CURIOSITIES #34: 'THE KILLER SHARK" (BLACKHAWK #50, 1952)

I found most of the DC BLACKHAWK comics of the 1960s easy to acquire without much expense, and never thought they were anything but slightly entertaining formula-fare. I don't imagine I knew anything about the Blackhawks' earlier incarnation under Quality Comics until sometime in the seventies, which was both the era when DC began reprinting some of those adventures, and when I obtained a copy of the two volumes of Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS. 

Even without knowing anything about Early Blackhawk, I could tell that DC's version was dependent on the same sort of menaces I saw in other Silver Age titles: lots of space-aliens and costumed super-villains. Not many in either category ever made return appearances, but the one exception was a costumed fellow named Killer Shark. Once or twice, I remember wondering if DC kept giving this character exposure because he'd been a familiar face at Quality.

I never made any deliberate attempt to find out, not even by consulting online resources. But I found out, by accident, that Quality Blackhawk did have just one encounter with a version of Killer Shark. Artist Reed Crandall's design for the villain-- shark-fin cowl, goggles, and sharp teeth-- was pretty much followed by DC later. However, Quality only used the character once as far as I can tell, killing him at story's end-- probably because that Killer Shark was a literal killer, inviting a certain rough justice.

I'm not minded to search out DC's first usage of the character, but I think that, aside from costume modifications, he stayed much the same throughout the Silver Age: a sea-raider who kept coming up with gimmicks to confound the heroic aviators. The above scene is from BLACKHAWK #170 (1962), and involves Lady Blackhawk getting turned into a mermaid for some reason. 

It's likely that Killer Shark is the only villain DC transplanted from Quality, and the DC editors probably brought him back into use only because the original series did not use costumed villains very often, and it was easier to rework an earlier character than make a new one. Though no versions of Killer Shark rate as great villains, he has some distinction for another transformation: he brainwashed Lady Blackhawk into becoming his mate, Queen Killer Shark, which gave Blackhawk and his partners more than a little aggravation. And these are probably the only sixties BLACKHAWK stories that have any dramatic oompf.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 3

 As I reviewed the original INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE, I decided that I had been too vague in giving my reasons for stating that a particular pair of icons had transitioned from being defined by "individual stature" to "collective stature."

In that essay, I stated:

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

I did not give any reasons for saying why I believed the Wasp and the former Ant-Man/Giant-Man had, by their appearances in the AVENGERS title,"excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series." I didn't make it a matter of the sheer number of the two icons' appearances in AVENGERS as opposed to their own feature, though one might construe as much. If so, that would relate to my established principle of Quantitative Escalation.

However, my intent as I recall it was that the appearances of the two icons was of greater qualitative consequence than their appearances in their own feature. This distinction relates, rather, to the principle of Qualitative Escalation, first mentioned in ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2.

There, too, my earlier statements require expansion. A quantitative assessments requires little explanation; it only signifies, "how many times did a serial icon appear in distinct narratives?" But I possibly should have expanded on my definition of "qualitative," though I've made clear, throughout many other posts, that I believe that "literary quality" always inheres in an author's mastery of one or more of the four potentialities. 

If the corpus of stories that starred Giant-Man and the Wasp had shown mastery of one of the potentialities, then I might consider that that corpus was a qualitative success, even if the series failed to catch on with readers and become successful. But on the whole, the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN serial was marked by generally inferior art and writing in comparison with the other Marvel serials of the period. 

In contrast, though there were some subpar AVENGERS stories following the re-entry of Goliath and the Wasp, the overall level of quality was much higher in all four of the potentialities (even there wasn't much more *didactic* appeal in AVENGERS than there had been in ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN). 

For instance, if I choose to focus upon "the creation of new villain-icons" as an indicator of a superhero serial's mythopoeic potentiality, then most of the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN villains barely stir one's memory, except for The Egghead and The Whirlwind.  (And they, like their enemies, generally got better stories when they made appearances in AVENGERS.) In contrast, the AVENGERS feature, even confined only to the first period in which Goliath and the Wasp were members, boasted characters like Ultron and the Grim Reaper, both of whom generated far more consequential narratives for the evolving Marvel mythology. And writer Roy Thomas was certainly at his most inventive in terms of extending parts of the mythology that he did not invent, as with the Kree-Skrull War.

Therefore, Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne benefit from their association with the better stories of AVENGERS, as opposed to those of their own feature, and "qualitatively" their Collective Stature supervenes their Individual Stature. And of course, this is also true given that these two icons made many more appearances in AVENGERS in the ensuing decades, and remain best known to comics-fans as members of that team, not as solo acts. Even stories that may be dramatically bad, like "Henry Pym, Wife Beater," have become inextricable to the cosmos now designated as "Earth-616" in a limited mythopoeic sense.

A NOSE FOR GNOSIS

What a difference a year makes.

It was in May 2019 that I first began referencing the four functions of Joseph Campbell's system as "epistemological patterns"-- which, as far as I know, he did not-- in the essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE. Of those functions I wrote:

For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Yet, in August 2018, I didn't see any connection between my system and epistemology in the FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE series:

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs could display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters...

In subsequent essays I noted that most if not all of my previous essays had indeed been epistemological in nature, but it was, as the HALF-TRUTH essay specifies, an epistemology of "half-truths," which is not the type of knowledge with which philosophers like James and Russell were concerned. 

FOUNT also specified that I deemed merely "functional" aspects of narrative fiction to be aligned to the perceptual form of knowledge, "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while the "super-functional" aspects were aligned to the conceptual form, "knowledge-by-description." I might, at some point, see whether or not my "lateral values" line up with "acquaintance" and "vertical values" with "description." But instead I'll segue to a subject I've neglected far more than epistemology: ontology.

The two philosophical terms were formulated by different thinkers at different times, but in modern times they've become joined at the hip, as in this basic statement online:

ontology asks what exists, and epistemology asks how we can know about the existence of such a thing.

Since I began examining Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy for possible application to my literary hermeneutics, as in essays like MIGHT AND MYTH, I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description." So far, as I observed in MIGHT AND MYTH, I've confined these alignments to sussing out what it means that the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR had more concrescence within the mythopoeic potentiality than the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, though to be sure, that era of SPIDER-MAN is more concrescent with respect ot the dramatic potentiality.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2.5

Before proceeding to the conclusions suggested at the end of Part 2, I'll make some generalizations as to some types of narratives that belong in my category of "magical fantasy stories," always with the caveat that I may make additions or alterations in future.

While as I've said "fantasy" by itself has often been a rubric that can cover everything from Tolkien to Roger Rabbit, the great reputation of Tolkien has resulted in the popularization of the term "high fantasy" for the more Tolkienian forms of fantasy. Wikipedia cites this definition: 

High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy^[1] defined by the epic nature of its setting or by the epic stature of its characters, themes, or plot.^[2] High fantasy is set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the "real" or "primary" world.^[2] This secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set on Earth, the primary or real world, or a rational and familiar fictional world with the inclusion of magical elements.^[3][4][5][6]

The careless writing of this essay implies agreement between all the sources cited, but this is not the case. The first source, a 2011 article on the site Fandomania, not only does not use the high/low distinction-- attributed, with whatever accuracy, to a Brian Stableford book-- but cites two forms of high fantasy that the maybe-Stableford definition would term "low fantasies."

The settings for these quests are generally in one of three varieties: a world separate unto our world, one where our world for all intents and purposes doesn’t even exist; a secondary world that is reached from our world through a portal; or, lastly, a secondary world within our own world. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series are examples of the first variety. They both exist in a completely developed secondary world that is not Earth — Earth doesn’t even exist in their minds. The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic example of a portal into another world variety and the Harry Potter series is a contemporary example of the “world within a world” type of high fantasy.

I'm glad, though, that the uncredited Wiki-writer linked to the Fandomania essay, because Cipera's broader definition is better than the very artificial high/low distinction. Cipera clearly feels that all three forms of fantasy can be associated because they are all drawing on the same wellsprings of myth and folktale to tell similar stories of high romance and adventure. 

So, all three of Cipera's categories would make it into my category of "magical fantasy stories." However, as Part 2 specified, my wider category also includes a folktale like ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. This story includes an element of magic and does not use the competing rationales of either "science" or "just because" to justify the story's wonders. But it also qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" because it takes place in a pre-industrial society that considers magic more important than any other rationale.

In a separate essay I plan to address various examples of stories-- whether from literature or folktales-- that don't fall into my category because they meet only one of the two criteria cited, or explain their wonders with two or even three co-existing rationales. I've already cited one such exception in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, which is the latter type of "hybrid story," mixing "magic" with "just because." But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2

Here's the statement I made at the end of Part 1:

...despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale...

One reason I eliminated "the magic rationale" as the main attraction is that some extremely popular "magical fantasies" make only very minor usages of magic.

Case in point: the ARABIAN NIGHTS folktale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." In the standardized version of the story-- which is the one most often adapted for modern narratives-- poor woodcutter Ali Baba witnesses a gang of thieves using a magical cave to conceal their ill-gotten treasures. The cave-door, which opens or closes in obedience to certain magic words, is the only magical item in the story. Everything else in the narrative, however improbable or melodramatic, would be deemed isophenomenal, governed by naturalistic laws. We don't know if the "open sesame" cave is the result of active or passive magic-- though I tend to favor the former, that some individual placed a spell on the cave-mouth to act as cave-mouths don't usually operate. But there's a sense of a regular magical procedure involved in the treasure-cave's makeup. The cave doesn't open "just because," say, it's funny for the purpose of a gag, a la my earlier example of ROGER RABBIT. That nonsense-rationale would imply the cave might open some times and not others.

The appeal of magical fantasies, whether they use a lot of magic or very little, inheres more in the fact that they reproduce a society that is fully or mostly "pre-industrial," in which it's possible for the characters to invest in magic because there is no competing rationale of "science." That does not mean that there is no science as such in the world, such as (say) the engineering principles needed for Ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. But in an archaic world, science simply is not as IMPORTANT as magic.

So, I'm admitting that "magical fantasies" have a vital appeal because they invest in the magic-rationale and not the other two rationales-- but there's also a greater, supervening appeal in that the contemporary reader/audience is transported back to a time when science had less influence than magic. And I'll look at some possible reasons for that appeal in Part 3.

Parenthetically, Ali Baba got the "just because" treatment in 1937's POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, and in that cartoon short it's clear that gags like "Abu Hassan got 'em anymore" overshadow any investment in even the minor magic of the "open sesame" cave.

 

 

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 1

I see from Google that others have used the reverse-pun in my title before this. Still, I suspect the connotations of my pun are a little different from anyone else's.

In UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR, I suggested that one could regard "fantasy" and "horror"-- categories which usually appear in that famous marketing troika, "fantasy, horror and science fiction"-- as two "super-genres," at least in terms of how they organize what I've called sympathetic and antipathetic affects. Having said all that, I'm going in a different direction now, Now I'm asking the unmusical question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?"

Before going further, I'd note another specification I made here regarding the three rationales all or most authors use to justify the metaphenomena in their stories:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

These rationales become important partly to sorting out some of the problems with the standard colloquial usage of "fantasy." At least where prose fiction is concerned, the "magic rationale" is the one most often connoted with works called "fantasy," because so much of the genre's development in the U.S. was influenced by Tolkien. But colloquially "fantasy" can also take in "just because" works like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. And though "science fiction" as such is usually considered as something of an "opposite number" to fantasy, even within the "Big Tent" of SF one sees certain works labeled "science fantasy."

On a related note, I talked a little bit about the history of my personal response to the "magical fantasy" genre in this Rip Jagger's Dojo comment:

I did not get converted to Tolkien first, but to Lin Carter, at least as editor. I got a half dozen fantasy paperbacks at a college book sale, and they included at least one CONAN, a Ballantine called DISCOVERIES IN FANTASY, and the Lancer collection of JIREL OF JOIRY. My memory is that I saw new depths in those fantasies for adults that I hadn't seen in things directed more at kids, like Oz and Peter Pan. I continued to read voluminously in both fantasy and SF for the rest of my life, but something about seeing a new potential in a genre at just the right age makes me prefer the fantasy genre in an affective sense.

Now, I ask myself, to what extent was my liking for "magical fantasies" associated with the appearance of the magic-rationale?

I think that the concept of magic has definite appeal. Magic usually takes two forms in fiction: one active, one passive. The active form involves some entity-- typically a mortal sorcerer, a god, or a demon-- using magical procedures to influence some aspect of the universe. The passive form takes the form of depicting the existence of entities that are thought to be intrinsically magical, but are not brought into being by anything but the intrinsic rules of a fantasy-universe. One finds both forms in LORD OF THE RINGS, in that characters like Gandalf and Sauron utilize specific procedures to influence their world, while whole categories of entities, such as dwarfs or trolls, are passively magical in nature even though they utilize no magical procedures. 

However, despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale-- which I'll discuss in the next section.