NULL-MYTHS: ""TRIGON LIVES" (NEW TEEN TITANS #5-6, 1981)

I can appreciate the fondness with which many fans regard the original Marv Wolfman-George Perez NEW TEEN TITANS. The book was one of the first DC comics-features that rivaled the sales-figures of the then-dominant Marvel titles. In addition, unlike many other books that sought to emulate the success of Marvel's X-MEN title, TITANS did have its own identity. As far as mastering the soap-opera dramatic potentiality exploited so well in X-MEN, Wolfman and Perez reached roughly the same heights as Claremont, Cockrum and Byrne. The TITANS title never quite came up to the same level as X-MEN in the mythopoeic department, though, and the issues featured here, TITANS #5-6, provide a good example of the feature's failings.

The four issues previous established the members of the 1980s incarnation of the Teen Titans-- old characters Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, and Beast Boy (renamed Changeling), and new characters Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven. The mystical heroine Raven was responsible for drawing together this ad hoc assemblage of heroes, though only with issues 5 and 6 were her reasons for "team-building" revealed.

The explanation is accompanied by an origin for the Raven character: one worthy of all the "Satanic panic" stories of the 1970s. Raven's mother was an Earthwoman, going by the name "Arella" by the time the Titans meet her. Arella in her youth was a discontented rolling stone who rolled her way into a Satanic cult. The cult performed a ritual meant to summon up Satan himself: what they got was a near-omnipotent demon-god from another dimension, Trigon. Trigon assumed a comely human guise in order to seduce Arella and lie with her. Apparently he went through all this trouble just to see the look on her face when he lets her see what he really looks like: a four-eyed monster with red skin and antlers. He deserts her, leaving her pregnant with the half-demon offspring of a demon. Arella can get help from no one on Earth, but for obscure reasons an otherworldly cult of pacifistic magicians goes out of its way to locate Arella and transport her to their own magical domain, Azarath. The mystics of Azarath teach Arella to "expunge all my feelings of hate and greed, and all of the more basic violent emotions."  It's not clear from the dialogue whether or not the priests had hoped to do the same for her daughter Raven, though that would be the most likely reason for them to have taken in Arella. In any case, Raven had too much of the Old Devil in her to live in peace and harmony, so she left Azarath, anticipating that some day Trigon would return to Earth. Unable to enlist help from Earth's more established heroes, she assembles a new Teen Titans, and issues #5-6 comprise the story of how the teen heroes manage to forestall Trigon's invasion.

In many respects this story could have been a routine "demonic invasion" plotline, in addition to providing a melodramatically tortured background for Raven. The story does connect all the necessary dots to build up said heroine's backstory. But it's in Wolfman and Perez's portrait of Trigon that the mythopoeic dots fail to connect, thus rendering the storyline inconsummate.

Wolfman and Perez spare no cliches in their attempt to make Trigon the baddest of the bad. He incinerates a little girl with a gesture; he blows up a planet in a moment of pique (rather than for a military advantage, like Tarkin of STAR WARS), and he's apparently bedded dozens upon dozens of wenches over the years. But all of his offspring, it seems, have either failed to survive the rigors of birth, or they have been assassinated by revolutionary zealots. He wants Raven, his only surviving spawn, to reign beside him over the many worlds he controls-- but Wolfman and Perez don't give this avatar of evil a reason for wanting an heir. In his battles with the Titans, Trigon seems to have insuperable powers, and he doesn't seem prey to age or sickness, so he can't want an heir for the reasons that mortal beings want them.

Here we encounter a situation not unlike the one analyzed here: because the TITANS book was meant to circulate on the newsstand-- where juvenile readers might pick it up-- it would have unlikely, though not impossible, to state certain things outright. Certainly when I first read the story, I assumed that the demon-lord's motivation is to have his daughter reign at his side not out of sentiment-- to which Trigon is clearly immune-- but because he intends to make her his queen in all respects.

I note that nowhere in the story does Trigon allude to a formal marriage between himself and his offspring, but of course, why would a demon care about such formalities? It's possible that this idea wasn't consciously on the minds of Wolfman and Perez. But even so, the problem of characterization-- a mythic characterization, rather than one dependent on mundane dramatics-- is still lacking. And this is without even observing that Wolfman and Perez's idea of Satanic evil-- that of being a big, mean dictator who kills a lot of innocent people-- is banal in the extreme.

In keeping with the Greek-derived name adopted by this motley band of superheroes, there may well be some TITANS stories that deserve to be considered mythic. But the Tedium of Trigon is not one of them.

MYTHCOMICS: "SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL," LOVE HINA (1999)

(I date this story "1999" because that's the date given for the whole volume of translated stories in which the story appears, but it may or may not be the actual date of first publication. The entire story is online here.)

A few months back, I was talking about manga with a fellow comics-fan, when he asked me, more or less out of blue, "What's with all the INCEST in Japanese comics?" (Or words to that effect.)

Since this is the sort of question for which no one-- not even the Japanese people themselves-- can provide a definitive answer, I gave my acquaintance a speculative explanation. I observed that the closest Japanese analog to the Judeo-Christian "Adam and Eve" are Izanagi and Izanami, two divine siblings who mate in order to produce most if not all of the created world. I hypothesized that it might have made a great difference in European culture if Adam and Eve had been literal (as opposed to figurative) siblings-- and that possibly Japanese culture was simply more prone to using this transgressive set of tropes than many other cultures because of their traditional mythology. I addressed some other aspects of this cultural predilection here.

I've already written about the Ken Akamatsu series LOVE HINA here, from which I borrow the following series-analysis:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka ... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house....

In this essay I analyzed the dynamics of the clansgressive "almost-but-not-quite-a-sister" fantasy found in LOVE HINA, but "Secret of the Mysterious Girl" is focused on the character of middle-schooler resident Kaolla Su, an energetic girl from an indeterminate, quasi-Indian realm. I touched on her most mythic aspect in the essay:

...though [Kaolla] too is a middle-schooler who would be age-inappropriate for Keitaro, Kaolla possesses a magical ability to "age" herself temporarily, so that she can become closer in age to the beleaguered dorm-manager.

"Mysterious Girl" is the first story to show that Kaolla can magically transform herself to a girl more suited to Keitaro. LOVE HINA is generally a very silly comedy, mingling fantasy-material with mundane reality with no particular rhyme or reason, but here the author touches very artfully on the topic of feminine maturation, though of course without neglecting the farcical elements. At a time when only Keitaro, Naru and Kaolla occupy Hina House, a massive storm creates some weird meteorological phenomena, including making the full moon appear to turn red. Keitaro, who hopes for a romantic encounter with Naru, finds himself frustrated by Kaolla's interference. As if to mock his needs, the middle-schooler-- whom Naru jealously calls a "child"-- invites Keitaro to visit her bed-- as long as he brings food, that is.

Keitaro sees the "older" Kaolla at the story's beginning. He doesn't believe the girl's story of being able to transform until he sees her a second time.

Akamatsu's image of the "red moon" probably owes something to traditional associations between femininity and the lunar cycles, though I admit that the artist doesn't dwell on the matter. Since this is a light comedy, naturally Keitaro is made ridiculous for his having contemplated even a kiss with a "too-young-to-kiss" female. Yet I think there's something serious beneath the silly humor. Unlike the male of the human species, the female radically changes her form during maturation. Nabokov's Humbert Humbert was fascinated with the image of the "Lolita," the female before the onset of maturation. But I theorize that even though the Japanese produce a great deal of "Lolicon" material, both in their mainstream entertainment and in their actual pornography, it may that they're really interested in is the magical transition between the child and the maturing woman-- which in turn, may also play into the transgressive allure of both literal and figurative forms of incest.

Theories aside, "Secret" is at the very least a more psychologically suggestive use of fantasy-tropes that one sees elsewhere in Akamatu's slapstick universe.

ANOTHER QUICK COMMENT-PRESERVATION

In reaction to this Ng Suat Tong essay at HU, I wrote:

I don't think it's correct to take a single incident from one Tarzan continuity and assert that it was standard across the board. Cite several, along the same line, and then you've got something.

I remember the sequence you describe, though I would have to see it again to see if I agree that the apes are extolled over the black natives. I would say that your case is stronger just for the base idea of the "white goddess" trope; at the very least, the trope certainly isn't terribly complimentary. FWIW Burroughs does show white primitives believing in godlike outsiders as well, but I guess one could argue that they are just blacks in whiteface.

Going strictly by the excerpts from the porn art seen here, I don't see racism going on here. I see Frazetta drawing a handful of Black Africans as lustful characters, maybe even with predominantly brutish features, but that may be part of the erotic thing going on here, whatever it meant to Frazetta himself. I think that's a little different from making fun of Blacks for filing their teeth and dumping missionaries in cook-pots, which would, like the "white goddess" thing, suggest a complete and irreversible primitivism.

Nice, how you snuck in that shot at the EC comics. 

ADDENDA: I'm not going to try to preserve all my comments on this thread, but I'm copying this one for future reference because it's an overall putdown of the HU mentality.




"He rejects it for ideological reasons."




Cute, but the correct word is "non-ideological," as in, "those things in life that are not strictly reducible to ideological means and ends."




"Frazetta’s art is always about his virtuosity, so these images are about him giving up control and still being the awesome dude in control."




And a female artist isn't "in control" because-- yeah, reasons.




"I think what Noah was trying to convey (please correct me if I’m wrong here, Noah) was that all art implies and expresses ideology, regardless of whether the purpose of its creation was ideological."


It's one thing to note that ideological aspects may have sneaked their way into a work with no express ideological purpose. It's another to try to fit everything into a Procrustean bed, which is the usual practice here at HU.




What's really at issue in Ng's article? That Frazetta fantasized about either being a hung black dude, or about laying waste to black dudes in the persona of Tarzan? No, none of you care about Frazetta's inner demons. You care about the fact that these erotic drawings, which you (incorrectly) deem racist, are going to sell for a lot of money-- and that there's nothing you can do about that, any more than you can go back in time and convince people about the racial injustices of Tarzan.


I really you could find some real injustices to tilt at. But there's one positive thing. At least you're illustrating the fallacies of taking even a liberal viewpoint too far into la-la land.

SECOND AND LAST ADDENDA: Damn, I almost never anticipate what excuse NB will use to terminate a discussion. Often I've preserved comments here because I thought he would take offense and delete them, and I've usually been surprised that he didn't remove them.


My last couple of posts, which I found inoffensive, were deleted because of what he liked to call "bad faith trolling." Since the posts are gone now, I can only approximate what I said. In response to his claim that I was indulging in ideologically-based arguments while defending the idea of non-ideological factors in art, I said that I was simply turning their own type of arguments against them. That's the only thing I wrote that could be halfway construed as "bad faith," though in truth it's nothing of the kind. Patently it's merely an excuse to terminate the discussion because I'm touching on issues he NB doesn't care to deal with.


It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations.


Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?


Not only does NB not care to answer such questions,  evidently he doesn't want his visitors troubled with them either-- which puts the HOODED UTILITARIAN right square in the same bailiwick as SEQUART-- censoring posts to keep their visitors content. There was a time that no one who professes liberal tendencies would indulge in such small-minded scapegoating, at least not with so little evidence of wrongdoing-- but as noted here, this era has bred a new sort of "liberal-so-called."

NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES PT. 2

The "Neopuritan nannies" referenced in Part 1 were pretty much the Usual Gang of Bloody Comic Book Elitists, but I've never meant to suggest that they were the worst of the lot. Such elitists are pikers next to some of the philosophers who have been guilty of creating false expectations for the world as a whole.

Marx may be the biggest Nanny of all time, given that he fostered the idea of controlling human destiny through the manipulation of economic factors. But one of the seminal "fathers of science fiction" had similar nanny-ish proclivities, as I find after my having given one of his works-- H.G. Wells' THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME-- a quick though not superficial read-through.

By the time SHAPE was published in 1933, Wells was no longer writing "scientific romances" very much. His key works were all the flowers of his youth, and in his later years he often sought to use non-fiction as a means to express his passion for Socialism. SHAPE is what we now call an "alternative history," in which Wells narrates his understanding of world affairs up until 1933, and then imagines the future events that will lead to the formation of a beneficent world state.

I find myself regarding this as a "nanny-ish" proposition because Wells' world state is, despite all his protests as to the continued value of a "sublimated" individuality, remains a place that values safety above all else:

What has happened during the past three and a half centuries to the human consciousness has been a sublimation of individuality. That phase is the quintessence of modern history. A large part of the commonplace life of man, the food-hunt, the shelter-hunt, the safety-hunt, has been lifted out of the individual sphere and socialized for ever. To that the human egotism has given its assent perforce. It has abandoned gambling and profit-seeking and all the wilder claims of property. It has ceased altogether to snatch, scramble and oust for material ends. And the common man has also been deprived of any weapons for his ready combativeness and of any liberty in its release. Nowadays even children do not fight each other. Gentleness in difference has become our second nature.

Now Nietzsche was no less aware that every society practiced this same ritual that he calls "self-overcoming," by which individual selfish tendencies are conquered in order to promote each society's "table of values." But the German philosopher was extremely leery that any civilization could reach a point of such advancement that it would not grow stagnant, so that it needed men of "courage" who would overturn the established values. This is why THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA so frequently has its interlocutor rage against "the good and the just:" not because society's rules aren't based in real needs-- to prevent theft, adultery, etc.-- but because such rules become the people's reason for living in itself, rather than serving as a means to an end. The idea that Wells proposes above-- of a mankind where "even children do not fight each other"-- with extreme suspicion. To my ear it sounds like an old man's vision of paradise: a place where no one raises voices or has any arguments-- and of course Wells was over sixty when he wrote SHAPE.

I also find Wells guilty of a Pollyanna attitude in Chapter 8, where he tries to use biological double-talk in order to make it seem as if the human propensity for cruelty is an aberration:

The older psychologists were disposed to classify cruelty as a form of sexual aberration — in ordinary speech we still use their old word Sadistic — but this attribution is no longer respected by contemporary authorities. Cruelty goes far beyond the sexual field. Just as hate is now understood to be a combative fear compound, the stiffening up of a faltering challenge, which may become infectious, so cruelty is regarded as a natural development of effort against resistance, so soon as the apprehension of frustration exceeds a certain limit. It is a transformation of our attempt to subdue something, usually a living thing, to our will, under the exasperation of actual or anticipated obduracy.

I've established in my own posts that I don't consider cruelty, or anything associated with violence, to be entirely derived from sexuality. But clearly Wells is trying to divorce human nature from cruelty by making it seem as if cruel action is simply an adventitious reflex. Thus, if a "nanny-state" takes away anything that people might fight over, then there will be no "transformation of [an] attempt to subdue something."

Contrast this with Nietzsche's psychological insight from ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS:

"To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival."

One may disagree with Nietzsche about the degree to which human nature is dependent upon cruelty in its most objectionable forms. But who, aside from a nanny, could doubt that a part of what makes us human is our competitiveness, our desire to excel? Since I've quoted Francis Fukuyama's verdict on these matters at least three times now, I suppose I need not repeat myself on this subject.

Though SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME is no fun to read-- it often seems like the author merely repeating himself: "See, I was right about this, and this, and this"-- it does show that the ideal of the overprotected society is far from a new one.

Since modern-day nannies so frequently worry about how susceptible minds will be driven to orgies of fascist violence by superheroes, I find myself wondering if Nietzsche might not have viewed them as more in the vein of Wells than of his "overmen." After all, most superheroes are devoted to maintaining the values of the society, rather than overturning values. So maybe had Friedrich N., been given the chance to behold the spawn of Siegel and Shuster, he would have found superheroes as repressive to spirit as I find Wells' "nanny-state."

NULL-MYTHS: HOLY TERROR (2011)

For this short review I won't get into all the hand-wringing politics as to whether Miller, or anyone, could have produced in modern times what Miller claimed that he intended to produce: a "piece of propaganda" showing a costumed hero beating up Muslim / Jihadist terrorists.

Obviously I have to mention the genesis of the project: that Miller floated the possibility of a project titled HOLY TERROR, BATMAN in 2006, about five years after the events of 9-11.  I do not know whether or not DC Comics seriously entertained such a project, which IMO could have had no beneficial effect on the brand of their Batman character. But Miller clearly plotted and visualized the narrative as if it would involve Batman and his sex-sparring partner Catwoman getting involved in a major terrorist attack upon Gotham City. Instead, for whatever reason the graphic novel was published instead by Legendary Comics, replacing Gotham City, Batman and Catwoman with Empire City, a new hero called the Fixer, and a larcenous woman who has clawed hands (or gloves), hisses like a cat, and is called-- Natalie Stack?

While deriving images from the Net I happened across a review of HOLY TERROR from Sequart's Julius Darius, and was appalled to see that back in 2011 I had paid this munchkin of mediocrity a compliment for having tried to produce a "balanced" view of the work. I didn't re-read the essay, but I noticed that its conclusion was concerned purely with whether or not HOLY TERROR might "trap" readers into feeling nasty prejudiced feelings or some such tripe. I would expect that every extant review of this graphic novel similarly privileged real-world politics over the formal qualities of the work. I won't do that here. If HOLY TERROR is a null-myth in the terms I've set forth, it's because it doesn't take its absurd premise far enough, not because it should have pulled back and played it more cautiously.

In my first reading of HOLY TERROR I was aware that it would not be in any sense a nuanced observation of Muslim culture, so I didn't expect it to fulfill such a goal. I did look to see whether or not Miller targeted Muslim culture as a whole, or only the subculture to which the Jihadists belong. Within the narrative proper, most of the protagonists' aspersions are cast at terrorists and their beliefs in sanctified suicide. None of the aspersions are particularly ingenious, so even if one countenances the viability of trash-talking Jihadists, I can't say that Miller does a good job of it. I'm sure that most critics had something to say about HOLY TERROR beginning with a famous quote-- or misquote-- from Mohammed: "If you meet the infidel, kill the infidel." That might seem like a slam-dunk for anyone arguing that Miller's playing to American bigotry. I don't dismiss that possibility. But there's also the possibility that even if the famous phrase is a misquote, real-life terrorists like bin-Laden did adopt it for their own ends. And if Miller is using the quote the way bin-Laden used it, that makes a crucial difference with regard to said author's intent.

Miller specifically said that his notion of "propaganda" was informed by the early examples of anti-Axis propaganda seen in American comics, in which unreal heroes like Superman and Captain America regularly punched out menaces like Hitler and Hirohito.  None of those comics can be judged as reproductions of reality. If they have any value at all, it lies within the attempt of American artists to project depraved vileness upon their nation's enemies.

Instead, Miller's villains-- usually wearing heavy burnooses or some similar garb-- are unremarkable in the extreme. As the heroic Fixer and his reluctant gal-pal Natalie commence their personal war on terror, they unmask some of the low-ranking thugs, but they're entirely ordinary. Toward the conclusion Natalie encounters the unnamed leader of the Al-Qaeda cell-- his face obscured by a beaded headdress-- and the leader informs her that the reason they're called a "cell" is because they're just a "tiny part of an organism so vast as to be beyond belief." Natalie and the Fixer manage to destroy the cell with its own weapons in the end, but significantly, the story ends not on a note of triumph but of consuming fear, as a hard-bitten police captain (a re-written Commissioner Gordon) suffers a sleepless night, wracked with anticipation of further atrocities.  I suppose Miller may have wanted to make the nation's current enemies seem more menacing by their facelessness. He might have had more success, propaganda-wise, in making al-Qaeda's crusaders as weird and freakish as the bogus "Persians" of 300.

The two heroes comprise another arrow from Miller's quiver that falls far short of its mark. Since they were originally envisioned as Miller's takes on Batman and Catwoman, he doesn't really exert himself to re-design their costumes into anything compelling. Instead, prior to the terrorist crisis, we see Fixer chasing Natalie across Empire City's rooftops, and the two of them look like nothing more than a pair of acrobats in fetish-wear. Going by Miller's past oeuvre, the fetish-look was probably intentional on his part-- but my point is that both characters are badly designed. Again, real propaganda needs not just images of the villains' vileness, but also images of the heroes' superior status-- and that's nowhere to be found here.

One last kick to this horse that probably died in most fans' minds years ago: on one page, when Fixer and Natalie are slashing and shooting their way through a horde of fanatics, Fixer's thought-balloon says, "We engage in postmodern diplomacy." I won't say all of Miller's dialogue is as bad as this, but this is a real howler. What, did Miller think that "postmodern" means "ironic?" Given that at one point some pundit thought that 9-11 had done away with "irony" in American culture, it seems profoundly weird to see a comic warning Americans of the doom at their doors invoking the vagaries of postmodernism, especially in support of what ends up being the oldest form of diplomacy-- the "gunboat" kind.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE HARD GOODBYE" (SIN CITY feature, 1991)

The individual ‘yarns” in Frank Miller’s SIN CITY sage range anywhere from “very good” to “mediocre. But the first one—latterly entitled “The Hard Goodbye”—stands as a masterpiece of comics-art.  In all likelihood it will remain an unacknowledged masterpiece for the near future. When THE COMICS JOURNAL ran its 1999 list of the “top 100 English-language comics,” some fans bemoaned the fact that Sim’s CEREBUS was left off the list due to insufficient votes. A few fans even expressed some appreciation of Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. But critically, SIN CITY has usually been ignored by the comics-literati.

While it's possible to criticize Miller's work on its own terms, most extant critiques  have been grounded in the over-ideological concept that Miller’s SIN CITY—and perhaps his work as a whole—can be summed up by the Old Fascist Two-Step: (a) Work A endorses violence, so therefore (b) Work A is also a tacit endorsement of fascism. For some reason, it’s always the “Rightie” version of “the rule of force,” never the “Leftie” version—but that’s another essay.

There’s no question that THE HARD GOODBYE is chock-full of violence. George Bataille, who viewed violence as so pervasive that it even subsumed the activity of sex, might have appreciated Miller’s ode to the hardboiled crime genre. Even though the story starts with a sex-act between the protagonist and the woman he’s framed for murdering, there’s no tenderness evident: the sex is nearly as violent as the violence. The first words, uttered by protagonist Marv in his ongoing voice-over—comments: “The night is hot as hell. Everything sticks.” With these simple words, Miller creates a world unredeemed by good air-conditioning, where people are always exuding sticky sweat—a prelude of sorts to the way copious bodies will soon be exuding another sticky substance.

Marv—whose surname is never given—is a hulking, flint-faced loser. Miller never clarifies how he ekes out a living in the demimonde of Sin City. Since he’s on parole from his last prison-sentence, one may imagine him getting bounced around in various petty jobs-- none of which, admittedly, matter to this story. The GOODBYE of the title begins the night Marv meets a beautiful woman named Goldie. Goldie wants Marv's protection from an unnamed menace, and she tries to get it by sexing him up. But Marv fuels his passion with booze. After sex he passes out, “stone drunk,” after which an assailant sneaks into their bedchamber and kills Goldie. Marv is immediately framed for her murder, but this disturbs him less than his personal failure as a protector:

“Why, I ask now. But when you got scared, when you trembled and your eyes went as big as a little girl’s, I didn’t ask why, not then. Then, I didn’t give a damn what was bothering you.”

I could pen a much longer essay than this one on the role of female characters in Marv’s universe, though for this post I can only say of such an essay that it would be free of the usual clichés about “objectification” and “women in refrigerators.” For the purpose of this essay, though, I need only assert that whatever Marv thinks about women, he sees men as their natural protectors. Even though he knows, and often asserts, that he belongs to the dregs of humanity, nothing about himself arouses such self-loathing as the thought that his “macho pig” lust caused the death of a woman under his protection.

Anti-violence ideologues will argue that Marv’s guilt is just an excuse for the violent rampage that makes up the rest of the story. That’s an argument I’ve refuted many times. Withiin the scope of this essay, I think that Miller makes it quite clear that Marv is not a hero in the general sense, and that he doesn’t even think of himself as a hero. The “big man” behind Goldie’s murder, as well as several other deaths, calls Marv a “monster,” and all of Marv’s mental musings make clear that he’s heard this appellation before. Even his square-headed visage may owe something to the iconic head of the movie’s version of the Frankenstein Monster. In any case, Marv, according to my system of persona-types, is not a hero. He doesn’t care about justice like Batman or Daredevil; he doesn’t even care about the code of the professional investigator, like Sam Spade. Marv’s a human monster who’s never had a reason to exist, until a band of well-connected murderers try to make him their patsy. The resulting violence is immensely cathartic to the sympathetic reader, but it’s a catharsis that functions less like the justice-seeking tales of Batman than like the rampages of the Frankenstein Monster against the stupidity and venality of mankind.

HARD GOODBYE is filled with many keen psychological insights into the mind of Miller’s human monster, too many to explore in a short essay. Yet the story is primarily a sociological myth. In the world of the superhero, the costumed crusader arises to facilitate justice, simply because the Law Can’t Be Everywhere. But in the world of hardboiled crime, Big Law is bed with Big Crime. The only satisfaction left to all those under the thumb of Powerful People—from simple wage-slaves to the "dregs of humanity”-- is that once in a while, they can spawn a holy monster that can tear down the towers of the rich with outpourings of Biblical violence. Even so, the conclusion remains less than triumphant, for the monster is fated to be destroyed, as Marv is, while the dark crucible of Sin City endures, brewing its endless concoctions of corruption.

_______

On a side-note, this is my 51st "mythcomic" analyzed for my "1001 myths" feature.

Only nine hundred and fifty to go now.

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES

In the previous essay I alluded to some of the phenomenological headaches I incur in trying to analyze a series like Frank Miller's SIN CITY. Because it doesn't focus either upon one serial protagonist or upon an ensemble of such protagonists, it's difficult to decide how to classify the phenomenality of the series as a whole.

But the problems of what I'll call "non-centric serials" are nothing next to that of anthologies in the medium of cinema. In other media-- I'm thinking primarily, though not exclusively, of prose, comics, and television-- every story within a serial anthology stands on its own. However, a film-anthology represents a concatenation of stories that cannot stand apart from one another, unless they are surgically separated. In some anthologies, the stories are not associated in any way, except by dint of appearing in the same collection. Some are tied by virtue of being adaptations of the work of a single author, as is the case with 1963's TWICE TOLD TALES, and some are associated through a common framing-device, as in 1945's DEAD OF NIGHT, where all of the stories may been dreamed by a single interlocutor, leaving it unclear as to whether the stories "really" happened or not within the film's diegetic reality.

Then there are what might be called "shared universe" films. This term is usually applied to franchises where some person or company owns the concept but other raconteurs are allowed to contribute to the universe. The Marvel Universe is a concatenation of franchises in which every fictional event can hypothetically be linked to every other fictional event. In contrast, some shared universes feature multiple authors crafting stories set within the parameters of some fictional universe, but each author's conceptions can be independent from those of other contributors-- or else, at very least, no one tries to tie them all together.

Miller's SIN CITY comics-franchise, one of those aforementioned "non-centric serials," never invited authors other than Miller himself to participate. However, though it might have been possible to adapt selected SIN CITY stories as stand-alone films, producer/director Robert Rodriguez chose to utilize the anthology-format. I'm sure his purpose in so doing was to sell the moviegoing public on the diversity of Frank Miller's hardboiled cosmos. The anthology-format does create some headaches for the devoted taxonomist, though.

I reviewed the two Rodriguez adaptations here last year, saying in part:

Frank Miller's SIN CITY graphic novels and the films adapted from them prove difficult, though not impossible, to classify.
The difficulty inheres in the fact that Miller's quasi-anthology series takes its primary inspiration from naturalistic sources, such as films noirs and the hardboiled detective genre, particularly as executed by author Mickey Spillane, ostensibly one of Miller's strongest influences.  However, while these works usually take their rigor from the sense that their protagonists exist in a world without miracles, Frank Miller made his mark in comic books with costumed superheroes like Batman and Daredevil. He could have chosen to make his Sin City books entirely naturalistic, but instead he injects moments of the metaphenomenal, usually dealing with uncanny forms of grotesquerie.

Unlike the comics-serial, there's no questions about what phenomenality is dominant for the first film. In my original review, I pronounced two of the first film's stories naturalistic and the other two uncanny, but I've changed my mind on that, and would now say that only the story called "The Customer is Always Right" can be deemed naturalistic.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR creates a few taxonomic problems, though, because it's the only work in which the phenomenality of the marvelous intrudes.

The film adapts two stories done for Miller's comics-series and two stories that Miller has not yet rendered into comics-form. By my current evaluations, the two comics-derived stories are both uncanny, while one of the "original" stories, "The Long Bad Night," is entirely naturalistic. The other original story is principally an uncanny tale due to the presence of the monstrous character Marv, but it has one marvelous element: the ghost of John Hartigan, last seen blowing his brains out at the end of "That Yellow Bastard."

And yet, for a marvelous element, Hartigan is singularly impotent. No one in the SIN CITY universe can see him as he drifts about, watching his former beloved Nancy planning revenge upon the evil Senator Roark, nor can he Hartigan do anything upon the physical plane. Only the fact that the audience is seeing things through Hartigan's spectral viewpoint confirms that the ghost is part of the diegetic reality, rather than being conjured up by mere guilt, like the spirits that haunt Shakespeare's Richard III.

Once, and only once, does the ghost get the chance to interfere. At the film's conclusion, Marv and Nancy team up to attack Roark's sanctuary. Marv takes out all the guards but is wounded, so that Nancy alone must face Roark. She attacks a painting of Roark, mistaking the image for the evildoer, so that Roark is able to wound her. However, by sheer dumb luck Roark too gets distracted by an image-- the image of the watching Hartigan, who somehow becomes visible to Roark only when seen in a large mirror. Nancy never knows what has distracted Roark, but it gives her the chance to draw down on him, and to kill him.

My review therefore classifies SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as a "marvelous" film. Over the years I've classified other films as marvelous for the same reason: a film, being a unitary construct, cannot be just a "little bit marvelous" any more than a birth-mother can be "a little bit pregnant."

And yet, I must admit that Hartigan's ghost seems a bit like a wild card, rather than something that really belongs to the Frank Miller cosmos. The ghost serves a purpose in one of the stories, much like the element of telepathy in Wilkie Collins' novel THE MOONSTONE, discussed in part here. Certainly Miller's image of the almost impotent ghost at least coheres with his overall themes, which is more than one can say for films which toss in marvelous elements as quickie jokes, as one can see in these two films of the "marginal-metaphenomenal."

I'm playing around with some possible re-classifications that might better represent the roles played by the uncanny and the marvelous, when it is clear that they do NOT cohere with any thematic underpinnings. But I confess it probably won't provide me with an effective aspirin for all my taxonomic headaches.