COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 3

I won't spend a lot of time on the "cavils" I mentioned in Part 2, but the main one relates to author Ray Nayler's decision to use an eccentric pronoun whenever referencing his intelligent, but sexless, android Evrim-- for that pronoun is the now notorious "them." "Them," as many readers will know, is a pronoun enlisted by "non-gender-conforming human beings" to signal their independence from gendered pronouns. 

As far as I can tell, Nayler's 2022 novel THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA takes no position whatever on the concept of gender neutrality. MOUNTAIN is, however, without question a novel imbricated in Liberal (but not necessarily Ultraliberal) politics. The protagonist is a female biologist of Vietnamese ancestry, and her quest is to learn whether or not the sea holds a new intelligent species of life, derived from the non-intelligent species of the octopus family. The novel largely takes place in Asia, not just because Doctor Ha is conducting her studies on a Vietnamese archipelago but so that the author can focus upon a largely Asian cast of characters. Most tellingly, one of the other main characters is also a female biologist, something of a rival to Doctor Ha, and it's a validation of the infamous "Bechdel Test," in that when these two women get together, they definitely aren't discussing men.

All fine and dandy; I observe these tropes but do not condemn them. However, in Ha's extended lecture on the human propensity for language, and for imagining things that "are not here," I wondered if the author was working in an unspoken defense of just about every subgroup that feels itself marginalized by some more numerically dominant subgroup. After all, the android Evrim, whom Ha claims to be human because he participates in the "symbolic world," despite "how you are born."

All of this could be food for a greater discussion than Nayler provides in his novel. But I will note in passing that in her defense of language's symbolic, "unreal" qualities, Ha mentions that language can also be used to promote "absurdities." Again, as I said in Part 2, Nayler does not attack what I would consider the pat "absurdities" that an Ultraliberal would usually attack. So I will do Nayler the courtesy of not claiming, as do some Conservatives, that "non-gender-affirming" persons are themselves "absurdities." But it's certainly arguable that some of the POSITIONS endorsed by persons in this subgroup are absurdities. For example, if a male is sentenced to a prison term, he can "claim to be a woman" and perforce be confined in a women's prison, simply because the authorities don't want to provoke a legal battle. Such a legally spawned delusion is also a result of language's potential for distortion, as much as any spawned by religion or philosophy.

COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 2

 This essay is loosely related to the 2018 essay through this statement therein:

For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

The initiating subject of this essay, however, is a passage from a 2022 science fiction novel I don't intend to review, one which has nothing to do with the earlier essay's assertions on Rousseau, though I have a feeling that author Ray Nayler would be generally receptive to Rousseau's concept of freedom, rather than mine.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA is the "zoomer" version of a 1930s SF-lecture novel, in which the author uses the bare bones of a fictional conflict as a means of illustrating said author's theories on science, philosophy, history et al. I was not engaged enough by MOUNTAIN to get more than a general overview of the story, which I blame on the fact that the author's characters are little more than sounding boards for his lectures-- a failing I detect in most of the modern SF-books I've attempted to read. So I will not attempt to move this MOUNTAIN with any analytical review. But in the one passage I mentioned, Nayler does make a statement about the human imagination that I found loosely comparable with the one I made above.

In the lecture about to be cited, female biologist Ha Nguyen has just witnessed an intelligent android, name of Evrim, rage against a third party who regarded Evrim as a "robot," which offended Evrim deeply. Ha seeks out the android to explain her take on language and humanity.

Language doesn't just allow us to describe the world as it exists. It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider. Because we are linguistic, creative beings, we can better think through things, solve much more complex problems. We can imagine how things might be, might have been, might become. Imagining what is not there is the key to our creativity. It is what no non-linguistic animal has. With that power, we are so much freer to act in new ways-- to innovate, to invent, to view our situations from a thousand angles and find a new way out. But we can also come up with a thousand absurdities, out of line with the truth. 

After going on a little longer about things Ha considers "absurdities," she pronounces Evrim to be human despite his artificial origins.

You're more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn't matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn't what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world.

This is certainly a more sophisticated argument for the sentience of the many artificial life-forms that have appeared throughout science fiction from Adam Link to Hal-9000 to Data from STAR TREK, none of which, as I recall, seek to bestow humanity on human-looking robots because of their ability to participate in "the human symbolic world" in all its ambivalence. In fact, the argument has more potential complexity than the main point of the novel, in which biologist Ha seeks to find out if Earth's seas harbor a species of intelligent octopus. 

Now, because the speaker is a scientist, it's a given that her character will not consider a number of "absurdities" that a pluralist like myself would consider. That said, the list of three "impossible things" cited by Ha surprisingly does not include religious belief, which as I recall is barely referenced in MOUNTAIN. But the list of absurdities DOES include such ideas as (1) we live in a computer simulation, (2) consciousness is an illusion, and (3) that Holy Writ of Atheism: "we are nothing more than blind chemical reactions without any 'real' awareness or free will." I imagine I would have found it more interesting had Nayler chosen to explore his concept of free will, rather than spending most of the novel noodling over his intelligent race of octopi.

As authorial lectures go, this one is one of the best I've read in a long time, much better than anything in another "Big Thoughts" novel I reviewed here the same year I wrote COGNITIVE CHAINS: Kim Stanley Robinson's 1985 MEMORY OF WHITENESS. (The word "whiteness" in the title related to a science-fictional "white energy"phenomenon, as opposed to its current reverse-racist connotation.) 

So even if I didn't feel like the MOUNTAIN was worth climbing, I did esteem one of the author's intellectual "foothills." But I also have some cavils against one of Nayler's applications of his symbolic world in terms of his implied political stance-- cavils I'll detail in the upcoming post.

DIDACTICISM DELIBERATIONS

Originally this essay was meant to build on my distinction between problems and conundrums. In my September 2023 post WHAT VS. HOW, I gave examples of two narratives which used a particular psychological source of knowledge, that of Freud, as a "half-truth" to set up conflicts between fictional characters. The first narrative dealt only with the ontological pattern in terms of "what things happened in the story," so it used its pattern superficially, just to create a "problem" that the characters could solve. (A superficial use of the pattern would also be a "problem" even if the characters failed to solve the difficulty.) The second narrative did make a thorough use of its epistemological pattern in such a way that it illustrated a "conundrum" for the audience. This level of difficulty would continue to exist for real people in their world, no matter whether the characters did or did not solve the way the conundrum manifested in their world. Originally, I wanted to emphasize that fictional works in which the author thoroughly explores a given epistemological pattern parallel the way real humans beings are obliged, by the nature of the reality they experience, to judge the patterns of that reality and make decisions on their interpretations of experience.

However, in the course of ruminating, I reread another epistemological post from May of this same year, FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. In this post I distinguished two complementary terms, the "stereotype" and the "simple variable," as distinct from two other complementary terms, the "archetype" and the "complex variable," in that the latter possessed a greater than average functionality, itself termed "super-functionality."

All well and good, according to my system. But "stereotype" and "archetype" only apply to one of the two "vertical" systems by which authors and audiences derive knowledge-based meaning from stories. That virtue belongs to the "mythopoeic potentiality," which manifests through the elaboration of the *quanta* I term "correlations."

Still okay, but I've not said nearly enough about the other vertical system, the didactic potentiality, whose quanta I've termed "cogitations." Stereotypes and archetypes have often been applied to symbolic discourse, so those terms don't translate well to talking about didactic constructions of meaning. But I've certainly seen cogitations that I thought were simple and merely functional, as against those that are complex and super-functional-- but for the time being, I'm proposing no new terms for these respective states. 

In my survey of the individual episodes of Classic STAR TREK, I'm sure I generally confined myself to exploring the mythopoeic correlations of each episode. But in theory, I *could* have explored that particular series purely in terms of whether its didactic cogitations were "functional" or "super-functional." Here are two examples.

As most TREK fans know, showrunner Gene Roddenberry was an avowed atheist. Nevertheless, the scripts he accepted for filming (and which he always re-wrote to suit his beliefs) sometimes involved the role of religion in the future-culture of the Federation, and Roddenberry did not present a standard atheist's view of religion. He knew his audience would not accept overt atheism, so often the producer accepted scripts that simply talked in general terms about the role of religion in society.

I gave the second season episode a poor rating "Bread and Circuses" in terms of its mythopoeic correlations, but it doesn't fare any better in terms of didactic cogitations, as should be clear from this excerpt:

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are initially captured by a resistance-group fighting Roman hegemony. They are much puzzled by the members' claim to be worshipers of the Sun, and McCoy even states, with amazing falsity, that the Romans of Earth had no sun-worship. By the end of the episode, though, it's revealed that the renegades are actually the Christians of this pseudo-Earth; they just took an extra 2000 years to show up. Despite an early claim in the story that the Federation embraces many religions, the story ends on an egregiously proselytizing note. Safe back on the ship, the crew-members content themselves with the ideal-- derived from many a Cecil B. de Mille movie, no doubt-- that in due time the evil of the Romans will be conquered by the goodness of the Christians. One may safely assume that Magna Roma's destined religion will also eventually lead to liberal democracy.

In my view, the episode advanced the didactic view that the pattern of cultural development seen on Earth was going to be duplicated on the world of Magna Roma: brutal polytheism being succeeded by a kinder, gentler monotheism, which is turn would be succeeded (though the episode does not directly say so) by the sort of secular humanism one beholds in TREK. It's in such a secular humanism that it's possible, as my note specifies, that many religions can prosper alongside one another, though it's a mark of Roddenberry's true sentiments that one hardly ever sees religious celebrations either on the Enterprise or in Federation colonies. I think the proselytizing note with which "Bread" ends was nothing but protective coloration, to diffuse any possible accusations of "space atheists," but whether I'm right or not, the proselytization contradicts the earlier statement of overall tolerance, and so the "cogitation" is not well executed. Even the reference to "panem et circenses" in the title fizzles out after the first arena-scenes.

In contrast, another second-season episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais," while it only rates "fair" in terms of its mythic correlations, might enjoy a "good" rating in terms of didactic cogitations. I would surmise that Roddenberry was probably more in sympathy with the story's ethos, even though again he threw in a minor anti-atheistic statement:

The trope of "aliens who were once Earth-gods" has always been absurd, but Coon and Ralston strive to give it some gravitas. On one hand the future-men declare that they no longer need the parenting influence of gods-- though, perhaps to keep from sounding too atheistic, Kirk delivers a line about finding it adequate to have "one" god. On the other hand, the script attempts to capture the Glory That Was Greece in this science-fictional context, and to admit, however obliquely, that all human culture descends from early man's attempts to understand the universe through a multiplicity of deities.

This script is not interested in the actual dynamics of Greek religion any more than "Bread" was interested in the dynamics of early Christianity. Still, there's a much better understanding of how early religion provides a foundation for secular humanism, even though the two seem opposed. That's why, following Apollo's defeat and extirpation, Kirk wistfully wishes they could have burned one laurel leaf to the memory of the deities that brought humanity out of ignorance. And so "Adonais" provides a "super-functional" cogitation, and for good measure works as a elaborate "conundrum" within the didactic potentiality, while the story of Magna Roma is merely a superficial "problem."

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON MAID (1923)

I hadn't read Edgar Rice Burroughs' THE MOON MAID or its two sequels in thirty or more years, and remembered little about them, much less the complications of their origins, as summed up by this site:

Edgar Rice Burroughs began work on The Moon Maid in June of 1922. The Moon Men had already been written but was yet unpublished. The Moon Maid was published as a five part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly on May 5, 12, 19, 26; June 2, 1923. The first edition hardback which contained all three parts of the story was published by McClurg in February 1926. It cut out almost twenty-five per cent from the magazine version (mainly from The Moon Men). The Ace paperback edition, 1962, restored the original material. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote The Moon Men in April and May of 1919 under the working title Under the Red Flag. It was published as a four part serial by Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 22, 28; March 7, 14, 1925. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of Russian communism. The sequel to The Moon Men was first published as a three part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly September 5, 12, 19, 1925. 

So in essence, ERB attempted to branch out and write UNDER THE RED FLAG as a sort of Earth-bound future history, more or less along the lines of Jack London's 1908 THE IRON HEEL. His publishers wanted something more in the vein of his previous successes Tarzan and John Carter, so he wrote THE MOON MAID, revised RED FLAG into MOON MEN, and then concluded the series with a years-later wrap-up in THE RED HAWK. I may or may not get a chance in the near future to re-read the second two parts, which as noted were subsumed into Ace Books' MOON MEN. So, though I've read summaries of what happens in the other two books, I'll confine remarks in this post to THE MOON MAID.

The title alone suggests the first John Carter book, A PRINCESS OF MARS, but though I consider MAID a mythic novel, it's not even close to the level of inventiveness of the first three Carter books. Like many ERB books it begins with a frame-device, in this case a man telling the entire story to another man. This time both the story and storyteller inhabit future-eras of Earth's history, and the frame establishes in a vague way that the storyteller is a reincarnation of the story's hero (who, spoiler alert, dies in the second novel). 

The story proper begins with protagonist Julian V captaining a spaceship from future-Earth of the 2000s, on its way to Mars. But the ship's crew includes Julian's rival Orthis, who like the hero came up through Earth's military hierarchy but who fiercely hated Julian for always being the better man in all departments. Orthis sabotages the ship so that it crashes on the Moon. Julian and Orthis are quickly separated from the ship and its forgettable crewmen, and both fall into the hands of an intelligent quadriped species, the Va-gas. While Orthis conspires with these feral creatures, Julian encounters a hot young humanoid named Nah-ee-lah, the "maid" of the title, and helps her escape the Va-gas. After various exploits, during which Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love but don't express their feelings, they reach (albeit separately) the maid's home city of Laythe. But not only does Laythe face trouble from within, from a rebel uprising (led by a guy who wants to move in on Nah-ee-lah), there's a "mongrel" race of Moon-humanoids, The Kalkars, who end up annihilating the city. The novel ends with Julian and Nah-ee-lah escaping to Earth, where I assume Julian has just enough time to sire at least one offspring for the events of the next book. In that book, the Kalkars, aided by the renegade Orthis, will succeed in conquering Earth. Thus MAID is a setup for that event, and as a result Julian V's story doesn't so much end as wind down temporarily, albeit conveying some of the cliffhanger-vibe seen in PRINCESS OF MARS.

Julian V, Orthis and Nah-ee-lah are all adequate but unexceptional representatives of their respective roles. ERB does his story no favors by resorting to the hackneyed idea that Orthis simply hates Julian for being his superior, and that Julian V hates him back in response. Despite ERB's muddled attempt to provide some convoluted theory of a strange identity between Julian V and his future incarnations, he comes off as a crude John Carter imitation, and Nah-ee-lah, the only named female in the story, is a routine helpless femme who doesn't assume any greater dimensions, as does Dejah Thoris.

The antagonists supply all the mythic content of MOON MAID. Late in the book Nah-ee-lah gives Julian a compact history of how Laythe (possibly named from the river of the dead from Greek mythology), the usual pre-lapsarian society, creates its worst antagonists. The four-legged Va-gas originate as herd animals who escape the control of the Laytheans, though it's not clear as to when they develop intelligence. Having been bred to provide meat to humans, the Va-gas perhaps understandably enjoy feasting on the flesh of the Laythean people. However, during Julian's time with them he's horrified to witness that the quadripeds also eat their own kind, even those fallen in battle with enemies, and this naturally does not set well with the Earthman's morals. In one memorable scene, the ability of cannibalism to eradicate familial bonds is seen when Julian describes the females of the tribe chowing down on their dead relations, with mothers eating sons and wives husbands.

The Kalkars derive their name from a Laythean work meaning "thinkers." They became an offshoot from their own people thanks to their forefathers, who liked to sit around and imagine injustices-- which is ERB's on-point critique of the instigators of the Russian Revolution. The Kalkars sow chaos within the ordered, guild-like structure of Laythean society, but Laythe somehow survives while the Kalkars form their own separate tribe. But Orthis, having escaped the Va-gas, uses his knowledge of Earth-tech to help the nasty mongrels conquer the ordered hierarchical society, thus presaging a similar conquest on Earth. Even if one doesn't agree with ERB's take on the rise of real-world Communism, in the Moon-world he creates two malign beings of opposed natures: one characterized by too little thought, and the other by too much (bad) thought.

I don't know about the other two parts, but MOON MAID is part of a loose continuity with the Mars books. It's through Earth's radio contact with Mars that future-Earth perfects space travel with the use of Martian "rays," and Storytelling Julian even mentions John Carter, though it's not clear just what he knows about the Martian hero.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 3

 In ICONIC BONDING PT. 1 I formulated three types of bonded ensembles using the Dick Grayson Robin as an example of a character who had participated in all three, to wit:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

In all of these examples, Robin is a superordinate icon, as are the majority of fictional heroes. In contrast, most fictional villains function as subordinate icons. So when villains appear in ensembles, they usually do not possess the quality of stature, only charisma. But this charisma-action also manifests in line with the three models seen above.

"Unbonded ensembles" would be any sort of short-term teams, or teamups that prove loose at best over time. For instance, there have been many gatherings of Bat-villains in the Bat-verse, ranging from RESURRECTION NIGHT to HUSH. No reader expects these peripatetic assemblages to have any durative value. The same applies to teamups that may last a few issues before dissolving, such as the alliance of Daredevil's foes the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. However, in the above cases the charisma-crossover action depends on the fact that the villains have been previously established. So when both the Enforcers and their boss the Big Man first appear in SPIDER-MAN #10, they had no crossover-charisma because they had no previous iterations. Further, their ensemble expires with that issue, for the Big Man never returns. When the Enforcers make their second appearance, which is also the first appearance of the Green Goblin, the "familiarity" of the Enforcers sustains a "proto-crossover" with the "novelty" of the Goblin, but only because the Goblin himself will go on to future appearances.

"Semi-bonded ensembles" are those that have some impressive duration, even when the icons aren't joined at the hip. I've written a couple of times about how Stan Lee took two THOR villains who no longer fit that feature, the Cobra and Mister Hyde, and made them a semi-regular team. However, even in the period when the two malcontents were most often allied, one would occasionally appeared independently of the other, or in alliance with some other super-fiend. In the 1980s Cobra severed his alliance with Hyde and his short-lived 1970s group of serpent-themed villains, the Serpent Squad, became reworked by later hands into the Serpent Society. I can't speak about Cobra's status in current Marvel comics, but up until the end of the 20th century he became much more prominent as the member of the Society than he was as a solo player, or as the partner to Mister Hyde.

"Bonded ensembles" are those in which the durative value is even more noteworthy, and may involve qualitative escalation as well as the quantitative kind. The Enchantress and the Executioner appeared together in their first appearance, and tended to appear together more often than not, with a slightly different angle: that the Executioner desired Enchantress as a bed-partner. There's a hint that this finally came to pass in a 1970 AVENGERS story, and future stories built on that development. None of the THOR stories in which Enchantress and Executioner are the only villains are charisma-crossovers, any more than Batman and Robin are stature-crossovers when they're the only heroes in a given story. And if the renegade Asgardians appear together in a non-aligned feature like THE HULK, it's not any more a charisma-crossover than Greenskin squaring off against a single non-aligned villain like Maximus the Mad.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there, any more than Sergeant Rock being separate from the grunts under his command. An exception was the Apokolips-Lord's brief role as the organizer of the first "Secret Society of Super Villains." But even there, the charisma-crossover would be between (a) Darkseid and any minions, such as the pictured Kalibak, and (b) the Secret Society as a whole, which functions as a semi-inclusive team. 

Heroes and villains may be the only two of the four personas that regularly appear in all these configurations. Even I, the author of said personas, will probably not bother trying to suss out if my models to apply to the other two, the "monster" and the "demihero."

 

NULL-MYTHS: "VENGEANCE! CRIES THE VALKYRIE" (DEFENDERS #108-109, 1982)

The "cry" of the title is more like a whimper, given the long history of Marvel's Valkyrie character. When I analyzed Dave Kraft's DEFENDERS story "Valhalla Can Wait," I noted that I'd started off this blog by surveying most of the early stories that established the history of the heroine. One of the things that intrigued me about the character is that, being produced at seventies Marvel, she wasn't created in the same manner as the Hulk or Spider-Man, who began in stand-alone serials devoted to their exploits. Instead, Valkyrie started as a tabula rasa character, an Asgardian powerhouse who, at first, seemed to be no more than a fantasy-creation of the evil Enchantress. Further, both she and her mortal "identity" were loosely intertwined with various prominent Marvel heroes (like the Black Knight and Doctor Strange) to menaces (the Nameless One and the Celestials) in a way that was not characteristic of heroes invented for the sixties, when there existed no overriding Marvel continuity-mythos. 

In DEFENDERS #4 Steve Englehart grafted the persona of the Valkyrie upon the madwoman Barbara Norris (who had been introduced in an unrelated HULK story). But though Englehart  established that the mortal Barbara still shared the body with the Asgardian being, he did nothing more with the history of Barbara. Steve Gerber began exploring Barbara's past in order to give more human context to the heroine, particularly by having the warrior-woman interact with Barbara's mortal husband Jack-- though Barbara's spirit during this time remained quiescent, effectively out of the picture. Once Gerber left, subsequent DEFENDERS writers largely wrote Jack out of the series. 

"Valhalla" suggests that Kraft toyed with the idea of writing Barbara Norris out of the Valkyrie mythos. His was the first tale to suggest that Valkyrie had never been a creation of her sorcerous mistress; that she had an identity in Asgard: Brunhilde, leader of the Valkyrior who gathered slain souls for Valhalla. Brunhilde's original body still existed in Asgard, and a scheming Asgardian deity caused the current Valkurie to come in contact with the comatose Brunhilde form, causing the soul of Barbara Norris to exit what had technically been her own body and entering that of Brunhild. By the adventure's end Mad Barbara in Brunhilde's body ended up going to the Asgardian hell, and Brunhilde's consciousness totally controlled the transformed Barbara-body.

I commented that Kraft's story possessed mythic potential but was very rushed, But at least it was a story, and not a farrago stuffed with continuity points, like Marc de Matteis' 'Vengeance." 

DeMatteis passes lightly over the Kraft story and begins his story by having Valkyrie's mortal body slain. Though the Enchantress had nothing to do with the murder, she conveniently shows up and issues a demand to Brunhilde's colleagues the Defenders. The original Brunhilde-body is now in the witch's possession, and she wants the Valkyrie's fellow Defenders to find an item with which to ransom said body, since it is now the only receptacle that can house Brunhilde's liberated spirit. There's some paltry debate amongst the heroes about the morality of the transference, since it will possibly doom Barbara Norris' spirit, but some of the Defenders attempt to do the Enchantress' bidding. 

I'll pass over the specific treasure they seek, because it's irrelevant to the story as a whole. Slightly more interesting is Enchantress' motivation for wanting the treasure. Out of the blue, she decided one day to conjure up The Spirit of Love and incarnate the being (not seen in Marvel comics prior to this story) so that Enchantress, the consummate loose woman, can bond with the Spirit. Somehow, the aforementioned treasure will restore the villainess's "purity," which is a point De Matteis does not explore overmuch. 

The heroes assigned to get the magical thingie end up choosing not to deliver the goods. Thus Enchantress tries to slay Brunhilde's body, but the Defenders forestall her. Love, who hasn't said much about all these goings-on, suddenly announces that he doesn't love Enchantress's manipulations, and he not only deserts her, he takes the spirit of Barbara Norris with him for some sort of heavenly union. This makes it possible for Brunhilde's spirit to become incarnated in her rightful body, and then issue #109 is taken up with Valkyrie taking her vengeance on the sorceress.

I don't envy DeMatteis trying to make a story out of all the body-switching complications he inherited, and I get that it's tough to focus on the main conflict, the one between Valkyrie and Enchantress, given that DEFENDERS was a team book and the writer was expected to give the other members of the super-team some activities to keep them busy. But De Matteis seems to go out of his way to make the matter MORE complicated than necessary, as with shoehorning non-members Spider-Man and the Beast into the mix. I should note that Mark Gruenwald was credited with a "plot assist," probably because that writer finished (but did not start) the "Celestials Saga" in the pages of THOR a few years previous. In fact, the latter part of "Vengeance" is a complicated sorting-out of Valkyrie's interaction with her lord the All-Father Odin, and maybe Gruenwald's role was mainly filling DeMatteis in on all the continuity complications from the aforesaid saga. Speaking as a fan of Marvel continuity, I *did* want to see the relationship of Valkyrie and Enchantress defined, just as I wanted to see the one between Valkyrie and Odin sorted out. But I didn't want to see a bunch of sterile plot-points trotted out in a desultory manner.

Artist Don Perlin was totally out of his depth with this sort of multi-character epic. I'm not familiar with much of his Golden or Silver Age work, but he was competent with simple, single-character titles like Marvel's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. It's astonishing that so limited an artist remained in place on DEFENDERS from 1980 to 1986, and I tend to assume that he kept the position because the title was perceived to be a dog, even though the book must have made enough money to avoid cancellation during those years. To be sure, Perlin's visuals got better with the DEFENDERS scripts of Peter Gillis, since those scripts were clearer and more straightforward than De Matteis's labored gobbledygook, and I even favorably reviewed one of the Gillis-Perlin collaborations here.

MYTHCOMICS: "THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS" (THE THING #17, 1954)

Even hardcore fans of old horror comics probably don't think much about Charlton's 17-issue title THE THING except insofar as Steve Ditko contributed both stories and cover art, such as the one seen above. And I'd have to say that most of the offerings were ordinary creep-tales without the gore that aroused the ire of parents and eradicated almost everything in the genre, aside from even blander work like DC's HOUSE OF MYSTERY. 

One of the gimmicks the editors used in THE THING were spoofs of famous fairy tales, which may have been an imitation of a similar concept seen in some of EC's horror comics. And in the last issue one such story, "Through the Looking Glass," managed a stronger symbolic discourse based on Lewis Carroll's ALICE books. The art was signed "Kirk," while GCD speculates that the writer may have been long-time Charlton workhorse Joe Gill. Comics fans know him best for collaborating on such sixties superheroes as Captain Atom and Peacemaker, though IMO his best credited work was on a tough detective, Sarge Steel.

In my review of the two, I pointed out that Carroll's Alice showed a certain amount of egotism and illogicality not always seen in film adaptations. "Glass" goes further, making the little blonde cherub (apparently a 1950s version) a holy terror. Whatever ambivalence Original Alice had as to her seven-year-old status, Cruel Alice hates children's books with a passion.

I'm not sure why Gill chose to have this Alice read THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, since like almost everyone else, he doesn't stick to adapting that book, or to ALICE IN WONDERLAND, but just jumbles together elements from both novels. She falls into a dream, and then falls literally, as down a rabbit-hole, and ends up in a "pool of tears," which has no context since this Alice never grows giant-size and sheds giant-sized tears.Instead of meeting a bunch of woodland creatures, Cruel Alice beholds a group of grisly ghouls who immediately announce their intention to eat her, which is a simplified version of the Carroll-theme I termed "omniphagia." Cruel Alice doesn't seem fazed by the threat. If anything, she decides right away that all these weird things mean that she's dreaming (which never occurs to Original Alice) and that now "I can be as cruel as I want."

Compared to what she does to the ghouls, Cruel Alice is almost merciful to the Cheshire Were-Cat. She meets the Mad Hatter and March Hare at their Mad Tea Party (as well as a background character who looks a bit like The Carpenter). The partygoers show Alice that they have no mercy to their Wonderland kind, offering her to snack on the dead body of the Dormouse before they dine on her. A handy beehive full of "killer bees" solves that problem, and then she meets the King and Queen of Hearts playing croquet (though not with flamingos). They claim to be civilized cards and they even show her their lovely dam.

The dam (not in Carroll) is just a setup for another drowning-death, as Cruel Alice shows the cards how to play poker, introducing them to a "royal flush." Her next two encounters are with the scions of the Looking-Glass World rather than Wonderland, the talking flowers and Humpty Dumpty, both of whom she happily expunges, albeit only after they provoke her.

Whereas Original Alice finds her occasional egotism dwarfed by the selfish and quarrelsome nature of the natives of her dream-lands, Cruel Alice absolutely outdoes her perpetually hungry dream-folk in unrelenting cruelty. In fact, when the remaining "citizens of Wonderland" beseige her, she apparently dreams up growth pills, ducks into a rat-hole (substitute for a rabbit-hole?) and makes herself a colossus so she can stomp everyone else to death. But whereas Original Alice escapes Wonderland in part by Getting Tall, for Cruel Alice getting too big for her britches proves a crushing experience-- because, for some damn reason the author can't trouble to explain, the homicidal child isn't dreaming.

"Glass" may not be a great story, even for Golden Age comics. But it's closer to the mythic meaning of Lewis Carroll than the majority of film adaptations, much less ungodly messes like THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR. 

Though I've reprinted the whole story here, it's probably easier to read here.