FIFTY-ONE PHENOMENALITIES, OR FIGHT!

I've been giving more thought as to how my "51 percent rule" applies to the form of serials and related formats.

Any regular readers of this blog shouldn't be thrown by this reference, for I've only brought up the rule three times over the years, and only once did I use the concept to discuss the intermingling of pheomenalities in a serial format. In ABNER ORIGINE I remarked upon the fact that the comic strip LI'L ABNER had made copious usages of marvelous concepts, though it was not usually classed as a fantasy-comic. I put this down to the fact that marvelous concepts only appeared in ABNER in an irregular fashion, and that the strip was better known for naturalistic tropes, like having its hillbilly characters run into society snobs and gangsters. At the same time, I mentioned that one of Al Capp's running gags was to portray both the strip's star Abner and frequent support-character "Mammy" as possessing inhuman levels of strength.  I opined that if this running-gag appeared as frequently as I thought that it did, then LI'L ABNER deserved to be considered a metaphenomenal strip, even if it wasn't as open about its fantastic nature as LITTLE NEMO and FLASH GORDON.

I conceived of the "51 percent rule" in keeping with the phenomenological considerations covered in the essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS. All works with dominantly metaphomenal content-- whether they are stand-alone works or parts of an ongoing serial narrative-- cannot help but reference the phenomenal principles typical of naturalistic narrative: that there must be some degree of causal coherence and intelligibility, if only to provide contrast to the violations of one or both of these two principles.

That said, there are serials that only very rarely stray into metaphenomenal territory, which is what originally caused me to formulate the rule. Over the years Marvel Comics reprinted, to the best of my knowledge, all of the adventures of 1950s western hero "The Ringo Kid." Of those adventures, only one possessed metaphenomenal content, a story from RINGO KID WESTERN #8 (October 1955). In this issue the heroic Kid encountered a mad scientist, Doctor Saturn, who invented a super-scientific device with which he temporarily blinded people, whom his gang then robbed.

I'm reasonably sure that no one would induct the Ringo Kid into the ranks of metaphenomenal heroes on the basis of one lousy adventure. But things get a little more dicey with a serial concept like LI'L ABNER. The strip lasted several years, and even if I had access to all of the ABNER strips, I wouldn't have any interest in sedulously noting exactly how many metaphenomenal storylines appeared in all of the strips, and what percentage of all the story-arcs possesses such concepts. Yet I wanted to formulate the rule as a *theory* that could account for the dominant proclivities of any series, no matter how long-lived. Once more, from the essay where I first propounded the term:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  

As I've noted elsewhere, the context in this essay has to do with sorting out the Fryean mythos that dominates a given serial narrative, but the same logic applies to its phenomenality as well, and I've been using it in this manner in my informal determinations, though not so much on this blog.

Still, even with this "rule of thumb" in place, it should be obvious that even if LI'L ABNER's metaphenomenal storylines did not make up over fifty percent of the total storylines, it's obvious that Al Capp possessed a creative passion for coming up with metaphenomenal concepts on a regular basis, while the guy who put a mad scientist into a RINGO KID story may have simply been tired of the usual cowpoke sagas, and so elected to "bend the Kid's genre," so to speak.

I said in the except above that "51 percent" didn't give the holder of such stock an "unqualified dominion," and the same applies to serial concepts. Sometimes one can see that a given author has a real passion for playing with metaphenomenal concepts, while another author may just be tossing out whatever seems to work.

To draw once more upon comic strip examples, DICK TRACY debuted in 1931, and if it had been cancelled in 1940, we would hardly remember it as having any metaphenomenal content, as Chester Gould only rarely used weird, freaky crooks in his 1930s stories. However, from the 1940s and on, TRACY became famous for its "rogue's gallery" of bizarre criminals. TRACY might or might not exceed the formal "51 percent rule" in terms of metaphenomenal content, but as with ABNER, one can hardly doubt the influence of said content on the strip as a structuring principle.

A MOVABLE HELLFEAST

'If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.'-- Virgil's AENEID.

In this 2014 essay I wrote:

I do not render any final verdict here as to whether "the causality human beings experience in life" is entirely naturalistic or not.  But it is certainly of a different order than anything we experience through fiction, and so the two are not homologous.  That said, when I think of the historical figure of Jack the Ripper, I opt for the default characterization that almost everyone does: that he was a real human being who killed out of some lunacy and eluded the law.

That said, because the Ripper was never identified, he presents an ontological problem that comparable "psychos" do not.  Even without being able to identify the Ripper as authorities were able to identify Ed Gein, practically no one doubts that the Ripper was a real human being, unlike the many fictional renditions modeled after him. As a real human being, he cannot be "uncanny" the way a fictional re-creation can be.

But can one say that even though he was subject to all the laws of the naturalistic universe we all share, that Jack the Ripper does not share in any way with the concept I've entitled "affective freedom" in this essay?

While a human being cannot be "uncanny" in the same way that a fictional character would be, any human being-- no matter how debased-- has the freedom to imagine himself within a fictionalized posture. This self-theatricalization would not change the actual phenomenality of the real human being. Nevertheless, the capacity for such a mental attitude, even in a negative moral state of being, still impacts on the general concept of freedom nonetheless.

For sake of this argument, assume that the historical Ripper is the same person who wrote this infamous "letter from hell," which I copied from this site:

From hell

Mr Lusk
Sor
I send you half the
Kidne I took from one women
prasarved it for you tother pirce
I fried and ate it was very nise I
may send you the bloody knif that
took it out if you only wate a whil
longer.

signed
Catch me when
you Can
Mishter Lusk. [sic]

The individual who wrote this letter was, without doubt, attempting to "fictionalize" himself in terms of the Ripper-persona, to become a figure of "dread" through the reference to the Ripper's psychotic violence and to the domain of hell itself.

How this impacts upon the general concept of freedom will be explored further in Part 2.

NULL-MYTHS: BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE (1988)

For a null-mythic version of the Joker, I strongly considered the 2012 storyline "Death in the Family," which extended over an arc of 23 parts, spread out over several DC features. I did read the TPB that concluded the series. In this story, apparently the conception of Scott Snyder, the Joker has watched the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE a few too many times., since he's started wearing his own flayed face-flesh as if he were the love-child of Leatherface and Jame Gumm. 

At length I decided that (a) it wouldn't be fair to review just one section of this involved arc, and (b) I didn't have any burning desire to read the rest. I will note that I can understand why Snyder and his DC co-workers might have wanted to "re-estrange" the Joker with this grotesque makeover, given that the familiarity of the Joker's iconic visage may have bred a certain degree of audience-contempt. Reputedly the series sold well, so in one sense there's no arguing with success. Nevertheless, I'd venture that Snyder et al seem to guilty of mixing their monstrous metaphors. The Joker, insane though he is, isn't insane in the same fictionalized way as Leatherface and Jame Gumm. They wear skin-masks to efface their real, overly fragile identities. But why would the Joker resort to such a device? Everything that makes the Joker one of the medium's most popular villains suggests that he's loved because he's become a living archetype. In the comics, at least, the Joker has totally subsumed whoever he was before his transformation--

Except in the world of Alan Moore.

I wrote this essay, THE KILLING BLOKE, some four years ago. I wasn't using the "null-myth" terminology then, but the Moore-Bolland "Killing Joke" story seemed perfect as an illustration of what I called (after Philip Wheelwright) "monosignative" rather than "plurisignative."  I hadn't then elaborated the four potentialities, but now I'd view what I wrote then as an anticipation of that doctrine. KILLING JOKE is, in essence, a story in which writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland decided to tell the story of the Joker's lost humanity.

I wrote, in part:

There's no question that Alan Moore was aware of the symbolic status that Batman and the Joker had assumed over the years. To be sure, though, Moore's Batman gets short shrift in that department, coming off most of the time like a weary costumed cop, the "straight man" of the comic duo, saying things like, "How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?" In contrast, the Joker gets so many good lines describing how he embraces a world of inescapeable nihilism that Moore might've done better to title the work "Sympathy for the Joker." Moore's own expression of sympathy for the philosophy of nihilism, then, results in a work that demonstrates what happens when, as noted above, the explanation of the myth becomes what the myth "means." Frye defines allegory as "forced metaphor," and in many respects the two opponents have been forced into metaphorical roles that do more to spell out Alan Moore's philosophical views than to emulate the free play of myth. 

"It's all a joke!" declares the villain, trying to lure Batman over to the dark side, "Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side? Why aren't you laughing?" The Joker gets much better lines than Batman, but I'm not sure his myth is any better served than Batman's by being bound in a philosophical strait-jacket. Moore's revisionist origin for the Joker posits that he was once just an ordinary schlump, a would-be stand-up comedian, who lost everything in a manner analogous to the way his bat-garbed enemy did. This take on the Joker's history didn't become accepted canon for the various ongoing Bat-serials, and it's not hard to see why: the origin gives the Joker a humanity that's at odds with his more traditional blackhat-villainy. In fairness Moore crafts his story so as to apply that the Joker's memory of his "origin" may not be true in all details, so Moore gets points for realizing that others might not care to follow his lead in playing with DC Comics' "toys."

Reviewing these remarks once more, I would even follow up my "straight man" remark to say that Batman and the Joker, instead of fulfilling their roles as archetypal crimefighter and criminal, have become something like a jaundiced pair of performers, sort of a superheroic version of the "Sunshine Boys."

Aside from the story's purely fortuitious effect on the career of Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon, the story has none of the deeper symbolism of which Moore is capable. Here we have an excellent master of his writing-craft indulging in an exercise, that of trying to graft realistic personalities onto fantasy-figures. It's a credit to Moore's dramaturgic talents that JOKE can still be read on that level. Certainly it's superior to DEATH IN THE FAMILY in that regard.

Returning to the subject of Batgirl--

Within the world of comics-fans, this may be the best-known scene in which Moore depicted a well-known female icon not of his own creation-- and given that he once wrote an essay complaining about the marginalization of superheroines in commercial comics, it's a delicious irony that it's a "Women in Refrigerators" scene all the way. I don't have quite the same knee-jerk animus toward such scenes as do others in the fan-community, but last year I was greatly amused to see that Liberal Moore found himself being pilloried for Writing Rapey Comics, mostly by Ultraliberals whose solution to the problem of evil is to avoid depicting it.

In a subsequent interview, Moore said that he didn't expect the crippling of Barbara Gordon to last: he was sure she'd get magically healed by one of the many DC miracle-devices. Kim Yale and John Ostrander are generally credited with realizing that the tossed-off mutilation of a long-time DC heroine-- albeit one at a rather low ebb of popularity in 1988-- could serve as a means of exploring the dramatic consequences of a differently abled superheroine. I wouldn't say that "Wheelchair Batgirl" was precisely much more mythic than her predecessor. I enjoyed those stories-- particularly those of Gail Simone-- on a purely dramatic level. But the fact that Original Batgirl finally did come back may say something about the sovereign function of fantasy within the context of fiction that has always been "play for play's sake." 

Ironically, though Alan Moore's tune throughout KILLING JOKE starts out as "Sympathy for the Devil," he says very little of importance about the Joker-- and instead supplies a leitmotif through which other raconteurs could compose their own version of "the Batgirl Song."

Whose baby is she, indeed?

MYTHCOMICS: "LAUGH, TOWN, LAUGH" (DETECTIVE COMICS #62 (1942)

In REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PT. 1 I wrote:

...are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Having uttered this challenge, I'm obliged to answer it more fully than I did above. Obviously I've given a partial answer by indicating that the first Joker story might not be the most representative of the character. As it happens, the Joker-tale from BATMAN #1 is a good rousing story. It appeals most to the kinetic potentiality. particularly because it features the Joker's first use of his smile-inducing "Joker venom" (horribly overused in current BATMAN comics, by the bye). But the story doesn't really tap into the mythopoeic potentiality of a clown-like villain.

What myth does the Joker incarnate? There's nothing new in my observing that one of the Joker's principal appeals is that he, like all clowns and harlequin-figures, provides a distorted "funhouse mirror" reflection of both normative society and human psychology. The tale in BATMAN #1 doesn't do this.

An untitled Bill Finger story in BATMAN #7 comes closer. In this narrative, the Joker invites a bunch of commonplace pranksters into his lair and encourages them to "up the ante" on their pranks, forcing them to fall in with his criminal activities. This is an unusual, interesting twist on the Joker, giving him some of the motifs of the Satanic tempter. However, Finger's story doesn't dwell very long on the role of the pranksters, and it devolves into another enjoyable, but hardly mythopoeic, Batman-Joker chase scene.

Similarly, some stories explore the dramatic potentiality more than the kinetic one. The aforementioned "Joker's Millions," which GCD hypothetically credits to David Vern, is one of these, as is another from the same year, also by Vern: "The Joker's Utility Belt," which earned some fannish fame when it was broadly adapted for the third episode of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. But neither of these 1952 stories really gives the reader a "funhouse mirror" view of the world.

For my money, the earliest Joker story that succeeds as a myth hails from 1942, written by Bill Finger and executed by Kane, Robinson, and Roussos. As this splash page makes clear, it involves the Joker providing his own ghoulish takes on the familiar jokes found in the legendary "Joe Miller's Joke Book:"

Nothing could seem less fraught with horror than such cornball humor as the riddle of why the fireman wore red suspenders-- until the Joker performs his take on the story:

To be sure, there's an important aspect of profit in the story. It wasn't enough for the 1940s Joker to murder a lot of people: the villain clearly measured his success by his ability to rip off money and expensive items. Not long before the Joker makes his latest escape from prison, a famous comedian shuffles off from this mortal coil. After he's died, he leaves clues to five other comedians (all parodies of famous 1940s funnymen), alleging that if they can manage to read the puzzle behind the clues, they can find their way to a fabulous treasure. For some reason, when rich people make weird bequests like this one, it apparently never occurs to them that some uninvited party might trespass on this little game, and start killing the clue-holders to get their clues.  The clue-trope was an old idea even in 1942, but the Joker isn't solely motivated by gain. He's also offended at having been excluded from the bequest to the great comedians, a rationalization that has some precedence in the folkloric story of Sleeping Beauty

"They dare hold a contest of this nature without inviting me! Hah! I'll invite myself! Ha ha ha!"

The intervention of Batman and Robin prevents the villain from knocking off more than two of his intended five victims, but Finger provides another twist here: Robin is obliged to save one man by providing artificial respiration, but his life-saving duties prevent him from saving Batman from capture by the villain. The Joker takes the bound Bat-hero to his private lair, and it leads to an exchange in which the Joker states outright his personal involvement in their running battles.

For a moment, he seems to revert to his original status, as a macabre criminal who simply wants Batman dead and gone:

And then, in an inspired Finger-outburst, the Joker rationalizes his desire to keep the hero alive for the sake of the game they play:

And so the Joker carries out his super-villainous project in one of the better death-traps of the period: a variation on the "lady or the tiger" scheme-- and even this fits loosely with the story's overall pattern, in which the villain comes up with new, more macabre takes on familiar situations. Batman wins out, of course, and Finger even provides an ironic touch near the close. The Joker gets hold of the treasure-- a set of priceless pearls-- and then flings them away, believing that they're worthless because they've lost their luster. Not only does the hero arrive to beat the villain into submission, he also provides a know-it-all lecture, informing the Joker that the pearls are still valuable and that their luster has only temporarily faded due to not being in contact with human flesh for a time.

Incidentally, this is one of the last Golden Age stories in which DC Comics allowed the Joker to kill victims. In the same year, he was executed for his crimes in "The Joker Walks the Last Mile" (DETECTIVE #64). However, the Joker has his henchmen utilize a special potion to jolt him back to life-- and then the judge rules that the super-crook can't be tried for any previous crimes, due to double jeopardy. From then on, DC was generally careful not to have him commit any new murders for which he could again be executed-- and so things remained until 1973, when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams conceived of the idea that since the evildoer was criminally insane, he couldn't be executed-- not even for a never-ending series of murders that would soon make Hannibal Lecter seem like a piker by comparison.

MY OWN PRIVATE COMPOSITE BIZARRO

Many many years ago I read a book by the Orientalist Lafcadio Hearn. It seems like it might have been GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN, but the only part I'm referencing is the ending. As I recall, Hearn narrates a final scene when he's attending a dinner party. He glances down at the bowl of soup before him, and sees his own face reflected. In a moment of clarity, he realizes that everything he's ever written is also a reflection of his inner self, which, if it could take on material form, would look something like the image of his own face.

Whether I'm remembering this narrative trope correctly or not, every writer, whether of fiction, non-fiction, or both, does the same thing Hearn was doing. No matter how adeptly one seeks to represent the reality in which one lives, one always comes back to depicting that reality through the prejudices and sentiments of his own inner self.

Now, last month I provided this working definition of the term "superhero":

The superhero is a hybrid figure, in which the reader's feelings of awe and admiration for the spectacle of heroic endeavor are melded with those feelings typically called "the sense of wonder" by science fiction, fantasy and related genres.

I glossed this by asserting unequivocably that this was my attempt to boil down my theories of sublimity-- of "the dynamic-sublime," which is heavily influenced by Kant, and of the "combinatory-sublime," which derives variously from Burke and Tolkien-- into a simplified formula that focuses on the "sense of wonder." It should go without saying that even though I consider these sublimities to be as universal as any affects can be, they don't necessarily have across-the-board appeal for every sentient human being ever. Nor could I say that the way I perceive the two sublimities is in every respect identical with the way others perceive them. I can only say that the writings of Kant, Burke and Tolkien persuade me that they experienced something akin to what I Gene Phillips experience in the department of the sublime.

Therefore, if I want to emulate Hearn's epiphany, then I would have to say that my definition of superhero, in which I find it a confluence of two distinct but complementary affects, necessarily reflects that my inner self has a particular liking for both the affect associated with dynamicity-- with special though not exclusive reference to the dynamicity of combat-- and with the affect associated with the free symbolic interplay of everything in existence.

As I said, these are only "universal" in the sense that a lot of people register the appeal of these affects-- though not always in combination with one another. Some readers only like to view scenes of dynamicity when they take place in naturalistic worlds which those readers can find credible: for instance, prior to the success of STAR WARS, many film-goers scorned any form of fantasy-fiction-- whether it was violent or not-- as "that Buck Rogers stuff," while fully investing themselves in violently-heroic films about cowboys or detectives.  At the same time, some enthusiasts of particular types of fantasy-fiction scorned violent entertainment of all types, and only liked fantasy-fiction when it was full of "deep thoughts," so to speak.

So if my inner self is "guy who likes both fights and fantasy of all kinds," then who would be my Bizarro-opposite?

I've complained a lot on this blog about ideological critics on the web, but most of them are not iconic enough (or interesting enough) to use for drawing comparisons.

At length I decided that my perfect Bizarro would have to be a composite of two iconic figures, a la DC Comics' The Composite Superman:

On one side, my Composite Bizarro would look like Frederic Wertham:

HOODED UTILITARIAN is currently a go-to for all manner of kooky types who share a righteous revulsion toward violence, glossed by an omnipresent fear that somehow, somewhere, even fictional violence can be used against well-meaning Lefties. A little while back I critiqued J. Lamb, here and here, for blatantly misrepresenting the theme and plot of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. I almost thought, "Wow, that's such an egregious misreading that it's worthy of Frederic Wertham himself." But though Lamb is every bit as incoherent as Wertham, he lacks Wertham's studied vitroil against even the most minor acts of violence-- slapstick, vanilla fistfights-- and so Wertham represents the ideal icon of one who takes pleasure in rejecting the affect of dynamic sublimity.


Wertham occasionally tossed in a few brickbats against the fantasy-elements of comic books, too: he didn't like an issue of SUPERBOY that misrepresented history by showing the young hero helping out George Washington at Valley Forge.  But the arch-foe of all forms of fantasy really has to be Wertham's fellow traveler Sigmund Freud.

Many other intellectuals had preceded Freud in attempting to reduce human fantasy-constructs down into simple formulas of negative compensation: not least Voltaire and Marx. But Freud more than anyone succeeded in tapping into the righteousness of "reality thinking," and he did so by tying his version of "reality thinking" to the ontogeny of the individual human being, forever ensnarled in the web of the "family romance." Fantasy could never be anything but an escape from the prison of reality, made up of one's erotic fixations-- or lack of same-- upon one's parental units.

In COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 4 I mused that some readers only enjoyed the manifestations of the "combinatory mode" and the "dynamicity mode" when they were, in essence, recapitulated in "non-sublime forms:" as, essentially, lions whose fangs had been drawn. The Freuds and Werthams of this world are also somewhat devoted to "non-sublime" versions of the affects that enthrall the vast majority of readers, but they are "non-sublime" for a different reason: for the purpose of illustrating some ratiocentric theory of reality, rather than as a way of engaging with a less overwhelming version of fictive "reality."

HEY, HEY, DON'T SAY WE'RE GAY

On COMICS MAKE NO SENSE I'm engaged in a civil argument (what a change!) about the extent to which Silver Age comic-book publishers tried to shield themselves from being accused of featuring gay characters. I'd guess that by 1960 no one was especially afraid of Frederic Wertham making a comeback, as it seemed that the Comics Code had largely served the purpose of mollifying the public concern over comic book sex-'n'-violence.

For my own future use if nothing else, here are my comments on the matter:

I'm not saying DC might not promote more romance in a given hero's life if he was accused of being gay or homoerotic. There's a fair chance that's why Batwoman started showing up in the post-Code Batman stories. But since Wertham didn't impute homoeroticism to Superman-- just plain old fascism-- I tend to think DC was just indulging in giving their hero a more active romantic life, as long as they could be sure that the female involved would die, lose her memory, etc.

And:

I wouldn't put it beyond the realm of possibility that the Wertham publicity might have made DC hyper-aware of their image for a while, though I'm not sure that they would have remained vigilant about everything for so long. OTOH, DC Comics effectively wrote Catwoman out of existence for about the first 12 years of the Code, so certainly some things twisted their knickers.
A caveat, though, is that sometimes superhero comic publishers also used girl characters both to titillate some of the boys-- the ones who didn't find girls entirely icky-- and to appeal to a potential female readership. So while I don't dismiss entirely the "hey, hey, don't say we're gay" stratagem, it's just one thread in the overall design, methinks. 

NULL-MYTHS: "THE SURREALIST IMP" (CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES #84, 1948)

Though I've labeled some features as "null-myths" because of their failure to emulate the better aspects of the Fawcett Captain Marvel, I should note that the Big Red Cheese had his share of blah stories.

While the titular character in the story "The Surrealist Imp" sounds a bit like an attempt to give Captain Marvel a pesky imp-foe along the lines of Mr. Mxyzptlk. the Imp never makes another appearance. He seems to have been created by writer Bill Woolfolk and artist C.C. Beck just to kick at the Surrealist Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The story starts off by depicting a world where artistic works gestate before being "delivered" to their earthly creators, roughly along the same lines as storks taking charge of unborn babies before depositing them within earthly wombs.

As the Imp's dialogue makes clear, he's not going to be content for long simply delivering artistic conceptions to their mortal makers. He decides that it's tedious for artists to simply paint what they see, so he decides to make the "real world" reflect the non-representational world seen in surrealistic artworks.

I'm honestly not faulting this story for its failure to provide an even-handed treatment of non-representational art. It's almost axiomatic that a comic book story of this period would not be able to handle such arcane aesthetic questons. But I do rate it as an inconsummate story because Woolfolk and Beck don't follow through on the logic of their own fantasy.

I suspect that the story mainly reflects Beck's preferences for utilitarian art; preferences the artist used to express in vitriolic essays of the 1970s, some of which saw print in the COMICS JOURNAL of that era. After the Imp runs riot in the real world for a few pages, Captain Marvel settles his hash with a quick bop on the noggin.

I would probably have preferred it if Woolfolk and Beck had simply forced the Imp to undo his magical distortions, rather than suggesting that his aberrant attitude could be "fixed" with a concussion. Moreover, while I don't expect two comics-makers in 1948 to know beans about aesthetic theory, they're the ones who claim that all of the artworks from the "ultra-dimensional world" are "masterworks"-- and then turn around and try to imply that there's something deficient in the surrealist viewpoint, with its "horrible garishness."

The full story can be read at this address.