MESSING WITH MISTER IN-BETWEEN PT. 2

Not long after finishing IVANHOE, I also completed Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE, a 1996 novelization of a British teleseries on which Gaiman collaborated. I didn't care for the book, but I must admit that its lack of imaginative scope is probably due to the fact that all elements had to be kept within the bounds of an inexpensive live-action series.

In keeping with what I wrote earlier about the Scott work, I'm only interested whether or not NEVERWHERE qualifies as a combative work, and if not, why not. (SPOILERS ahead.)


In the tradition of Carroll's Alice, modern-day British businessman Richard Mayhew falls down the wrong rabbit-hole. He ends up in London Below, a perhaps extradimensional domain that has a separate but sometimes parallel culture to that of the real world. Mayhew, who possesses no physical skills, becomes involved with a small coterie of freedom-fighters as they're pursued by assassins sent by a corrupt angel. The novel concludes when one member of the team, named Door, manages to propel the assassins and their master into another dimensional plane.

In my view, though Gaiman devotes a lot of space to Door and the other allies, NEVERWHERE's focal presence is not an ensemble of connected characters, but Mayhew alone. Thus, by the transitive principles I've advanced, the novel can't be combative unless Mayhew has some claim to being a combative hero.

Now, whereas Ivanhoe is a protagonist with a lot of battle-skill who doesn't get a final combat-scene, Gaiman does put the microdynamic Mayhew in the position of a hero. Without getting into the plot heavily, one of the coterie, Hunter, seeks to destroy a fabulous beast, a sort of oversized wart-hog. Hunter, who is a masterful fighter, attempts to spear the beast, but she's gored fatally. She gives the spear to Mayhew, and then Hunter distracts the animal's attention. When the beast attacks Hunter, Mayhew spears it to death. For the remainder of the novel, Mayhew is credited with the monster's death, and is even called "the Warrior," even though he has no illusions about his capacity in that respect.

There have been some occasions where I've judged a work to be combative even if the principal protagonist was not the most powerful person around. In Part 1 of MEGA, MESO, MICRO,  I discussed the breakdown of dynamicities in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, as represented by main hero Jack Burton and two of his allies, reporter Gracie and tough kung-fu practitioner Wang.

Burton, like Mayhew, is the focal presence of the story, and just as Mayhew's ally Hunter is far more powerful than he, the same applies to Burton vis-a-vis his ally Wang. However, I considered Burton a combative protagonist because he's like Aristotle's hedgehog, possessed of one really good trick. Mayhew may kill a monster with a great weapon, but the weapon's just given to him, with no sense of his having mastered it. Further, the fact that he can only kill the beast because Hunter distracts it defuses his claim to combative status.

Thus, even though Ivanhoe doesn't get a final fight-scene, everything else in the novel makes clear that he has the capacity for such a battle. Mayhew is the opposite: he does participate in a final fight-scene, but he never really has the capacity even to touch the boundaries of the *megadynamic* combatant, as does Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE FANTASTIC ORIGIN OF THE RED SKULL" (TALES OF SUSPENSE #66, 1966)

In this essay, I cited the two-page origin of Batman as a mythcomic, deeming that its discourse could be separated from the main story it prefaces, the unremarkable "The Batman Wars on the Dirigible of Doom." The story "The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull" requires more mental gymnastics.

Lee and Kirby revived Captain America in AVENGERS #4 (March 1964), and a modern-day series for the Captain appeared in November of that year. However, after four Cap adventures in modern times, the creative team began retelling stories from the hero's appearances during the Golden Age. I'd speculate that Lee and Kirby had not yet decided what to do with the displaced patriotic fighter, and that they were testing his appeal as a wartime feature while keeping him active with the Avengers. However, after eight WWII issues, Captain America returned to modern-day adventures. Still, the Great War was still part of the story, since in TALES OF SUSPENSE #72 Cap faces off against the Three Sleepers, Nazi-created robots who had been created by the Red Skull as a much-delayed measure against the Allies.

One possible reason for Cap's visit to the past may have been that Lee and Kirby had decided to revive the Red Skull for the 1960s. Such a revival had happened before, when a version of the Red Skull had also appeared in the non-canonical stories of the Commie-busting Cap of the 1950s, but Lee and Kirby naturally ignored that iteration. Issue #66 seems clearly designed to impress Silver Age readers with the WWII record of Cap's greatest villain-- which suggests that by 1966 Lee was planning to have the Skull revived for Silver Age adventures. In keeping with Marvel's attempt to design dramatically strong origins for villains, such as the Mandarin and Doctor Doom, Lee and Kirby did the same thing for the Nazi fiend, who had never had a distinct backstory during the Golden Age.

The "fantastic origin" of the title, though, is not a self-contained vignette like Batman's: it's a narrative of roughly five pages that the villain relates to a captive Captain America. The frame-story, like "Dirigible of Doom," is nothing special: as a result of the Skull's capture of the flag-garbed fighter, Captain America is brainwashed and sent to kill the Allied commander, and this in turn leads to yet more involved plot-developments. None of the main story is mythic, only the five pages in which the Skull tells his story-- even though said narrative is occasionally interrupted by Captain America trying to assault his enemy.

The narrative owes much to the origin of the hero. Captain America starts out as a nobody, a spindly weakling defined only by his desire to fight for his country. The Skull doesn't even get a name, calling himself a "nameless orphan." Later stories, though, give the villain the proper name "Johann Schmidt"-- almost certainly a German-ization of the commonplace English name "John Smith." And though the origin of the Skull doesn't directly reference the economic depression of Germany that preceded the rise of the Nazis, there's at least a prevailing consciousness in Kirby's visuals that the nameless orphan lived in a time of hardship and privation.

The hero interrupts to tell the villain that "my early years were no bed of roses," which is probably an even more indirect reference to the American Depression. Lee and Kirby don't choose to press the parallel further, but simply concentrate on showing how the young orphan grows up as a virtual nobody. Then the Nazis rise to power by openly terrorizing the citizens to compliance, and Orphan-Skull admires not only their forcefulness, but that of the man who inspired them. The orphan-- whose face is never shown-- is working as a bellboy when Adolf Hitler himself comes to the hotel where the future villain works. Apparently the young man's sense of self is so meager that he doesn't even consider joining the Nazi ranks as a soldier, for he reflects, "[Hitler] has power-- and I am nothing."

Then the bellboy takes refreshments to his idol, and this changes his life.

One may fairly fault Lee for his purple prose here, with his Fuhrer stating that he, like the maltreated nobody, nurtures hatred "for all mankind." But then again, this is the myth of Hitler as a absolute devotee of evil, rather than an attempt to portray the flesh-and-blood chancellor of Germany. Thus in the not-yet-molded clay of the bellboy, Hitler sees his chance to give birth to "evil personified."

At this point, the bellboy-- who has received at least basic storm trooper training-- accepts the skull-mask given him, and totally incarnates the role his mentor created. Modern fans, examining the last two panels of the page above, have speculated that Kirby's original idea for the sequence was simply that the Red Skull took another soldier's gun and shot his former trainer to death. This would explain the surprised look on Hitler's face. However, Lee chose to emphasize the Skull's penchant for psychological terror, for in Lee's script, Hitler gives the order for the trainer to die, and the Skull spares the man's life by shooting the buttons from his jacket. I for one think that the revision makes the Skull more vicious: he doesn't just want to kill, he wants to degrade-- hence, he spares the man just so that he'll be a "slave" who will "obey your every whim."

Going by the Aristotelian model I used earlier, the early part of the bellboy's life was the "beginning," while his meeting with Hitler and his ascension to supreme villainy forms the "middle." If there is an end as such, though, it can only be the Skull's revelation that he did not content himself with being Hitler's loyal second in command. In addition to fighting the Allies, the Skull has started preying on Hitler's trusted advisers, undoubtedly because he plans to turn on his former master-- which was probably designed to serve as an obvious contrast to Captain America's altruism.

I should add in closing that at this point in Marvel's history, the creators might not have been ready to broach the subject of the Holocaust in a comic book meant for entertainment. Lee's script does work in the term "Aryan" twice. The first time, a storm trooper accosts a man on the street, saying "You are not a true Aryan." One page later, Hitler rants at a subordinate, "Must I create my own race of perfect Aryans?" In both cases, Lee's context is not explicitly racial, but seems to be shorthand for the concept that Nazis-- as opposed to the race of "Nordics" to which Germans supposedly belonged-- considered themselves "supermen."

Though the frame-story of "Origin" is not that interesting mythically, it ends with the Skull using a chemical treatment to brainwash Captain America into thinking he's a Nazi. If only Stan Lee had realized how much attention he could received back then, if he'd omitted the rationalization and just shown Cap turning Nazi, as was done in this overblown modern production.

MYTHCOMICS: ["SCALP ITCH"}, JOE COLLEGE #2 (1950)

In a previous essay I won't trouble to track down, I wondered whether or not American "teen humor" comics had any potential to produce the symbolic discourse necessary for a mythcomic. Just the fact that both Gershon Legman and Frederick Wertham took a few shots at the genre might indicate that there was some potential for gold, where these two ignoramuses saw only dross. Legman was a little more explicit than Wertham about the psychosexual undercurrents of the genre, though like Wertham he was content to cite one supposedly disruptive example of said genre to prove his contentions. I quoted him in greater detail in this 2008 essay:

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

This quasi-Freudian reading manages the feat of making teen humor comics sound a lot more psychologically interesting than they really are. I've seen Legman's one example, a 1947 Timely issue of JEANIE, and it's no than so-so slapstick, though it does have a scene where a pretty girl's father gets conked by his daughter when she mistakes him for a burglar. "So-so slapstick" pretty well describes the majority of all teen humor comics from Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages-- and I speak as one who, whether motivated by intellectual genre-curiosity or by nostalgia for simpler times, has sampled most of the titles out there. Such forgotten ARCHIE-imitators as ALGIE, GINGER, MAZIE, DEXTER, and Thoth knows how many others sometimes had nice art, but offered little more.

Then I came across my copy of JOE COLLEGE #2. There were only two issues of this Hillman title over the years 1949 and 1950, and none of the stories in #1-- which I read on COMIC BOOK PLUS-- were anything special. Nor were any of the stories in #2, except for the cover-featured "Joe College" story. The artist on both of Joe's stories was Bob Powell, and though Joe's first story is ordinary, Powell did dip into some psychological waters for the second and last tale. The cover shown above, though it depicts an imaginary situation (a savage Indian seeks to lift Joe's scalp under the pose of being a barber), captures the essence of the tale's screwball premise.

By 1949 "Joe College" was a term for a fun-loving college student, and that's all there is to the series' youthful protagonist as he attends his alma mater, Hardknox University. But in the story I've retroactively entitled "Scalp Itch," all of the mythicity inheres in the young WASP's encounter with certain not-yet-vanished Americans.

Following a page on which Joe accidentally antagonists a cranky red man named "Horse Feathers" (a decorous euphemism for "horseshit"), one of Joe's professors explains the complicated reasons why there's a whole quasi-reservation of Indians on the campus grounds, Long ago an Indian tribe donated the land to the college's founder, and in a very improbable exchange, they and all their descendants got to live in some mansion near Hardknox. One assumes that the campus provides them some upkeep as well, though the professor asserts that all their money comes from standing around the campus begging for coins. (This is how Joe antagonizes Horse Feathers; mistaking him for a statue of an Indian and passing remarks about the redman's ugly mug.) On top of these considerations, the tribe gets two more privileges. First, one of their women-folk is apparently allowed to "roam der campus until she finds a mate," and though it's an ordinary mortal woman named Princess Dreamboat, Joe has somehow heard about this part of the custom and claims "I thought she was just a myth." However, Joe hasn't heard the second stipulation: that once every ten years, the men of the tribe "are allowed to take vun scalp from vun student"-- and though in practice this means nothing more than shaving the victim's head, it's definitely a demonstration of resentment at white people, since the Indians "always pick der longest and blondest hair."

Naturally, the two customs converge upon blonde, hapless Joe. First, he rescues the wandering maiden "Princess Dreamboat" from a waterfall, and she promptly falls in love with him. (Joe somehow neglects to mention that he has a steady girlfriend.)

At the same time, it happens to be the night when the tribal members can enact their hair-cutting hazing ritual, and Horse Feathers almost gets his wish, until Dreamboat intrudes in fine Pocohontas style.

I'll omit one of the climactic turnarounds, in which Horse Feathers's evil intent rebounds on him, but I will reprint the other climax, in which Joe's girlfriend catches the Indian maiden spooning with Joe, and proceeds to give her a trim job.

The fact that the Indian girl wants the white guy's loving feelings, while the men of her tribe want to cut something off of him, shouldn't require a lot of comment, beyond the commonplace notion that "hair= virility" in myth and folklore. I particularly like Dreamboat's line, "I've just been scalped by a savage white woman." The little tear in Horse Feathers' eye is a coincidental bonus, which takes on extra humor given its resemblance to this famous "crying Indian" commercial image.

I have no idea if JOE COLLEGE was Bob Powell's first "teen humor" comic book, though I know that he worked in the genre again in later years. The artist's wild sense of humor looks forward to the inspired lunacy of the MAD comic book that began two years after JOE COLLEGE's demise. though, oddly enough, Powell didn't do much if any work for EC Comics.

The entire story can be read here.

MESSING WITH MISTER IN-BETWEEN

At the end of KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2, I said:

Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

However, having re-read all of my posts that I tagged with the label "narrative-significant schism," I don't think any major modifications are necessary. Over the years I've tended to favor works to be combative if they satisfied both the narrative and significant values: that is, if they featured a major clash of spectacular forces toward the climax (narrative) which in turn the reader experienced with a sense of sublime satisfaction (significant). But I find that I didn't originally specify that this always had to be the case.

In early 2013 I posed this question at the end of MYTHOS AND MODE:

Whether or not the "narrarive/subjective" schism between meaning within and meaning without can influence the modes of the combative and subcombative will be seen in future installments of MYTHOS AND MODE.

I gave myself this answer in MYTHOS AND MODE 2:

In RISING AND FALLING STARS I established that it was possible for a work to fall into a given mythoi-category (say, “adventure”) even if one of its two major aspects—“plot” or “character” aligned better with another mythos.  This would only be the case when the “adventure-plot” dominated over the “drama-characters,” my chosen example being that of the James Robinson STARMAN. In a similar manner, narrative values can trump significant values in terms of determining whether or not a work is combative.  

So in my earliest meditations on the subject, I said that "narrative values can trump significant values," in contradistinction to the later notion that both had to be satisfied. My example in MYTHOS 2 was Shakespeare's MACBETH, which gives the reader a story which culminates in a battle between opposed figures (narrative value), even though the battle doesn't quite portray what I called "sublime dominance" (significant value) in that the reader/viewer doesn't see that both men are high-dynamicity figures.

That same year, I wrote TWICE THE MIGHT BUT LESS FILLING, and though I stressed examples where one of the two values was not satisfied, my wording doesn't make it inevitable that the failure of one value cancels the influence of the other.

...not every narrative that contains two opposed sources of "might" necessarily evokes the combative mode.  It's for that reason that I've distinguished the presence of both narrative and significant values within the combative mode.  The lack of one value or the other can cancel the narrative's potential for combative sublimity.

"Can"-- but not "will." Further, over the years I've cited a great number of combative works in which a final combat was mitigated by the presence of a hero's ally who actually delivered the killing blow: what I called "the triumph of the supporting ally" in this essay. In such cases, the narrative value is not quite fulfilled, in that the conflict is not directly resolved by the *agon* between protagonist and antagonist. However, there is at least a connection between the protagonist and his ally, and so the ally's actions are subsumed by the dynamicity of the protagonist, as long as said protagonist actually displays his/her own megadynamic power.

In essence, IVANHOE follows this pattern as well. Ivanhoe has the skill and power to thwart Bois-Guilbert, given that he has done so on previous occasions. His climactic victory over the villain is only put into question by wounds he sustained from a tournament-attack by all three of the book's principal evildoers. So the "significant value" is fulfilled, in that everything in the narrative sets up the potential for a clash between "two opposed sources of might." The "narrative value" is circumvented so that Scott can place emphasis on the internal conflict of Bois-Guilbert, who, over one hundred years before 1933's KING KONG, is another "beast" slain by a "beauty," since the knight dies of his "contending passions" rather than from Ivanhoe's weapons. Yet, Scott's novel, even though it critiques some of the problematic areas of medieval martial culture, still devotes so much space to other combative scenes that the reader can obtain the "narrative value" from other parts of the novel. I'd tend to think that this sort of "transitive effect" is only possible when it's been made quite clear that both protagonist and antagonist do possess the power to bring about a major combative clash in the narrative sense, even if that clash is forestalled for some reason. There's also a minor parallel in the 1956 FORBIDDEN PLANET, which I examined here, in that the protagonists, who possess megadynamic power but not as much as their enemy, must resort to strategy rather than force to win the war. In a sense, Walter Scott solves his hero's problem by giving the villain an "Achilles heel" that kills Bois-Guilbert-- though this wound would not have been fatal, if Ivanhoe had not shown up ready to fight.

ADDENDUM: I had intended to work in a reference to the title somewhere, but forgot it. FTR, "Mister In-Between" is just a metaphor for the intermediate state that a work falls into, when it satisfies an expected narrative value but not a similar significant one, and vice versa.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value [in a given work] unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax.-- PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX.

"Centricity" with respect to the Walter Scott novel IVANHOE, was addressed in Part 1, and in this section I'll be addressed the other subject in the post-title: combat-- or, more specifically, the way combat is handled at the climax of IVANHOE.

I wrote PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX in 2013, about a year after I settled on a definition of the combative mode in this essay. For the most part, I've been satisfied with the broad applicability of the statement seen above, but now that I've read Scott's most famous work, I'm glad that I hedged my bets somewhat with the statement about "exceptions." In this case, the exceptions don't "prove the rule," but they do make it necessary to expand the rule somewhat, to account for special cases.

For most of the novel, Scott arranges events that lead the reader to expect a major fight-scene at the novel's climax, between the title character and the principal villain, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert. It's established that the two of them previously clashed, with Ivanhoe coming out the victor. Their quarrel is not specified, but given that much of the story concerns the cultural tensions between English Saxons like Ivanhoe, and their Norman, French-speaking overlords, like Bois-Guilbert, it stands to reason that the knights probably quarreled for cultural reasons. Scott knows that by novel's end the truculent Saxons will be relatively placated when the righteous Norman Richard the Lion-Hearted ousts his bad Norman brother John. But even with that foreknowledge, Scott gives the reader every reason to want to see another "bad Norman," Bois-Guilbert, bested in direct combat.

Further, the two men are indirectly romantic rivals. Bois-Guilbert falls in love with the lovely Jewess Rebecca, and after taking her and her father prisoner for purposes of ransom, Bois-Guilbert is even willing to sacrifice his position with the Templars if Rebecca becomes his willing consort. However, Rebecca has conceived a "forbidden love" for Ivanhoe, though he is engaged to another woman, one of Christian upbringing. Ivanhoe's first encounter with Rebecca is marked by attraction on his part as well, but unlike Bois-Guilbert, Ivanhoe represses that attraction, obedient to the cultural laws forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians. (This is probably one reason a lot of readers don't like Ivanhoe, for not flouting those laws, though admittedly he's already defied his father earlier, by opposing that noble's intention to make a political marriage for Rowena.)

But later events oblige Ivanhoe to play the knightly rescuer to this "forbidden fruit." A group of Templars, having seen the extent of Bois-Guilbert's affection for the Jewess, accuse Rebecca of literal witchcraft, and plan to execute her. She can save herself only if a champion fights on her behalf, and Bois-Guilbert is assigned to oppose any champion she may summon. At this point Rebecca has once again rejected him, but he's still in love with her, and he tells himself that as long as he doesn't actually have to fight an opponent, her murder will be the fault of the Grand Templar. Then, Ivanhoe appears, and the two square off for a joust. The reader expects that Ivanhoe, even though he's taken wounds in a previous battle, will call upon inner reserves of strength and best his formidable enemy anyway. But that's not how Scott handles things.

The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career. The wearied horse of Ivanhoe, and its no less exhausted rider, went down, as all had expected, before the well-aimed lance and vigorous steed of the Templar. This issue of the combat all had foreseen; but although the spear of Ivanhoe did but, in comparison, touch the shield of Bois-Guilbert, that champion, to the astonishment of all who beheld it reeled in his saddle, lost his stirrups, and fell in the lists.

Ivanhoe, extricating himself from his fallen horse, was soon on foot, hastening to mend his fortune with his sword; but his antagonist arose not. Wilfred, placing his foot on his breast, and the sword’s point to his throat, commanded him to yield him, or die on the spot. Bois-Guilbert returned no answer.

“Slay him not, Sir Knight,” cried the Grand Master, “unshriven and unabsolved—kill not body and soul! We allow him vanquished.”

He descended into the lists, and commanded them to unhelm the conquered champion. His eyes were closed—the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened—but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.

“This is indeed the judgment of God,” said the Grand Master, looking upwards—“‘Fiat voluntas tua!’”

Scott does not enlarge upon the "contending passions" that cause Bois-Guilbert to expire without taking any real injury, though the author devotes a great deal of space before the death to showing that the Templar's desire for Rebecca torments him. He has the power to kill Ivanhoe, but if he does so, Rebecca also perishes-- and since he cannot simply surrender to Ivanhoe, his only alternative is apparently to "will himself to death." The mythopoeically inclined reader may choose to view Bois-Guilbert as the "negative image" of Ivanhoe, given that he can act on the desire that Ivanhoe will not countenance.

But what does the Templar's death mean, within the structure of the novel? There's no shortage of fight-scenes throughout the story, for IVANHOE is a novel aimed primarily at male readers. True, there are a number of scenes that take issue with the 13th-century code of honor, not only with respect to the treatment of Jews but also regarding the noblemen's nasty habit of raising money by ransoming people. Rebecca is every bit a spokesperson for the feminine penchant for peace as Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert are proponents of the masculine penchant for conflict.

And yet the central appeal of the novel is not really a critique of the knightly codes of honor and combat; it's more of a side-comment. In the past I've shown how certain works proved subcombative precisely because the author led readers to expect a major conflict, and then undermined that expectation. In MYTHOS AND MODE 2 I wrote this of Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS:

Despite the suggestions that [longtime enemies Coriolanus and Aufidius] may finally sort out the question of superiority by play’s end, CORIOLANUS is, unlike MACBETH, not centered around a combat.  Instead, Coriolanus’ arrogance brings about his disaffection from his fellow Romans, leading to a temporary alliance with Aufidius and the Volscians, and finally to an ignomious demise rather than a heroic confrontation.

Shakespeare goes after the "warrior code" in TROILUS AND CRESSISA with even greater vigor, as I suggested in THE TOILS OF TROILUS.

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel [between Achilles and Hector]-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor. 

Clearly, in a narrative sense, Scott undercuts reader-expectations for a rousing final fight-scene in IVANHOE just as Shakespeare does in the cited plays. But-- does Scott do it for the same reasons that Shakespeare does it?

The answer is obviously no. The fact that Ivanhoe, even though he's not yet recovered from his wounds, is willing to risk his life for the gentle Rebecca clearly validates the better values of the knightly code; values which are entirely negative within both CORIOLANUS and TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. So how should my statement from PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX be amended?

Technically, I've already implied a solution in earlier essays. In KNIGHTS PART 1 I made a loose comparison between Scott's Ivanhoe and Will Eisner's Spirit only in terms of the relative simplicity of both starring characters. For the most part, it would be awkward to draw more extended comparisons, particularly because Ivanhoe was intended to be the star of one stand-alone work, while the Spirit was devised as a serial hero, intended to last over the course of potentially endless adventures.

However, it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

MYTHCOMICS: HELLSING (1997-2008)

Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also your successes.-- Nietzsche,  "War and Warriors," THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Since the rise of the distinct genre of horror-fiction in the 19th century, the vampire subgenre has often centered its horrific thrills upon the victim's loss of identity. The vampire breaks down the normal borders of his victim's whole being. The attack may be physical, as in drinking someone's blood, or it may be on a psychological/metaphysical level, forcing the victim to drink vampiric blood, so that he or she loses even the identity of a victim, becoming instead another being poised on the borders of the living and the dead. Bram Stoker's DRACULA provides the "ur-text" of vampire mythology for later authors, and the majority of authors have followed Stoker's example, focusing upon vampirism as a series of metaphysical and/or psychological assaults upon the victim's individual will. Vampire-tropes are less often used for large-scale sociological myths, except when they're merged with other metaphenomenal tropes, like the apocalyptic war between good and evil.

War threatens the human sense of identity in a much less personal manner. When wars are staged on the apocalyptic scale, it doesn't matter whether they take place in naturalistic or metaphenomenal domains, for all such "world wars" draw countless persons from numerous realms, forcing them to subsume their individual desires in order to defeat a common enemy. DRACULA presents the reader with a covert, small-scale conflict between the Transylvanian Count and a band of English citizens (and one American) led by the Dutch doctor Abraham Van Helsing. But what if a "world war" took place between the living and the undead, with two of the undead pledged to defend the living against a mad warmonger?

Kohta Hirano's ten-volume manga epic HELLSING takes its name from Stoker's vampire-hunter Van Helsing, though it's hard to imagine that the author wasn't aware of the accidental pun in the name, implying that "hell" could "sing." The story takes place in what seems to be an alternate world, in which Protestants and Catholics still mount armed campaigns against one another. The Protestants of England are represented by the organization Hellsing, masterminded by Lady Integra Hellsing, descendant of the original Dutch doctor. However, the group Hellsing's purpose is not to skirmish with Catholics but to guard against eruptions of the supernatural. Only two historical events are repeatedly stressed in HELLSING: the Van Helsing group's original defeat of Dracula in the late 1800s, and the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. How much time has passed, and how many other differences there may be in the world's post-WWII makeup, are not things Hirano bothers with, as one of his primary purposes is to render to his readers a big, noisy shonen fantasy full of blazing guns and bloody fangs. It's also a loving tribute to other pop-cultural myths other than than Bram Stoker's, for it includes references to APOCALYPSE NOW, DUNE and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. Even Hirano's generic name for the monsters in his world-- including not only vampires but zombies and a few werewolves-- betrays its pop-culture roots, since the name of the monsters, "Midians," is most likely borrowed from the monster-filled city of Midian in Clive Barker's 1988 novella CABAL.

And yet, Hirano weaves a tapestry that is as deep as it is wide: one that evokes not only the vampire-myth's concerns with personal identity, but also the philosophical concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche as they apply to the chaos of war and the nature of the human will.

Even before the threat to England proper begins, Integra is forced to fight for control of Hellsing following the death of her father. Her corrupt uncle plots to slay Integra and almost succeeds, except that Integra stumbles upon a hidden secret of her distant Dutch ancestor: the dessicated corpse of Count Dracula, held in a room in Hellsing headquarters. In time-honored cinematic tradition, Integra sheds blood upon the corpse and it comes back to life, slaying her attackers. But unlike most versions of the master vampire, this one becomes the servant of the female descendant of his own slayer, and becomes her primary weapon in the ensuing conflict. He even signifies his subjugation by taking the reverse-name "Alucard," even though Integra is fully aware of his true identity. However, as if to prove that old habits die hard, especially among the undead, Alucard uses his power to enlist his own servant: another Englishwoman, the naive but feisty police officer Victoria Seras. Throughout the hellacious battle that comes, Victoria serves as something akin to the callow new recruit in war-films, and it's through her eyes that the reader sees the horrors of bloody battle.

Stoker's fictional Dracula was the bane of England in the 1800s, but Nazi Germany became a real-life threat over thirty years later. In the midst of sectarian quarrels between the Protestants and the Catholics, a recrudescent quasi-Nazi movement arises. I say "quasi-Nazi" because the movement has no preoccupation either with the tenets of Nazi belief or with Hitler's desire to bring all of Europe under his aegis. Rather, a mysterious leader, known only as The Major, marshals massive forces against England, forces including both mortal men and "Midians," since only the latter have the power to battle Alucard. The Major's only purpose is to unleash "the dogs of war" at every opportunity, apparently agreeing with Nietzsche ( though the philosopher is never directly quoted)-- regarding the salutary effects of war:

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.

I won't go into great detail about the military maneuvers of this "Second Blitz" or about the many side-stories respecting supporting-characters. However, I should mention Iscariot, the Catholic assassination wing, in which Hirano seems to have conflated the stories of the arch-traitor Judas and those of the Hebrew Zealots, the anti-Roman terrorists from the era of Jesus of Nazareth. Iscariot's foremost killer is Irish-Catholic Anthony Anderson, an inhumanly strong human being who would rather fight the master vampire than the Major. To religious fanatic Anderson, the vampire is the epitome of blasphemy. (Anderson's scenes, though brutal, always convey a bit of humor, since the assassin speaks in a thick brogue that makes Barry Fitzgerald sound like Noel Coward.)

Alucard shares sentiments of both the Major and Anderson. In life, Alucard fought in the wars between his people and the Ottoman Turks, and saw so much slaughter that he came to conceive of human fighting as a form of "prayer" to an uncaring God. At some point he even thinks that hecatombs of wasted lives will attract God's attention, thinking that "Jerusalem will descend" as a result. Yet Alucard, unlike Stoker's Dracula, is disgusted with his prolonged existence, and fantasizes about being destroyed by someone like Anderson. Further, whereas Stoker's Count never remembered any of his victims, Alucard is a composite being, who has no true shape (or identity) of his own, and who is made up of all the previous souls he's devoured. In fact, in the climax the Major even finds a way to use Alucard's formless nature against him.

The climax illustrates Hirano's skillful opposition between the human will and the will-lessness of monsters like Alucard. The Major reflects to Integra that he knows it would feel "wonderful" to become a vampire, to exist through "combination with the existence of others, the fusion of lives, the unification of minds." Yet he believes that fragile humanity is more glorious, due to the individual's sense of identity. "What's mine ist mine. Each hair, each drop of blood. I am me," says the Major, putting forth a Nietzschean take on Aristotle's law of identity. Even after it's revealed that the villain is a cyborg-- accounting for his youthful looks many years after WWII-- he insists, prior to his destruction, that "so long as I haf my own vill... I'll still be human!"

Admittedly, because HELLSING is a big noisy shonen manga, it's not concerned with philosophical subtleties. But among the ranks of hyperviolent fantasy-adventures that also have philosophical undercurrents, HELLSING is one of the best of its kind.

SECOND PRESENCE, ECCENTRIC, BUT NOT PERIPHERAL

The title refers back to the 2016 essay THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL. That title referred to presences in a narrative peripheral to the concerns of the focal presences. These peripheral types might be actual characters, like the genie-figures I mentioned, or they might be presences that have no personality, like the unseen germs that devastate the Martian fleet in both H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS and the 1953 film-adaptation.

"Peripheral" was a term I was trying on for size as a permanent critical term, but "third presence" was more frivolous, merely playing on terms like "third person plural." More recently, I've replaced what I originally meant by "peripheral" with "eccentric." The latter, connoting everything outside the center of a given narrative or group of narratives, seemed to make a better pair with my opposing term "centric," connoting everything pertaining to said center.

And yet "peripheral," though not useful as an ongoing term, isn't without meaning in my system. The periphery of a circle is not just everything outside the center, but the circle's outer limits-- and this is indeed what I was talking about when I spoke of the influence of certain entities upon the combative mode of a given work.

The most normative form of a combative narrative is the one in which the narrative action is worked out between the centric"protagonist" and the dominant "eccentric element," the "antagonist." In 2013's PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX, I stated:

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax. 

I then provided for a few variations. For instance, the combative struggle could be interrupted so that there was no clear victory between the opponents, as is the case in the kaiju film KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. I also noted that sometimes the victory might be obtained not by the centric presence, but by someone allied to the centric presence.

Another variation is seen in my review of the 2012 DARK SHADOWS,wherein vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins has a violent conflict with the villain but is taken out of the fight, after which the villain is destroyed by the main character's allies. But as long as there has been some narrative plot-thread to leads inevitably to some sort of spectacular combat, it doesn't matter if the combat follows the dominant pattern of the main hero overcoming the villain.  In fact, though it's rare for a combative film to end in the defeat of the hero, it does happen, most memorably in 1982's BLADE RUNNER.

Now, an ally to the centric presence is, like the antagonist, an "eccentric presence." So is (to cite one of the examples from THIRD PRESENCE) a character like the witch in THE COURT JESTER. The witch uses hypnosis on protagonist Hubert, enabling him to mount a spectacular fight against his enemy, but that influence falls short of bringing about a spectacular victory, even though Hubert does (sort of) best his adversary. Specifically, I said that when "the protagonists are not not empowered by [their genies'] influence," there took place an "inconsummation of the transitive effect." Yet, I don't believe I ever stated outright that the reverse-- a consummation of the transitive effect-- took place whenever an 'eccentric presence" did indeed empower the protagonist. DARK SHADOWS is one of many film-works in which the combative mode is maintained even when the hero is aided by some eccentric presence, as I've charted in movies like HOOK, BARBARELLA, and even such obscurities as THE HOODED TERROR.

So in some scenarios, the "eccentric presence" is "closer" to the aims of the centric presence, and so it enjoys something like "secondary" status insofar as it helps the hero bring forth the spectacular climax necessary for the combative mode. Other eccentric presences, however, are closer to the "periphery," and so are closer to being "third persons" in the equation. They may have effects that are important to the narrative as a whole, for the religious theme of the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS could hardly be realized without the germs, seen here as part of God's plan, killing off the invaders. Yet the germs' influence undercuts the spectacular violence of Earth's battle against the Martian invaders, rendering Earth's military might nugatory. A contrasting example, one that consummates the transitive effect, is found in 1991's HOOK. In Barrie's PETER PAN, Peter Pan is spared of the dirty work of killing Hook by kicking the pirate off his ship, into the jaws of Hook's secondary foe, the crocodile. The novel's beast is only an unwitting ally to Peter Pan, but he furthers the combative mode just as the germs disperse it. Similarly, the taxidermically-preserved corpse of the crocodile in Spielberg's HOOK serves a similar role. Even though the creature no longer lives, its body still possesses the fatal charisma of Barrie's beast, and so it again serves the purpose of executing the villain so that the hero need not do so.

I have some additional thoughts pertaining to the transitive effect as it applies to both serials and stand-alone works, but these should be worked in the forthcoming second part of A KNIGHT OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY.