MYTHCOMICS: "BREAK YOUR DESTINY" GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (2011?)

 

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

"...in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male."-- SHOOTING THE SHIRT, 2014. 

The title "Break Your Destiny" appears only on this splash page from the second part of the final SWEEPER story. Shiina's story, and those of other mangaka, were published in various magazines and in a 2013 collection, in order to generate revenue to be donated to the benefit of victims of a devastating 2011 Japanese earthquake. 

Any readers of the SWEEPER manga would have known that Tadao Yokoshima's "destiny" was to be the beloved butt-monkey of the phenomenal ghost sweeper Reiko Mikami, so author Takashi Shiina would have been having fun with that preconception by claiming that "this man's desire is going to change Japan's history." But the history of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship ensures that none of the Japanese history-books must be changed, and despite the title Yokoshima finds that his destiny is locked in, and by his own free choice.

One element in the story suggests that this is supposed to be set in the early days of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship: the fact that their colleague, the sweet-natured Okinu, is still a ghost. This state of affairs came to an end in the story-arc "Sleeping Beauty" (circa 1996), during which time Okinu was reincarnated in a mortal form. Okinu forgot her friends for a while, but when she remembered, she rejoined with "Mikami GS" for the remainder of the series in her purely mortal form. And yet, if this story were supposed to be taking place before "Beauty," that would create a continuity-problem, for reasons I'll explain shortly. Since Okinu's being a ghost is not important to the narrative, it's most likely that Shiina simply indulged in a little nostalgia with his friendly ghost-girl.  

  

The setup is only loosely established: Mikami has been hired to dispel a bunch of spirits from a deserted Japanese temple, and she demands that the holdouts inside the temple surrender to her authority, or she'll wipe them out. Okinu reminds Mikami that Yokoshima's being held hostage in the temple, and Mikami seems indifferent to her male assistant's fate, as long as she succeeds in her mission and gets paid. However, to herself Mikami muses, "I am really counting on your charm towards the supernatural, Yokoshima. It's one hell of a gamble whether she might fall for you or not." In other words, though Mikami unambiguously wants to earn her fee for ghost-sweeping, she's not just writing Yokoshima off, but is gambling that he will "charm" the head spirit somehow. (How Mikami knows it's a female spirit is left to the imagination.) But in the period prior to "Sleeping Beauty," Yokoshima-- never a Don Juan at the best of times-- had not demonstrated any special "charm towards the supernatural." It's only in the later adventures that Yokoshima attracts two or three "supernatural girls" into his orbit, and that's what Shiina's thinking of when he, speaking through Mikami, credits Yokoshima with "charm."

Yokoshima, however, was not apprised of Mikami's opinion of his charms, so he's in turmoil at having been deserted. However, the head spirit-- Seiryuto, an analogue to a character from another Shiina manga-- offers Yokoshima a deal. If Yokoshima supplies her with supernatural power, Seiryuto will whisk him back in time to an era where he can become the ruler of Japan and can have access to all the women in the world. Yokoshima agrees, and Seiryuto transforms her temple into a time-traveling spaceship. 

Mikami and Okinu witness the ship take off, and hear Yokoshima bid farewell to them, and to Mikami's "boobs, ass, and thighs." Though Mikami doesn't know what's going on, she demonstrates that she's not as willing to let her assistant disappear as she suggested earlier. She uses a wirepoon gun to fasten a line to the ship, so that it hauls Mikami and Okinu along in its wake. Thus the two intrepid heroines travel in time as well and end up receiving exposition from none other than the famed warlord Nobunaga Oda. This could be deemed a quasi-crossover in that Shiina's next manga after SWEEPER was a fictionalized series about Oda in his teenaged years.

One thing the girls learn from Oda is that they didn't end up in the same period as Yokoshima. He appeared in medieval Japan half a year ago and began using Seiryuto's advanced weaponry to conquer the local lords. From Mikami, Oda finds out how the greedy exorcist offended her assistant, and Oda has a suggestion on how to fix the situation so that Mikami and Okinu can take their buddy back to their time: Mikami must apologize to Yokoshima. The 16th-century warlord shows a remarkable knowledge of the 21st-century term "tsundere," advising the heroine that it's not good to "be too much tsun and no dere." Against her instincts, Mikami tries to practice apologizing, but Oda informs her that she looks like "a complete villain." Oda, knowing that her attitude will never compel Yokoshima to give in, formulates an alternative plan.

Sometime later, Oda's army marches on Yokoshima's lands. Yokoshima doesn't care about fighting Oda, for he's surrounded by the beautiful women of his court. But Seiryuto won't let him canoodle with the hotties, because Yokoshima can only endow her with his supernatural power as long as his lust is not satisfied. Presumably the alien yokai has been blocking Yokoshima for the past months for that very reason, since he's just as desperate for sex as he was working for Mikami. Yokoshima doesn't want to confront Mikami on the field of battle, but the court ladies affirm that they won't give him nookie if he has no temporal power. Boxed in by his Faustian bargain with the alien, Yokoshima dons his armor and joins his army in the field.

Oda's alternate plan was to still have Mikami apologize to Yokoshima, but with a mask over her face to conceal her insincerity. But headstrong Mikami pursues her own destiny, and dons the horrendous mask of an oni, which just stokes Yokoshima's fear of her. Despite her mixed signals, Mikami makes a sincere (for her) effort to apologize, but her need for absolute control causes her to deny her apology seconds after making it. Yokoshima is unable to follow Seiryuto's counsel and convert his fear into anger, but his fear of Mikami's vengeance drives him to attack her with his sword. She mostly blocks his blow, but he hits her mask and it splits. Seiryuto is then surprised at the disappearance of her power-source, for even though Mikami maintains through her words that she doesn't need her assistant in any way, her "crying eyes" belie her lying words. For some vague reason, Seiryuto's loss of power propels her and the three ghost-sweepers out of the medieval era.

And what is the reward for Yokoshima's virtue, his realization of how important Mikami is to him, and he to her? Why, his reward is vice-- the vice of Mikami's wrath. But going on all evidence, she's insincere again in saying that she's punishing him for having physically attacked her. Mikami resents that Yokoshima pushed her into losing her prized self-control, not to mention any anger she might feel at his willingness to leave her. Seiryuto builds on Oda's tsundere comment by claiming that Mikami is "99.9999 percent tsun"-- which is another way of saying that Mikami has no dere to spare. Okinu tries to see the sunny side of torture by saying, "Well, but at least their hearts are connected-- I think." 

And yet Mikami does speak a truth of sorts in her final adventure-- one that makes the most sense if she utters it after she and her butt-monkey have endured all the travails of the 1991-99 series. In some of those adventures, Mikami became hazily aware that she's conceived a liking for Yokoshima, but she would never verbally admit it in his presence. But this last time, when he protests that she ought to show him "some grade of affection" after he chose her over rulership of Japan, Control-Freak Mikami makes the admission, "This is how I show affection! Through my whip of love!" 

Such a confession is entirely in line with a female who became obsessed with control after she failed to hold the attention of the men in her youth with traditional female traits. The final words of Mikami explain why she didn't fire the horny teen who kept ogling and molesting her, and it certainly was not because Yokoshima worked cheap. It's because he's so besotted with her beauty that he'll endure any rigor, any torture, to be near her-- and his passion transforms her into the perfect domme for such an intrinsic sub. As with many similar figures from Japanese pop culture, her violence becomes a "symbolic displacement for the sex-act." But at least Takashi Shiina offered some "grade of affection" for his character Yokoshima in the story "Stranger Than Paradise," in which it's revealed that (maybe) Yokoshima and Mikami eventually tie the knot-- though even holy matrimony is not enough to resolve all the conflicts in this equally sacred "battle of the sexes."

                         

              

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 2

 In PART 2, I cited one possible formula for all of fictional narrative, based largely on the radical of conflict:  

most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

This conflict doesn't always eventuate in fictional violence. But the first two important critics of the comic-book medium, Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thought that, at least within the context of children's entertainment, fictional violence was always capable of poisoning the well of young minds, resulting in the unwanted syndromes of sadism or masochism. Though their ideals were not the same, Legman and Wertham favored the same sort of one-sided, hectoring arguments to prove they were right. Today, Legman is barely known to comics-critics, and Wertham is seen as a massively dishonest, though possibly well-meaning, fraudster. I may be the only person who's critiqued them in tandem within essays written for this century, emphasizing that neither of them seemed to know how to distinguish between syndromic and non-syndromic forms of sadism. In SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND I wrote:

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind.

I'm also probably the only writer who ever gave either of them any credit for getting anything right in the midst of their overall wrongness. In the 2024 essay GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE, I mentioned how at age 10 I encountered a mention of Legman in this 1965 TIME essay, whose writer was enamored enough with Legman's 1949 book LOVE AND DEATH to quote a significant passage, part of which reads:

...in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily.

Now, suppose in that same year of 1965, there had been another young reader of that TIME essay, name of "John." Being also about ten, John would have been reading comic strips since he could read, including both BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS, but he probably wouldn't have known anything about sadism or masochism. But John reads that passage, and though he doesn't give a squat about the Katzenjammers, John gets a bit of a buzz from the idea of hapless Dagwood being "degraded daily," in such a way that all the pains and humiliations he suffers, no matter their origins, are somehow ascribable to "the kewpie-doll character of Blondie." John isn't sure, because of Legman's vague language, as to exactly why the adult readers of Chic Young's domestic comic strip would find such fantasies attractive. But the broad implication would seem to be that something about seeing Dagwood forced to be The Eternal Goat must also give those adults such a buzz.

Now-- was John, or any of the millions of Americans who regularly watched the tortures of Dagwood, necessarily a syndromic sadist because he, or they, derived some sadistic or masochistic pleasure from seeing those tortures? Legman would have said so. I would say that one only becomes a syndromic fetishist of any kind because the subject continues to seek that particular pleasure over and over, rather than just getting the buzz from time to time when one encounters the stimulation in a "casual" fashion, without especially looking for it. This is the same "casual sadism" that moved Elizabethans to watch both "bear baiting" spectacles and Shakespearean dramas, because the cruelties of both were diverting, though not necessarily syndromic.

Now suppose that I read every Ditko comics-story in existence, and I found no sadistic/masochistic content in anything but in his collaborations with unquestionable fetishist Eric Stanton. That could prove that Ditko had no more than a casual creator's interest in the dynamics of sadomasochistic art. We don't seem to have any testimony from the reticent Ditko as to what he thought or felt about working with Stanton. However, Stanton did make a significant comment on general relationships of artists sharing the same studio.

PURE IMAGES: I've shared studios with different artists and you can't help but work on each other's stuff. You'll be there reacting with energy to their work, and in turn they get excited about the project.

STANTON: Yes, you have to. You'll be working in one train of thought and you don't even realize that there are other opportunities.

PURE IMAGES #1 (1990)

To slightly reiterate my point from the first essay, if Ditko were a syndromic sadist, I think we would have seen much more evidence of his inclinations in his rich career. I would expect to see something closer in spirit to the oeuvre of Tom Sutton, who produced both sadomasochistic art for the erotic comics market and edgy mainstream horror stories that dripped with perversity. But that's just how things look to me at a point when I've yet to read every story Steve Ditko ever produced.             

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 1

RIP JAGGER'S DOJO now carries this recommendation for a book by one Richard Seves. The book concerns the fetish art of Eric Stanton, as well as the American subculture in which certain types of fetish art were promulgated, usually concentrating upon sadism, masochism, or some combination of the two. Stanton is not well known to most comics-fans even today, but during about ten years of his career, he shared a New York studio with an artist who was then reaching the apogee of his fame in the limited venue of American comic books, Steve Ditko. 

I have not read the book but will probably plan to do so some time in the future. At least one reason for me to do so is that much of my literary project on this blog is to examine art of all types from the viewpoint that most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

I don't remember encountering info on the Ditko-Stanton connection any time before the 1990s. A few quotes from Stanton appear in PURE IMAGES #1 (1990), a magazine devoted almost entirely to Greg Theakston's essay "The Birth of Spider-Man." Those quotes were purely focused on the question of what, if anything, Stanton might have contributed to the web-slinger. Most fans seemed to take the position that Ditko, well-known for taking strong moralistic stances in his essays and comics-works, probably participated very little in the quasi-legal erotic comics/artwork that Stanton produced. But the Seves book, going on Rip's review of it, seems to take the position that Ditko's contributions, if only in terms of inking artwork, were much more substantial than many fans imagined. 

 Based at least partly on the Seves book's information, Rip said:

I confess little interest in this form of kinky presentation, and at the risk of protesting too much I think like many this has perhaps caused me to overlook something quite obvious. Steve Ditko was a fetish artist. He was not as I had previously thought a colleague who helped touch up an image here and there for his studio mate who was a fetish artist, but instead he was part of an artistic team which intentionally created narratives within the confines of the fetish field. It's a bit of a surprise to find this out about a guy who despite his reclusive nature has had his work feverishly examined for decades now.

 I too don' t tend to associate Ditko with any form of fetishistic erotica. Yet I have no problem in arguing for such content, even if it's expressed on a purely subconscious level, if there's strong textual support for the argument. And that's the only way one could approach Ditko's work, because as most fans know, the artist never gave interviews and only started disseminating his memories of SPIDER-MAN's creation very late in his life, through the venue of privately printed fanzines. I've only read a few Ditko essays, usually in excerpted form, and I tend to doubt that Ditko ever discussed in any terms the increasing cultural focus on erotic art that began in the decade of the 1960s, the same era in which he came to prominence. I also get the impression that Ditko never publicly commented on his work-relationship with Stanton. But if he did, I'd guess that said commentary would have been minimal at best, dwarfed by Ditko's marked concentration on his many Randian social pronouncements.

If the totality of Ditko's oeuvre contains any significant fetish-content, I would think it would have manifested less through his various superhero works for Marvel and DC, than in the short horror stories in which the artist specialized before his sixties breakout success and after he left the Big Two for a time in the 1970s. These would probably represent Ditko in his purest state, in which he was most free of editorial oversight. My impression of those stories I've read-- but usually not reviewed-- is that they lack erotic content, and that they usually hinged on the trope of "the biter bit," where some malicious or foolish individual Gets His in the End. I guess one could argue, as did Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, that such tropes are fundamentally sadistic. But I do not, as I'll try to clarify in Part 2.           

  

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 2

 in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.” -- Freud quote from "The Economic Problem of Masochism."

Sublimation (psychology):  the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. -- Dictionary.com

Freud located the etiology of masochism in personal guilt. I assert that the real source of true, syndromic masochism is that of a transpersonal manifestation of shame, arising from being physically or psychologically unable to protect oneself. 

Having never been a woman, I don't know how mothers talk to their daughters (or any parallel relationship) about their gender's getting the short end of the sexual dimorphism stick, at least in terms of self-defense. Mothers may tell their young ones that there's nothing they can do about the biological factors that make men stronger, except to figure out ways to get around the male of the species. But internally, there should be, in females as much as males, some distress at knowing that one's physical nature puts one in danger of humiliation and/or death. 

One coping mechanism-- termed "sublimation" by Freud and others -- might be for female humans to enhance their potential for reproductive security by feeling awe at superior male strength, which then serves the long-term biological purpose of benefitting their offspring's survival. This biological imperative may be the source for female preference for a male type that Leon Seltzer called a "caring caveman." The caveman part might not be strictly necessary once humans were no longer living in caves, but aesthetic programming is not easily superseded, even in an era where, in theory at least, money takes the place of muscle as a means of males protecting females from incursions.  

Sigmund Freud certainly understood that sublimation was necessary to allow any humans, males or females, to cope with uncomfortable social situations, judging from this quotation:

What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation...-- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

 So I don't know why Big Sigmund had to characterize women alone as "masochistic" for embracing whatever aspects of pain and/or humiliation were involved with the act of coitus. It's possible that the first human to experience pleasurable pain was of the female persuasion, but if so, I suggest that the pleasure didn't stem from a uniquely feminine nature. And compared to the females of various lower species-- such as lionesses, who have to put up with barbed penises-- human females have it fairly easy in the copulation department.

At base sublimation might be best viewed as an endurance test, one that also applies to males. What did it mean to caveman males-- assuming that any of them figured out how much a role their primeval thrusts played, in the formation of progeny-- to know that for all their strength, only women could keep the race alive? Going on archaeological evidence, it seems that humankind's earliest human-form deities were the so-called "Venus figurines," embodiments of female procreative power. Did males sometimes feel irrelevant before that power? Did they sublimate that sense of powerlessness into other goddesses? That might explain the rise, in historical times, of war-goddesses like Athena, Anath and Ishtar' deities who broke down the normal categories of "men make war, women make babies." And maybe, in later eras, this sublimated sense of humiliation resulted in quotations like the following, from the pen of the man whose name was used to categorize the syndrome called "masochism."

I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My guess as to why Freud didn't intuit masochism in both genders as a sublimating activity is that for him, anything that wasn't normative heterosexual intercourse flew in the face of his idea of sublimation. For him, sublimation was all about adapting to reality, rather than indulging formulating elaborate fantasies, be they of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or of Margaret Mitchell. 

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure. 

     

  

NEAR-MYTHS: WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE (2016-2021)

 

I have a dim recollection that when Grant Morrison first began publicizing his WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE project-- and I was not able to locate the item I'm remembering, so this is at best a paraphrase-- that he considered it something of a challenge to devise a Wonder Woman concept modeled on the original Marston/Peter series of the Golden Age. Morrison stated that he intended at the very least to address the bondage element in some way, which element has been largely elided from many if not all post-Crisis WW renditions. Whatever I read sent up a bit of a red flag in my mind. I've liked a lot of Morrison's work, particularly many of his takes on DC characters like Superman (in ALL-STAR SUPERMAN) and Batman (various arcs from roughly 2008 to 2013). However, I wondered if he was simply undertaking the WW project because she was part of the "DC Trinity," not because he had a sincere interest in Marston's concepts.

Well, the three graphic albums of WW EARTH ONE-- part of a DC imprint that sounds like little more a refurbished ELSEWORLDS-- are at least more focused than Morrison's scattershot ACTION COMICS run. Still, I never felt like Morrison was allowing his EARTH ONE take on WW to soar into the heights of erratic creativity for which the writer is best known.

Several departures from the Marston canon are entirely justified. The Marston series was launched a few months prior to the Dec 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, but there was no way that a contemporary WW series, even a limited one, would begin in a WWII setting. However, one of the base concepts of the Marston series was that the heroine undertook her mission to man's world not just to fight Nazis, but to reform warlike males and bring them under the loving authority of the Amazon goddesses Athena and Aphrodite. I don't imagine that Marston, as much as he may have believed in his gynocentric philosophy, had any notion of showing the rise of a dominion of pagan goddesses in 20th-century America. However, Morrison-- who honors Marston as a representative of "alternative lifestyles-- decides that his Amazing Amazon will not just attempt such a conversion but accomplish it within a span from the 21st century to a time three thousand years in the future.     

To emphasize this manifest Amazon destiny, Morrison dials back the eternally-frustrated hieros gamos Marston arranged for his heroine and her beloved American Steve Trevor. In order to tweak expectations, Morrison makes his Trevor a Black man. However, Morrison isn't interested enough in his Trevor to make him into even a two-dimensional character. Morrison gives the readers mixed signals regarding the Diana-Steve relationship. It's as if he and artist Yanick Paquette were leery of imparting too much importance to the Amazon Princess's first potential heterosexual encounter. It's clear all the Amazons of Paradise Island have had frequent lesbian relationships, including both Diana and her mother Hippolyta-- even though no erotic encounters as such are shown-- so it's arguable that he might as well have dispensed with Trevor altogether.

Surprisingly, Morrison gets far more mileage with his version of perpetual comedy-relief Etta Candy, here renamed "Beth" and given the persona of a randy, plus-sized cheerleader for Wonder Woman's feminist agenda. Even the famed "woo woo" schtick works, possibly thanks to Morrison emulating various plus-sized celebrities. As a counter to all of the countless stories in which Diana's mother, Amazon queen Hippolyta, was simply a timely aid to her heroic daughter, Morrison forges a more acrimonious relationship between the two. But given that Hippolyta is destined to be disposed of in the second book, the effort feels somewhat doomed. Morrison also dispenses with WW's "clay statue" origins, but to no great effect  

But just as Marston couldn't really elaborate villains who had a well-conceived reason to oppose the Amazon's "loving authority," Morrison also struggles to embody believable masculine villains. Though a prelude establishes that in ancient times Hippolyta did encounter the genuine son-of-Zeus Hercules, the status of the Greek gods in the EARTH ONE domain is dubious. Does Ares, usually the opponent of loving Aphrodite in the comics, really exist, or is he just metaphorically true in the head of main villain Maxwell Lord? Possibly Morrison wanted any converts to Diana's philosophy to embrace her POV without any assurance of deific confirmation.

 Morrison's version of Doctor Psycho is not any better. In Marston, Psycho is an ugly dwarf who seeks to control women with his mental weapons, rather than with male muscle. Morrison's Psycho is a handsome charmer who comes close to seducing Wonder Woman with skillful mind games, but he like Trevor lacks depth. 

Similarly, Morrison devotes no background to his only female villain, the only holdover from WWII-- the Nazi Paula Von Gunther. Hippolyta allows Paula to join the Amazons after mental conditioning, much as Marston did, but this time, mercy for Paula has dire consequences. All of the villains, like most of the support-cast, are a little too transparent in their status as plot-functions.

Paquette's art is nice-looking but far too poised to possess any dynamism, even in the fight-scenes. Rough and blocky though H.G. Peter's art was, there were times it got across the cruel basics of the sadist/masochist tangos between various characters. In the hands of Morrison and Paquette, all that transgressive stuff just seems a little on the vanilla side.st

I'm not sorry I read WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE, but it's clearly not really Grant Morrison's jam. I'd be totally okay with Morrison steering clear of Matters Amazonian for the future.        

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE TRILLION DOLLAR TROPHIES" (SUPERBOY #221, 1976)

 

This story, one of the last Jim Shooter wrote for The Legion before he became an assistant editor at Marvel, is a curious venture into "quasi-adult" subject matter for both Shooter and for a feature associated with the Superman mythos. That, more than the story's formal qualities, are its foremost features, and the tale garnered a degree of negative response for its appatrent employment of B&D elements.

Short version: the Legion-heroes are the "trophies" of the title. Two criminals, Grimbor and Charma, seek to capture the heroes for purposes of reaping a ransom from the group's rich patron. Charma is in some ways the "dominant" member, for she has the power to dominate any male and make him her subservient slave. However, this same talent evokes titanic rage in any female, even though Charma may not be impinging on anyone's particular mate. Charma thus needs a powerful male protector, so she enslaves the reluctant lock-maker, Grimbor the Chainsman. The duo seem like castoffs from a William Moulton Marston story, though I tend to think they represented a "one-off" idea for Shooter, rather than any syndromic obsession.

          First, while Grimbor takes on Colossal Boy, Charma gets beat on by Shadow Lass.

 

Timber Wolf and Light Lass try to separate their enemies, but as Charma takes another beating from the female Legionnaire, her cries cause both Grimbor and the male Legionnaire to come to Charma's aid, so these heroes are also captured.

Later, when Charma is about to kill off some of the captive heroes, Shrinking Violet, one of the weakest Legionnaires, comes to the rescue. Though Violet is governed by the same compulsion to punch out Charma, the heroine does so with an eye to making the captive males so angry they break their chains and accidentally clobber Grimbor. The story closes on the revelation that at some point Grimbor planned to get back in the driver's seat by making special chains to restrict her domination-power.

It's not a very good story, nor a deep story. But one must admit- it's not a dull story.  

  

MYTHCOMICS: CARNIVORA (1994)

 

Some time back the Italian album-series DRUUNA was recommended to me, and I finally found time to read the series, this time on COMIC ONLINE FREE.COM. 

My first thought is that it would have been easy to read the albums out of order, because creator Paolo Serpieri wasn't especially concerned with inter-album continuity. While keeping in mind that the literary term "picaresque" may have been misused in many instances, the adventures of the titular heroine Druuna would seem to conform to that model. That model focuses on the wanderings of unattached protagonists seeking to make their way in the world, whether by hook or by crook-- often crook, since the genre takes its name from the Spanish word "picaro," meaning a rogue who lives by his (or her) wits. Female protagonists may tend to be somewhat more innocent as they flee the attentions of lustful predators; some can be fairly called rogues, like Defoe's Moll Flanders, while others exist to be repeatedly attacked and abused, like the 1965 parody-character Phoebe Zeitgeist.  Serpieri's Drunna follows the latter model, and like Phoebe she spends an inordinate amount of time being stripped of her clothing and being subjected to numerous indignities-- though unlike Phoebe, Drunna seems to be able to "relax and enjoy it," even though she doesn't seem to be a syndromic masochist.

I found Volume 4, CARNIVORA, to be the volume that most succeeds in assigning a psychological mythicity to Drunna's circumlocutions-- a psychology that I associate with the nightmarish conviction that one can never know where reality begins and dream ends. To the extent that continuity matters, earlier volumes established that Drunna originally occupied a space-faring generation starship, though like most of the ship's occupants, she thought she lived on a regular planet, specifically a city infected by a devastating plague. By the time of CARNIVORA, Drunna has been taken aboard another starship, but everyone aboard this ship is aware that they are descendants of a devastated Earth, and that they are searching for a new planet to colonize. Druuna becomes a chess-pawn to various parties aboard the ship, sometimes being used for sex, sometimes as a means to fight against a tyrannical computer-intelligence. But whatever victories Druuna achieves in earlier volumes are abolished here, in a recursive world where, as the Einstein-looking scientist above says, dreams and reality can become confused.

The POV shifts from the scientist to that of Druuna herself, imagining herself back in the plague-city. She experiences the possible hallucination of being murdered by weird surgeons, then awakes in a bedchamber unharmed, where she meditates on her unexplained pregnancy (which is also apparently an illusion) and on "the perverse pleasure of waiting, that strange obscene desire." A strange man enters the room and abuses her, after which his phantom-like associates gather to cheer him on. 

But then Druuna finds herself back on the starship, awakening from the first of many demonstrable dreams. The ship's computer addresses her, and she learns that Shastar, her deceased lover from the plague-city, has had his consciousness merged with that of the computer. She meets Terry, a female crewperson, who informs her that many of the other inhabitants have been devoured by a carnivorous alien intruder (presumably the "carnivora" of the title). The creature imprisons its victims in membranous webs, but Terry avers that these crewpersons are as good as dead. 

Then Terry's supposed identity goes out the porthole. Two crewpersons appear and shoot her, revealing that she's a "replicant," a copy of the original female created by the invader. Druuna, though not a fighter by nature, kills the monster born from phony-Terry's guts with a weapon, saving the life of one crewman. The other crewperson, the real Terry, regards Druuna as another possible menace. She divests Druuna of her few clothes and chains her up in a room where some of the ship's degraded inhabitants, "the prolets," swarm forth to manhandle the bare-assed heroine.

While Druuna suffers the fate of the perdurable female, the captain of the ship, known as "Will," is seen on his own, meditating on the oppressiveness of  the universe. Druuna, or a replicant thereof, joins him. He has sex with false-Druuna a couple of times, but it doesn't do anything to lessen his mordant musings on the relativity of time. Awakening from post-coital sleep, he finds Druuna missing. Will wanders about looking for her, has a dialogue with an unnamed crewman imprisoned in the alien's webbing, and then finds fake Druuna-- and also fake Will, a replicant of himself. 

Meanwhile, real Druuna seems to awake, no longer tied up as she was before. However, this awakening is yet another engineered dream, as she converses with a hologram of dead lover Shastar. The hologram gives Druuna such helpful information as "Beyond this wall the universe is reflected upside down and time is inverted." Shastar tells Druuna to communicate the ship's peril to the crew, since the captain's been destroyed by the alien beasts. Then she awakes for real (or as real as things get here), though she finds that her assailants have apparently left her unbound and the door to the chamber open. She finds another crewman dead, while not far away, Terry encounters the false Druuna.

Perhaps because more crewpeople have died, Terry doesn't go off half-cocked this time, but this only permits Fake Druuna to accuse Real Druuna of being the alien copy. After tricking Terry into shooting Druuna, albeit non-fatally, the replicant summons one of its beastly allies to overpower Terry, who takes her own life so as to avoid becoming a hors d'oeuvre.

The ship's doctor finds the wounded Druuna and barricades the two of them in the computer-room. The doc pulls a sheet over Druuna's head, since she's apparently died, while outside the replicants order him to let them in, for they are true life and he is only "death and negation." Doc blows up the ship, but his consciousness is propelled into his own past. Then he somehow fast-forwards to a period before the ship ventured near the aliens' domain, and he talks the captain into reversing course. Druuna is alive again, but the doc can't help wondering if he actually succeeded, or if everyone he's encountered might be a fiendish copy of the real Earthpeople.

If TWELVE MONKEYS hadn't come out one year later than CARNIVORA, I would have said that this story was something of a cross between that mind-bending time-travel flick and 1982's THE THING. Druuna's sexcapades play a somewhat less direct role in the narrative here in comparison to other installments. However, it did occur to me that the recursive nature of dreams and illusions throughout CARNIVORA might be profitably compared to the ecstatic (and repetitive) nature of human sexuality, which also have, however briefly, the effect of abolishing the participants' consciousness of commonplace reality. In the end, though the reader can go on to witness more adventures of the picaresque heroine, those narratives also continue to de-center both Druuna and her world so that the idea of a shared reality seems as illusory as the dream of Chaung Tzu.

MYTHCOMICS: “THAT SERIOUS GUY IS A CRIMINAL?” LOVE HINA (2002)

I’ve discoursed several times on Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, summarizing its series concept here and condensing its joined themes of female sadism and male masochism in CROSSING THE LAWLINES5, thusly:

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

While keeping in mind that this sort of wacky, semi-eroticized violence is not identical with syndromic sadism, the question arises: since Ken Akamatsu himself is (I will presume) a biological male, does his idea of masculinity start and end with the vision of the male as a hopeless goof?

 

My answer is, “almost.” Keitaro Urashima begins the LOVE HINA series as a klutzy twenty-something who’s failed his college entrance exams three times. When he gets the job of managing an all-female dormitory owned by his aunt Haruka, he becomes the proverbial “rooster in the hen house”—though only if the rooster was crossed with a punching-bag, since Keitaro is forever blundering into compromising situations with the girls and then getting clobbered by them.

 

Further, Keitaro is almost the only male character in the whole 14-volume series. The only other masculine character is thirty-something Seta, who roams the world doing archaeological digs and who occasionally teaches a course at Tokyo U, the college to which Keitaro has repeatedly applied. In addition to these admirable aspects, Seta is trained in kung fu and occasionally has friendly bouts with “kendo girl” Motoko. He also tutored Keitaro’s principal love interest Naru, who had a strong crush on Seta in previous years. Yet Seta is unaware of Naru’s crush and often proves just as maladroit as Keitaro, so that he never really presents Keitaro with any real competition for the love of Naru or any other of Keitaro's other potential hookups. In the story considered here, the self-questioning “That Serious Guy is a Criminal?,” Seta does not appear, but his daughter Sara does. Sara joins the other dorm-residents in constantly belaboring Keitaro, though she’s only a “bitch-in-training” being that she’s about ten years old and not actually involved in the erotic aspects of the situation (which was probably a distinct relief to most readers).

 

 As the story commences, Naru and the other girls are enjoying a hot springs bath. Naru cautions their visitor Mutsumi that while residing at the inn she may get peeped at by the “beast” Keitaro. Naru sees Keitato approach the bath and prepares, with a look of predatory anticipation, to slug him when he trespasses once again. 

But Keitaro passes by the women's bath, goes back to his room and immerses himself in studies for his next entrance exam. Sarah and the equally mischievous Kaolla break into his room to gratuitously whale on him with blunt objects. To their surprise, Keitaro dodges their attacks without even seeming to notice their presence, because he’s so completely focused on his studies. When he does notice the girls’ presence, he remarks, with complete innocence, “Don’t you normally run in and try to jump-kick me?”

 

Soon all the girls observe that Keitaro is so focused that he isn’t making klutzy blunders anymore, nor giving them any reason to clout him. Akamatsu never makes any direct reference here to philosophical or religious precepts, but surely the artist means for his audience to understand that Keitaro has unintentionally tapped into a unique mental state, possibly one in line with the Taoist idea of “doing without doing.”

 

 

Kitsune takes up the challenge to femininity, declaring, “I’m going to use my feminine wiles to magically change Keitaro back into the pervert he deserves to be.” Clad in revealing clothes, Kitsune waltzes into Keitaro’s room during his studies. Yet he’s so focused he doesn’t notice her at first, much less getting flustered by her lady parts. If anything, Kitsune becomes attracted by Keitaro’s new aura of male reserve, and Motoko chimes in with similar sentiments. “It’s good to see him so focused and not tempted by the lure of the female.” Kaolla and Sarah want Keitaro to go back to his dipstick persona, so that they can continue to rag on him. Gentle Shinobu, the next-oldest, is the only one who doesn’t want to abuse Keitaro, but she too wants him to go back to “normal,” apparently because he seems too inaccessible in his quasi-Zen state of mind.

 

Naru is the last to behold the new Keitaro, and though she somewhat appreciates his focused attitude, she’s offended that he no longer reacts when she flashes him some tit or leg. The nubile eighteen-year-old even starts worrying that she’s losing her sex appeal.

 

At the conclusion Keitaro himself re-asserts the status quo. He bursts in on the girls while they’re bathing and explains to near-naked Naru that he’s finally solved an involved problem he’s been working on for days. However, once he solves the problem, his Taoist reserve disappears, his normal personality returns, and he becomes flustered by seeing all the girls in their birthday suits (except, happily, Sarah, who’s wearing a onesy). It’s certainly another of Akamatsu’s humorous jibes that at first the girls all ignore Keitaro’s trespass because they think he’s in his “serious guy” mode, but that, once he reacts to their charms, he again becomes a “criminal,” and thus fair game for a beating.

 

Keitaro never again gets into “Zen master” mode, but there are other stories in which he shows signs of maturation, and these signs of masculnity inevitably prove attractive to the age-appropriate girls of the dormitory. Thus Akamatsu does imply that women still like the image, if not the reality, of “men who take charge”—though in this comic universe, strength principally signifies durability, as in being able to endure any abuse doled out by the “gentler sex.”