NULL-MYTHS: ["A HOUSE NAMED DEATH"] (SUB-MARINER #41-42, 1971)

 As I've mentioned from time to time, I don't generally do "null-myth" reviews just for ordinary junky comics. A comics-story has to be particularly bad to earn such a review, and not just in terms of having bad verisimilitude, but bad mythicity/artifice as well. Even given these self-imposed strictures, I find it amazing that I haven't managed to savage more than one of the many works of Gerry Conway up till now. 

In the early seventies I turned 15, and I very nearly hated every comic with Conway's name on it. In retrospect, I would give him his due by saying that unlike a lot of other pros who turned out tons of undistinguished formula-work, Conway did seem to have a genius for co-creating characters with great potential-- the Punisher, the Man-Thing, Killraven-- though usually that potential was realized not by Conway but by some later raconteur. I despised most of his famed run on SPIDER-MAN, and the best that I can say of it is that he was no longer trying to be "artsy" on the title, as he was in some of his early scripts for DAREDEVIL and THE SUB-MARINER.

I take the title "A House Named Death" from the cover-copy of the second story in this SUB-MARINER two-parter. At the time of this tale, the feature was clearly losing steam, and the editors sought to give Prince Namor a new cachet by killing off his beloved (4-5 years before Gwen Stacy in SPIDER-MAN) and sending the hero off on various peripatetic adventures. "House" essentially sticks the Atlantean prince in a sci-fi Gothic. One night, the prince is flying along, minding his own business, when some guy on the ground zaps Namor so that he falls. The mysterious guy is joined by an aged woman, and they skulk off into the darkness.

Namor wakes up on the cobblestones of a nearby small American town. where he's immediately succored by Lucille, an attractive young brunette. He apparently recovers enough that she can lead him to shelter, given that she couldn't carry him by herself-- and as it happens, Lucille's dwelling place is the house of her aunt, first given the peculiar name "Aunt Serr." Namor is weak from both his injuries and his lack of exposure to water, though no one in Conway's story, including Namor, ever thinks about his getting access to some H2O. After Lucille gives Sub-Mariner a little set-up on his circumstances, he passes out again-- and wakes up chained in a room by Aunt Serr, whom the reader recognizes as the old lady from before. Auntie relates some of her personal tragedies to Namor, about her birthing a "devil spawned monster" due to radiation exposure, and she seems to be contemplating some "unformed" master plan and thinking about using Namor to help her. The prince breaks loose but gets zapped again by Auntie's son, who is now revealed to have the body of a humanoid-shaped slab of rock.

After some more fights and histrionics, Auntie shows Namor the mechanism she'd used to cement her hold on the locals, which she has also used to transform them into a bunch of multiform monsters, though we don't find this out until Part 2. At the end of Part 1, Auntie reveals that she's used her machine on her niece, causing Lucille to transform into a hot energy-girl, whom Auntie wants to be the bride of her monstrous son. Lucille, who in this form is totally under Auntie's mental control, zaps Namor for the cliffhanger ending. 

Possibly Auntie and her rockhead son think Namor's dead, for Part 2 begins with him recovering in the wilderness, where the villains desposited him. Conway tosses in an oddball erudite reference to the Spartan custom of abandoning deformed infants in the wild, yet he can't find time to note that the rain falling upon Namor's form, courtesy of artist George Tuska, must be restoring the prince's strength. Sub-Mariner wanders into town, and, after another gratuitous fight-scene, meets the town's residents, whom have all been made into monsters by the woman who wants her freakish son to have a town of freaks to cohabit with (though there's no indication that "Rock" ever does so). Soon Namor meets the rest of the townfolk, who bear Aunt Serr no good will for their fate.

The only thing Namor learns from the freak-people is that they claim that Aunt Serr has no niece, which may mean that none of them have ever laid eyes on Lucille (despite the fact that she was first seen traipsing around their town in her human-looking form). Namor can't comprehend this mystery, so he makes a frontal assault on Auntie's house again, and once more gets knocked for a loop by Lucille's powers.

 For anyone who may've come in late to the story, Auntie soliloquizes once more about her plans to mate Lucille with her son, and she makes a loose implication that she may have created Lucille from some artificial process, as she threatens the energy-girl: "Do as I say, you silly fool-- lest I return you to the dissipator." Possibly Conway meant to imply that this was the same device by which Aunt Serr transformed normal humans into monsters, though if so then the "dissipator" must be one of the more all-purpose multi-tasking machines ever depicted in Marvel Comics. Namor recovers just as Big Rock Serr comes in, and as they fight again, the townspeople sneak into Auntie's lab and blow everything up. Lucille, still for some strange reason more attracted to Namor's biceps than to Big Rock's literal "boulder shoulders," finally turns on Aunt Serr, blasting the old lady and then using her power to send Sub-Mariner careening out of the house, saving him from being consumed in the conflagration.

The one amusing thing I noticed on this reading of the "House" tale is that Aunt Serr's name is almost certainly meant to be a pun on the word "answer." But like everything else in the story, this wordplay is inconsummate since even the reader who "gets it" can have no strong idea what it references. Aunt Serr may believe that her mad course is the only "answer" to her dilemma, and Conway gives her a few lines in which she waxes Nietzchean: "No man is free... Only by succumbing to the will of the universe-- of those greater than themselves-- can they find true freedom." But it's a clumsy moral at best.

The verisimilitude blunders throughout the story are considerable, but those affecting the mythicity are far worse. Conway might have penned the story of a woman who felt her personal creativity cursed by the uncaring fates, and who decides to mutate all the "norms" in order to make them share her misery. The subplot about "how do you handle the problem of Lucille's origin" goes absolutely nowhere, and Conway further undercuts his own narrative by working in a bunch of irrelevant ongoing subplots, one of which is meant to cross-promote events transpiring in Conway's continuity for DAREDEVIL. In the annals of out-of-control stories in the medium of comics, "A House Named Death" deserves some sort of retroactive Golden Raspberry at least.

MYTHCOMICS: “MOURNING PREY” (AMAZING ADVENTURES #39, 1976)

When mainstream comic books began a somewhat more adult-oriented phase during the Early Bronze Age—which was also the time when I began thinking more coherently about comics characters as myths—I might have judged most of the better works “mythic” simply because they dealt successfully with larger-than-life topics. This POV didn’t prevent from perceiving that a lot of stories that played around with such topics were just pretentious twaddle. But when I did encounter a well-executed series with genuine mythic concerns, I probably saw the whole series as mythic. These days, however, my analyses depend on closer reading. Thus, some stories in a given series may seem primarily dramatic or didactic in their appeal, and only one or two are truly mythopoeic.

Marvel’s KILLRAVEN series, a post-apocalyptic take on H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, started out as largely generic and unremarkable. The series took on its greater complexity (mythic and otherwise) once writer Don McGregor began collaborating with penciller P. Craig Russell, and many of the stories they executed are enjoyable on the purely dramatic level, such as issue 32’s “Only the Computer Shows Me Any Respect.” One of their strongest mythopoeic tales, however, was also the one that concluded the series. Years after the termination of the KILLRAVEN series, McGregor and Russell re-united one last time on a Marvel Graphic Novel featuring one more adventure of the heroic title character and his roving band of Martian-fighters. This reunion was interesting but flawed in many respects, suggesting the Wolfean aphorism “You can’t go home again.”

The letters-column of AMAZING ADVENTURES #39 notes that the featured story was not intended to be a conclusion to the peripatetic series, since the news of cancellation came down after the story’s completion. Indeed, “Mourning Prey” even devotes one panel to foregrounding a story for the next issue, which tale would of course never be told. But the unnamed person answering the letters opined that “Prey” did provide a “haunting” conclusion to the series, and with this sentiment I readily concur.

“Prey” is rife with allusions to various ambivalent states of mind. On the extrinsic level, this parallels many of the ways that post-apocalyptic stories enact their charms upon their readers. The readers realize that within the story, the characters suffer greatly from having their formerly peaceful world severely restructured. But remodeling the world gives the author the chance to shape things to mirror his own preferences, and from that flows the basic appeal of the subgenre. On page 16 Killraven says, ‘Earth will never be the same as it was before the Martian invasion.” Readers identity with the hero’s travails, but at the same time they know that their pleasure stems from that chaotic upheaval.

Like most of the McGregor-Russell collaborations, “Prey” starts out with Killraven and his band of Martian-fighting “Freemen” wandering through some strange environment for some ill-defined purpose—in this case, the Okefenokee Swamp in January 2020. January usually connotes the demise of the old year’s troubles and the promise of a new year’s bounties. Russell’s art certainly conveys the sumptuosity of a swamp far more baroque than any in ordinary reality, but McGregor’s prose contradicts this impression, as Killraven is made to think that “the morning future seems empty and dead.” Throughout the story McGregor finds three or four other ways to work “morning” into the tale, though none of the characters—Killraven, M’Shulla, Old Skull, Carmilla Frost and their local guides Huey and Louie-- ever draws the parallels that McGregor wants the readers to draw between this word and the homophone “mourning.” Carmilla is the first character to voice the latter word when she bestows the name of “Mourning Prey” upon the creature that attacks the Freemen during their trek. Here too McGregor combines ambivalent content — “mourning” because of the creature’s “melancholy quality” and “prey” because she seems intent on making the Freemen her victims. Omitted from Carmilla’s exegesis is the likelihood that the name really stems from a play on the words “morning prayer,” a religious observance which usually connotes hope, not unlike the month of January. No one in the story uses the word “pray,” though toward story’s end we do get mention of a “communion.”

The story not only opens in media res, it skips back three times from real-time to yesterday-time before finally remaining in real-time for the duration. I’ll forswear all the diegetic hopscotching and stick to a linear telling. While Killraven, his friends and the guides are tromping through the swamp, they find their way blocked by a series of webby cocoons hanging from the thick trees. Not willing to go around, Killraven blasts the cocoons with his pistol. Out rain dog-sized caterpillars that attack the travelers. While in the process of fending off the creepy-crawlies, the hero spots a golden-hued, unspeaking woman flying overhead with butterfly-wings, glaring at them. Later that night the rebels make camp, and Carmilla meditates on the butterfly-woman’s genesis, without ever explicitly claiming that she’s the result of Martian genetic manipulation. Moments after Carmilla puts a name to the “sentient identity” of the strange female, Mourning Prey attacks the group, commanding a horde of golden butterflies able to spit formic acid. Killraven himself seems to suffer a telepathic assault from the woman, who seizes him and lifts him into the sky. Killraven levels his pistol at her head, but for some reason does not fire. Then, before she’s flown high enough to injure the hero, Mourning Prey drops Killraven into the swamp-waters. While both he, M’Shulla and one of the guides are knocked out of action, somehow Mourning Prey spirits away Carmilla, Old Skull, and the other guide. Killraven and M’Shulla tromp around the swamp looking for their friends and having flashbacks to the yesterday-action.

Then the sound of Old Skull’s flute leads them to a blissful arbor, where Mourning Prey and her butterflies are entertaining the missing trio. Old Skull claims that through telepathic contact the butterfly-woman has realized that the travelers didn’t mean her any harm (a conclusion not entirely believable: surely Killraven guessed that giant cocoons had some sort of living beings in them?) But in any case Mourning Prey forgives the injuries done her, and by coincidence just happens to be ready to send forth her butterfly-progeny to seek out their individual fates, whatever they may be. Russell sells this shaky conclusion with intense images of “an embrace by sight, a communion of hands,” and Killraven watches raptly as the butterfly-mother’s brood—who may or may not develop as she did—fly off into the sunlight.

The poetic trope of the ugly caterpillar metamorphosing into the lovely butterfly sees sustained usage here, almost as much as all the references to the “sunsets and dawns” mentioned in McGregor’s closing paragraph. Indeed, Mourning Prey’s chimerical change of heart may mirror the dual nature of reality as it’s experienced both by fictional characters and real readers: the dark experiences of loss and death, counterbalanced by hopes for renewed life and rebirth. This ambivalence appears even in a possible but unconfirmable inspiration for the butterfly-woman’s cognomen: the “mourning cloak” butterfly. The living creature was so named by various Germanic/Nordic peoples in reference to a myth-image of a widow who, though garbed in the dark colors of mourning, allows just a little bit of color to show in her attire, the better to express her hopes for a renewal and recovery of future life.

MYTHCOMICS: “EYES OF THE SERPENT” (SUPERMAN FAMILY #174, 1975-76)

 

In one reminiscence Roy Thomas recalled that his one-time DC editor Mort Weisinger was the first person he Thomas heard use the term “mythology” for a corpus of comic-book stories, in particular the “Superman Family” titles over which Weisinger held sway for the entirety of the Silver Age. I would guess that this was just a convenient tag for the editor, that he probably cared little or not at all about what comprised a genuine archaic mythology, or what status if any modern-day stories might have as “myths.” Still, in the late 1950s Weisinger made some concerted effort to have his writers utilize far more fantasy/SF tropes in the Super-books than had previously been the norm. Not all such metaphenomenal tropes are automatically mythic in nature. Yet as it happened, many writers in Weisinger’s stable—Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman and of course Jerry Siegel—did manage to use these tropes to tell a handful of stories with a high level of mythic concrescence.

However, Weisinger was edged out of DC just in time for the debut of the Bronze Age in 1970, and the Super-books were parceled out to assorted editors. Julie Schwartz took custody of the two titles starring the Big Blue Cheese, SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS. But though Schwartz’s Silver Age writers had also produced a respectable number of myth-stories, in the Bronze Age the editor favored in large part two writers given to penning very gimmicky, superficial tales: Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin. When three of the ancillary Super-features—SUPERGIRL, JIMMY OLSEN and LOIS LANE—failed to sell well, DC cancelled the individual titles and transferred their features to a portmanteau book, THE SUPERMAN FAMILY. As it happens, it was in this title that editor Schwartz and writer Maggin produced one of the few stories that can stand alongside the best myth-outings of Siegel, Binder and Dorfman.

The first page of Kurt Schaffenberger’s art for “Eyes of the Serpent” is a splash-page portraying a scene that does not literally occur in the story: Supergirl flying into combat against a giant winged dragon, while on the dragon’s back rides a green-scaled humanoid. The humanoid looks a bit like a frog-man, but Maggin’s caption makes clear that this fellow so viridian is also ophidian: “At the dawn of time, it was the acid tongue of a serpent that brought evil into the world—a serpent much like the one that now challenges Supergirl!” In this introductory sentence, Maggin establishes that in this world, he validates as real the story of the Garden of Eden, including Eve’s temptation by a serpent later identified with Satan. However, the story Maggin tells is about a serpent who is only “much like” the Biblical tempter, the better to avoid any accusations of mixing serious religious figures with the “let’s pretend” of a comic book.

As the story proper begins, the same serpent-man from the splash, Lord Beriak, stands in an indeterminate location (full of rocks and smoky vapors) along with other serpent-men, who give Beriak his assignment. He must journey from wherever the serpent-people make their home to a college in Florida, where the Kryptonian heroine works as a guidance counselor in her Linda Danvers identity. Beriak's purpose is that of “reasserting our dominance over the human race.” (Some influence from Robert E. Howard’s “serpent-men” stories seems likely, given that the snake-people are never identified as either aliens or supernatural demons.)

Once Beriak arrives in the fictitious Florida town of New Athens—where, for once, the locale plays a role in a Super-story—he takes on the appearance of a good-looking human male and contrives to meet Linda Danvers. Linda/Supergirl is somewhat attracted to the false flesh of Beriak, but she doesn’t immediately agree to date him. Since Beriak’s as-yet-unrevealed master plan requires him to gain mental dominance over Supergirl, he decides that she may become more pliable if he wears her down a little. To that end he summons a dragon from the vasty deep of the neighboring ocean and makes it run amuck in New Athens, so that the heroine will appear and bring the beast to heel. (Though dragons have some status in Bible lore, this critter is just another of DC’s countless convenient prehistoric survivals.)

While all this is going on, a mysterious young fellow named “Davy” appears at the college, and he like the serpent-man shows some ability with exerting persuasive mojo. The Davy character, created by Maggin for a three-part Green Arrow story in ACTION COMICS, is given no precise origin, but he’s clearly meant to be identified with the youthful David of the Bible, since Davy carries a lyre on which he can play enchanting music, and a sling with which he can cast stones, like the one David used to defeat Goliath. Maggin does not ever say that Davy is identical with Bible-David, who after all aged, sinned and died in the course of his narrative. But since the House of David was associated (in a roundabout way) with the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, Davy is as associated with the powers of Heaven as the serpent-men are with the Devil.

In addition, in what may be the shortest foreshadowing in a comic book, an orange-picker falls unconscious after eating an orange in a local grove. The man is never seen again, though by customary expectations the reader would assume he’s okay once the threat of the serpent-men has been vanquished.

The disguised Beriak once more encounters Linda Danvers after her heroic other-self has driven off the winged dragon. This time, he places her under his mental thrall, at least enough that she accepts a date with him. As Beriak leads his victim to the slaughter, Davy follows along, sometimes playing the music on his lyre, though for reasons undisclosed the serpent-man can’t hear it. (Perhaps Maggin believed the legend that snakes can’t hear or thought that his audience would believe as much.)

Beriak takes his date to an orange orchard—possibly the same one where the unnamed man collapsed—and ramps up the Eden-references by getting Linda to eat one of the tree’s “forbidden fruits.” Whjen Linda eats the orange, it apparently puts her under Beriak’s total control. Beriak then reveals his scaly other self and makes the Girl of Steel perform a few super-feats for his amusement. Then he finally reveals his master plan. Beneath one of the orange-trees in the orchard—presumably the one from which Linda ate, just to keep up the parallel with the Biblical Tree of Knowledge—lies a “golden stone” called the Eden Rock. Once Beriak compels Supergirl to surrender her life-energy to the stone, this maneuver will give the serpent-race total dominion over humanity and all of its superheroic defenders.

However, Supergirl has been shamming: she caught on to his imposture early on. The two super-beings fight, and though Beriak gets the upper hand once, Davy is on hand to distract him with a handily-hurled sling-stone. Beriak finally recognizes Davy as an old foe of his Satanic species, and Davy uses his magic to keep Beriak restrained while Supergirl tunnels beneath the earth and destroys the Eden Rock, so that no one can use it again. Then, as the enemies square off again, Beriak’s fellow serpents, who are watching from afar, decide to call back their agent, commenting that he was stymied by “our old nemesis, the immortal singer David.” Supergirl and Davy converse briefly and the story ends with a minor coda at Linda’s workplace.

It would appear that the serial’s Florida setting was the only reason for Maggin to substitute an orange for the forbidden food, though to be sure some scholars don’t believe the Biblical fruit was an apple, either. Maggin doesn’t say why this particular delicacy is forbidden, or who forbade it, or why eating it doesn’t really affect Supergirl at all. Presumably the only parallel is an inverted one: unlike Eve, Supergirl resists the blandishments of the serpent, and so preserves her world in contrast to Eve losing Eden for herself and Adam.

As noted, since the Biblical David was not “immortal” like Davy, there can only be a symbolic connection between the two. Davy is what Carl Jung might have called a “puer eternus,” an eternal child—which is, to an extent, an archetype to which Youthful David subscribes as well. Bible-David has no connection with the mythology of Eden except in the sense that David provides a link between Adam and Jesus of Nazareth. In a larger sense, of course, the expulsion of the first Man and Woman from Eden leads to Christ’s sacrifice to redeem humanity, so the Fall foreshadows the Redemption, and the general defeat of Satanic evil. In addition, in Maggin’s scenario Davy is meant to be something of a destined warrior like David: able to overcome evildoers who seem far more powerful than he.

There is nothing paralleling the Eden Rock in Genesis. However, there are a few foundation-stones in the Bible and in later Judeo-Christian commentary. In the Zohar, God is said to have unleashed the flood—the instrument by which the Divinity eradicates almost all the sinning spawn of Adam and Eve—by moving a foundation-stone called the Eben Shetiyah. There is no firm evidence in the story that Maggin knew of this trope. But given that he was already juggling the myths of Eden, it’s not improbable to think he might work in one from the Flood-Myth, even if he does turn it into a standard comic-book gimmick, “the thing that makes all humanity bow down.”

Lastly and leastly, Beriak’s name doesn’t seem to have any strong forbears, Biblical or otherwise. There is a Canaanite deity named Berith or Baal-Berith, who later becomes a Christian demon, but in this case it’s just as possible that “Beriak” took no influence from this figure, that the serpent-man just has a nonsense-name. It’s of passing interest that “Berith” means “covenant,” which reference could take us back to Flood-mythology—but that’s not a holy hill on which I’d choose to make my stand.

MYTHCOMICS: “SAVING FACE” (THE QUESTION #13-14, 1987)

One of the aspects O’Neil frequently touched on in his Bronze Age Batman stories was the notion of the hero as a master martial artist. Prior to O’Neil, Batman fought like a boxer most of the time, with occasional touches of judo or wrestling. But even though the author imported into the Batman mythos many tropes of the martial arts genre, one particular trope—that of the use of martial arts as a means of personal growth—made no appearances in O’Neil’s Batman-tales, or, for that matter, in anyone else’s Bat-tales. The Cowled Crusader needed no personal growth; being Batman was his entire raison d’etre.

O’Neil did use the "spiritual growth" trope somewhat in the largely forgettable RICHARD DRAGON title, but not until the late 1980s did he find the proper vehicle to merge his interest in hardboiled crime with that of Oriental esotericism. Indeed, the foremost work to spring from DC Comics’s acquisition of Charlton Comics’ superhero characters was the first run of THE QUESTION, originated by O’Neil and artist Denys Cowan. To fans of Steve Ditko’s original blank-visaged crusader, this version must have seemed a travesty, foregoing Ditko’s trademark moral sbsolutism in favor of a hero who constantly had to “question” everything—culture, society, and his own inner nature. Indeed, the original hero, as presented in the first issue, literally “dies” before he receives tutelage by none other than O’Neil’s previous kung-fu stalwart, Richard Dragon.

I’ve already praised the metaphysical questions posed in issue #11, but the two-parter that I entitle “Saving Face” orients more on the sociological end of things. Following a “grabber” scene in which an army recruiter is killed while giving his enlistment pitch, Vic Sage, a.k.a. the new improved Question, converses with Doctor Rodor, his sometime mentor. Their short dialogue gives Sage just enough time to make a distinction between the tortures of coercion and the ordeals of discipline by stating that “discipline comes from inside.” Then Sage is called away to the scene of a disaster, where, all unknowing, he has a near-encounter with his next opponent.

Said adversary is Colonel DeBeck, an ex-military man full of the desire to castigate the armed forces of the United States for weakness and lack of discipline. To graphically illustrate this vulnerability, DeBeck and a small squad of other disaffected men attack a small detachment of soldiers giving a public demonstration of their training. Sage can’t reach the soldiers before DeBeck’s men slaughter them. Later Sage expresses a muted admiration for the sheer nerve behind the assault. In the guise of the Question, Sage tracks down DeBeck, but the former colonel summons his squad, and the hero is captured.

Rather than simply killing the vigilante, DeBeck tests the resolve of his opponent, burying him in the earth up to his neck, so that the hero can breathe and speak but nothing else. Yet DeBeck also claims that he withstood this same torture in Cambodia, and so promises that if the Question will go free if he surpasses DeBeck’s record for withstanding the torture.

O’Neil plays fair throughout the ordeal: the Question gets no lucky breaks or last-minute rescues from allies. To survive, the hero must use his Oriental meditative techniques to sink into himself, to escape the torment of being unable to move while exposed to the elements. He does receive a little imaginary help from a scorpion, on whom Sage projects the persona of his teacher Richard. Of course it’s really Sage giving himself “sage” advice: “accept the discomfort and pain and fear and cherish it. It’ll only leave when you invite it to stay.”

Without giving away the well-orchestrated ending, the Question does indeed survive his encounter with the honor-obsessed murderers, and goes on to continue his inquiries into other aspects of existence. In an interesting subplot, Sage’s girlfriend Myra runs for office, and the constant hectoring of the publicity machine causes her to dream of herself stripping on a stage before a crowd of horny gawkers.

MYTHCOMICS: NEVADA 1-6 (1998)

In general I didn't like a lot of Steve Gerber's post-Bronze Age work. The antic creativity present in such 1970s features as THE DEFENDERS, MAN-THING and HOWARD THE DUCK faded in favor of an often nihilistic sourness. Possibly this feeling caused me to quickly pass over NEVADA, a six-issue 1998 Vertigo series by Gerber and artist Phil Winslade. But now it seems to me one of Gerber's best accomplishments from the latter part of his career.

In a roundabout way, NEVADA arose from one of the author's more bizarre inspirations. The story goes that in 1977 Gerber missed his deadline for HOWARD THE DUCK #16, and that, rather than simply reprinting an earlier HOWARD story, he and some artists whipped together a series of illustrated meditations on life, the universe, and everything, sometimes through the eyes of the acerbic duck, sometimes from Gerber himself. One two-page piece allowed Gerber to express his absurdist take on the then-prevalent "obligatory fight scene," in which a Las Vegas chorus girl and her pet ostrich battled an animated lamp. Many fans didn't care for the stratagem-- one reader wrote simply "Next time go reprint"-- but supposedly Neil Gaiman opined that he'd actually like to see such a story. Twenty years later, Gerber and Winslade produced NEVADA, though not from Marvel, the publisher of HOWARD, but under DC's Vertigo imprint.

Like many Gerber protagonists, the Vegas showgirl Nevada, whose birth-name is not disclosed, would have no luck if not for the bad kind. She dances for her living at the tacky "Nile Hotel and Casino," has an assortment of cool, trippy friends, and shows her essential kind-heartedness by rescuing her pet Bolero (named for the Ravel ballet composition) from an ostrich farm. Though she has some ongoing hassles, like a rejected boyfriend who won't take "no" for an answer, she came to Vegas to start a new life. To be sure, we learn nothing about the old life except that at nine years she auditioned for a Christmas church play by portraying the Virgin Mary with a pillow that realistically showed the icon as "great with child," thus evoking the ire of Christians who didn't like too much reality in their religion. As if to satirize religion in general, her featured dance at the Nile is a re-enactment of the Egyptian story of Osiris' dismemberment, but given a snarky feminist denouement.

However, soon Nevada has bigger problems than a stalker (who, by the way, gets totally trounced by one of Bolero's deadly kicks). Some innocent tourists at the Nile get literally dismembered by an alien visitor from another realm, and Nevada finds herself the victim of time-slips, causing her to encounter cavemen or to witness a guillotine-execution during the Reign of Terror. Who's responsible? Is it Mister DeVesuvio, a mysterious crime-boss who has a glass tube in place of his head? (A similar character, Ruby Thursday, appeared in Gerber's DEFENDERS.) Or is it the drunken sot Odgen Locke, who once taught theoretical physics but now seems to be able to transform himself into an angel-winged warrior? But no, the real culprit is a cosmic event breaking down the boundaries between worlds, which incidentally makes possible the invasion of the aforementioned killer alien. Nevada actually meets and kills the alien, but there's an unnamed higher power who wants her special talents to be a "Rift Warrior," a defender of the cosmic order.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of reluctant heroes since the debut of Marvel Comics, but Gerber isn't interested in characters who make token protestations before easily acceding to the call of destiny. Through the author's Bronze Age work alone it's clear that Gerber enjoyed the allure of combative heroes while still feeling a lot of ambivalence about the use of violence, particularly sanitized violence, as a means of escape. Thus when Nevada's abducted by the "higher power" to put her through an ordeal called "the Hammer," we're not talking a few strenuous training-sessions with Master Yoda. Instead, Nevada goes through tons and tons of patented Gerber mindfuckery, leaving the reader wondering if her cosmic perceptor is on the side of the angels or not. But Gerber does make Nameless Higher Power the vessel of one essential nugget of wisdom: that most of sentient suffering arises from a hunger so great that it rises to the level of universal decay, not unlike the principle of entropy expoused by the villains in the Man-Thing tale "How Will We Keep Warm When the Last Flame Dies."  Nevada, despite her distrust of her perceptor, Nevada does have the stuff to fight back a downfall that could be brought about not by an evil overlord, but rather by "some moronic soul whose ego cannot endure being second in line." And thus Nevada does become a Rift Warrior and forces back a greater invasion of alien dipsticks bent on destroying the fabric of space-time

After this, the dancer returns to reality, though not without more attendant troubles. Clearly, the author left the door open for more stories with Nevada, Bolero and their quirky pals, but since it was a creator-owned project, this was the last show for the Vegas showgirl. Perhaps it's just as well that she went out on a high note. Nevada sums up her situation and her mordant but courageous philosophy in a letter, ending in part with the words:

"So what do you do when reality bites back and the new life falls apart. I can only speak for myself. Fuck it raw and keep dancing."

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 2

Assuming that one validates my equation between artistic creativity and Mary Wollstonecraft's concept of "virtue" as it is determined by the sexual division of labor-- what then?

Well, if everyone viewed such discrepancies in virtue as the result of a long-standing biological process, we wouldn't get things like THE OBITUARY MARIE SEVERIN SHOULD HAVE RECEIVED, in which we learn, according to author Alex Dueben, that it represents "the career she could have had, had she been born a man."

Not since the days of "Spiderbuttgate" have I seen such a display of blithering ressentiment, in which the shortcomings of any person who fits an intersectional profile can be excused by references to "endemic sexism."

Now, I wrote my own obit for Marie Severin, combined with one for Gary Friedrich, who coincidentally passed on the same day. Mine was not a general assessment of either comics pro, aside from crediting them both with "better-than-average formula entertainment," which assessment I would apply to both pros separately.

What we have here is sheer revisionism, an attempt to build Marie Severin up to a major figure in comic books. In the comments-section, Heidi McDonald avers:

Looking at the work here, Severin should always be mentioned in the same breath as Wood and Kurtzman.

To say the least, I do not agree. Severin simply was not that imaginative. Forget comparisons to Wood and Kurtzman; Severin was not even as accomplished as a contemporaneous "Marvel Bullpen" artist like Bill Everett. Everett is of course most famed as the creator of the Sub-Mariner, but even if one compared Everett's accomplishments in the Silver and Bronze Ages to those of Severin in the same period, there's nothing on Severin's resume that even rates with Everett's co-creation of Daredevil. Indeed, Everett even created one of Marvel's most prominent sixties villainesses, Umar the Unrelenting--

--whom Severin also drew a few issues later.

Now, if one agrees with my proposition that, based only on their Silver-and-Bronze Age contributions Everett was superior to Severin, is there a biological explanation for this opinion? Certainly I would not advocate Camille Paglia's explanation, as discussed in Part 1, to the effect that Everett's abilities in male projection-- and being able to write his own name in the snow-- had anything to do with it.

But Everett may have been a better creator simply because, being a man, he was more invested in excelling in a largely male arena, while Severin was not so invested.

Granted, one can certainly find male practitioners who weren't even as good at formulaic entertainment as was Severin. But on the whole, there were simply more good male creators than there were female ones, and no revisionism can change that.

I assert, further, that there are a fair number of female comics-pros who not only show exceptional creativity, but who arguably can excel their male contemporaries. An example would be Rumiko Takahashi, one of the foremost manga-artists, who IMO easily outpaced her former manga-teacher, the recently departed Kazuo Koike. I admire Koike's writing on such properties as LONE WOLF AND CUB and LADY SNOWBLOOD. But even allowing for the manga-works I have not read, I would say that Takahashi displays a far greater profusion of disparate characters and concepts. And she did so, even though it seems likely that Japan had its own tradition of "endemic sexism."

MYTHCOMICS: "PLANET STORY" (MARVEL PREMIERE #61, 1980)

The Bronze Age of Comics-- which I would peg as the period from 1970-1986-- was the last era in which Marvel and DC published a significant number of new characters in their own features but not derived from earlier features. Year 1986 seems like a good cut-off point, given that the profitability of two works then published-- WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- encouraged many creators to quit automatically contributing to "the Big Two."

To be sure, many of these characters proved no more than minor players, and Marvel's Star-Lord-- despite an impressive translation to the cinema in recent years-- couldn't even be said to be one of the sales-failures that remained a fan-favorite for years later, such as Killraven and the Man-Thing.

The base-concept of Star-Lord was essentially "Green Lantern without the Green Lantern Corps." His origin involved an alien giving Earthman Peter Quill cosmic powers, with an eye to creating more space-supermen later. But Quill/Star-Lord was the only one created, and despite his ties to Earth, his few adventures didn't involve his home planet, also in contradistinction to DC's Green Lantern. Given an "element-gun" for self-defense and an intelligent ship named "Ship" for transport, Star-Lord tooled around various galaxies for about a half dozen stories, before disappearing for the remainder of the Bronze Age.

The title "Planet Story" does concern a planet, though it's likely that either writer Doug Moench or artist Tom Sutton also had in mind the famous pulp-magazine PLANET STORIES, which specialized in adventurous space-opera. If so, it's an ironic title, because the script bears less resemblance to space opera than to more involved science fiction meditations on quasi-sentient planets, like Harry Harrison's DEATHWORLD. Moench does not give the planet in his story a name, but for convenience I will call it "the Sharing World."

Star-Lord and "Ship" have no particular agenda, save curiosity, when they happen across the Sharing-World. Their survey indicates that the world is replete with lush vegetation but no "higher fauna." Yet Star-Lord also observes a ruined city, indicating that at some point intelligent beings occupied the planet. Under his own flight-power, Star-Lord leaves his vehicle in orbit and descends. As soon as he does, various phenomena-- a volcano, an earthquake, and a bunch of tentacled plants-- assail the hero. He makes his way to the ruined city but finds no clue to explain the absence of the city's makers, though Star-Lord suspects that the populace may have been exterminated by the hostile environment.

Once Star-Lord leaves the city, again he's attacked by planetary phenomena, such as wind and lightning, but this time, the phenomena are driving him toward a destination. The hero is precipitated into the "organic cavern" of a huge tree, and the entrance seals up when Star-Lord tries to leave. The only thing inside the tree are various honeycombed chambers, which Star-Lord mentally compares to "cadaver-drawers" with no contents. Then he learns that they do have contents: groping plant-tendrils that try to grab him, though he's able to keep his distance from them.

Suddenly, the planet itself communicates with Star-Lord through the medium of dust that arranges itself into holograms (no, there's no explanation of how this could be accomplished). Through these images the Sharing-World informs its guest of its history with its sentient inhabitants, through the vehicle of the giant tree (and possibly other trees elsewhere on the planet).

Long ago, an intelligent race of parrot-headed creatures existed alongside the glories of the sentient planet, living as "noble savages in an alien Garden of Eden" (which is implicitly Star-Lord's interpretation of things). However, the parrot-people, whom the planet calls "the Sharers of Old," begin to dislike the planet's tendency to interact with them through the tree-tendrils. (Moench's script is unclear on some points: at first it sounds like some of the Sharers are killed by having their energies drained by the "vampire tendrils," but later it sounds like a symbiotic relationship that injures no one.)

In any case, the relationship is in later sections deemed as important by the Sharing-World, because intelligent beings, unlike lower animals, can choose whether or not to participate in the sharing-ritual. However, the parrot-people choose to leave this 'garden" and build their own cities. Then they follow the usual course of tool-using sentients, exploiting the planet and giving nothing back. In response the planet begins to die, and finally the Sharers give up and desert the Sharing-World via spaceship.

Then, as soon as Star-Lord has been given a Cook's Tour of the world's history, the feeding-tendrils latch onto him. At this point Moench and Sutton shift the narrative viewpoint to that of the Sharing-World, which describes its quasi-erotic attachment to the long vanished Sharers, and its desire to have Star-Lord take up the same role. The planet's attacks were caused by its eagerness to take on a new "lover," but though the reader learns these facts, but Star-Lord isn't tapped into the planet's ruminations. He breaks free of the tendrils and returns to his orbiting vessel. Once there, he confers with his intelligent ship, wondering if he ought to use the ship's weapons to destroy this menacing world. However, "Ship" talks the hero out of doing so, and the two of them leave-- which proves a final irony, since by that point the Sharing-World wants to die for its lack of loving symbiosis.

(The entire story can be read here.)


Even without Moench's early Eden-reference, one could hardly miss the tale's indebtedness to the Old Testament narrative of Adam and Eve. In said story, God gave the first humans the choice of whether or not to obey God's commandment not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Moench neatly inverts this myth, for here it's a tree, through which the planet manifests its will, that's more or less "feeding" on the inhabitants of the "garden." There's no tempter that moves the parrot-people to leave; they do so of their own volition, and Moench largely implies that their motives are more selfish than self-protective, and they're rejecting their quasi-sexual union with the planet rather than coming to a new knowledge of male-female sexuality. Christian philosophers have opined that humankind's exile from Eden was a "fortunate fall," but in Moench's story, strongly suggestive of ecological ideals like the "Gaea theory," the Fall is unfortunate for both the world and its intelligent denizens.

The element of "choice" is also less metaphysical and more sensual: the planet wants to share only with those who have the power to choose. Tom Sutton's art emphasizes the chaotic curves of natural life as against the hard lines of sentient dwelling-laces, and Star-Lord's brief captivity by the tendrils suggests a sort of human-alien sex along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer's 1953 story THE LOVERS, though Sutton's imagery suggests rape, as does one of Moench's lines:

"...the exit irised shut with a sloppy, wet sound that made me think of ripeness and guilt."

THE SUBJECTIVITY WAS ROSY

I stumbled across Dirk Deppey's current blog, which I mentioned before in two posts, here and here. He had supplied a link to one of my old essays in which I argued with him, and I thought that my response-essays would probably be the last I'd write about him.

Then I see that he's got a quote from me in his current portal:

"Like most Journalistas, Dirk Deppey is spiritual kin to Fredric Wertham."

I don't have anything new to say about either the original context of my remark or about the wry, jokey context in which Deppey presents it. So instead I'll touch on something that interests me more: the subjectivity of taste.

I've occasionally discussed my belief that the decade of the 1970s, more or less equivalent to the so-called "Bronze Age of Comics," was a crucial creative time for mainstream American comics. Deppey, in a 2007 essay, found the decade more than a little wanting:

And then there were all the old Marvels of my childhood. At last, I could read all the good stuff that I'd heard people praise, but that I'd never had a chance to see!
Actually reading them disabused me of any notion that these were good comics. Jim Starlin's stuff approached "vaguely interesting," once or twice, but beyond that? Crap. Killraven? Crap. Marvel's horror line? Crap. The early Conan and Red Sonja comics had nice art, but were all written in that stilted voice that Stan Lee had used for Thor comics. ("Zounds!") Even those old X-Men comics quickly lost their luster once I could no longer read them with a nine-year-old's eyes. Hell, the first half of Frank Miller's run on Daredevil was nowhere near as cool as I remembered it.

Obviously, I don't care about his opinions any more than Deppey would care about mine. What I care about is the question as to what individual taste means in a social context.

I scraped at the iceberg of an "intersubjectivity solution" here and here, where in essence I was giving one of Tom Spurgeon's broadsides more attention than it really merited. Deppey's above comment also doesn't really amount to much in analytical terms, but as I said in the intersubjectivity essays, both my opinion that Marvel's KILLRAVEN was good and Deppey's ppinion that it was "crap" are right insofar as they capture whatever expectations either of us has for quality fiction. I summed up the essentially non-rational nature of taste in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2:

Every expression of personal taste, I suggest, is informed by what I will now dub "proto-propositions."  In attempting to justify my liking of FANTASTIC FOUR over CHALLENGERS, my mind might initially formulate the proto-proposition, "I like The FANTASTIC FOUR better than CHALLENGERS for the emotions in FF."  With conscious thought I can expand this statement into a full-fledged proposition, one phrased so as to show how the FANTASTIC FOUR characters show many dimensions while those of the CHALLENGERS do not, complete with examples and counter-examples to support my propositional logic.  Equally valid is the proto-proposition of a fan who might not like superheroes of any kind: "I like CAPTAIN MARVEL better than HUMAN TORCH because the first one shows superheroes as silly"...  But no matter how good or bad the formal proposition, it remains rooted in a "proto-proposition" that expresses whatever validates the individual subject...

So, as I'm sure I've said a few other times, it's idiotic to debate tastes; all one can only debate the fully logical propositions one uses to defend one's tastes. Deppey chooses to defend his 2007 tastes by the usual elitist attempt to run down the tastes of others, in this case by claiming that anyone who liked the works must have read nothing but comic books.

I suspect that what protected me from 1970s Marvel worship despite having read a bunch of them as a kid was the fact that I read too much prose at the time to ever consider such comics as the be-all and end-all of storytelling. I wasn't exactly reading Proust as a child, but even 1970s YA novels like O.T. Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City had a depth and grounding to it that was absent at Marvel — or DC, or Charlton, or anything else that published for the spinner racks during the years that Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were president.

Since I know the kinds of things I was reading around the time I was also reading 1970s comics, I think it far from likely that my liking for Bronze Age comics was a consequence of considering them "the be-all and end-all of storytelling." There may well be some extreme comics-fans who would never read anything but funnybooks. But then, where are the statistics to prove that they were typical of the fandom of the period? I noted in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2 that 'even *intersubjective* agreements are significant only to the degree one finds their statistical dominance important.'

Without any such statistics, Deppey's assertion by itself is just another proto-proposition with nothing to back it up-- and one which validates the individual subject, Dirk Deppey, as a Person of Taste as against the Undiscriminating Rabble.

A final note: I wouldn't mind arguing on some more current Deppey topic if he cared to write something more current. However, an awful lot of space on the site is devoted to the films of Pedro Almodovar, and I can't very well argue about those-- given that they are such unremitting crap.

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?

SECRET ORIGINS OF SUPERHERO DECADENCE

In this post Curt Purcell dispels the misconception that Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Moore's WATCHMEN started superhero comics down the road to "decadence." He argues that "market forces and pressures internal to the genre" would have led superhero comics to that path in due time anyway, and demonstrates that two direct-market features, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE, did descend into decadence a good three years before Miller and Moore produced their aforesaid works. It must be added that both creators had been working in comics regularly for some years, although Moore wasn't significantly known to American readers until he debuted on SWAMP THING in the same year OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE appeared.

In "Aiming the Canon" I presented a mini-history as to how the changes to the comic-book market in the early 1970s led Marvel and DC to inject "adult concerns" into some of their product, though their intended market was almost certainly older adolescents rather than the thirty-to-fifty-somethings who support the current incarnation of the Direct Market. Since the DM was barely getting started in the 1970s, older adolescents were pretty much the only new market that comic books could have pursued with the resources available to them in those days. For this reason, even though the newstand-distributed color comics did become more daring in terms of content, I still regard them most of them as "juvenile pulp." There was at that time no paradigm for tapping into adult readers who made popular such paperback serials as THE EXECUTIONER-- not even when Marvel Comics unveiled their own copycat version of same.


I specified "color comics" above in order to single out those periodicals markted primarily to the less-than-adolescent audience, which category logically cannot include either underground comics or the Warren black-and-white magazines. Both of the latter did contain higher levels of verboten material than the color mags, and certainly both had some effect on the ways Bronze Age creators chose to push the envelope. But I can't speculate on that effect here, as my intent is mainly to touch on the flashpoints that led from "juvenile decadence" to its adult manifestations.

One such flashpoint that precedes the Bronze Age as such was Neal Adams. Technically speaking, Adams' work for the color comics was "clean" insofar as it didn't generally show decapitated heads or spewing blood. Nevertheless, Adams was instrumental in cultivating in some fans a taste for the "grim and gritty," and much of his appeal lay in his ability to suggest violence. In STRANGE ADVENTURES #208 (Jan 68) the hero Deadman (not yet a discarnate spirit) threatens to break the arm of his enemy Eagle. No ruptured flesh or broken bone is seen. But the reader feels the real possibility of the bone being snapped. This was heady stuff to a generation growing up on Batman-and-Robin fisticuffs, or even antiseptic Jack Kirby brawls.

As mentioned before CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1 (Oct 70) set a new standard for the depiction of both sex and violence in color comics. I'm still impressed that CONAN got away with as much "dirty" violence as it did in its first year-- noses bloodied, men devoured alive by monsters, the hero punching an enemy in the testicles. This is pure speculation, but perhaps Marvel got the feature past the Comics Code as a sort of test-case, to see if the market justified getting down-and-dirty again. CONAN's financial success may've paved the way for the 1971 revisions to the Code that, among other things, made possible the widespread marketing of horror and monster titles once more.

Interestingly, one of the first monsters to anticipate the wave of color-comics bogies was not a traditional Hollywood type like Dracula, but Marvel's Man-Thing, appearing just once in the b&w SAVAGE TALES #1 (May 71) before being transferred to color comics shortly thereafter. As SAVAGE TALES was an incursion on the non-Code market dominated by the Warren books, perhaps it's no accident that one of Conan's co-features in the first issue starred a monster intended for a continuing feature, in contrast to the slightly-earlier appearance of Swamp Thing in a non-continuing horror-tale. In any case, with the revision of the Code Marvel and DC were at last willing to unleash a new world of monsters to counter the world of superheroic gods they'd unleashed in the previous decade.

One narrative advantage of having monsters as stars was that, like the barbaric Conan, they could get away with greater levels of violence than the average superhero could. That said, superheroes too began to lose a lot of their Silver Age innocence, and probably no event of the early 70s captures that slow progress toward increased violence than The Death of Gwen Stacy in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121 (Feb 1973). And even though the event itself was approved by SPIDER-MAN's two previous scripters, editors Lee and Thomas, the execution, as carried out by writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru, exemplified a darker, more disruptive approach to the Marvel Universe. The subsequent introduction of that aforementioned Executioner imitator added yet more fuel to the shadow (so to speak).

The Punisher wouldn't become a superstar for several years, but the Marvel-DC superhero universe grew darker from yet other incursions. The burgeoning monster-stars began to cross over into the superhero worlds, but a more significant effect may've arisen from "straight" superheroes who incorporated far more grotesquerie and violence than, say, the generally-sanitized adventures of Marvel's Incredible Hulk. ADVENTURE COMICS #431 (Jan-Feb 74) exhumed a Spectre who outstripped the juvenile ghoulishness of his Golden Age template, while GIANT-SIZED X-MEN #1 (May 75) provided a certain claw-handed hero with a regular berth for mayhem-to-come. It may be argued, though, that Wolverine does not reach his true potential as a "savage hero" until X-MEN #98 (April 76) revealed that the character's deadly claws were part of his anatomy, which gave him a little more gravitas than just another costumed schmoe with blades attached to his hands.

Arguably DC Comics, though providing a home to the Spectre (in one incarnation) and Swamp Thing (in two), reveled a little less in "juvenile decadence" than Marvel did. Still, the die was cast right up against the handwriting on the wall, as is best seen by the way the Death of Gwen Stacy begat the Death of Iris Allen. Ross Andru, perhaps bringing with him lessons learned alongside Gerry Conway at Marvel, took over the editorship of the FLASH feature with issue #270 (Feb 79), and by July of the same year Iris was dead under quite grotesque circumstances that anticipated the death of Sue Dibny in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. And though Andru didn't remain editor for an exceedingly long period, allegedly sales on THE FLASH did go up during its "grim and gritty" period, which factor may well have contributed to DC's increasing investment in "decadent" material, such as the two 1983 features Curt Purcell references, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE. Though I liked neither of them, both were significant marketing breakthroughs as they were designed to appeal to the burgeoning Direct Market, and so are ancestors to the "superhero decadence" of current days.

I would not categorize either OMEGA MEN or VIGILANTE as "adult pulp," though, for their narratives are still adolescent in tone, as is Andru's FLASH. But in the same year Andru revised DC's stalwart speedster, Frank Miller became the resident artist on one of Marvel's not-so-stalwart mainstays, beginning with DAREDEVIL #158 (May 79). Neither he nor Moore is "to blame" for any increase in decadence, adult or juvenile, but Miller has the distinction of bringing forth the Adult Pulp paradigm to comic books four years before most Americans knew Alan Moore from a hole in Blackburn, Lancaster.

Whatever one thinks of Frank Miller, no one can argue that, historically, Miller began to influence American comics before Moore. The linkage of these two creators in the public mind through their 1986 projects does have some interesting repercussions I won't address here, just as I won't deal with the question of why Miller's DAREDEVIL does qualify as adult pulp but Wolfman's VIGILANTE does not. As to whether either of those topics will be the next I address-- that too remains a secret, even to me.