MYTHCOMICS: "THE METAL WOMEN BLUES" (METAL MEN #32, 1968)

The DC feature METAL MEN provides a variety of good examples of my current metaphor for literary complication as seen in this essay.

The original creators of the franchise, writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Ross Andru, didn't work on this particular issue, though they had collaborated on most if not all issues up until issue #29. The next two issues were written by Otto Binder and penciled by Gil Kane, and on #32, Binder's story was illustrated by Mike Sekowsky. Since Sekowsky became editor on the feature with #33, replacing long-time writer-editor Kanigher, it seems very likely that Kanigher was being edged off the title, even though he collaborated with Sekowsky for a time. However, clearly before Sekowsky became the new boss, Binder was instructed to follow the storytelling example of the almost-old boss. Back in the day, I could hardly tell the difference between the Binder stories and the preceding Kanigher tales, though now I can see that Binder's plotting was much tighter, despite his emulation of Kanigher's writing-practices.

"The Metal Women Blues" begins typically enough. Tin is being fawned over by his girlfriend Nameless, the only robot in the group not created by Doc Magnus, and the second of two female group-members, the other being Tina, the platinum doll infatuated with her creator. The other male robots-- Gold, Lead, Iron, and Mercury-- petition Magnus to creates mates for all of them. Magnus initially refuses, until Tina points out that if he creates a mate for her, she might become less enamored with Magnus. (Admittedly this is something Kanigher's lovelorn platinum robot would never say, but possibly she's merely trying to help her male comrades.)

In no time, five new robots join the group, known collectively as "the Metal Women" even though they have one male member-- which is just good payback for the years in which the Metal Men sported not one but two female members. However, though the four lady automatons are attracted to their opposite numbers, Platinum Man has no desire for Tina, preferring to keep their association formal-- which puts Magnus back behind the romantic eight-ball.

Just like in a Kanigher story, the two groups are immediately called into action against an alien threat: a giant automated machine. And it's at this point that the girl robots evince something less than shrinking-violet behavior.

"I know I made a mistake," says Magnus, "when I didn't incorporate 'timidity' in the metal women's responsometers. But I didn't want them to be too 'tame' for the Metal Men." However, not only are the lady-bots fairly aggressive, they're actually good at the business of being mechanical superheroes, which causes the males to label them "female glory-hogs." (To be sure, Nameless is unchanged, though for a time she sides with the other "girls," and Lead Girl isn't a glory-hog, just so dumb she makes Lead look swift of wit.)

However, the beings who sent the automated destroyer are observing the contumely, and they decide to take advantage of the situation. The villains are a group of nearly identical 'female robot Amazons," who are all haggish-looking and who are given no raison d'etre at all, just as many of Kanigher's menaces came from no place and had no rationale for their existence. (Maybe some robot-maker made them all look like his shrewish wife, a la I, MUDD?) The Amazon Queen, realizing that the males' vanity has been wounded, sends a "cute girl-robot" to lure the metal guys into a trap. (The cute but unnamed robot-girl even goes armed with "Chan-oil #5 perfume.")

In no time, the trap closes on the guys, who are reluctant to fight "weak women.' The Amazons promptly kick the Metal males' asses and get their broken bodies out of sight, except for Platinum Man, who gets his weight boosted so much that he sinks beneath the earth.

The girls do follow, but they catch sight of Platinum Man in his hole, and he briefs the lady-bots on the strategies the Amazons used against the Metal Males. Thus the Metal Women defeat the Amazons tout suite.

However, since the feature's status quo had to be maintained, the Metal Women then try to rescue Platinum Man, just as a flood of magma flows up into the hole he made. And so the Metal Men return to their normal lineup. Magnus offers to build more inamorata but the guys all decline-- though as a final joke, Mercury gets caught trying to keep the cute girl-robot for himself (being an inferior creation, she simply falls apart in the wake of her creators' destruction).

"Metal Women Blues"-- which is titled "Robot Amazon Blues" on the cover-- is as cornball as anything Kanigher wrote. However, it does maintain a good level of symbolic complexity as well. It begins by showing the guys, who just want women to fawn over them, having their lives complicated by female crusaders generally as competent as they are. While the Metal Women are just "sisters doing it for themselves," though, the Robot Amazons are thoroughly negative incarnations of negative female aggression-- made even less appealing by the fact that they're all ugly.

Binder's most interesting symbolic touch isn't, strictly speaking, necessary for the story's plot, and it illustrates how even a juvenile story sometimes has deeper layers. While the Amazon Queen is busy working on the cutesy robot, the former observes that the unnamed femme metale is made of an alloy of all the metals being lured-- mercury, lead, tin, iron, and gold-- which brings up the loony but amusing idea that in this universe, intelligent robots "stick with their own kind."

CONCRESCENCE AND COMPLICATION

...though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")--
ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

 This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

I've been using the imagery of wave formations whenever I've invoked the idea of amplitude, but here's another metaphor for connectedness: that of the knot-imagery put forth by Aristotle.

Since the beginnings of this blog, I've defined the significance of literary symbolic activity in terms of complexity. The idea of complexity as a value does not seem to appear as such in Aristotle's POETICS, in that the bulk of his argument focuses on art's ability to describe the good and the beautiful. The philosopher does use the categories of "simple" and "complex," but the categories reflect nothing save whether or not a given work contains what Aristotle called "the recognition scene." A simple narrative doesn't have a recognition scene; a complex narrative does.

Aristotle doesn't connect these categories to the "desis/lusis" dichotomy, which I assume was not original to him. However, I think that Aristotle found a moral value in the recognition scene, and that by the trope's presence, it gave a given narrative a greater moral potential. Thus a play like Euripides' MEDEA is simple because it possesses no turnabout scene, in which a protagonist realizes his "connectedness" to some other person or event, as Sophocles' OEDIPUS does.

For my purposes, the presence or absence of a recognition scene makes no difference. However, I find it interesting that the literary activity Aristotle calls "tying" is often rendered in English as "complication," while "untying" is often rendered with the French word "denouement," which originally had the same meaning of "unraveling."

Aristotle's logic is persuasive. Clearly he has examined, in his analytical manner, the way a given author creates interest in his protagonist's struggles by "tying" him up with one or more complications, and then "untying" him in such a way that the hero is either delivered up to good or bad fortune.

As a description of the authorial process, this is accurate, but I don't think it describes the finished literary narrative. I would certainly agree that the process by which Oedipus pieces together the clues regarding his true identity is a complex process. However, the metaphor of an unraveled knot doesn't adequately describe the conclusion of OEDIPUS REX, which is no less complex than all the knotty complications that lead up to the conclusion. The only way in which the play's denouement resembled an untied knot is in terms of a viewer's relief once he knows what has happened to the protagonist and all other significant characters. But the actual narrative process, by my lights, is either (1) simple all the way through, (2) simple in some places and complex in others, or (3) complex all the way through. Not surprisingly, these three levels of complication line up fairly well with my analysis of the levels of literary quality I called "poor," "fair," and "good." At the time I wrote that essay, I was using Aristotle's term "unity of action" to explain the presence of complexity in a given discourse; now, the concept of concrescence has largely usurped the place of said unity.

Thus, for me, every narrative is a knot, perhaps most visually approachable through this representation of different levels of complexity in molecular knots:

Now, since I've gone to great effort to expound upon the ways in which complexity can only be judged through examination of the four potentialities, I won't repeat that argument here, except to say that I've allowed for the possibility that symbolic complexity is not the only form of complexity. I've also allowed that "simplicity" has a role to play even in the most complex narratives. But focusing just on symbolic discourse, then a symbolically poor work would resemble the simple knot "A," a fair work would resemble B or C, which are more complex by virtue of having more crossings, and a good work would resemble D or E.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 3

Just a quick follow-up to this quote from John W. Campbell Jr. in the last essay--

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

In that essay I observed that this statement, by itself, is not an indicator of true racism. It suggests that the speaker is aware of the basic truth that every ingroup- be it racial, religious, ethnic or political-- has its share of "good apples" and "bad apples." This is such a commonplace to verge on truism, though it's still better than the sort of identity politics that extends the grace of great suffering even upon the rottenest apples in the barrel.

In that essay, I defended that one statement, though I concurred with Alex Nevala-Lee that other Campbell statements were indefensible. But now I'll point out that even though I believe that Campbell's statement as it stands has a basic logical truth, it's utterly useless in a societal sense.

Obviously, Chris Rock can get away with telling a largely black audience that some black people really are "niggahs," because of the way they act. And one can find no small quantity of other examples in which a member of an ingroup uses a slur to apply to himself, but would not accept hearing the same slur from a member of an outgroup.

It's all but impossible for a member of an outgroup-- as WASP Campbell would have been to the three groups he references-- to use any given slur to apply only to the rotten apples of a particular ingroup. The assumption will always be that the slur is being used across the board, and this applies as much to people who claim marginalized status as to anyone else. To cite a personal example, I once happened to provoke the ire of a black panhandler by simply looking in his direction. His precise motives for calling me a nigger I'll never know, but I would guess that-- aside from hoping I'd throw money at him to get rid of his odious presence-- he felt he was getting even with flinging at me an epithet used against his people. Further, I don't think he was using the epithet purely against me; he almost certainly would have used the insult against any white person who ticked him off.

So Campbell's rationale, while consistent logically on its own, has no use-value within culture as a whole. Obviously the only real societal solution of the problem of ingroup epithets is that no one, even without the ingroup, ought to use them. However, making a taboo of any word insures that its power will become even stronger, so neither general nor specific taboos have any use-value either.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 2

Following up directly on PT. 1--

As I said, Nevala-Lee's evidence from the final chapter of ASTOUNDING leaves no doubt in my mind that John W. Campbell Jr. was more than a casual racist. However, there's one citation Nevala-Lee tosses out as if it proved the case for racism as much as, say, the editor stating that "the Negro does not learn from example."

In a mid-1960s letter (page 360), Campbell justifies the use of racial epithets to describe specific individuals within a given ethnicity who are what Campbell calls "bums." And while I don't think I have any overly sensitive readers of this blog (mostly because I don't usually have any), I will palliate the editor's offensive language with the use of initials in place of words:

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

As I said, Nevala-Lee presents this bit of evidence as if it supported his case as well as the one about Negroid learning capacity.

In truth, it does not, and it coincidentally bears a strong resemblance to the train of comedic logic used by Chris Rock in stand-up routines like this one.

Now, since Nevala-Lee presents other evidence that Campbell did not confine his application of racial epithets only to persons who sinned against probity in some way, one may decide to consider the "bums only" argument moot, since it was being made by a racist. I don't consider it so, although I will cheerfully agree that Campbell probably only used the argument as a justification of his general racism.

However, Nevala-Lee's uncritical citation of this passage indicates to me that he's not capable of sussing out the difference between the statements "Everyone of Race X is a N" and "Only rotten people in Race X are Ns."

And that, without belaboring the point any further, constitutes negative equity: the use of accusations of unfairness to perpetuate unfairness.

Case closed.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 1

To preface this essay, I'll quote myself once more on the topic of negative and positive equity:

'In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away"... In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.'

In Part 2 of January's essay-series EMANICIPATION VS. FREEDOM,  I commented on the opening chapters of Alex Nevala-Lee's ASTOUNDING. I commented upon the promising nature of a book on the "neglected topic" of the effect of John W. Campbell's editorial reign at ASTOUNDING SCI-FI, but I also found fault with the author's need to "virtue signal" on what Campbell should or should not have done in his heyday with respect to racial matters.

As I've now finished the book, my early anticipations of the work's quality as a cultural biography of the men profiled was fully justified. Further, though I do not retract anything I wrote about Nevala-Lee's opening remarks, I should note that he does not "virtue signal" throughout the text, which would certainly have damaged the credibility of the work. Only in the last chapter (not counting an epilogue) does Nevala-Lee substantially return to the topic of "race in modern America" that he raised in the first sections.

In my remarks, I made this statement:

Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but he certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

In that last chapter-- titled "Twilight" after one of Campbell's most famous short stories, and referencing the editor's declining years and death-- Nevala-Lee does indeed demonstrate that John W. Campbell was more than a casual racist. To be sure, I had heard the accusation once or twice from other sources, though I personally would not have been able to weigh in with any informed opinion. I had read a fair number of Campbell's reactionary editorials from the last decade of his life, when ASTOUNDING had been remolded into ANALOG. Said editorials usually stayed away from the topic of race, though I do remember one essay in which Campbell inveighed against the "burn baby burn" politics of Stokely Carmichael and gave his approval to the accomodationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr. And Nevala-Lee does not reference Campbell's editorials either, finding more than circumstantial evidence both in Campbell's letters and in anecdotes from people who knew the editor. There is, for instance, more than enough evidence to state that Campbell nurtured an animus against the Negro race, and that even some of his favorable judgments-- as when he told Jewish writer William Tenn that he Campbell considers the Jews "homo superior"-- were also couched in racist diatribes. In my earlier essay I scoffed at Nevala-Lee for suggesting that Campbell could have made any difference to American racial politics in the 1940s with his little SF-magazine, and I still scoff at that. However, I also argued:

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy

And, mirable dictu, one anecdote attests to Campbell's having resisted the currents of the new cultural paradigm, in that he reportedly refused to publish Samuel R. Delany's NOVA because it had a non-white protagonist.

So, it would appear, from everything I've summarized about Nevala-Lee's disclosures, that the balance of his complaints against Campbell should constitute "positive equity." And for the most part, this holds true. Except---

See Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS: "LIFE AND DEATH AND THE END OF TIME" (LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #50, 1988)

ENTROPY:
a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder-- Merriam Webster online.

From the POV of a Silver Age DC enthusiast, John Byrne would be the incarnation of entropy. DC continuity was constructed slowly and erratically during the Silver Age, and was then codified into a regularized cosmos during what I term the Bronze Age. But by 1986, DC continuity was deemed unwieldy in comparison to competitor Marvel Comics. Byrne, who insisted on revising the Superman continuity to exclude Superboy, was one of the key players who degraded the established continuity, though to be sure if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.

Of course, the re-ordering of post-1986 continuity had a drastic effect on the profitable feature LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, which was based on the idea that the 20th-century crusader Superboy periodically traveled to the 30th century to have adventures with a cadre of similarly teenaged heroes, the Legion. For the first few years, writer Paul Levitz compensated by inventing the idea of a "pocket universe" where the Legion's continuity was maintained. Yet, since the company didn't want, contra Byrne, any sort of Superboy flying around, that hero had to be killed-- killed by the same entity who created the pocket universe, the Time-Trapper.

This particular Legion villain had gone through some pre-1986 revisions himself. He was invented as a toss-off villain in the story "Menace of Dream Girl," wherein he prevented the heroes from traveling to the future (providing a contrast to the debuting heroine Dream Girl, who could at least intuit future occurrences). Hamilton's story implies that the Trapper is just another sci-fi mastermind, though a later Levitz story makes him into a member of a super-powerful race, the Controllers. By the time of this 1988 story, though, the Trapper becomes the embodiment of a cosmic principle:

They have called him by a thousand names. He is night. Death. Apocalypse. Eternity. Entropy. Time.

The opening pages of "End" show the solitary robed figure of the Time Trapper in a wasteland far removed from the Legion's era, while the captions inform the reader that "all things have ended here, even those that never began... If logic wars with faith over the nature of the beginning, so too it must over the ending. Logic decrees that all things begun, must end."

To say the least, this was not the typical language of a Levitz LEGION story. The elevated, philosophical tone comes closer to what Levitz sounds like in the 1978 tale "The Summoning." Clearly, whatever Levitz's personal opinion of DC's 1986 revisions, he determined that he could give his readers a good story extrapolated from the editorial mandate that "old guard" Superboy had to die. Levitz couldn't alter that policy, but he could create a situation in which the feature's incarnation of entropy was punished for his crime.

Having established the cosmic background of the villain, Levitz approaches the heroes of the Legion in more basic terms, That said, he interweaves two plotlines that are germane to the attempt of the Legionnaires-- spearheaded by their resident genius Brainiac 5-- to avenge Superboy, The first plotline involves a "friend of the Legion," Rond Vidar, who appears to have come back to life despite having been slain by his villainous father. The second thread relates to another character introduced in two earlier stories: Rugarth, a scientist accidentally transformed into another cosmic being known as "the Infinite Man." Rond's mystery is resolved later in the story, but the Infinite Man poses an interesting moral problem, since he's brain-dead and cannot agree or disagree with the role given him by Brainiac 5.

Both of these subplots, not coincidentally, involve persons who may be able to transcend death, thus setting up the suggestion that the degradation of entropy may not be the final answer to all things, as the prologue supposes.

To make the vengeance-drama more personalized, the entire Legion doesn't voyage into the entropic world to combat the Trapper. Only the four members who witnessed Superboy's death make the journey: Brainiac 5, Duo Damsel, Saturn Girl, and Mon-El (who, incidentally, was conceived as something of a Superboy knock-off). To say that the heroes are overmatched is an understatement. Duo Damsel, who lost one of her natural three bodies in an earlier adventure, loses her last extra body.

And Mon-El, the most powerful of the group, unleashes a lot of power but fails just as hard.

However, the Trapper is given some pause by Rond Vidar, whose mysterious return to life is explained by his mastery of a Green Lantern's power.

Yet in the end, Brainiac 5's plan depends on introducing the incarnation of entropy to his conceptual opposite, The green-skinned genius argues that the theory of entropy is countered by one arguing that "time itself is infinite, folding back on itself in endless cycles-- and each end may simply be a new beginning." The incarnation of this principle is, of course, the Infinity Man.

Naturally, the Legionnaires survive this cataclysm and go on to other adventures, just as the Trapper comes back in new incarnations. Levitz ends the story in circular fashion, repeating some, though not all, of the captions from the prologue, but suggesting that even the Trapper's kingdom of entropy has proven temporary.

This story, while consequential to LEGION fandom, didn't have a lot of impact on comics as a whole, certainly not as much as this week's "near-myth," "The End at Last."  Levitz and Giffen produced a better symbolic discourse in their "End of Time." But as I argued in this essay:

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

NEAR MYTHS: "THE END AT LAST" (STRANGE TALES #146, 1966)

Since this week's mythcomic falls into the domain of a metaphysical myth, this gives me an excuse to look at one of the most famous metaphysical myths in mainstream American comics.

Two issues prior to STRANGE TALES #146, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had just finished the longest, most ambitious story-line in the "Doctor Strange" feature, during which the master of the mystic arts was forced to run from pillar to post, fleeing the minions of his earthly enemy Baron Mordo, who in turn had been granted superior magical power by the extra-dimensional dictator Dormammu. Strange attempts to cope by petitioning another entity, the mysterious Eternity, for help-- thus giving rise to one of Ditko's most visually arresting creations.

However, once Strange does find Eternity-- made to look like the cosmos in humanoid form-- the cosmic being simply tells Strange to pull himself by his own bootstraps. What seems like a brush-off turns out to be the simple truth: Strange does manage to defeat both Mordo and Dormammu without any special resources, ending both threats for the time being in #144.

The done-in-one story in #145 is so negligible that few fans back then could have anticipated that it would give way to "The End At Last"-- which was also the end of the Lee-Ditko collaboration on the good doctor or on anything else, for reasons that have been discussed on the web in great detail.

It starts out with Dormammu, smarting from his recent defeat, deciding to make another foray against the Earth-magician. In addition, the mystic madman decides to launch a pre-emptive strike against Eternity, just in case the ethereal incarnation of the cosmos might give him some trouble.

Thus Dormammu seals Eternity away in his own dimension and spirits Strange into yet another occult contest. However, Eternity doesn't stay sealed very long.

Ditko's artistry was at the top of his game here, and arguably he would never produce another magic-scape battle equal to this "clash of thaumaturgic titans." Dormammu is apparently destroyed, and Strange just barely escapes the dimensional chaos.

Yet despite the intensity and artistry of Ditko's panels, the story lacks the concrescence I've found necessary for a mythcomic. Dormammu, as always, is no more than a typical blustering tyrant despite his unique appearance, while Eternity, while pleasingly enigmatic, remains too abstract to take on any deeper resonance. Even though I would presume that Ditko's Randian outlook permitted no religious sentiments as such, I can't help feeling that he called upon Biblical myths in order to ring down the curtain on the "Doctor Strange" universe by bringing together a figurative "God" and a figurative "Satan"-- though the tone of the contest reminds me more of the pre-Adamic rebellion of Satan and his forces against God than the final conflict of Revelations.

But, even though metaphysical myths allow for more abstraction than the other three types, Ditko's opposition of "upstart evil" and "a force beyond good and evil" simply doesn't generate the symbolic discourse necessary for a full-fledged mythcomic.