NEAR-MYTHS: "REQUIEM FOR A TITAN" (TEEN TITANS #14, 1968)

 

In this essay I distinguished three general periods in the first run of the TEEN TITANS feature: "Wacky Titans," "Relevant Titans," and "Spooky Titans." But "Requiem for a Titan" was an odd game-changer for long-time DC scripter Bob Haney. "Requiem" didn't mark a sea-change for the feature-- future stories still utilized a lot of wackiness revolving around the alliance of the teen sidekicks-- so it seems like Haney just had a sudden desire to thrust the innocent barely-adults into the chaos of guilt and moral breakdown.     

In a haunting sequence-- or as haunting as a comic with brightly clad superheroes can get-- artist Nick Cardy outdoes himself. Robin the Boy Wonder meets a new fiend, The Gargoyle, in a graveyard that includes prominent markers for Robin and his teammates. At the white-clad villain's command, Robin divests himself of parts of his costume, as if surrendering parts of himself. He balks at removing his mask, but the Gargoyle conjures up giant phantom images of the other Titans, all of whom mock the Boy Wonder. Robin capitulates and removes the mask, upon which action the villain projects a ray from his ring. Robin vanishes as the Gargoyle cackles that "the Teen Titans are embraced by Limbo-- and in Limbo rule I, the Gargoyle."

So what is Limbo, before it was the name of a Trinidadian dance? Early Catholic theology, particularly that of Augustine, posited Limbo as an intermediary realm between Heaven, which was a reward for believers, and Hell, a punishment for unbelievers. Since Bob Haney never defines the nature of the otherworldly dimension he calls Limbo, it's fair to speculate that Haney wants to get across the idea that the place is somehow an exception to the norms of good and evil, even if Limbo's under the control of a demonic-looking master.

A long flashback then transpires, as we are told how the Gargoyle came into the Titans' lives. Though none of them ever saw him before, the costumed figure claims that he went to prison, and that one of the Titans sent him there by falsifying evidence. Though Gargoyle produces zero evidence for his claim, three of the Titans-- Aqualad, Kid Flash and Wonder Girl-- simultaneously place credence in the notion, and all three suspect the detective member of their group of the malfeasance. But nothing about the Gargoyle's story is anything but gaslighting; he fed the heroes his phony story in the hope that all of them would suspect one another. Robin alone did not suspect his teammates, but the doubt nurtured by three of them allows the Gargoyle to consign them to his domain. 

Further, after exposing the doubt-ridden heroes to the influence of Limbo, Gargoyle can bring them back as giant phantom versions of themselves, but with their morals reversed, so that they now hate Robin and everything in the "real world." Gargoyle leaves the noble-minded Boy Wonder to perish in a fire, but he survives, though the world thinks the other Titans dead. Robin then seeks out the security of the Titans secret HQ, only to learn that Gargoyle and his "phantom titans" have taken it over, with the fiend claiming that he and his allies will "wreak crime and evil for the greater glory of the Gargoyle." (Note that nowhere in the story does Gargoyle ever disclose any simple, mundane motive for gain or power.) Robin escapes again, but he refuses to reach out to any other heroes, such as his mentor Batman or the Justice League. Though he's done nothing of which to be ashamed, he's immensely guilt-ridden by his failure to stop Gargoyle-- which is more regret than one sees in the story from the three "faithless" Titans.

After a couple more pages the flashback ends, and we see how Robin, after being hit by the rays from the villain's ring, has entered the free-form world of Limbo, now transformed into another giant phantom. However, the Boy Wonder tricked the villain into merely thinking he Robin had filled his mind with evil thoughts. (Gargoyle's raison d'etre seems to be the opposite of Peter Pan's, where "happy  thoughts" conferred power.)

  After Robin clobbers his ensorcelled teammates, he and Gargoyle have a battle in the bizarre Limbo-realm. Robin cleverly sabotages Gargoyle's ring, which action conveniently strands the villain between dimensions, but delivers all four Titans back on Earth and none the worse for wear. The three "traitors" have forgotten all of their evil deeds, and there's no firm evidence in the story that Robin tells any of them what happened.

Haney, like other DC writers of his generation, must have executed dozens of "scientific-Gothic" story-resolutions, wherein an apparently supernatural phenomenon is neatly explained by some technological gimmick. Not only is Gargoyle's true identity never revealed here, one sees no firm denial that he may indeed be some extra-dimensional being. Now, there are a few concessions to the possibility that he's just some clever Earthman. Nick Cardy's Gargoyle has claws on his hands and toes, but he also seems to have seams separating what might be gloves and boots from the rest of the silvery body. Robin calls the Gargoyle's appearance a "getup," meaning he sees it as a costume. But as I said earlier, Gargoyle certainly acts as if he just worships evil for its own sake, and as if he takes pleasure, like a medieval devil, in corrupting pure hearts. The Limbo-ring may be some form of "magical technology," and since Gargoyle admits he has no "power to remain in Limbo" without the ring, that mitigates against any view that he was actually a native of that dimension. Gargoyle did return for a small handful of stories, but no one, not even his creator, ever again gave him this level of mythic ambivalence.                             

TITANIC NEAR-MYTHS AND CURIOSITIES

 I wasn't expecting to write more than a quickie piece on DC's first TEEN TITANS title, which lasted (not counting three try-out stories) from issue #1 in 1966 through issue #43 in 1973. And this is still only a selective view at best, at that.                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

      

What prompted me to revisit this moldy oldie from my youth was my having reviewed all five seasons of Cartoon Network's TEEN TITANS teleseries. In this post, I evaluated the mythicity of the fifth-season episode "Revved Up" as "good," stating: 


'In the 1960s TITANS comic, the writer introduced a villain with the improbable name of "Ding Dong Daddy," who executed crimes with the help of specially rigged vehicles. This was a rare (for the time) shout-out to a cartoon character outside the boundaries of four-color comic books: the artistic persona of Earl "Big Daddy" Roth, a caricaturist renowned for weird monsters driving fast cars. REVVED UP introduces the animated Ding Dong as a guy who somehow gets hold of a secret treasure owned by the Teen Wonder himself. When Robin and the other Titans try to reacquire the mysterious item, Ding Dong compels them to participate in a car-race-- and Cyborg, who dearly loves his T-car, is more than happy to oblige.'                                                                                                                     I didn't adequately explain why I thought the episode had better than average mythicity, but it later occurred to me that I'd implied that the mere use of the imagery of the artist Roth and some of his caricatures alone conferred mythicity. I could have corrected the language of the post, and no one would have noticed but me, but I thought I could expand on my thoughts better in an ARCHIVE post. What I was trying to get across was that the images of "Big Daddy" Roth and his creations were not mythic in themselves but only accrued sociological mythicity as representations of the "car culture" of the time. I felt "Revved Up" tapped into some of the same sense of humans' fascination with high-velocity vehicles. That fascination comes across by the way the Titans, Ding Dong Daddy and other malefactors cpme up with inventive car-creations, albeit with a certain degree of reflection about how cars work in the first place. (Without that reflection, "Revved Up" wouldn't possess any more mythicity than an episode of WACKY RACES.)                                                                                                       

So much for the TITANS cartoon episode, but what about the original comic book, to which the cartoon occasionally paid homage? In the title's seven-year-run, it was comprised of three periods: "Wacky Titans" (the one all the fans joke about for its un-coolness), "Relevant Titans" (wherein some of the heroes put aside their costumes and tried to have more "street-level" adventures), and "Spooky Titans" (wherein the heroes reassumed their costumes but tended to get involved in markedly supernatural difficulties). Ding Dong Daddy appears in the third issue of the "Wacky Period," but it's one of the better issues on which writer Bob Haney and artist Nick Cardy collaborated. There's still a lot of bad "hip" dialogue that made the Wacky Period so celebrated for its nuttiness, but the plot's not that different from one of Bill Finger's Golden Age tales about Batman and Robin trying to keep young boys on the straight and narrow.                                                                                                 

  The story opens when an automated car robs a bank in Gotham City and escapes the Dynamic Duo, managing even to outmaneuver the Batmobile. By dumb luck, a governmental education committee asks the Teen Titans to investigate a high incidence of dropout high-schoolers, right in River City (OK, not really). From typical teen Danny, the heroes learn that many local teens are deserting school thanks to the high pay they earn at Ding Dong Daddy's car shop. Ding Dong is a crook of course-- he must be, since he's contributing to the delinquency of minors-- but Haney doesn't bother describing what sort of business the villain's using as his cover for his nefarious activities-- like, does he repair vehicles, or does he sell both cars and motorcycles of his own personal design? What he really does in his crime-career is to design other vehicles, like the bank-robbery buggy in Gotham, to pull off automated robberies. It's the sort of crime-career that only makes sense in the world of superheroes and their "pattern villains."                                                                                     

One might expect that once the Titans pay a call on Ding Dong, he might just quell his criminal activities and lay low. Instead, the superheroes' advent functions like a thrown gauntlet, and he sends forth three different gimmick-vehicles to confuse and confound the Titans. When Robin spies on the "Hot Rod Hive," Ding Dong sics thugs on the Boy Wonder and puts him in a death trap-- the sort of thing that practically begs a visit from the local constabulary.             

                                                

Instead, the Titans respond with a flanking attack, masquerading as ordinary bike-riders and talking Danny into getting them jobs at the Hive. The heroes don't do a really good job of staying undercover, since they use their special powers to stomp some nasty bikers who have nothing to do with the main story. (Note the bizarre headgear Nick Cardy gives to the bad bikers.) What's to keep any dropout loyal to Ding Dong from exposing the Titans to the villain?                         

                                                                                                                                              

  Nevertheless, the subterfuge works, in large part because the wig-wearing Wonder Girl distracts the maker of crime-cars by shaking her moneymaker for him in private. In jig time the heroes are able to expose Ding Dong's criminal nature to his student-employees, who are duly aghast at being involved in felonious doings. Ding Dong unleashes one last gimmick on the heroes-- a killer gas pump, of all things-- and then River City can go back to the status quo. I don't believe Ding Dong appeared again until the cartoon show, but he's a decent enough pattern-criminal, given a little novelty by the Roth caricature and by the fact that there aren't that many vehicle-themed villains.                                                                                                       

As I said, I'm not going to attempt an overview of even one of the TITANS periods, but I will note a few other curiosities in the Wacky Years. Beast Boy, who was a vital member of the super-group in the 1980s, only got one guest-appearance in the 1966-73 run, when he tried to join the Titans in issue #6. The main story's not very good, and the art by Bill Molno is subpar, but the page I reprint above does show writer Haney seeking to emulate a little of Marvel's "misunderstood hero" trope, which was on fuller display in DOOM PATROL, where the animal-imitating teen originated.  For good measure, the letters column for the issue contains one letter of no particular consequence from future pro Mark Evanier. Also, a continuity-minded fan asked the editors of TITANS if Wonder Girl would get phased out since she'd been written out of the WONDER WOMAN series by Robert Kanigher, which event I addressed here. The TITANS editors did not respond to the continuity confusion.     

                                                                                           
Finally, just for grins, here's a page from the first appearance of the Mad Mod, who got more than a little exposure on the TEEN TITANS cartoon show. Haney and Cardy introduced the character, whose raison d'etre had more to do with fashion-gimmicks than with mind-control-- and who was apparently Cockney, since he had the habit of dropping his "H's." Though I rather doubt that any Brit of any linguistic division went as far as Haney's depiction, since Mad Mod even laughs without the use of the "H-sound," going, "'Aw, 'Aw" or occasionally "'Ar, 'Ar."  

NEAR MYTHS: STOCKING STUFFER #1

Not to be a Grinch about it, but though there's a lot of mythicity in the actual rituals and customs of Christmas, to say nothing of the intersection of pagan myth and Christian worship, not that much mythicity appears in pop-cultural Christmas entertainment. I like sentiment as much as the next fan, but with a few exceptions, like possibly Seuss's original Grinch-fable, holiday cheer doesn't seem to translate into what I've called (in my windy way) "hyperconcrescent symbolic discourse."

Case in point: TEEN TITANS #13, Bob Haney and Nick Cardy's winsomely corny reprise of Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL, blended with faux-hip teenaged superheroes. Haney probably guessed that most if not all of his readers had "grooved" on various adaptations of Dickens, and so what better grist for the story-mill than to have the Teen Titans experience almost the same story in "real life," with only minor changes of names and situations:

First the teen heroes sit around reading comic books, while Robin loftily recommends a more portentous author:

And then they start to experience almost the same events of the CAROL.

At no point, surprisingly, do any of the heroes start worrying, a la Will Farrell, that they may be helpless pawns of some capricious author. They just go about solving a crime that involves the skinflint "Mister Scrounge," his employee "Ratchet" and Ratcher's crippled son "Tiny Tom." I'd be lying if I said I hadn't enjoyed the pants off this cornball version of metatextuality back in the day, and that I still enjoyed Cardy's masterful mise-en-scene upon recently rereading same.

However, the closest the comic comes to mythicity is the weird, eye-catching cover:

The idea of having a bunch of good guys pinned to a Christmas tree like living ornaments is by itself nothing special. However, the idea of the faux-tree being  made out of a collection of junk is inspired, since Xmas presents usually connote the promise of The New, while Junk connotes the Old and the Unpromising. Further, seeing the heroes are bound by old tires and radiators and bedposts makes it seem as if the junk is alive, preying on the energies of youth. However, even Haney's lunatic imagination couldn't figure out how to justify "junk-that-eats-teens-as-food" (in contradistinction to the more familiar "teens-eat-junk-food"). So in the story proper it's not a tree of junk, just a big conical pile of trash that somehow has the power to magnetically attract the good guys, though not any of the bad guys they're fighting at the time. An added, almost Old-World touch is that the two figures in the foreground-- the "Scrooge" doppelganger and modern-day crook "Mister Big"-- are making deep, flourishing bows to one another as if emulating those turn-of-the-century personifications of politeness, Alphonse and Gaston.

MYTHCOMICS: "WHEN THE SEA DIES" (AQUAMAN #37, 1968)

At the end of RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT I mentioned that some of the comics I enjoyed for their "lateral meaning," such as the Drake-Premiani DOOM PATROL, were not noteworthy for a lot of abstract meanings.  The Silver Age AQUAMAN was much in the same vein. Though the character lasted throughout the early Golden Age, not until the early 1960s did DC Comics try to build him up in his own comic book. The stories of this period range from the ephemeral to the mildly enjoyable. Though the 1968 animated cartoon gave the Sea King a media-boost like nothing he'd ever seen before, the stories of the late 1960s comic book by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy became slightly more ambitious than the cartoon. During the decade the hero had slowly accrued a substantial supporting cast-- sidekick Aqualad, girlfriend-cum-wife Mera, son Aquababy-- which helped maintain the series' light-hearted tone. Yet Haney and Cardy added a note of seriousness by giving Aquaman a new recurring villain, the Ocean Master, who was in truth (though he didn't know it) the Sea King's half-brother. This gave the hero various melodramatic whim-whams whenever he was forced to battle Ocean Master's perfidious plans for world conquest.

"When the Sea Dies" is one of the few stories in the period to get the most out of Nick Cardy's superlative draftsmanship. The story opens with Aquaman and his extended family running into Ocean Master once more, but he's not the main villain this time. The primary foe, the Scavenger, announces himself by infecting Aquaman's oceans with a weird "rotting" disease, so that the water is replaced by discolored pockets of air. Scavenger's purpose: he wants Aquaman to find an alien artifact, the Time Decelerator. Aquaman doesn't know where it is, so he tries to fight Scavenger and his "scorpion-ship."  However, the ship is strong enough to withstand a whale's headbutt, and for that matter it becomes difficult for Aquaman and his coterie to fight in a seascape with no sea in it.

As I've said before, cosmological myths are not governed by actual science. The Haney-Cardy concept is nonsense by the actual definition of rotting, which deals with the decomposition of organic matter. Water, not being organic matter, cannot "rot"-- to say nothing of the fact that Haney never explains why the "hollowed-out" parts of the sea simply don't get filled by the rest of the ocean rushing into the empty spaces.  Yet visually, it's an inspired notion. The Aqua-family's life beneath the sea isn't really governed by the laws of marine biology anyway. Within the space of the story, the ocean functions not so much as a real-world body of water as like the cytoplasm within a cell. Neither Haney nor Cardy make this explicit comparison-- it's entirely my own interpolation. I simply find it interesting to imagine Aquaman, Mera and the rest as being self-aware occupants of a decomposing cell, aghast to find the very substrate in which they exist falling apart.

And why does Scavenger want the Time Decelerator? Why, to become immortal, so that he won't age and his body won't break down-- the same doom that he assigns to Aquaman's seas. Aquaman and Ocean Master are forced to team up against the common enemy, and as it happens Ocean Master is the one who actually locates the immortality-bestowing device. Aquaman has to slug Ocean Master to keep him from blowing up Scavenger's ship (because Mera and her kid are held hostage inside), and he battles Scavenger once the villain has charged himself up with immortality-juice. However, as an ironic touch that hadn't been done to death in 1968, Scavenger's immortality ends up devolving him to the level of protoplasm. He vanishes and the seas go back to normal, thus concluding the aqua-hero's one Silver Age adventure into apocalyptic destruction.