the same era in which he came to prominence. I also get the impression that Ditko never publicly commented on his work-relationship with Stanton. But if he did, I'd guess that said commentary would have been minimal at best, dwarfed by Ditko's marked concentration on his many Randian social pronouncements.

If the totality of Ditko's oeuvre contains any significant fetish-content, I would think it would have manifested less through his various superhero works for Marvel and DC, than in the short horror stories in which the artist specialized before his sixties breakout success and after he left the Big Two for a time in the 1970s. These would probably represent Ditko in his purest state, in which he was most free of editorial oversight. My impression of those stories I've read-- but usually not reviewed-- is that they lack erotic content, and that they usually hinged on the trope of "the biter bit," where some malicious or foolish individual Gets His in the End. I guess one could argue, as did Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, that such tropes are fundamentally sadistic. But I do not, as I'll try to clarify in Part 2.           

  

 

COSMIC FLIGHT, SPIDER BITE

 I'm currently working on an extensive FANTASTIC FOUR critical evaluation that will encompass the two mythcomics posts I have planned for this month, respectively posts #399 and #400. (Since the first time my posts reached 100, I have endeavored to make each hundredth-post something special, as do many comics-serials.) Since I'm planning to eschew my critical jargon where possible, I decided to get at least some of that out of my system by expanding on the following remarks from last year's DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3:

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age... In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them.

Here, then, are some demonstrations of my perceptions re: the four potentialities in each Silver Age serial.

 The kinetic potentiality in fiction concerns anything that's an analogue to physical sensation. Often I've referenced this potentiality with respect to those immortal selling-points, "sex and violence," but it also includes all sympathetic and antipathetic affects linked to sensation. Within the sphere of the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, Jack Kirby designed an almost unparalleled rogues' gallery of unattractive villains to engage in combat with the generally attractive heroes (and yes, over time the Thing becomes cute than horrifying). This cover to FF #100-- which I for one wish could have been Kirby's last contribution to the series-- shows a good cross-section of the heroes and their opponents.

Ditko's run on SPIDER-MAN was not as long as Kirby's on FF, and he never showed a literal assemblage of all his best villains. (To be sure, both artists produced a handful of loser-foes, whom no one would particularly want to see again.) The closest thing to a Ditko "greatest hits" would be the "Sinister Six" tale in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1.

Despite how long each artist worked on each series, they're both in the same domain as far as how well they exploited the kinetic potentialities for repulsion and attraction. However, as I said above, the ways in which each writer/artist combo approached the dramatic potentiality took very different forms.

In the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, melodramatic tragedy arose every once in a while, as in the story "This Man, This Monster." Yet I believe editor Lee chose most of the time to soft-pedal such emotional tumult, if only because he was always writing about four characters in an ensemble that had to remain together for the series' sake, no matter how often they talked about breaking up. Thus I'd argue that comedy rather than tragedy tended to rule the FF-realm, as seen in these pages from FF #54:         

In contrast to this series, though, SPIDER-MAN was a loner. Thought the series displayed an ample amount of comedy-- often in the form of playing jokes on J. Jonah Jameson-- there was a marked emphasis upon Peter Parker being caught in a tangled web, woven by some dispassionate god and in which Parker was tormented as for sport. From AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #17:

I'm not in any way devaluing comedy over drama; that's the sort of thinking that makes the Oscar Awards such a drag. But I am saying that because Lee and Ditko focused so much on teen melodrama, with some parallel crime-melodrama content, they often didn't veer into the vertical level of meaning very often.

 All of the famous Spidey villains seen above are just crooks in costumes; they want to steal things, Spider-Man gets in their way, and they want to kill him so that they can go back to stealing with impunity. That's why I've found so few mythopoeic or dramatic complexities in the L/D SPIDER-MAN, or, for that matter, in later iterations of the franchise. A couple of Spider-foes have world-conquering ambitions, like Doc Ock and the Lizard, but arguably Lee and Ditko devoted less space to their abstract motivations. 

The Red Ghost, in his first (and only good) story, wants to dominate Earth's moon for the glory of Communism. The Puppet Master has more interest in controlling other people's lives than in interacting with his stepdaughter. Doctor Doom is obsessed with being the best at everything and thus wants more than anything to prove that he can beat his detested rival. All of these motivations BEGIN in the dramatic potentiality, but as I've argued in the various mythcomics essays I devoted to each FF-villain, the creators found ways to organically develop the mythopoeic and the didactic OUT of the dramatic motivations.       

And with all that in mind, my next essay will deal with a quick and dirty history of the Fantastic Four after Lee and Kirby.
              

MYTHCOMICS: DOCTOR OCTOPUS--NEGATIVE EXPOSURE (2003-04)

 

In DUELING DUALITIES PT 3 I suggested one reason for the lack of strong mythicity in the SPIDER-MAN feature was its investment in soap-opera narrative from its very beginnings. This set a pattern in which both the original creators and every raconteur who followed tended to concentrate upon the dramatic potentiality more than the other three. The example set by Lee and Ditko has never to my knowledge been equaled, but even the later creators' best efforts excel in terms of emotional drama. But it's always been possible to meld the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities, and indeed both Lee and Ditko often did so-- just not often in collaboration with one another.

A number of Spider-Man villains boast cool designs-- the Lizard, Electro-- but seem rather monotonous in terms of both potentialities. Yet I've always thought Doctor Octopus possessed untapped possibilities, though even Frank Miller defaulted to casting Octopus as yet another mad scientist. Until recently, as far as I knew, the 2004 movie SPIDER MAN 2 was the only work that substantially built up the character of Otto Octavius. However, slightly before that movie debuted in theatres, artist Staz Johnson and writer Brian K Vaughan (of Y THE LAST MAN fame) collaborated on a more nuanced version of the eight-limbed evildoer. To be sure, despite the new angle on the villain, this is still a SPIDER-MAN tale. However, unlike most such stories, Vaughan's story is narrated by a new character: BUGLE staff photographer Jeffrey Haight (whose name, Vaughan informs us, is pronounced like "hate.")

Even though Peter Parker as of this 2003 tale is still in college (as he has been for the previous forty years), few SPIDER-MAN writers have paid any attention to the hero's avocation of photography. Vaughan seems to be the first to note that the discipline has its own aesthetic history, and the character of Haight is deeply enmeshed in that history. He's invested in becoming known as an artist, though at the same time he wants a key validation from the commercial newspaper he works for: the honor of the front page. Haight is deeply offended that a college-boy stringer like Parker so often earns that honor, even though Parker has no knowledge of, or interest in, photographic art. Haight's desire for validation becomes the hub of his Faustian hubris.

But, in order for Haight to be tempted, his tempter must become an aesthete who talks Haight's language. I doubt if any depiction of Doctor Octopus before this showed him having a deep appreciation of the arts. Yet, to make the story work, Vaughan's multi-armed menace starts out the story by raiding a museum with a Da Vinci, including a painting in which a human subject is represented as having "eight limbs" like the Doctor. Parker in his superhero guise shows up to battle Ock, but so does Haight, who thinks he's got a scoop, being the only photographer on the scene. But after Spidey takes down the villain and sends him back to prison, Haight's aspirations for front-page glory are dashed. Once more, Peter Parker's photos win the day. 

  But though Haight "but slenderly knows himself," Vaughan's aesthetically minded super-villain recognizes Haight as an "artist manque," and realizes that he can manipulate such a man. So Octopus invites Haight to his prison cell, pretending to be a fan of the photographer's unjustly neglected work-- though in truth Ock knows enough about photography to consider Haight's photos "vile."

   Haight's also a perfect patsy because he's got a cop-girlfriend who can get the photographer a look at Octopus's mechanical arms, held in a vault shielded from the criminal's mental influence. Haight, after getting scooped in two more Spider-adventures (each involving one of the classic Ditko villains, Vulture and Mysterio), is foolish enough to set free the arms, and the price of Haight's cooperation is that he wants a chance to film an ultimate battle between Ock and Spidey at a mutually agreed-upon site. (Haight frequently expresses an indifference to Spider-Man's being killed, presumably because he suspects the hero of helping Parker get the best photos.) And so Haight sells his soul for a mess of photographic pottage, and he's just barely capable of comprehending that his act of betrayal puts his girlfriend in peril.      
       

However, once Haight's ego-dream is about to come true, he finally begins to sense that he's allied himself to a murderer who can justify any action on the basis of his superiority to common humanity. And so, after Octopus exposes Haight's villainy to the wall-crawler, the photographer finally gives the mad scientist "negative exposure." 

Haight's eleventh-hour conversion gives the web-slinger the chance to defeat Ock once again. Yet even here, Haight still wants to make a bargain, this time with the man who saved his life. He promises to confess his crime to the authorities, if Spidey will deliver his photos to the Bugle. And then there's one last irony before the closing curtain-- or maybe two ironies, from two jailbirds. Or three, if I should find it ironic that it took forty years for the comics-version of Spidey's best villain to rise to the level of epistemological myth.   

 

KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 3

 In my previous recent essays, I've been examining the way two ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing, have interpenetrated human history in the past and continue to do so. principally through their modern manifestations as "conservatism" and "liberalism." However, I added a couple of subdivisions to the mix. Keeping and Sharing can both manifest into extreme forms, both of which can be subsumed under "radicalism." The less extreme forms of both are best described as "meliorism"

Routine political discourse often distinguishes between radical and meliorist forms of liberalism. In the meliorist form, the ethic recommended to those that hold power can be summed up as "You Should Share" such things as rights and privileges with those that do not have (or do not think they have) said capacities. In the world of American civil rights, it's almost de rigeur to name Martin Luther King Jr as an exponent of persuading powerholders to cede power to the marginalized. In the radicalist form, the prevailing argument says, "You Must Share" and the best-known advocate from the same Civil Rights era, Malcolm X, favored the stick rather than the carrot.

Conservatism, though, displays the same two subdivisions. Liberals are usually only able to recognize the extreme form, so that everyone from the KKK to the guy running the Christian cake-shop are viewed as equals in tyranny. Naturally there are specific agents who want to Keep Power under all circumstances and cede nothing.  However, meliorist conservatives display the ethic that "You Should Share," albeit only under the right conditions. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned the reputation of a Liberal for measures like empowering the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Yet, the act of interning Japanese-Americans was fundamentally a conservative act, even if one takes the most charitable view of FDR's action.

And so I come to my first fictional example, that of the opposition between meliorism and radicalism seen in SPIDER-MAN #68-70 (dated January, February and March 1969). Yet to examine this scenario, a little grounding is necessary, since the conflict revolves around one of Spider-Man's support-cast, Joe Robertson. Though introduced in ASM #51, not until issue #55 does Stan Lee set up the newsman's role as a regular character, where he's a voice of reason as against the mule-headedness of publisher J. Jonah Jameson. He's also the epitome of a Liberal meliorist view: Joe Robertson ascends to his position of authority purely on the basis of merit. 

Jumping forward a year and some months, Joe's son Randy Robertson is briefly seen in ASM #67, but only in #68 do we see Randy's purpose: to show Stan Lee's negative view of radicalism. Thus, almost as soon as Peter Parker encounters Randy on the campus they both attend, up comes the shadow of Randy's friend Josh-- who, since he never has a last name, might as well be called Josh X.

Though Lee was often criticized for the piddly nature of the "campus protest" involved here, he shows considerable acumen in showing how militant Josh X is. There's no "hey, how they hangin,'" just, "are you joining the cause?" Lee obviously means readers to find Josh abrasive here and later, even though Peter Parker nominally approves of his cause. The campus protest will tie into Spider-Man's adventure with his frequent foe The Kingpin, but the cause is less important here than showing how Randy, the offspring of a meliorist parent, is being influenced by a radical who demands that the campus authorities "Must Share," while said authorities are taking the radical conservative posture, presumably currying favor with alumni to garner donations (though Lee does not say this).

Josh X is even less appealing in his second scene in the story. Though Randy is the first to invite Parker to help the students fight the good fight, Josh not only acts like Parker owes him allegiance, he addresses a near-stranger as "Whitey" as if he doesn't owe Parker the slightest courtesy. Stan Lee doesn't have Parker react to the racial slur, but rather to Josh's statement that the young militant doesn't think he has to listen to, or account for, the response of the authorities to the protesters' demands. On the next page, an unnamed Black protester casts aspersions on Randy for being "the son of an Uncle Tom," and Josh, for whatever reason, defends Randy as a "soul brother." But it's not hard to imagine Josh flinging the same insult if Randy failed to follow Josh's lead.

The battle between the spider and the gang-lord continues into ASM #69 and #70, but Stan Lee devotes just a handful of scenes to winding up his mini-debate about meliorism and radicalism. In the first of the two scenes above, Joe is aghast that a son of his was involved not just in protest, but in causing damage to personal property, which is something neither Randy nor Josh apologizes for. (In the next issue, Lee changes his mind and says no damage was caused by the protesters.) Randy, probably channeling whatever Sidney Poitier movies Stan had seen, complains that he has to be more "militant" because his meliorist father is part of "the White Man's establishment." Joe makes the more reasonable argument about proving oneself, though oddly, Josh gets the last word, claiming that "we" (meaning Black people) won't get anywhere unless they "kinda shake Whitey up a little." Given that Stan Lee was almost certainly a meliorist, it's fairly generous that he at least acknowledges the rationale of the radicalist in this issue. In #70 the voice of the "Must Keep" authority is at last heard, as the dean admits having failed to listen to the voices of his students, and that he was on their side but was busy fighting the real entrenched interests. the college's trustees. Josh admits the need to think about things a bit more, but no one's ever privy to his thoughts since I don't think he ever appears again.  

So in this late 1960s tale, some respect is accorded the "You Must Share" ethos even if the "You Should Share" is clearly the superior ethic. Yet what about one of the principal franchises of the era of identity politics?

The 2018 MCU film BLACK PANTHER presented audiences with a world where "You Must Share" is the only game in town. However, it's not a power structure based on the racial politics of America. Rather, Wakanda, an idealized African fantasyland, is called upon to pledge fealty to the radicalist ethos. In a loose way Wakanda is also governed by an Ethos of Keeping, though it's implied to be a world without the racial divisions found in the outside world, only a heritage of tribal quarrels that can be solved with rituals of combat. Wakanda keeps its miracle element vibranium out of the hands of the powerful and the powerless alike. However, their isolationism takes a major blow thanks to a poor relation of the realm's hereditary ruler, The Black Panther.   

Considering that T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu is critical to the end of Wakanda's isolationism, the character is barely more than a bare function of the plot. We are never told what radical influencer managed to persuade N'Jobu, brother of the reigning Wakandan king T'Chaka, to betray his country's policies and try to sell weapons to radicals in that hotbed of political activity, Oakland. Nor does the film tell us why T'Challa is so traumatized by the death of his traitorous uncle. N'Jobu's main purpose in the movie is to spawn Erik Killmonger, whom many critics described as the film's "real hero." Even though Killmonger takes over Wakanda with zero concern for its people and with the agenda of using their weapons for his network of blacktivist conspirators (also never defined), all that counts is forcing Wakanda to Share with the downtrodden, "By Any Means Necessary." Of course, Whitey is still the main villain even when no White person is directly involved in Killmonger's plans. Thus CIA agent Everett Ross is automatically a "colonizer" according to one of T'Challa's guardians. Yet none of the Wakandans uses that term for Killmonger, even though he's applying CIA tactics to ruin their country for his own agenda. Even though Killmonger dies, he succeeds in ending Wakanda's isolation. And the audience knows this must be a good thing because the nation starts donating money to American Blacks-- who I guess are supposed to be way worse off than all the impoverished tribes of real-world Africa.            

It's clear from BLACK PANTHER that without any sort of compensatory ethos, the radicalist ethos loses all control of whatever moral compass it might potentially possess. I would like to think that PANTHER's success at the box office was a short-lived anomaly, since most of the radicalist MCU movies since then have tanked. But as another famous Liberal-with-Conservative-tendencies observed, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."                 

   

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE GRIM HUNT" assorted Spider-Man comics (2010)

 

This post is more of a notation than a proper review. I only picked up GRIM HUNT from a local library because I noticed that, though its main plot concerned the return of Kraven the Hunter from the undiscovered country, a subplot dealt with an alliance between the prophetess Madame Web and at least two Spider-Women. None of the HUNT narrative bears any strong resemblance to the storyline of Sony Pictures' recent flop MADAME WEB. But since the subplot about the "Spider-Clan" precedes the action of HUNT, it's possible that either this arc, or another like it, gave the Sony scripters the idea that Marvel's "school for spiders" concept could be converted into a "girl power" movie.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Ironically, the subplot could have made a better film than the upscale Lifetime movie that Sony came out with. Every fan knows that Marvel Comics began to come out with assorted "spider-women" to protect and/or enhance the franchise created by Spider-Man. That's one reason I'm not giving HUNT a proper review: it's referencing all sorts of continuity-based developments that I'd have to research over many assorted SPIDER-MAN comics. In any case, as far as the origin-stories of characters like "Arana" and "the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman" are concerned, the heroines' resemblance to Spider-Man is mere coincidence. Someone-- I might assume the dominant writer of HUNT, Joe Kelly-- elevated the coincidence to the level of a metaphysical possibility, that all of Marvel's Spider-people are bound within a "web" of influences. Madame Web asserts the existence of this intertwinement, while Peter Parker and the other Spider-people are more skeptical. This sort of metaphysical uncertainty might have been produced a better dramatic arc for a movie about spider-heroines, even one that was obliged to erase Spider-Man from the (literal) picture.                                                                                                                                                                                                      Then there's the main plotline about the rebirth of Kraven the Hunter. I was loosely aware that, following the demise of the villain in the 1987 continuity "Kraven's Last Hunt," other pretenders to his throne had popped up, at least one of whom was Kraven's son. By 2010, there's a whole family of Kravniofs, all of whom quarrel with one another over their patrimony but who are united in the quest to bring down their nemesis, "The Spyder"-- also sort of a symbolic representation of all the spider-people, I think. Joe Kelly's definitely a much better SPIDER-MAN writer than most of the people who followed in the wake of Stan Lee, but I can't really judge this HUNT without having seen more of the surrounding terrain.                                                                                                                                    

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

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First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!