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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MYTHCOMICS: "TRIUMPH OF THE TORNADO TYRANT" (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17, 1963)

This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.

The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?

No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.

However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.

Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?

And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.

So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily. 

Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.

But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."

If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition. 

I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.

THE I CHING DYNASTY

This post at CRIVENS COMICS AND STUFF led me to ruminate a bit on the character of "the Incredible I Ching" as portrayed in his sole venue, as the teacher of "the Mod Wonder Woman" of the late sixties and early seventies. I won't discuss that phase of the Amazing Amazon's history overall, except with respect to what it means psychologically for DC's character of Wonder Woman/Diana Prince to have a father.

First off, it's necessary to state that the basic schtick behind the character's name-- where he would introduce himself by saying "I Ching"-- wasn't particularly racist or chauvinist. However, it was so lame that even the primary creators of this arc, Denny O'Neil and Mike Sekowsky, dropped it quickly.

Second, although Wonder Woman's creator William Marston was himself a father in real life, it was apparently important to him that his heroine should be fatherless; molded out of clay by her figurative mother, the Amazon Hippolyta, and then brought to life by a Greek goddess. Wonder Woman, raised in an all-female society, never evinced any sign under Marston that she felt the lack of a paternal figure in her life. After Marston's passing, Robert Kanigher was for the most part the person most in control of the WONDER WOMAN franchise for the next twenty years, and for all the divergences Kanigher took from Marston's template, I'd say that on balance his heroine too was just fine without ever having had paternity in her life.

The character's first appearance, like his last, is defined by "comic book coincidence." At the start of the "Mod" arc, the superheroine Wonder Woman has to give up her powers for contrived reasons. Almost immediately, an old blind Chinese man with peerless martial arts skills accosts Diana Prince and talks her into training with him, so that she can fight evil with her purely mortal abilities.

Though I don't believe the arc ever uses the term "sensei," the initial relationship between Diana and I Ching is purely that of student and sensei. The two of them also become a crimefighting team, particularly against a mastermind named Doctor Cyber, but it was initially a very formal relationship, not showing the parental warmth seen, say, in the Golden Age Batman/Robin interactions.

Then, toward the end of his first run on the Mod Arc, Denny O'Neil scripted a big, teary emotional outburst for Diana in WW #182. Diana has been romanced by a handsome swain, only to find out that he's an agent of Cyber. She loses control and slams him around with forceful karate punches. When Ching stops her, she rejects his fortune-cookie homilies, telling him to shut up as she runs away.

Now, I should point out that although this was meant to be a more "realistic" reaction than what passed for drama in any of the earlier Kanigher WONDER WOMAN stories, Mike Sekowsky, taking over both writing and artistic duties in the next issue, never comes back to this moment of drama, as contemporary Marvel writers like Roy Thomas or Archie Goodwin might have. This would prove to be a repeating pattern in Mod Wonder Woman.

Issues 183 and 184 take the now mortal Diana back into Amazon territory, and Ching goes along for the ride. The Amazons are now being menaced by Ares, God of War, whom Sekowsky capriciously imagines to be Hippolyta's father and thus Diana's figurative grandfather. While the Amazons are besieged, Diana voyages to a dimension where many of the Earth's heroes dwell apart from humankind, all in a quasi-Arthurian setting, despite the presence of non-Arthurian types like Siegfried, Roland, and (possibly as a sop to feminism) Brunhild, leader of the Valkyries. The heroes make a show of indifference but end up helping to defeat Ares, after which Diana and Ching go back to Earth.

The next emotional moment, from #186, shows a bit more of Sekowsky's humor about the interactions of Diana and Ching. Diana spends most of the story trying to rein in the rampage of a psychologically unstable witch named Morgana-- a "yo yo," as Ching calls her. Sekowsky's big joke is that Diana keeps trying to fight the witch with her mortal skills, and won't listen when Ching tries to tell her he just happens to know magic and can overpower the witch in that manner. And on top of that, Diana and Morgana go toe-to-toe on a purely physical plane, and Diana loses, much to her chagrin.

Issue #187 and 188 introduce a new parental wrinkle. Through a set of seeming coincidences, Ching is reunited with Lu Shan, his long lost daughter. But "seeming" is the operative word, for Lu Shan is an agent of Cyber, and she shoots Ching in the belief that he's responsible for killing her mother.

Now, one would think that even a rather erratic writer like Sekowsky would want to follow through on this big revelation, even if it was just to invalidate Lu Shan's claim as false. But nope, we don't get it from Sekowsky, and we don't get it from O'Neil in his last few scripts for the Mod Arc. But for some reason, even before the decision had been made to end the Mod Phase, in issue #188 Sekowsky delivered a two-page in-joke in which Diana clobbers two petty thieves in a department store. The in-joke is that one of the thugs is named "Creepy Caniguh," which presumably expresses Sekowsky's opinion of the former WONDER WOMAN scribe.

In the ensuing issues Ching presumably has lots of opportunities to hold forth on what caused his natural daughter's grudge, but if he expounds anything to Diana, there's no evidence on any of the pages. Then Lu Shan, last seen escaping Cyber's HQ after shooting her dad in #187, makes her bid to become a super-villain. In this O'Neil script, she kidnaps Jonny Double, potential boyfriend material for Diana, as part of a scheme to get hold of a magical jewel to power a big dimension-crossing machine for purposes of pillage. 

Diana and Ching learn about these plans, promoting what I believe is the first time Ching expresses parental affection for Diana. But of explanations about the death of Ching's wife-- nada.

The next issue, #203, is essentially the last adventure for Mod Wonder Woman. scripted by Samuel Delany as one part of a projected new story-line that never came to pass-- one in which Ching is not even mentioned. But DC Editorial had already decided to bring back the Amazon Princess, and Robert Kanigher, as if summoned from the vasty deep by Sekowsky's jibe, was tapped to return Diana to her roots.

I'm not sure I could survive revisiting the extreme stupidity of Kanigher's hackwork in this period, and in any case the only relevant part of #204 consists of seven pages in which Kanigher kills off Ching and has Diana forget her whole "mod phase" before transitioning back to her Amazon status, and to whatever plotlines mattered to Kanigher.

Now, one might view this summary execution as "tit for tat." When O'Neil and Sekowsky took over the title, they certainly didn't make a smooth transition from whatever Kanigher's last scripts had been. In fact, they showed extreme disinterest in the old WONDER WOMAN mythos by killing off Steve Trevor, just so he wouldn't get in the way of whatever romances they wanted to give Diana. Compared to Trevor's unceremonious demise, Ching's is not that bad, if one grants that, in that era, no one but hardcore fans expected seamless continuity from comic books. 

Also, it's not impossible that someone above Kanigher-- hypothetically, Dick Giordano-- might have advised Kanigher to give Ching a decent send-off, not unlike a much later incident in which Giordano *allegedly * warned Keith Giffen not to kill off Aquaman's wife. In the absence of any testimony about outside influences, though, I have to say that I like the line Kanigher writes for Diana, calling Ching the father she never had. I'm sure Kanigher cared absolutely nothing about anything that had happened during Mod Wonder Woman, just as it would be hard to argue that the author even cared about his own WW stories, beyond putting money in his wallet. But a good line is a good line, whether its author cared about the story or not.

Much later, Brian Azzarello undid the whole "virgin birth" of Princess Diana by claiming that she was the daughter of Zeus. I've read none of these. But even with all the narrative problems of the Mod phase, I Ching still holds the honor of "first father."

SIDE-NOTE: Because #204 introduces Diana's Black Amazon sister Nubia, I did force myself to revisit Kanigher's "Origin of Nubia" story in #206. It's like a lot of Kanigher's WW stories from the pre-Mod era, where events often unfold with only the thinnest justifications. Here, instead of Hippolyta praying to have a child who's like her, Aphrodite rather randomly instructs the Amazon queen to make two clay kids, one light skinned and one dark skinned-- apparently for no reason but so that Evil Ares will have the chance to steal the dark one and try to mold her into his perfect warrior. This scenario did have some mythopoeic potential, but Kanigher pretty much blows it from start to finish. But again, I have to admit that Kanigher's basic concept had some validity, since a lot of later creators took pleasure in doing their versions of "Black Wonder Woman."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE METAL WOMEN BLUES" (METAL MEN #32, 1968)

The DC feature METAL MEN provides a variety of good examples of my current metaphor for literary complication as seen in this essay.

The original creators of the franchise, writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Ross Andru, didn't work on this particular issue, though they had collaborated on most if not all issues up until issue #29. The next two issues were written by Otto Binder and penciled by Gil Kane, and on #32, Binder's story was illustrated by Mike Sekowsky. Since Sekowsky became editor on the feature with #33, replacing long-time writer-editor Kanigher, it seems very likely that Kanigher was being edged off the title, even though he collaborated with Sekowsky for a time. However, clearly before Sekowsky became the new boss, Binder was instructed to follow the storytelling example of the almost-old boss. Back in the day, I could hardly tell the difference between the Binder stories and the preceding Kanigher tales, though now I can see that Binder's plotting was much tighter, despite his emulation of Kanigher's writing-practices.

"The Metal Women Blues" begins typically enough. Tin is being fawned over by his girlfriend Nameless, the only robot in the group not created by Doc Magnus, and the second of two female group-members, the other being Tina, the platinum doll infatuated with her creator. The other male robots-- Gold, Lead, Iron, and Mercury-- petition Magnus to creates mates for all of them. Magnus initially refuses, until Tina points out that if he creates a mate for her, she might become less enamored with Magnus. (Admittedly this is something Kanigher's lovelorn platinum robot would never say, but possibly she's merely trying to help her male comrades.)

In no time, five new robots join the group, known collectively as "the Metal Women" even though they have one male member-- which is just good payback for the years in which the Metal Men sported not one but two female members. However, though the four lady automatons are attracted to their opposite numbers, Platinum Man has no desire for Tina, preferring to keep their association formal-- which puts Magnus back behind the romantic eight-ball.

Just like in a Kanigher story, the two groups are immediately called into action against an alien threat: a giant automated machine. And it's at this point that the girl robots evince something less than shrinking-violet behavior.

"I know I made a mistake," says Magnus, "when I didn't incorporate 'timidity' in the metal women's responsometers. But I didn't want them to be too 'tame' for the Metal Men." However, not only are the lady-bots fairly aggressive, they're actually good at the business of being mechanical superheroes, which causes the males to label them "female glory-hogs." (To be sure, Nameless is unchanged, though for a time she sides with the other "girls," and Lead Girl isn't a glory-hog, just so dumb she makes Lead look swift of wit.)

However, the beings who sent the automated destroyer are observing the contumely, and they decide to take advantage of the situation. The villains are a group of nearly identical 'female robot Amazons," who are all haggish-looking and who are given no raison d'etre at all, just as many of Kanigher's menaces came from no place and had no rationale for their existence. (Maybe some robot-maker made them all look like his shrewish wife, a la I, MUDD?) The Amazon Queen, realizing that the males' vanity has been wounded, sends a "cute girl-robot" to lure the metal guys into a trap. (The cute but unnamed robot-girl even goes armed with "Chan-oil #5 perfume.")

In no time, the trap closes on the guys, who are reluctant to fight "weak women.' The Amazons promptly kick the Metal males' asses and get their broken bodies out of sight, except for Platinum Man, who gets his weight boosted so much that he sinks beneath the earth.

The girls do follow, but they catch sight of Platinum Man in his hole, and he briefs the lady-bots on the strategies the Amazons used against the Metal Males. Thus the Metal Women defeat the Amazons tout suite.

However, since the feature's status quo had to be maintained, the Metal Women then try to rescue Platinum Man, just as a flood of magma flows up into the hole he made. And so the Metal Men return to their normal lineup. Magnus offers to build more inamorata but the guys all decline-- though as a final joke, Mercury gets caught trying to keep the cute girl-robot for himself (being an inferior creation, she simply falls apart in the wake of her creators' destruction).

"Metal Women Blues"-- which is titled "Robot Amazon Blues" on the cover-- is as cornball as anything Kanigher wrote. However, it does maintain a good level of symbolic complexity as well. It begins by showing the guys, who just want women to fawn over them, having their lives complicated by female crusaders generally as competent as they are. While the Metal Women are just "sisters doing it for themselves," though, the Robot Amazons are thoroughly negative incarnations of negative female aggression-- made even less appealing by the fact that they're all ugly.

Binder's most interesting symbolic touch isn't, strictly speaking, necessary for the story's plot, and it illustrates how even a juvenile story sometimes has deeper layers. While the Amazon Queen is busy working on the cutesy robot, the former observes that the unnamed femme metale is made of an alloy of all the metals being lured-- mercury, lead, tin, iron, and gold-- which brings up the loony but amusing idea that in this universe, intelligent robots "stick with their own kind."

MYTHCOMICS: "SECRET OF THE SINISTER SORCERERS" (JUSTICE LEAGUE #2, 1961)

(Note to followers: the following essay was written a few years ago, so the style and presentation is a little different from my current habits.)

Quick Summary: Simon Magus, the Troll King, and Saturna, Lord of Misrule, are three evil sorcerers who desire to rule their native dimension, Magic-Land, a realm where the laws of magic, not science, hold sway.   When they learn of the dimension of Earth, where scientific law rules instead of magic, they cause the respective laws of each dimension to become transposed, so that the sorcerers can use scientific weapons to dominate the now-powerless inhabitants of Magic-Land.   The Justice League travels to Magic-Land, breaks into three teams in order to combat each of the sorcerers on one of Magic-Land’s three continents; when the heroes triumph, the spell is reversed and both dimensions return to normal. 

This story—the fifth Justice League tale, preceded by three appearances of DC’s premiere Silver Age superhero team and one issue of the regular magazine—is noteworthy on three counts (appropriate, since so much of the story is dominated by groups of three).  It is the first to have the League travel, not to the usual alien planet for their usual exotic adventures, but to a parallel dimension whose laws are different from those of Earth’s continuum.  Parallel Earths would later become extremely important during the entire Earth I/Earth II conception.   

It’s also the first Justice League story in which the heroes face a team of villains, rather than a single malefactor who hurls various weapons or catspaws against them.   But most importantly in my eyes, it’s the first time writer Gardner Fox, the Silver Age’s most mythologically-skilled writer, managed to use a Justice League story as a playground in which to let an assortment of mythic and folkloric figures hold sway.   Yet, despite the playful quality of the story, there’s a sense that, consciously or otherwise, Gardner Fox imposed an interesting mythopoeic order upon what might look, at first glance, like the usual grab-bag approach to mythology.

The most profitable way to mythologically critique comic books is first to draw general comparisons between the concepts used in a modern pop-fiction story like this one-- henceforth abbreviated as “SotSS”-- and similar concepts from archaic myth.   For instance, one would not ordinarily think that stories from archaic myth had much in common with Fox’s tale of parallel worlds exchanging their very natures.   But archaic tales have similar ideas; they simply aren’t expressed in terminology drawn from science-fiction.   For instance, if mythic tale-tellers want to show the world physically suffering from some usurping power, then such suffering shows up in the form of drought or bad harvests.  And in some cases, one can even find such thought-processes not just in stories, but also in festive rituals like Halloween and the Roman Saturnalia— two festivals that are obliquely referred to in the course of “SotSS.”

For instance, given that Halloween is traditionally a time that calls up otherworldly spirits-- which is to say, speaking broadly, spirits of the deceased-- it’s probably significant that the three sorcerers discover the Earth-dimension on All-Hallows Eve.   The other festival I mentioned, the Saturnalia, can be discerned more by clues than by overt mention, but as I see it, Saturnalia—the late-December Roman festival from which Christmas more or less inherited its time of celebration—is implicit in Fox’s story.   For Saturnalia was a time in which the celebrants themselves overturned the usual order of things, with slaves being treated like lords and vice versa, and where a commoner was often elected to be a temporary king (perhaps being slain in the end).   Further, the celebration took its name from the Roman harvest-god Saturn, whose legend was loosely grafted onto the myth of Greek Cronos, the Titan who was defeated by Zeus when he attempted to usurp the natural progression of the generations by swallowing his children.   The specific celebration of Saturnalia died out once Christianity held sway, but it seems that the same basic idea informed medieval Europe’s “Feast of Fools,” which carried on Saturnalia’s custom of electing a commoner to be a king, and giving him the rather-significant name of “the Lord of Misrule.”

  

With some of these concepts in mind, let us look at the three sorcerers who cause the dimensional usurpation in “SotSS”:

SATURNA THE LORD OF MISRULE:  The name of this character provides the central clue to the mythic concepts underlying “SotSS,” since that name includes references to both the Saturnalia and to the medieval “Lord of Misrule;” he is also foregrounded as being is the first villain to be encountered and defeated by two of the heroes (Green Lantern and the Martian Manhunter).   Interestingly, though nothing in the story explicitly mentions the villain’s godly namesake, or any of the attributes of Saturn (god of the harvest, god of time), Saturna does hurl against the heroes two hybrid creatures—a manticore and a griffin.  It’s of passing interest that some analysts deem hybrid creatures in general to signify transitions of the calendar in archaic times, which might ally the character even more strongly with the notion of cyclical changes during the calendar year; an important element in many archaic myths.   Aside from this association, Saturna’s most important aspect—and one to be compared with the other two villains— lies in the elemental nature of his Magic-Land continental-domain.   This continent is called “Asgard,” though strangely artist Mike Sekowsky draws the villain as a Middle Eastern potentate, but all we see of this Asgard is Saturna’ hideout, which is in (to borrow from Green Lantern’s exposition-heavy dialogue) “the heart of this mighty rock cavern.” 

THE TROLL KING: whereas the other two sorcerers are given Middle Eastern apparel, the Troll King is a bushy-bearded Viking-type whose main resources, as heroes Flash and Wonder Woman discover, are trolls: some of which are giants, while others are dwarfs.   In Scandinavian mythology, of course, trolls are seen as the enemies of both men and gods, and mythologically represent man’s dark, inferior side, but they take on specific “Saturnalia” aspects when one knows that the word “troll” may be derived from Nordic “thrall,” meaning “slave.”   Thus “Troll King” might be deemed another way of saying “king of the slaves,” which gives the name much the same resonance as the title “lord of misrule.”   And while the name of the Scandinavian “home of the gods” was perhaps-whimsically bestowed on Saturna rather than on a fellow who would look more at home in a THOR comic, Fox gives the Troll King’s realm a name borrowed from yet another culture, calling it “Olympia” after the Mount Olympus of the Greek gods.   This “Olympia” is the conceptual opposite of Asgard. for while Saturna made his home in a cave, the castle of the Troll King is located, like Olympus, at the top of a mountain.

  

SIMON MAGUS:  Unlike his two partners, this sorcerer’s name has no strong connection with Saturnalia or its analogue rituals, but it does connote the same general concept of an evil entity that threatens to usurp the natural order.   Just as Saturn is a tyrannical ruler overthrown by Zeus, and trolls are the perennial enemies of the gods, Simon Magus is a semi-historical figure who may have opposed the orthodox Christian church on a number of narrative occasions.   In history, Simon Magus is said to have founded a rival sect of Christians called the Simonians, some of whom worshiped the magus himself as an avatar of Zeus.   In the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus attempts to buy supernatural powers from Simon Peter, but his most spectacular challenge to orthodoxy takes place in the apocryphal “Acts of Peter,” where Simon levitates before the Emperor of Rome to prove his power, yet loses out when Peter directs a prayer against Simon, causing the magician to fall to his death.

Fox’s Simon Magus contains no direct references to any of these stories; the most obvious reason for Fox to choose the name was that Simon Magus was the archetypal “evil magician” of Biblical times.  And yet, though there’s no way to know whether or not Fox knew that Simon had been worshipped as an incarnation of Zeus, the odd thing is that Simon is given a Zeus-like aspect.   Some may remember, for instance, that when Zeus deposes Saturn (in Greek, Cronos), Zeus then divides the world between himself and his brothers Hades and Poseidon: Hades gets the underworld (which essentially allies him to the earth beneath which his realm lies), Poseidon gets the sea, and Zeus takes the airy regions of the heavens.   And yet, some authorities also believe that the three brother-gods are all just aspects of Zeus himself (since Zeus was sometimes given unheavenly-sounding titles, like “Zeus Chthonios,” Zeus of the Earth).   

Certainly that is the case with Fox’s Simon, anyway. The three heroes sent to round him up—Superman, Batman, and Aquaman— find that Simon is “ruler of the air, land, and sea,” and that they must combat Simon separately in three different regions of his continent.   Superman challenges him in “his floating air-castle” (the heavens), Batman pursues him in a forest (the earth), and Aquaman, of course, battles him in “the depths of the Magic-Land oceans” (the sea).   However, there is only one Simon: he is able to disappear from the clutches of Superman and Batman when each of them bests him, but when Aquaman bests him in the ocean, he can no longer flee and must capitulate.   And to put the mythic icing on the cake, even though the Magic-Land continent ruled by Simon is seen to have elements of air, sea, and earth about it, its name refers to only one of those elements, for the continent’s name is—“Oceana.”  (The true mythic-nitpicker will know that, while there was no “Oceana” in myth as there was an “Asgard” and an “Olympia”-- sort of-- but that the name sounds a lot like "Oceanus." This figure was a Titan, like Zeus’ oppressive father Saturn/Cronos, and was thus one of the generation Zeus confined to Tartarus. In addition, the name was sometimes used to designate a gigantic “ocean-stream” that encompassed the Earth.

And what should one make of all these mythic details?  To be sure, none of them occurred to me when I first read and enjoyed “SotSS” as a young adolescent.   But now, even though I know they were not necessary to my enjoyment as a child, these details suggest to me that the story’s author was able, if only unconsciously, to encode a simple-seeming boy’s story with some of the deeper resonances one can find in archaic myth.  Such resonances may not mean a great deal to many readers, especially in a time when most authors and readers would not know Simon Magus from Simon Templar. Still, I enjoy seeing that at least one comics-writer read mythology deeply enough, poetically enough, to “overturn” one’s expectations on what a boy’s comic should be about.                   

TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE

A Myth-Analysis of “The Justice League’s Impossible Adventure!”


I’ve been recently arguing with a messboard opponent that the essence of myth, both in its religious and literary manifestations, is opposed to any kind of dialectical thought. Indeed, it’s arguable that dialectical thought (what Cassirer would also call discursive thinking) is what transforms archaic myth into religion, and what separates so-called “high” literature from its lower forms. I don’t oppose the idea of such a separation, but I don’t assume that the form of literature that has been infused with dialectical thought and/or ideology is superior to the form without such discursive manipulations. Works belonging to the first form I’ve denoted as works of “thematic realism,” because the themes they pursue are meant to have realistic application to the world in which the audience exists. Works of the second form—which include the superhero adventure mentioned above, from JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #59—are naturally unrealistic in the thematic sense, but as I hope to prove, lack of realism does not equal lack of relevance.

JLA #59 begins, as many of the feature’s adventures do, with some of the superheroes being spirited out of their headquarters by unknown forces—specifically, five members: Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash and the Martian Manhunter. They find themselves on an alien planet with a red sun, which immediately deprives Superman of his fantastic powers. (As Superman was the only hero capable of flying off the planet into deep space, this development was probably writer Gardner Fox’s strategy for keeping all five heroes planetbound.) The Leaguers soon encounter their alien hosts: a trio of identical purple-skinned “wise men” types, who call themselves “the Impossibles” (a name that would be risible even if it wasn’t shared by a trio of 1960s animated superheroes from Hanna-Barbera). The Impossibles claim that they possess an inerrancy that any Catholic Pope might envy, since everything they do is for the best—and their purpose in abducting the quintet is to take away their super-powers. And though their inerrancy sounds Catholic, their impulse seems guided by Protestant virtues, since they choose these five heroes because none of them earned their powers, which were all gained either through the circumstances of their birth or a fortuitous accident. “Fate giveth and fate taketh away” seems to be their motto, but the Impossibles, despite being numerically equivalent to the Greek Moirae, don’t actually know the future, and are fascinated to see what good will come of their tampering.

In short order, one of the Impossibles’ machines reduces all five heroes to mortal status. Moments later, the three wise aliens are blasted by rays from some unseen source. Before slumping into comas, the Impossibles assert that they have been attacked by their enemies “the Contras,” and that “Without us—should we be destroyed by the Contra Creatures—the entire universe will be dominated by sheer evil.” The heroes immediately accept the truth of the Impossibles’ declaration, perhaps being of the belief that any beings called “Contras” must be contrary to good (and this many years before the word acquired its current political charge!) As the quintet dashes forth to battle evil, the Martian Manhunter notes that even though they’ve lost their powers, they’ve also lost their weaknesses.

Appropriately enough, the villains are five in number too, but whereas the Impossibles were identical, the Contras look as they came from five different worlds: a crystal man, a walking brain, a spiral-creature, a flower-man and a “living neon-being.” “Everything on that world must be different from everything else,” reasons one of the heroes before they engage the Contras in battle. All five heroes get ignominiously trounced, though two of them are saved from death by the fact that they don’t possess their super-powers. Thus the powers the heroes did not earn are providentially taken away just when they would have proved a fatal burden.
The Contras approach the unconscious Impossibles, bent on killing them. Flash theorizes that the Contra’s weakness may be that they “never do anything the same”—which is the writer’s way of making it possible to bestow on the villains any weakness he chooses, some of which are identical to those of the heroes. Superman just happens to find a chunk of meteoric kryptonite, which he uses to destroy the neon-being. Aquaman, following somewhat more scientific principles, traps the walking brain by immersing it in the ocean and submerging it, reasoning that “no brain can do without oxygen for more than six minutes.” The Martian Manhunter, now able to handle fire without ill effects, manages to burn up the flower-being. The crystal man and the spiral-creature are defeated without resort to specific weaknesses, since within the pages of the JLA neither of the heroes who deal out those defeats—Flash and Wonder Woman—have specific weaknesses to utilize against these villains. (I specify “within the pages of the JLA” because in Wonder Woman’s own feature, she was sometimes said to lose her powers when chained by a man, but Gardner Fox’s JLA doesn’t draw on that bit of Amazon mythology.) In the end, all five aliens are destroyed with a ruthlessness unusual to the milieu of 1960s superheroes. This may account for why none of the Contras ever speak. Because they don’t, the Contras never entirely seem like sentient beings, and so the heroes can demolish them as cheerfully as if they were smashing inanimate matter, even though both the brain and the flower-being seem to be modeled on living things.

In conclusion, whether by direct or roundabout means, all the Leaguers regain their powers from their acts of Contra-smashing, which is as good as saying that they have now “earned” the abilities that fate gave them earlier. Upon recovering, the Impossibles exult in an “I told you so” moment, and return the quintet of Leaguers to their headquarters for some last-panel badinage about the impossibility of their adventure.

I used the word “providentially” earlier. In one sense, JLA #59 is about the myth of Providence, in which the will of a benign God sorts out men’s fates according to their desserts. In broad form it’s the same theme that informs both Alan Moore’s PROMETHEA and C.S. Lewis’ NARNIA books. However, unlike those works—both of which attempt to deal with the Providence-theme in dialectical fashion, however successfully—the JUSTICE LEAGUE adventure doesn’t advance a true dialectical argument. This lack of a dialectical element, however, does not adversely affect the story’s complexity. JLA #59 uses many of the same elements that a dialectical story would have used, such as the opposition of stability (the Impossibles) with chaos (the Contras). The story’s game of “vanishing powers and weaknesses,” though, is arguably one that comes forth in its full glory only in a tale able to ignore the demands of thematic realism, and to focus on what the 1940 film THIEF OF BAGDAD calls “the beauty of the impossible.” If one hypothesizes that one of the chief pleasures offered by the superhero genre is that of beholding the flagrantly impossible, then the rather-comic name given to these purple-skinned purveyors of providence may be entirely appropriate. After all, though in all likelihood no audience-member for this story has ever lived in a world where one can be sure of being “right” at all times—much less regarding the correct apportionment of good and evil—this fact does not remove the pleasure of viewing a world where the impossible is real.