BLOOD AND THUNDER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

Dick Giordano passed away on 3-27-10. He's not quite the last of the old-time "blood and thunder" comics-creators, since people like Denny O'Neil, John Severin and Russ Heath are still kicking, but he was one of the best at pulp action, as this cover to SARGE STEEL.

A detailed obituary appears on Mark Evanier's site, but
mine is simply an appreciation for his talent as an artist in the "blood and thunder" style. I pattern my use of the term after that of Richard Slotkin's in REGENERATION AFTER VIOLENCE, using the term to portrary a host of "tough guy" writers ranging from Jack London to Raymond Chandler.

The influence of this school of pulp action on early comic books is hard to gauge. Both the costumed and non-costumed heroes of the late 30s were a little too "softboiled" to have belonged to any tough-guy clubs: that is, while physically tough their characters usually followed the pattern of eternal white knights like the Lone Ranger. One occasionally sees early comics playing with the hardboiled approach, as with an early Eisner experiment, "Muss 'Em Up Donovan," but in comic books the blood and thunder doesn't really get going until the late forties, with the rise of the crime genre and TWO-FISTED TALES. The approach probably reaching its last high point in mainstream comics with the Kanigher war books at DC Comics.

"Blood and thunder" didn't mean simply violence: any number of costumed heroes were as violent as the crime comics, which is probably why Frederic Wertham lumped them all together. But in the blood-and-thunder aesthetic there was usually a strong naturalistic vibe, a mood uncomfortable with the wild excesses of fantasy seen in the superheroes, the SF/horror books and even Conanesque fantasy.

Giordano perhaps had the misfortune to be one of the last advocates of this vibe. One notices that most of his Charlton "action heroes" eschewed most of the fantasy world-building one saw in contemporaneous costumed heroes at DC, Marvel and others. Pulp naturalism was clearly Giordano's orientation, as shown in his work at DC, from the remodeling of WONDER WOMAN into a superspy-type to one of his later projects, an adaptation of MODESTY BLAISE.

I don't imagine he ever really had much in common with the fans who loved the worlds of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox, much less the virtual takeover of the superhero genre by the spawn of the X-Men. But for a time, his work provided an interesting contrast to the dominant superhero meme: a return to simpler days when casual buyers picked up comic books to read about tough detectives dueling it out with sexy temptresses, with not a ray-gun in sight or an angst-crisis in sight.

AN UNPOPULAR (YET EXEMPLARY) MYTH

I've sometimes thought about writing more essays here in which I analyze this or that story (whether in comics or another medium) along my chosen myth-critical lines. With comics, however, visuals are so much a part of the story that one almost has to invest in the time, trouble and expense of using a scanner. That's not going to happen just now. For the present I'll probably continue scavenging fair-use pictures from the web, like the one I found recently in this entry for THE MASKED MAYHEM.

But before getting to the scavenged subject, here's more theoretical stuff.

Though I define the quality of mythicity in narrative as that of symbolic complexity, not everyone uses the word "myth" this way. Often when the average person describes Superman or Batman as a "myth," they simply mean that they are extremely popular with many people, as some myths in the archaic world undoubtedly were. However, since not all archaic religious myths had widespread popularity-- some being confined to this or that isolated tribe of "fanboy" worshippers-- it follows that not all literary myths are going to be world-beaters either. On some old messboard I wrote:

'As I said on a recent thread that didn't go anywhere, "Unpopular Myths," I don't deem it necessary that a myth be widely known to have mythic qualities. Even in archaic times, there were "real myths" that were confined to small enclaves or sub-societies, so widespread popularity is not my base criterion.'

I do consider that even a little-known myth, religious or literary, can be exemplary to its audience and to those scholars who study such things long after the original audience is either gone or fading.

And so here we come to Archie Comics' character The Jaguar.

This series had been cancelled for a few years by the time I started collecting comics in the late 1960s. It was far from being a favorite, though occasionally I thought the base concept-- hero with the powers of the animal kingdom-- has some potential. I mention this to assert that The Jaguar wasn't something for which I had particular nostalgic affection. Aside from the aspect MM mentions in his blogpost-- that the feature had a high ratio of female cast-members-- The Jaguar was pretty unexceptional, though not bad in a "hold-your-nose-as-you-bag-it" way.

What I did find exemplary was one story in the Jaguar's 15-issue series, "The Sea Circe from Space," which Masked Mayhem referred to on his blog.

Now, a simple reference to an archaic myth, like the one to "Circe" in the title, doesn't make a modern narrative mythic, any more than its popularity or lack of same. What makes such a narrative mythic is its ability to tap into one of the four Campbellian functions that I expounded upon here.

"Circe," cover-featured on JAGUAR #3, scripted by SUPERMAN writer Robert Bernstein and drawn by John Rosenberger, doesn't remain confined to the Circe motif it references, which involves a sea-witch with a propensity for changing human beings into animals. Instead, the character of Kree-Nal (yes, the name does sound like them Kirby alien dudes) positively hates humans for their "imperfection and ugliness."
But as the story's ending reveals, Kree-Nal's rage against ugliness is your basic Jungian projection: Jaguar finds out that when she and her people are underwater, they become bestially ugly. If this wasn't a comic book one might wonder why they don't consider their natural selves beautiful, but the upshot is that Kree-Nal ceases her campaign against humans once Jaguar learns her secret.

(On a side-note, Kree-Nal makes repeated appearances in the series attempting to romance the Jaguar. Whether she ever bags him is lost to the mists of time but one can be sure they never go on dates underwater.)

The psychological symbolism incarnated in "Sea Circe of Space" might owe less to the specific myth of Circe than to the mytholgies involving Medusa, Hera, and even the medieval "Loathly Lady." All of these myths turn upon the notion of an offense, or possible offense, to female vanity (while the myth of Circe doesn't). Hera is best known for persecuting her rivals for Zeus' affections, whom she, as Circe Writ Large, usually changes into animals. According to one version of Medusa's origins, she's a mortal woman cursed to become hideously ugly by Athena, and her ugly snake-heads give her powers of transformation, though of a different order than the powers of Circe. And here's handy Wikipedia on the Loathly Lady:

"The theme became a staple of Arthurian literature; the best known treatment is in the Wife of Bath's Tale, in which a knight, told that he can choose whether his bride is to be ugly yet faithful, or beautiful yet false, frees the lady from the form entirely by allowing her to choose for herself."

While I won't go into great detail about the symbolic significance behind these archetypes entwining feminine vanity and transformational power, I regard that "Sea Circe" is the sort of story which, despite being targeted at an audience of kids, does tap into those archetypes in an exemplary fashion-- though obviously not (even when the comic itself was on newsstands) one that was particularly popular.

GETTIN' SLOPPY THERE, LOSTBOYS

While I've always admired LOST for not spoonfeeding its viewers tons of exposition, I think the show's writers have stayed away from that narrative strategy so long that they've forgotten how to provide exposition when they have to, as seen in the last episode, "Ab Aeterno."

1) PROBLEM 1: The Black Rock ship, impelled by a storm that may have been conjured up by Jacob, the island or just Mother Nature, smashes the statue of Tawaret to smithereens, but is not itself smashed and zooms all the way into the jungle. This really strikes me as a desperate writer's ploy: "Hey, we've got to explain both of these things: let's combine them. Two great tastes taste better together!"

2) PROBLEM 2: Jacob seems somehow responsible for the ship being there-- at least he admits to having brought others to the island prior to Richard's ship-- but not only does he do nothing to prevent the killing of the slaves by the ship's officers, Jacob seems unaware of Old Smokey's invasion of the ship, his killing of the officers and the Temptation of Richard. The result is that everybody aboard the ship is dead except for Richard, and Jacob seems to conceive of Richard's potential usefulness at the last moment, rather than having planned things out as he did with the Oceanic castaways. Assuming that Jacob is some sort of deity who has a jones for experimenting with humans in an island/ant-farm, you don't learn much from the ants if you let them be killed off so quickly.

3) PROBLEM 3: The God of Ricardo's faith lays down laws and then expects his flock to take the moral superiority of those laws on faith even when the god doesn't come to his worshippers' defense at the drop of a burning bush. In contrast, Jacob brings his ant-subjects to the island and then-- what? Tells them nothing about why they've been brought there? Apparently the Others are an experiment in which Richard goes forth and recruits people from the outside world instead of trying to build a society out of stray Egyptians or Spanish slaves or whatever. But all the Others get from Jacob via Richard seem to be oracular commands rather than moral laws. Does a god who dispenses no moral laws have any moral high ground to judge the choices his followers make?

4) PROBLEM 4: And Nemesis seems to be even stupider. He's trying to convince Ricardo to go after Jacob and kill him. To that end, he materializes the spectre of Ricardo's lost love Isabella, and then makes it seem like the Smoke Monster abducts her. (Can Smokey's split off parts of himself, like DC Comics' Clayface??) THEN-- Nemesis tells Ricardo that he IS the Smoke Monster, but hey, all that roaring from me and that screaming from Isabella had nothing to do with one another: she was really captured by "the devil," who is Jacob. Of course the main reason for this odd strategy is that Richard in 2007 knows that Jacob's unnamed enemy is the Smoke Monster, and so someone's got to tell him. And since Jacob's character can't be allowed to break his super-secret "I'm too cryptic for my shirt" attitude, the writers had Nemesis do the reveal instead. Brilliant!

I'm perhaps crabby because I miss seeing the ensemble, and really didn't care that much about Ricardo/Richard and his problems, but I really thought the writers flubbed this one. Plus points: Hurley as "ghost whisperer" continued to be awesome, and it was interesting that the destiny mapped out for Ricardo by the slave-trader-- that of a servant/factotum-- is the one he accepts from Jaocb. I hope this sloppiness doesn't mar the Big Ending.

SWIPE, FILED FOR COPYRIGHT

This month the heirs of Jack Kirby, in accordance with copyright law, filed for many of the Marvel properties which Kirby co-created with Stan Lee, and for one which I judge to be little more than a reworked "swipe."

The usual use for the term "swipe" in comic-book circles is to indicate when Artist B has swiped, with minimal if any changes, some artistic rendering by Artist A, to the extent that one cannot doubt that Artist A's work was the model.

However, the term "swipe" has been used more broadly at times, and on occasion certain artists have been known to "swipe" even from their earlier selves, recycling configurations or designs they themselves have used for newer work.

However, the latter use is not the case with the claim being made by Jack Kirby's heirs to the Marvel property SPIDER-MAN. The complicated history of Spider-Man's genesis has been told best in Greg Theakston's 1990 zine PURE IMAGES #1, but as its contents aren't available on the web, this writeup by Al Nickerson (going on memory here) seems to substantially agree with Theakston's analysis.

As detailed therein, the sequence of events goes like this:

1) Joe Simon, together with writer Jack Oleck and artist C.C. Beck, conceive a proposal for a new character SPIDERMAN, which they present to one publisher, Harvey Comics. Simon creates a logo for SPIDERMAN but at the last minute the name of the character proposed is changed to THE SILVER SPIDER, probably in emulation of such long-running heroes as THE GREEN HORNET and THE BLUE BEETLE.

2) Harvey Comics rejects the proposal, which has very little "spidery" about it (as a letter from the editor notes) and which looks, thanks to Beck's art, much like a reprise of the artist's most famous comics-work, CAPTAIN MARVEL. The proposal then languishes in the Harvey offices for years.

3) Roughly around 1959 Simon reclaims the original proposal from Harvey and brings it to Jack Kirby. But instead of using either "spider" name, the duo decide to rework the Oleck-Beck-Simon- material into a new concept, THE FLY. Harvey Comics *does* accept this proposal and they publish the Fly's flights until cancelling that first series in 1964, though Simon and Kirby only collaborate on the first four issues. This entry by the Kirby Museum shows points of comparison between the Beck-Oleck-Simon work and the Simon-Kirby work on THE FLY's first appearance.

4) A few years later, Kirby, no longer teamed with Joe Simon, is working regularly for Marvel. Stan Lee asks if Kirby has any ideas for new features, and Kirby pulls forth the original concept of SPIDERMAN, complete with Simon's logo.

5) Kirby submits five rough pages to Lee. Lee allegedly doesn't like Kirby's take on the character, and reassigns the project to artist Steve Ditko. Lee and Ditko proceed to make SPIDER-MAN (now with 100% more hyphen!) into Marvel's best-selling feature.

Now, the legal suit of the Kirbys vs. Marvel today will unfold as it will no matter what I say about it.

But as much as I sympathize with Jack Kirby's treatment at the hands of Marvel and publisher Martin Goodman, I could only sympathize with his having significant rights to the SPIDER-MAN character *if* that input, as it appeared in that lost proposal, came directly from Kirby himself.

And though it's chancy to put much faith in reminiscences of some fifty years ago, it looks like whatever Kirby pulled out of his files was little more than a reworking of the Beck-Oleck-Simon SILVER SPIDER, with maybe a touch of the Simon-Kirby FLY-- in other words, a swipe.

I don't mean to be overly judgmental of the practice of swiping as an artistic survival skill. I'm sure everyone in the business does it and that it harms no one anyone as long as it's used minimally and with discretion.

But a swipe from Artist A seems a pretty weak basis to use in a case revolving around Artist B's rights.

THE OBJECT OF HIS SUBJECTION

In this comment-thread Charles Reece is good enough to imply that I'm a subjectivist with this winsome phrase:

"I can't much help you if you want to insist that the stick actually bends in the water."

Since I'm not a subjectivist, any more than I was an essentialist, I'll hold forth a little about why I think he made this mistake.

What I have argued consistently is that there is a domain of literary quality that one may call, following Cassirer, the "expressive," because it deals with that part of literature that expresses emotional tonality. Expressivity is manifestly not some sort of loosey-goosey "get in touch with your feelings" attitude, nor does it have anything to do with dismissing all questions of objective quality as they pertain to literature. Expressivity is, for Cassirer, the fundamental rock on which the house of man's intellect is built:

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

Note that though Cassirer says that one might be "tempted" to restrict art and myth to the domain of expressivity, he does not say that one should do so; merely that they both remain intimately bound up with the expressive modality. More on that in another essay.

Now, I suppose some might look askance at phrases like "inner life" and judge Cassirer some sort of fatuous Romantic. But I would say that Cassirer's logical description of emotional states is not itself emotional, certainly not to the extent that the following quote (supplied by Mssr. Reece from Karl Marx's POWER OF MONEY) is:

"Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune."

Given that the materialist Marx would probably qualify as one of those to whom Cassirer imputes "dogmatic sensationalism," I find it interesting that a comparison of the two quotes shows Marx to be more reliant on a subjective position. Cassirer gives us an "is" proposition with respect to the way human emotion has been the foundation of language, art and myth. Marx gives us an "ought" as soon as he proposes that the only proper "exchange value" should be "love only for love, trust for trust, etc." He, it seems, is just as concerned about the "inner life" of man, but paradoxically he's the one proposing an economic theory of man's civilization that marginalizes everything that is not economic.

I suggest for this reason and others that even though many of Marx's disciples worship at his fane because they believe he has thrown some objective light upon the status of mankind (as well as man's art and myth), Marx is actually successful with his disciples because he is a master of a subjective metaphor that stirs emotion.

True metaphors, according to Paul Ricoeur, are "alive." I may not like a lot of things Marx or his disciples chose to bring to life with their invocation of the evil-conspiracy metaphor, but I can't doubt that the central metaphor's got a great range of expression.

However, it's perhaps not much better off in its real applications than was the Greek nymph Echo in her quest for Narcissus-- that is: to be forever a subject looking for its object.

ADAPTATION FOR THE MILLIONS

Inasmuch as I typed a long example of adaptation for one respondent, who failed to respond to it, I may as well transfer it here as a basis for further exploration as to why Marx Got Everything Wrong:

'I sometimes wonder if Marx's education went any further back than the 18th century. I can't see how anyone who had a classical education-- as I gather was given to almost everyone who got to the higher rungs of learning in his day-- could come up with this stuff.

I assume he knew, at least as a raw datum, that literature was oral before it became written, but possibly back then studies of oral literature were in their infancy. Today, however, we know that wherever you have traveling bards, they alter their stories to fit whatever audience they encounter.

I don't imagine the ancient bards had a word for it, but I'd call it "adaptation" sooner than "commodification."

And the practice hasn't died out, even in its oral manifestation. Here's a real-world example for you: in the 80s Harlan Ellison-- who had some background as a stand-up comic, BTW-- spoke before a packed auditorium at a Houston SF con I attended. I forget what led up to this bit, but at one point he said something like, "And I know you Houstonians will appreciate such-and-such, because everyone knows that Houston... is batshit crazy!"

Appreciate laughs and applause from the audience. Probably everyone there, contra Michael Fleischer, was pleased to hear Ellison call them crazy.

Did Ellison mean it? Probably not. He probably knew next to nothing about Houston.

Did he later go to Austin and use the same routine on Austinites? I'd bet the farm on it, because that's what traveling comics do. They tell jokes to suit one audience and then modify them to suit another one."

In many ways Karl Marx is the perfect example of the intellectual who can't see the Moira for the Themis. Here's a man who was exceptionally well-read but whose most sustained piece of literary analysis was a short essay on Sue's LES MYSTERES DE PARIS, a book which might interest some comics-fans in that the novel contains a crusading aristocrat who in general description bears some resemblance to a certain scion of the Wayne Family. Why is this man's etiology of what was later called "mass culture" so persuasive, given that he gives no evidence of knowing anything about the subject?

Marx seems to have known nothing about the demands placed on artists by their audiences, whether those audiences were seen directly, as they were for traveling bards and are still for traveling comedians, or whether the audiences make their pleasures and displeasures known indirectly, as through letters, letter-bombs and other gestures. Instead Marx elides the audience to a greater extent than did any aristocrat or petit-bourgeoise, by the simplistic stratagem of supposing that the ignorant masses have no tastes of their own, but are simply responding according to their training by their moneyed overlords.

Most Marxist literary critics have continued to follow the path of elitist paranoia, with Adorno going so far as to say that even "light art" like folksongs are but a substitute for the authentic art that the bourgeoise keep for themselves. So, even long before the printing press or the television tube, the masses were huddled before their fires, yearning (though they did not know it) for the authentic art of Nabokov, but *forced* to endure the curse of "light art."

Pardon me while I vomit. More later.

ADAPTATION, ULTIMATELY

"Socrates: In like manner, I want you to tell me what part of justice is piety or holiness, that I may be able to tell Meletus not to do me injustice, or indict me for impiety, as I am now adequately instructed by you in the nature of piety or holiness, and their opposites.

Euthyphro: Piety or holiness, Socrates, appears to me to be that part of justice which attends to the gods, as there is the other part of justice which attends to men."-- Plato's EUTHYPHRO, trans. Benjamin Jowett.

In the above section Socrates, who as he says is about to be tried for impiety in an Athens court, attemtps to get alleged religious expert Euthyprho to define impiety for him. As in most other Socratic dialogues the poor chump Euthyphro is outmatched from the first, but though he isn't able to parse his argument finely enough for Socrates' liking, in the section above he does come close to formulating a sound answer regarding the ways that "justice" can encompass both duties to the gods and duties to men. The formulation carries a significant resonance with Jesus' famous "render unto Caesar" pronouncement from Mark 12:17, even if in that dialogue it's the religious guy rather than the skeptic who wins the argument.

One of Charles Reeces' responses on the comments-thread to SHADOWS AND FOGGY NOTIONS PART 2 brought up a concept that I've always thought seemed partial and poorly conceived: that of "commodification." I asserted that I thought that I thought that what Marxists call "commodification" was better seen as a wider process I term "adaptation," by which I mean the sum total of all actions taken by artists-- or those making artistic works available to any audiences-- that in any way alter or slant the works to make them acceptable to those audiences.

Reece brings up an example of what he calls commodification, but as I told him, I found it suspect, and so won't consider it here. I think I have a substitute example with which he should logically agree, though, since it concerns an injustice done in the name of conservative interests. This example is the story of how representatives of DC Comics squelched an attempt to create the company's first black superhero in TEEN TITANS #20.

The story's told in great detail here, and of course various interviews have come out in the fan press in which no one named seems to want to take the heat for the decision to de-blackify the character of "Joshua." Here's Len Wein's summation of the controversy:



"At the last minute Carmine got gun-shy and was afraid that we wouldn't be able to sell the book in the South and that all these terrible things would happen. So he just pulled the issue and said, 'Nope, we're not going to do it.' This was less than a week before the book was supposed to ship to the printer."

Now, I don't see how any Marxist in his right mind would not consider this an act of reducing a work to what Reece calls a "homogenous substance." Whether Infantino's actions were exactly what Wein said they were is not my concern here: I wasn't there. But someone made it necessary that a character intended to be a black man was made into a Caucasian, and that person was probably motivated by fears of economic retaliation by buyers in the southern United States.

Marxist rhetoric is replete with many, many examples of such hypothetical commodification, a few as worthwhile as the one above, though most are drivel, like Theodor Adorno's ravings against Donald Duck.

However, let us flashforward to 1993, and a different medium. Much racial rhetoric has gone down the pike, and now the company of Walt Disney-- not exactly a stranger to questions of racial impropriety-- puts out a film version of Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN, directed by Stephen Sommers.

There was of course no question that the novel's major black character would be played by a black actor, one Courtney B. Vance. No replacements by a Caucasian pinch-hitter here. But how does Vance play the character?

Does he play the runaway slave Jim with the same authentic "Negro" dialect given him by author Mark Twain?

HELL NO he does not. There's not a "massa" or "whuffo" to be heard in the Sommers adaptation of the Twain novel, which is also illustrative of a different type of "adaptational" process. Just as Carmine Infantino may have feared reprisals if he published a black superhero in 1969, in 1993 Walt Disney most likely feared another sort of economic reprisals if they came out with a film with a black man talking in dialectic, no matter how accurate to the times that dialectic would have been.

So my question to Euthyphro Reece is as follows:

Is the latter example also commodification?

Or is it not a greater part of a process of adaptation to a hypothetical audience, even as service to the gods is a portion of the category of just actions?