THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING

 A brief response on CHFB to the old question, "Are superheroes fascist if they practice altruism?"

______

I generally agree with the "argument of altruism," but it's never stopped any critic who was determined to read a given text the way he wanted to,

One can even go further back to (I thnk) Socrates. I'm not looking it up, but I think he's the guy who argued that people feeling sorry for imaginary people was not the same as feeling sorry for real people. This was and is true, as far as it goes. But you can also argue that even the most exalted novel or play is still about "imaginary people" and could be considered a distraction from "real life." 

We humans don't tell imaginary stories about imaginary people primarily to talk real people into doing real things, good or bad, even though individual humans can use stories for this purpose. We tell stories because we have to. Every single day of every human being's life, his or her brain is filled with questions of, "what if I do this? What if someone else does something else?" 

With all that ceaseless activity-- how could we NOT tell stories of things that we imagine happening to imaginary people? Stories with happy endings, sad endings, absurd endings. It's foolish to think one could ever get rid of one kind of story, a story one may not like, and keep all the others. They're all tied to our nature, and they only go away when we all go away. 

(Sorry, I'm channeling SANDMAN today...)

THE READING RHEUM: METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN (1941/1958)

 On some occasions, like this one, I've used Dave Sim as an example of an artist dominated by the didactic potentiality. But a writer of Robert Heinlein is probably a better example of such domination, particularly in the case of works like METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN.

The novel appeared in three consecutive issues of John W. Campbell's ASTOUNING magazine in 1941, and Heinlein later added who-knows-what new material for book publication in 1958. CHILDREN is part of Heinlein's vaunted "Future History" project of interrelated stories, one of the more organized "continuous universes" in 20th-century science fiction.

The events transpire in the 22nd century, in what I would call one of Heinlein's typical quasi-Libertarian societies. (Only the society of the future United States is seen.) Unbeknownst to all the level-headed citizens, amongst them dwell a secret subgroup, "the Howard Families," an amalgamation of familial groups that have voluntarily "bred" themselves to have extremely long lives. They've kept their practices secret from the general public by having family members fake aging and death before assuming new identities. I believe other writers had conceived this basic practice for individual immortal characters, but Heinlein might be the first to have extended the idea to whole families.

Lazarus Long, the plain-talking oldest member of the families, is on the scene when the Howards' secret is exposed. Suddenly the rational members of the future-world lose their cool, believing that the "children of Methuselah" have some secret potion or device to delay aging. Long comes up with what he believes to be the only solution: the families must hijack the government's interstellar craft and try to find new lodgings. Long and some of his similarly competent (and similar-talking) allies even have to shanghai many of the other members because the family's fate is too important to be left to individual whim. Not unexpectedly, neither Long nor anyone else faces any blowback from this decision.

For the other two-thirds of CHILDREN, Long and company journey to a couple of habitable worlds, but they find that both have extremely alien occupants. Heinlein's aliens don't have interior lives or culture as such and can best be viewed as intellectual abstractions, representing an Earthman's attempt to conceive of alien nature. Possibly the author was reacting against thousands of earlier SF stories in which alien cultures are no more than Ruritanian romance-characters with purple skin. In any case, most of the would-be colonists determine to journey back to Earth. On returning, the prodigals must sort out their new position amid a changed Earth-populace, though this occupies only the last couple of chapters. (I'll just note that the fugitive families find themselves in a situation analogous to victims of "The Snap" in MCU films.)

My vague memory of reading CHILDREN some forty years ago is that I felt thrilled by the potential adventure of the colonists' plunge into uncharted space, even if they didn't end up colonizing anything. Now I find the second two-thirds of the book the least interesting, and the most intellectually arid, lacking the sense of wonder I could get from contemporaneous works. The conflict of the long-lived families with the covetous normal people strikes me as the strongest aspect of the novel, and I wonder how Heinlein might have handled things if the families had chosen to fight for their legal rights on Earth. The alien visitations now seem deadly dull, in part because the story substitutes talk, talk, talk for action. And as I noted above, all the focal characters sport the same "crackerbarrel" way of speaking, so there's barely any dramatic interaction. To be sure, this was one of Heinlein's first long works and later novels showed better pacing and characterization.

One of the subordinate characters in CHILDREN, navigator "Slipstick" Libby, was the star of Heinlein's second-published short story, "Misfit," making the novel a minor crossover. But Heinlein would later revive Long as a protagonist  in four other novels, one of which, THE NATURE OF THE BEAST, dealt with the idea of fictional worlds having extra-dimensional veracity.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE DEVIL OF THE CONGO," (JUMBO COMICS #28, 1941)

{Note: the story-title "The Devil of the Congo" appears only on the cover of the magazine.)

I continue to visit Fiction House's SHEENA stories every once in a while because, as pedestrian as many of them are, every once in a while I've spotted strong myth-material, though no full-fledged mythcomics yet. 

I don't recall whether or not "Devil" is the first Sheena story to display a well-dressed, implicitly Westernized Black man in contrast to the tribesmen with whom Sheena interacts. But his position in the splash panel, looking upon the bound figures of Sheena and her mate Bob, clearly denotes him as the villain, and from the first page he's clearly going to be held responsible for the assault upon the peaceful Wasuri tribe. (Like most of the tribes in this and other jungle comics, the tribe will never appear again.)

After a short encounter with a couple of the missing Wasuri, Sheena and Bob are told that the other tribespeople have gone to Elephant River in response to a "white man's curse." Then two more warriors show up and capture the heroes, and the warriors' cowled commander says something about taking them to see a "Great Black Father." The warriors, who are also identified as Wasuri, take their prisoners to the hitherto deserted village, and it happens that the Great Black Father himself has just arrived there as well. I guess he came from that Elephant River place, which is maybe his HQ, but the point is never elucidated. 

Even kid-readers in 1941 probably would have recognized the play on words in the villain's name. The name "Great White Father" was used by American colonials as a high-flown title for whatever authority they reported to-- be it the English king or the American president-- when speaking to various Native American tribes, And the same kid-readers would probably know that the name carried paternalistic associations, even if they might not have really cared that much about conning some Indians. So even just a few pages into the story, it's obvious that this "Great Black Father" is supposed to seem like a numinous presence that can impress simple minded natives the way "Great White Father" was used to impress Indian tribesmen. Unlike the representative of White superiority, though, the villain of the story is a liminal presence. Though he uses the implements associated with White culture-- a gun, a cigar, a megaphone-- and is dressed in suit-clothes, he also wears a stereotypical African headdress. 

At any rate, Sheena and Bob somehow break free and escape the Wasuri village. Their main concern seems to be to find the missing Commissioner Fletcher, but Sheena's attacked by a leopard and must kill it. This delays the duo long enough for the Wasuri to overtake them and drag the heroes back to the village, where, mirable dictu, it turns out that the corrupted tribesmen are torturing Fletcher. Fortunately, the one thing Sheena manages to do during her brief freedom is to send her pet chimpanzee for help, and the chimp manages to stampede a herd of zebras into the village. So this time the heroes escape with Fletcher in tow, and he provides the big reveal: that the Great Black Father is the tool of fascists seeking to "exploit" the natives. (This trope is identical to the one in the 1946 WONDER WOMAN story "Invisible Terrors," though the Sheena tale was published a little before the summer of 1941, about six months before America declared war on the Axis Powers.)

Sheena leaves the injured commissioner with Bob and goes looking for help. She encounters a group of colonial soldiers, several Blacks led by one White guy, but they're actually the fascists who have empowered the Great Black Father. (One may presume the real authorities were Brits, since Kenya is mentioned as a neighboring country and Great Britain controlled Kenya from 1901 to 1960). Sheena gets away and encounters yet another expedition, but this one is headed by Fletcher's wife, and all the colonial soldiers with her are also Black Africans. Sheena has Mrs. Fletcher send the soldiers ahead to the Wasuri village, and the rather dim villain assumes they've come to join him, resulting in his capture. Then the real fascists are shot down and everyone in the Wasuri celebrates because they're impressed with the show of force. 

Though the tribe conveniently forgets the "white man's curse" narrative when it's convenient for the unknown writer of the tale, it's interesting that an escapist story like "Devil" even alluded to native discontent with colonial rule, which topic was almost entirely off limits during the heyday of the jungle-adventure genre.

"Devil" also provides a minor turning point in terms of the depiction of Sheena's skill set. A lot of early stories show the heroine fighting only with such weapons as spear, knife, and bow-and-arrow. "Spoilers of the Wild" may be the first story to show her using a judo throw, but the artwork for "Devil," attributed to one Robert Webb, shows her punching and kicking full-grown men around, which is generally the way Sheena is depicted for the remainder of her comics career.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE SWORD AND THE SERPENT"] (ARAK #35-36, ARAK ANNUAL #1, 1984)

[This time, since none of the interior titles of this three-part tale provide me with a good umbrella-cognomen, I'm using the faux-title taken from the cover of ARAK SON OF THUNDER #36.]

In my breakdown of the overall series I noted that its star "Arak Red-Hand" was a full-grown Native American man with his own belief-system when he was tossed into the matrix of Dark Ages Europe. Thus he does not at any time subscribe to the pagan mythos of the Vikings he first encounters or to the Christian beliefs of the friends he makes in the court of Charlemagne. But in addition to making the main character non-committal about others' gods, author Roy Thomas usually avoids showing evidence of supernatural manifestations belonging to the so-called "Peoples of the Book," i.e., Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Arak certainly meets several members of each faith during his travels, but the only named character who suggests some miraculous nature is an old man named Josephus, who may be the legendary Wandering Jew. 

"Serpent," however, places the Arak character in a site where it is possible for him to correlate his own "Old Enemy," the Serpent-God of the Quontauka tribe, with the "serpent in the garden" common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. The desire to provide such a correlation may be why Arak, accompanied by the satyr Satyricus and Syrian travelers Alsind and Sharizad, visit the city of Syrian Damascus, which was said to have built over the remnants of Eden itself. 

To be sure, there's a proximate plot-rationale for Alsind and his female cousin to guide Arak and his comic relief to that city. Alsind claims to be the son of a deposed emir, and thus the true heir of the rulership in that city. In exchange for his help, Alsind promises to help Arak secure a ship for his ongoing quest to find his people.

A further wrinkle is that Arak himself is a testimony to the existence of his own "pagan" religion, since he's revealed to be the literal offspring of the Quontauka thunder-god. This heritage means that he displays some roughly-defined shamanistic skills. One such attribute is demonstrated when he and his allies approach Damascus, and Arak sees a specter hanging over the city, one that no one else sees-- the image of a giant fiery sword.

Later that issue, Arak and friends get some backstory, in part from that recrudescent wanderer Josephus. According to legend, the angel Gabriel expelled Adam and Eve from Eden with a flaming sword, and this "Firesword" still exists somewhere in Damascus. Josephus fears that evil hands seek the sword's power to control all Peoples of the Book, and this fear is soon justified. While Arak and friends attend a welcoming feast at the home of Alsind's uncle, the guests are attacked by masked assassins-- who, when slain, turn out to be serpent-headed humanoids.

Arak employs his "shaman-sense" to guide his allies to a certain spot in Damascus, and Alsind informs them that the area once harbored the palace of the Ummayad line to which he belongs, a palace razed out of existence by the rival clan of the Abassi. The uncle's servants dig up the area, finding a skeleton. (Arak vaguely compares the skeleton to Adam, not remembering that Adam was supposed to have been driven out of Eden-- though Thomas may have been thinking of a legend that was spun out of Genesis 3:15, to the effect that Adam himself had "crushed the head of the serpent" at some point.) When the diggers flee the site, Arak takes over, and opens the way into a subterranean chamber defined by two visual aspects. First, the walls of the chamber are dominated by huge roots-- roots which Alsind's uncle compares to "the Holy Tree of Knowledge," though with no specific justification. Second, in the center of the chamber floats the Firesword, but this time the same size as an ordinary weapon. When Arak seizes the sword with his shaman-strength, a half-human, half-snake entity bursts through a wall and tries to wrest the sword from the hero. During the fight the snake-man confirms that the deity he worships is the same Old Enemy of Arak's thunder-father, but this only fires up Arak to slay the serpent with the sword. However, the snake-man is only the tool of a mortal servant of the serpent-god, the Lord of Serpents, and since he can't take the blade from Arak, the Lord uses his magic to spirit Alsing and Sharizad away, as ransom for the weapon.

Arak, hoping to rescue his friends without surrendering the great weapon, journeys with Satyricus into the desert-land adjoining Damascus, again using his shaman-sense to seek his enemy. A brief conversation establishes that Arak finds it difficult to control the Firesword, for its energies seem to want to return to Heaven. (Why they were held in place in the root-chamber, Thomas does not discuss.) A sandstorm separates the hero from his buddy, and for several pages, each of them experiences phantasias of the villain's creation. Satyricus finds himself in Hades, meeting his dead friend Khiron the Centaur again, and the satyr briefly fantasizes about gathering together all the denizens of the underworld to bring back the glories of Hellas to Greece. Arak is briefly seduced by a vision in which he rejoins his Quontauka people, but he soon discerns that it's an illusion. He dispels the vision and finds Satyricus, at which point they find themselves back in the desert.

The stone head of a serpent, the conduit to the magician's lair, pokes out of the sand. In the throneroom of the Lord, Arak gives up the sword to liberate Alsind and Sharizad, but then he assaults the evildoer, trying to regain control of the weapon. The warrior then uses his own skills to pull the flames off the physical sword in the hand of the magician, creating a separate sword of pure fire. With this fire-blade Arak stabs his foe, and then releases the power back to Heaven, so that only an ordinary metal blade remains on Earth. The serpent-lair conveniently collapses, but all four good guys escape. Though there's evidence that the mortal Lord also escaped despite his wound, he's never seen again as a primary antagonist. Thus, "Sword and the Serpent" is the first and last hurrah for both the Sword of Gabriel and the Lord of the Serpents.

ADDENDA: For the sake of exposition-clarity I left out one small point. Among the exploratory party is Dinar-Zad, sister of Alsind's uncle and mother to Alsind, though she's not seen her son in many years because of Alsind's exile. However, Dinar-Zad betrays both Alsind and Sharizad by pushing them into the clutches of the Lord. It turns out that at some point Dinar-Zad became the tool of the Serpent-God, having also helped the assassins gain egress to the palace. Thomas certainly chose the name Dinar-Zad because it's an alternate name for the ARABIAN NIGHTS name usually translated as "Dunyazad." In the NIGHTS Dunyazad is the loyal sister of Scheherezade. But Dinar-Zad's significance is not that of betraying her son and her niece, but that of being a woman who betrays humanity-- an even more obvious symbol-reference to that other deceptive female, Eve.

NEAR MYTHS: THE ARAK SAGA (1981-85)

There''s the germ of a really good sword-and-sorcery concept in the eighties DC series ARAK OF SON OF THUNDER, created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Ernie (RICHIE RICH) Colon. In the eighth century CE, a Native American man is shipwrecked off the coast of Norway and found by Vikings. The Scandinavians dub the strange red man "Eric," though he pronounces this new name "Arak." His memories of his past life are hazy so as to not get in the way of the first step in his heroic destiny, which begins with his seeking vengeance on an evil sorceress who kills his Viking friends. This mission, and many like it, propel Arak throughout many of the historical hotspots of 8th-century Europe and even parts of Asia. 

Given the peripatetic nature of the feature, there can't be any serious doubt that Roy Thomas sought to duplicate in ARAK his success with the Marvel feature CONAN. Thomas had not only encouraged the company to purchase adaptation rights to the Robert E. Howard barbarian, he wrote the rough-hewn hero's adventures for the better part of the seventies prior to leaving Marvel and accepting employment with DC. Like Conan, Arak is a barbaric fish out of water as he passes through domains of relatively greater sophistication. Like Conan, Arak never spends much time in any locale, always finding some reason to move on and sample the challenges of other lands, usually represented by more wizards, beasts, and demons.

In my view the "germ" of greater potential suggested by ARAK would be the fun of cultural contrasts, of having a barbaric hero, with all of his own cultural preferences, bouncing off the priorities of French knights-in-armor, Muslim traders, and the like. But Thomas does not do this. Despite the fact that his scripts (whether on his own or with collaborators) are among the wordiest he ever produced, there's never room for interesting meditations on deeper subjects. To some extent this was the way Thomas wrote his last five years of CONAN, so maybe he figured lightning would strike twice if he followed the same course. However, CONAN had two things ARAK never had. First, skilled workhouse John Buscema provided the visual look of the main title, and to some extent followed a visual template for other artists to follow-- whereas Arak was cursed with the less "cinematic" art-styles of Colon, Tony deZuniga and others. Second, whereas Conan was a rough fellow who was often unpredictable, Arak was a very dull upright heroic type. This resulted in most of the stories ranging from poor to merely average in their appeal. There's one good myth-sequence I'll analyze separately, but otherwise, in this essay I'll just touch on points of interest.

"The Devil Takes a Bride," #2-- Arak gets mixed up with a maiden named Corrina, who's confined to a castle because her mother had congress with a demon. Or--maybe she's her own mother--? The hero picks up the first of his long-running support-cast, the aged good magician Malagigi, who serves the court of Charlemagne.

"Sword of the Iron Maiden," #3-- Arak gets his second support-character, the female knight Valda, given the rather fey cognomen "the Iron Maiden," and who is the daughter of the legendary lady knight Bradamante. Valda becomes Arak's first romantic interest in the series. Issue #7 contains an amusing reversal of a similar scene in the first encounter of Conan and Red Sonja. In the earlier story, Red Sonja prompts Conan to go skinny-dipping with her in order to make him dumb with lust for her. Valda joins Arak in a mutual bath, but her purpose is clearly to get him to show interest in her so that she can shut him down, proving to herself that he wants her and to Arak that she ain't no easy lay.

"The Last Centaur," #10-12-- Arak ends up in Greece, where all the gods have apparently died, though this leads the warrior to a revelation about his own possibly divine paternity. He meets the last centaur, who dies, and the last satyr, one Satyricus, who pledges to go along with Arak on his various quests and provide comedy relief. In #12 Valda gets the first of a handful of backup strips about her early days.

"The Slayer from the Wine-Dark Sea," #15-- Despite the title's Homeric reference the main focus is medieval Byzantium, where the majority of the series' stories transpire. As seen on the cover, Arak gets a Mohawk for a while in response to having found he's half thunder-god, but the hairstyle won't last long. 

"At Last, Albracca," #21-- There wasn't been a lot of "sense of wonder" in the ARAK title up to this point, or much past it, precisely because Thomas kept his scripting at a very pedestrian level. But, after not having read this story in some thirty years, I was struck by one wonder: that of Arak and his allies traveling over a "sea of moving stones." At the end of this arc Valda and Malagigi decide they must return to France, while Arak and Satyricus undertake a new quest: that of finding a way to locate Arak's lost people in the Americas. But before Valda leaves, she and Arak finally do the deed.

"To Your Sky Born Father Go," #33-- After the end of a rambling arc involving the Golden Bough and Arak growing his hair out again, Arak "dies," ascends to commune with his thunder-god father, and then returns to life. It's at this point that Thomas belatedly decides to give Arak an overarching adversary, a "serpent-god" who's also the enemy of Arak's dad and all life on Earth. Arak and Satyricus pick up two new cast-members, a pair of Syrian cousins named Alsind and Sharizad, who will later be revealed to be cognates of the famed characters Sinbad and Scheherezade. This arc is followed by Arak's first meaningful battle against the serpent god, which as I said I'll consider separately.

"Once Upon a Unicorn," #37-- This stand-alone, Valda-centric story may not be mythic but it is, unlike all the other stories, fun. The issue features the only Colon art job that isn't trying to be John Buscema, and his fine, slightly cartoony linework is well suited to the story's humorous tone. When Valda returns to the court of Charlemagne, she finds that her king wants her to perform an unusual duty. She's expected to tame a unicorn with her virgin nature-- which she ain't got no more.

"Dragon Slayers for Hire," #48-- Though Arak has a few more encounters with serpent-creatures, Thomas does not really bring the snake-god back as such. The writer does bring Valda and Malagigi back to accompany Arak, Satyricus, and Alsind for the remainder of the issues from #38 on, though "Scheherezade" gets married off in an earlier issue. "Slayers" is a pretty lame story, though it sports the curious art-team of DeZuniga and Carmine Infantino, and it gets rid of the tiresome Alsind by pairing him up with a jeune fille. There's also some curiosity-value in that Thomas takes the trouble of taking his heroes all the way to China and introducing them to his version of Mulan, about thirteen years before the Disney movie made the legendary Chinese heroine famous the world over. And after all that, Mulan barely does anything! Still, she is given a certain amount of heroic charisma, which is more than I can say for "Sinbad," so in my book this is the only real "charisma-crossover" in the series.

"The Road to the Rising Sun," #50-- Arak and company end up in Japan, and after a battle with a nasty oni, Arak sets sail with Satyricus in search of the Americas, while Valda and Malagigi determine to hike back to France again. I suppose the "hero sailing into the sunset" is as good a way as any to conclude things, since the feature never found a strong voice anyway. In the letter columns Thomas talked about a VALDA mini-series that was to be drawn by Todd MacFarlane, which patently never came to pass. Thomas also mentioned the possibility doing another ARAK adventure as a book, which I suspect would not have found much demand even if DC had permitted it. To date there have been a couple of "in name only" iterations of the Arak character, but no actual continuations of the Arak Saga.

HELLBLAZER: ALL HIS ENGINES (2005)

I have only an irregular acquaintance with the HELLBLAZER series, starring John Constantine, ruthless, seemingly hellbound occultist, but most of what I've read so far amounted to near-myths. However, ALL HIS ENGINES shows considerable inventiveness in presenting the liberation of a "Persephone" from both pagan and Christian conceptions of Hell.

To be sure, only once do writer Mike Carey and artist Leonardo Manco evoke the Persephone myth, and even then, Carey uses the Roman name for the Greek woman taken to hell by the god Pluto, in the opening chapter title "Proserpine Gathering Flowers" (the phrase derived from a Victorian painting depicting the famed myth). The innocent virgin this time is Trish Chandler, who is one of several persons struck down by a mysterious coma. Trish's father Chas happens to know something about the world of the occult inhabited by his mate Constantine, and he calls upon his old buddy to sort things out.

A divinatory ritual sends Constantine and Chas to Los Angeles, and there they meet a corpulent demon, Beroul, who has trapped the spirit of Trish in his capacious gut. Beroul holds her hostage to ensure the cooperation of Constantine in Beroul's big project: to knock off all the other demons floating around the City of Angels.

Constantine then decides that he must play along with Beroul to preserve Trish's life, and thus, he must find a way to kill all those other demons. He decides his best course is to take advantage of the many persons of Hispanic heritage in L.A., or rather, of a select few who are still tied to the Aztec death-god Mictlantecuthli. (I"m just going to type "Deathgod" henceforth.) The modern-day believers lead Constantine to the Deathgod while Chas eventually ends up enjoying a booty call with a comely young Hispanic woman, Melosa. The name is a Spanish variant on "Melissa," which in Greek myth signifies a priestess of the bee-goddess cultus, though Melosa is not an actual priestess of anything and in fact is pretty much a practical modern woman.

Constantine converses with the Deathgod, essentially mocking him with his inability to enjoy the glory days of his ancient pantheon. He plays the ancient death-deity, egging him to strike out at these latecoming Judeo-Christian parasites. Accordingly, Constantine traps all of Beroul's enemies in a deconsecrated church and the Deathgod devours them all. However, Beroul then shows up and forges a deal with the Deathgod, and then refuses to honor his pledge to release Trish from his demonic male womb.

On top of that, Chas has a crisis of confidence, believing that he'll never see his daughter freed-- and there's a strong implication that he sees himself starting a new life with Melosa. Thus, even though Melosa isn't a pagan priestess, there's a sense that she provides a temptation that can cause Chas to stray from his righteous course. But Constantine makes a special deal with the Deathgod to betray Beroul, liberating Trish from the demon's gullet-- after which Constantine must also manage to liberate the innocent "Persephone" from the control of the Deathgod.

The conclusion is actually fairly upbeat for a HELLBLAZER story, except that Chas, reunited with his daughter, essentially breaks things off with Melosa. One can trust Constantine to put a pessimistic spin on any salvation, though, as he ends with his meditations on the unadvisability of "giving any hostages to fortune," because "you're on your own in the end." This recalls the context of the Milton quote that provides the novel's title. In PARADISE LOST Milton pictures Satan being hurled to perdition despite "all his engines"-- and throughout the narrative, Carey and Manco suggest that Constantine will never be able to save himself as he saves others.