DOMME COMS

Regarding my new term in the title, it came about when I encountered TV Tropes using the abbreviation "Dom Com" as shorthand for "domestic comedy." I've been aware of the term "domestic comedy" since I first began reading about fictional genres, and everyone's heard the term "Rom Com" that became popular in the 1990s. But when I read "Dom Com," I responded with my own "Domme Com."

Now, there are a lot of serial comedies in which two or more characters contend in small ways but end up making up, like the classic I LOVE LUCY. This is the basic aesthetic of what I've called the "accomodation narrative." But any comedy, self-contained or serial, that emphasizes an ongoing imbalance of power would broadly qualify as a Domme Com. I'll concentrate here on heterosexual entanglements, though I'll touch briefly on other possible combinations.

(1) The primary type that I've examined here I'll call "The Delectable Domme." Such stories feature a female Domme constantly exerting her power over a male Subbe (a spelling I'll toss in to distinguish the term in my mind from my other use of "Sub.") Examples I've covered over the years include, with assorted variations, include URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, NISEKOI, and NAGATORO. Usually these are one-on-one encounters, though various support characters may irregularly torment the male protagonist to provide variety.

(2) A second type, "The Deflected Domme," forswears any power-imbalance between the two main hetero characters, but one or more support-characters exert power over one of the main ones. Said support-characters are not necessarily limited to being of a gender opposite to that of the Subbe. For instance, relations between Darrin and Samantha on BEWITCHED are usually pacific and balanced. But many of Samantha's witchy relations intrude on the couple's marital bliss to torment Darrin, usually with minor, annoying transformations. In keeping with countless mother-in-law jokes, Endora is the main Domme, but it may be no coincidence that Samantha's lookalike cousin Serena is the next most frequent female tormentor. Yet Darrin also frequently gets "subbe-jected" to humiliation by his father-in-law and by Endora's brother Arthur, so male Dommes are seen there as well.

(3) I'll term the third type "The World is His Domme," in that there's a Subbe character who's constantly the butt of torments from nearly everyone, male and female, with whom he comes in contact. In the teleseries ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, Costello's character is sometimes given bad treatment by Abbott. But Abbott is in no way Costello's main tormentor; he's just one of many, male and female.

(4) Finally, I'll term the fourth type "Queen of the Tormenting World," because the Subbe suffers from any number of diverse torments from separate sources, like the Costello character-- but the Subbe suffers all these torments largely because he's become tied to a Domme female. The comic strip BLONDIE, which I'll be examining in future essays, is one where husband Dagwood has become the target of everyone in his circle-- neighbors, bosses, cops, pesky salesmen-- specifically because he's married to a dominant spouse. Blondie, for her part, sometimes appears to be an accommodating spouse like Samantha Stevens. But close examination shows that on a semi-regular basis Blondie exerts power over Dagwood, either overtly bullying him in one way or another or humiliating him with acts of "innocent sadism." (Example: Blondie moves a ladder while Dagwood's working on the roof of their house; after Dagwood falls to the ground, Blondie seems unaware of having wrought harm.) 

A second "Queen" example I've often discussed here is MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. In this show Peg Bundy barely makes any bones about tormenting husband Al. Al, unlike Dagwood, responds with insults, but his impotent responses merely underline that he's just as much under Peg's thumb as Dagwood is under Blondie's. MARRIED offers an unusual variation in that the husband-wife couple is mirrored by the relationship of their teenaged kids. Bud, in contrast to the Al-Peg dynamic, occasionally does manage to degrade Kelly because she unlike her mother is stupid. Nevertheless, the majority of their battles validate Kelly, if only because of her dumb luck, so it's pretty obvious that the sibling relationship was designed to mirror that of the married couple.

Next up: Chic Young's not-so-innocent sadist.

NEAR-MYTHS: BATMAN ETERNAL (2014-15)

I'd read some decent reviews of this 2014-15 series, though I've the impression that most of the "big changes" instituted by ETERNAL proved nugatory.

The involved plot, orchestrated mostly by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV, doesn't bear a lot of close examination. It's a big, noisy Bat-soap opera, with the city of Gotham once more under siege by both ordinary criminals and super-crooks. Yet ETERNAL qualifies as a "near-myth" by virtue of its attempt to rework two previous celebrated multi-issue storylines, respectively 1996's LONG HALLOWEEN and 2003's HUSH. From HALLOWEEN, Snyder and Tynion took the idea of a foundational conflict between the mobsters and the costumed freaks, while from HUSH the writers emulated the mystery of a Master Manipulator who somehow marshals most of Batman's major foes against him. I don't think Snyder and Tynion managed to weave a tight master-trope as HALLOWEEN did, and the "hidden mastermind" schtick in ETERNALis put off for so long with red herrings that I for one lost interest in the Big Reveal.

Some myth-kernels of interest:

Contrary to some theories that Catwoman's estranged father might be venerable mob-boss Carmine Falcone, ETERNAL reveals that her true "bad dad" is a different mobster, introduced here for the first time, name of Rex Calabrese. Despite an acrimonious relationship, Calabrese eventually talks Selina into becoming a new Gotham crime-boss-- which I imagine did not last long.

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl is more or less in mourning for Dick Grayson, since I believe this is the period when he was supposed to be in a temporary state of death. Yet she apparently has some sort of tentative interaction with "second Robin" Jason Todd, reborn in the form of Red Hood, which is sort of like dating the first Robin's symbolic sibling. It's a nice touch when, thanks to the Mad Hatter's connivance, Batgirl fights Hood under the impression he's the Joker, who's a bugaboo for both characters.

Spoilers works out her daddy issues the same way Catwoman does.

And the eighties version of Alfred's daughter, Julia Pennyworth, is reborn in a new form. apparently a POC of some sort, though her racial makeup was not expounded in ETERNAL. She becomes part of the Bat-team but I don't know if she eventually got a costume or what.

And Batman pretty much remains Batman. So it's a good lively read, but nothing transformative.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

At first Kanigher kept the teen and adult Wonder Women separate, though issue #120 (1961), he found a way to cross over the respective icons by having each of them encounter the same peril, "the Mercurian Menace," but at different times in the Amazon's heroic career. Then in #122 he began to play with time, showing Princess Diana getting de-aged to her younger selves, including not just "Wonder Girl" but also "Wonder Tot."

Then in WW #124 Kanigher introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman and her teenaged self both existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though both icons continued to enjoy independent stories. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. Given that both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were designed to generate their own separate cosmoses, every story with both characters after WW #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, just as much Thor and Iron Man are in every co-starring appearance in THE AVENGERS, which is also a semi-bonded ensemble, but only for those characters whose own features reached a certain level of escalation (as opposed to the earlier example of Giant-Man and the Wasp, explained here).

CURIOSITIES #39: "WHO'S AFRAID OF A DUMB BUNNY?"

 Apparently, Dan Jergens was back in 2015, because when he wrote a chapter of his BAT-MITE series, he guest-starred The Inferior Five-- consisting of The Blimp, Awkwardman, White Feather, Merryman, and...

TOUGH BUNNY?????

So Jergens was too politically correct to call her "Dumb Bunny," for fear some noodge would say he was marginalizing women or the like. Yet the character he calls "Tough Bunny" is still as dopey as the original "Dumb Bunny." So he's still willing to tell jokes about dumb women, but he just won't say the WORDS "dumb bunny." 

Plus which, even the corny humor of the original INFERIOR FIVE was funnier than anything Jergens wrote in this dreckfest.

So glad I didn't spend any money on this one.

 

MORE MORE NAMOR

 I've been having a good conversation with Sub-Mariner fan "John" in the comments for this 2017 post, so I thought I'd dish out a few more observations on Marvel's waterlogged warrior.

One thing I didn't mention in my 2017 essay is that from time to time I go searching through the SUB-MARINER comics of the forties and fifties, looking for stories that fit my specialized category of "mythcomics." What I've found so far as mostly decent formula stories with really fine Bill Everett art. This isn't a knock against the Golden Age version of the character. Dozens of long-lived characters were better served by their art than by their plots or characterization. Everett's SUB-MARINER is in my view on the same level as Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN; great to look at, but not that much story-wise.

Still, there were some interesting twists here and there. In issue #38 of the second SUB-MARINER series (February 1955), Everett apparently felt that other people's stories had taken his once-popular character and powered him down too much. So his solution in "The Sub-Mariner Strikes" was to "re-power" Namor with the idea of restoring his superman-status. After he's restored to his former status, the Emperor announces that he wants to launch a new war of conquest against the surface-dwellers-- a war that never gets off the ground, aside from the one task he gives Namor: to dispose of an air-breather ship. Namor ends up sparing the humans' lives, though not without regrets, since they act like assholes to him. No further suggestions of aggression by Namor's people take place in the ensuing stories, so perhaps the editors decided that they wanted Everett to confine himself to done-in-one tales.

Then in issue #40-- three issues away from the title's cancellation-- Everett wrote and drew "The Sub-Mariner and the Icebergs," a tale which might have provided some tropes that Stan Lee used in his 1960s revision of Namor's origin.

An American fleet of ships intrudes upon the arctic oceans where Namor's sub-mariners live. Namor immediately believes the flotilla is an invasion force and uses his people's tech to surround the ships with icebergs. In self-defense the ships' leader orders the icebergs dynamited, which causes some destruction of the sea-dwellers' nearby city-- which recalls the mission of Captain McKenzie in the Marvel Origin. Everett then has the Emperor send Namora to sabotage the ships, which resembles the way Namor's mother Princess Fen infiltrates McKenzie's ship with some idea of spying on the humans. (How she was going to spy with her blue skin hanging out was never explained.) 

Namora is captured and held hostage, which forces Namor to talk turkey with the captain of the flotilla. He claims to be the head of a scientific expedition looking for uranium-- and though this isn't necessarily a venture without ANY military applications, it proves true that the humans aren't intentionally encroaching on the sub-mariners. 

Namor accepts the humans' pledge of peace, but his evil cousin Byrrah tries to re-incite hostilities. However, before he can do so, the humans inform Namor that his own interference with the icebergs has triggered an unstoppable seismic reaction that will destroy the sub-mariners' city. Over Byrrah's protests, Namor evacuates his people-- and sure enough, the city is destroyed by a seaquake. The story ends with a plea for peace and a touch of tragedy as the subsea people seek to rebuild "their shattered empire." In FANTASTIC FOUR #4, Stan Lee may have remembered "Icebergs" when he had Atlantis destroyed by nuclear tests and its people scattered, though only a few more Sub-Mariner stories transpired before Namor was reunited with his people once again.

THE READING RHEUM: DON RODRIGUEZ, CHRONICLES OF SHADOW VALLEY (1922)

Except for readers who have a desire to understand the many historical permutations of what I call "the magical fantasy" genre, most people are acquainted with the early 20th-century writer Lord Dunsany in terms of his being an influence on two better-known authors, Lovecraft and Tolkien. The only widely distributed paperback editions of Dunsany's work were six works reprinted releases under the Ballantine fantasy imprint in the early 1970s.

I read most of the Dunsany paperbacks many years ago, except for DON RODRIGUEZ, the author's first published novel. I had enjoyed most of the works in the Ballantine series, both short stories and two other fantasy-novels, so I expected to find the same virtues in RODRIGUEZ as I'd found in the others.

But this first novel is not only devoid of Dunsany's signature use of exalting language, it's written in a tiresome, pseudo-archaic dialect that never uses one word when ten can be fit in. Here's a sample from the first chapter:

Now there were no wars at that time so far as was known in Spain, but that old lord's eldest son, regarding those last words of his father as a commandment, determined then and there in that dim, vast chamber to gird his legacy to him and seek for the wars, wherever the wars might be, so soon as the obsequies of the sepulture were ended. And of those obsequies I tell not here, for they are fully told in the Black Books of Spain, and the deeds of that old lord's youth are told in the Golden Stories. The Book of Maidens mentions him, and again we read of him in Gardens of Spain.

Far worse is the fact that almost nothing of consequence happens in RODRIGUEZ. The titular don is a young man disinherited by his dying father back in the days of medieval Spain. He goes forth to make his own way, planning to acquire both a wife and a castle, not necessarily in that order. This might sound like a good setup for adventure, but Dunsany almost seems to be trying NOT to describe anything exciting. The most engrossing event occurs early in the novel, when the young Don rents quarters in an inn. The evil innkeeper, borrowing a schtick from the stories of Theseus, plans to kill the Don when he sleeps that night and steal all of his possessions. A servant warns the Don, who sets up a trap for the innkeeper and kills him. 

The Don then agrees to let the servant who warned him become his servant, even though the impecunious nobleman doesn't have a lot of money. Then the two wander about getting involved in various paltry events-- talking with a sorcerer who shows them visions of past and future wars, liberating another nobleman from some officious policemen. After the duo go through various unexciting events, the Don eventually makes a contact who initially seems supernatural, but is not, and that individual sets the Don up with a castle, so that he can marry a woman he's conveniently fallen in love with.

The near-total lack of romance and adventure might make one suspect that Dunsany had some notion of emulating satirical works like those of Cervantes or Voltaire. But there's no satire here, and I'm almost at a loss to figure out what Dunsany was trying to accomplish.

The closest clue I can find appears in an online observation about Dunsany's historical significance to the fantasy-genre.

Lord Dunsany's first novel, "Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley conveys its young disinherited protagonist through a fantasized Spain, gifting him with a Sancho Panza companion, good luck with magicians, and a castle" [The Encyclopedia of Fantasy]. It is a landmark tale for Dunsany, beginning his move from the otherworldly short stories for which his reputation is justly famous to novels, such as the follow-up The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Charwoman's Shadow. L. Sprague de Camp has said: "Dunsany was the second writer (William Morris in the 1880s being the first) fully to exploit the possibilities of ... adventurous fantasy laid in imaginary lands, with gods, witches, spirits, and magic, like children's fairy tales but on a sophisticated adult level." But more than this, Dunsany was probably the single greatest influence on fantasy writers during the first half of the 20th century.H P Lovecraft, in early fiction, like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, imitated him, and very well.-- FANTASTIC FICTION.

It's probably quite true that in terms of "adult fantasy"-- that is, excluding juvenile-oriented authors like Baum and Barrie-- that Dunsany was picking up on a precedent established by William Morris. Morris is of extreme importance, as De Canp said, to the history of otherworldly fantasy-- but I've read and reviewed Morris' four otherworld-fantasies, and he adopted an archaic, fusty style like what Dunsany uses in RODRIGUEZ. I don't think Morris ever wrote anything as utterly dull as RODRIGUEZ. But perhaps Dunsany had some idea of emulating, not just Morris, but the episodic nature of early chivalric romances. That might explain why he was able to use his more imaginative language in his earlier short stories (which date back to the early 1900s), but for his novel Dunsany chose to follow this dull episodic model. Of his handful of later novels, I've read just two, and I remember both as having the same enchanting combination of beautiful language and engrossing magical concepts I found in the earlier short stories. But RODRIGUEZ barely qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" at all, and then only because of the hero's rather pointless encounter with the sorcerer. I saw one review claiming that the Don makes a small cameo in a 1926 Dunsany novel, THE CHARWOMAN'S SHADOW, which I remember liking and may attempt to reread for comparison's sake in the near future.

MYTHCOMICS: "BLACK MAGIC IN A SLINKY GOWN" (BAFFLING MYSTERIES #6, 1952)

I didn't remember to dedicate this month, the month of Halloween, to mythcomics in a horrific vein. However, in one sense Halloween is as much celebrated for all forms of fantasy, not just horror, and I've already suggested how the two super-genres are intrinsically tied together in this essay.  So my choice of a Mary Marvel story about "sky spirits" makes a good contrast to a tale centered on the specter of fear-- even though I've chosen another obscure story that even most Golden Age fans have forgotten. As I've done with many such stories with no definite credits, I'll assign total credit for the script to the artist whom fan-artists have tentatively identified as Mike Sekowsky.

Despite the title, neither anything magical nor any slinky gowns play a special role here, and GOWN isn't even explicitly about sexual enticement. However, I feel sure that when Sekowsky conceived the story in 1952, he would have been riffing on one of the most popular tropes seen during the horror-comics boom of 1948-1954. That trope is that of the conniving "black widow" murderess. No matter what form of phenomenality each story utilizes, the basic setup is always one in which a scheming woman marries a man, often older than she is, and then plots to murder him, usually with the help of a male lover, often younger than the intended murder victim. 

The story proper introduces the reader to slinky Leonore Black (complete with a telltale hourglass on her dress in the splash panel). Leonore has just married an older, richer man named Richard, but before so doing, she broke off an engagement with a more age-appropriate young man, Dan. Dan is not however Leonore's co-conspirator, and so his only function in the opening scene is to inform the reader that Richard happens to have a huge collection of dead spiders. Leonore coyly references her intention to knock off her new husband, but Dan doesn't pick up on the allusion.

Richard doesn't have long to enjoy his marriage to Leonore. He shows her his dead spider-collection-- the provenance of which is never explained-- and remarks that he fell in love with Leonore's arachnid-like allure. But Leonore is not swayed by flattery, for she carries out her next part of her plan by changing into a giant black widow spider, wrapping Richard in webbing, and giving him with a presumably poisonous bite. Leonore certainly wins no prizes for subtlety in her method of murder, but the police are duly stumped by a victim covered in webs, and no blame attaches to the newly-made widow. Her new status, though, gives her a cultural excuse to wear black all the time.

Leonore also isn't worried about social proprieties, for in a matter of days she's chatted up Dan and talked him into proposing to her. Apparently, even though she's soliloquized about using Richard's money to go after spider-killers everywhere, she harbors some idea of attempting a normal life with Handsome Dan. He takes her to visit a friend who runs a local aviary, and to Leonore's horror, the aviary guy likes to feed some of his birds with -- spiders. Leonore doesn't expose herself right away, but she does tell Dan an abridged "origin story." Young Leonore had an early fascination with spiders. Her paternal unit passed away, and her new stepfather tended to beat both Leonore and her mother. A black widow spider seemingly intervened, killing the stepfather. And after that, with no explanations related to either magic or super-science, Leonore simply manifests her "inner spider," and this gives her the power to change into a giant black widow.

Leonore of course has no intention of letting Dan's aviary friend off the hook, and he's her next target. The second murder makes even a dullard like Dan suspicious, so he invites his fiancee to his laboratory for a chat. Once there, Leonore, who perhaps is not the most attentive listener, learns that her intended is a zoologist, and that his lab is full of boxes conveniently labeled as containing toads, lizards, and wasps. Though Dan has not killed any spiders so far as the reader knows, Leonore picks up on his suspicions and decides that it's time for another extermination. Providentially, Dan has "giant wasps" in one of those boxes, and as soon as the insects are released, they attack the giant spider and sting it to death. Dead Leonore conveniently reverts to her original human form and Dan decides not to divulge her secret to the world.

 While male authors don't have a monopoly on the creation of female monsters, real or figurative, I can't avoid noting that nearly all the authors writing and drawing horror comics during this boom-period were men. That probably had some effect on the sheer quantity of "black widow murderess" stories. However, in GOWN, the monstrous female is barely motivated by killing for profit, given that her primary focus is the defense of the tiny arthropods with whom she's obsessed. The influence of her brutal stepfather makes Leonore more sympathetic than most cold-hearted vixens, even though her insanity is no less obvious. Real black widow spiders certainly are known for slaying the males who mate, or try to mate, with them, though at least one online source says that the lady arachnids are usually motivated purely by hunger. Leonore clearly doesn't eat her victims, though a few horror-publishers of the period might have been willing to go there. But the script does play around with one other spider-trait. In the course of the origin-story, Leonore mentions, seemingly to no point, that "I spend hours at the spinning wheel." The only symbolic reason to mention this, since it has no relevance to the plot, would be because Leonore wants to "spin" in some way analogous to the way (some) spiders spin webs. It's at least of passing interest that spinning wheels are dominantly associated with females, because in most tribal cultures, women weave and sew clothing for everyone. 

The monster-woman's last name of course references "black widow spider." Her first name, derived from "Eleanor," doesn't have any spidery connotations, but it does have a general horror-association, in that it sounds like the name of the deceased heroine from Poe's "The Raven."