ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

 Let's see if I can get in one last barnstorming essay for the last day of 2025, building on what I wrote in this essay:

when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

I'm going to relate twin concepts of "artistic insanity" and "artistic sanity" to a couple of other paired concepts, both alluded to in the title. One of those pairs, "draftsmen and caricaturists," I may have made up out of whole cloth. However, in general "draftsmen" are praised because of their fidelity to visual imagery as normally experienced, and thus they're dominantly associated with representational art. In contrast, it's a given that "caricaturists" deliberately distort commonplace visual reality for the sake of expression, so they can be dominantly associated with non-representational art. I place both Chester Gould and Al Capp in the caricaturist camp, in large part because of their comparable facility with bizarre looking characters.

Now, the second concept-pairing comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I'm going to lead off with Camille Paglia's evocative interpretation of Nietzsche:

The Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism — frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

It's also worth noting that in the philosopher's original text, he also aligns the Apollonian with the art of "the dream" and the Dionysian with the art of "intoxication."

To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.

Now, both Gould and Capp wrote story-strips, in contrast to the once-and-future dominant form of the gag-strip. But both of them designed their successful features in reaction to the rise of the adventure genre in comic strips of the late 1920s. Hal Foster's TARZAN began in 1929, while in the same year two older gag-strips, Elzie Segar's THIMBLE THEATER and Roy Crane's WASH TUBBS, were successfully reworked to feature tough-guy heroes, respectively Popeye and Captain Easy. While Segar was fundamentally a caricaturist, Crane and Foster were representational draftsmen, and Foster became one of the three most influential artists upon early comic books: Foster for both TARZAN and for his 1937 PRINCE VALIANT, and both Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff, respectively having breakout successes with FLASH GORDON and TERRY AND THE PIRATES. The latter two debuted in 1934, the same year as LI'L ABNER. By contrast, TRACY, debuting in 1931, predated the influence of Raymond and Caniff. However, many testimonies of artists from the time-- for instance, Joe Kubert in ALTER EGO #119 -- indicate that in the late 1930s, Foster, Raymond and Caniff were like master classes in draftmanship to such developing comics-artists as Sheldon Moldoff and the aforementioned Kubert.

What the great draftsmen had in common, despite all their different types of content, was what Nietzsche called "the art of the dream." One should probably specify that Apollonian art-talents guide their fantasies in what might be best termed "waking dreams," dreams guided to a semblance of representational reality. This aesthetic permeates Caniff's 20th-century Oriental adventure, Raymond's space opera, and both the jungle-adventure and Arthurian exploits of Foster.

Now, from the first of Capp's LI'L ABNER strips, comic caricature ruled all of the major characters: the Yokums, the aforeseen General Bullmoose, the jinx Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Evil Eye Fleagle, and of course Capp's DICK TRACY spoof Fearless Fosdick. Even the one category of characters who are supposed to be physically desirable-- the many hot girls of ABNER-- tend to be pneumatically stupendous, even Amazonian, in nature.

Now, the earliest TRACY strips, while not as accomplished as the Big Three in terms of actual draftmanship, might be perceived as being fairly representational in nature. However, by the late thirties Gould was investing more energy in developing his rogue's gallery of freakish fiends, as well as upping the *intoxicating* effects of ultraviolence and emphasizing stark use of black and white in the non-Sunday strips. (For that matter the Sunday color strips favored simple, primary colors rather than a graduated color-palette.) Gould didn't share Capp's enthusiasm for busty women-- most of his good-looking women, like Tess Truehart above, are ordinary types-- but he does seem to use a fair number of female grotesques, just like Capp.  

Assuming I've made my case that Gould and Capp were dominantly caricaturists, does it follow that they were "Dionysians" as well? Not necessarily. But in practice, I believe that even though Gould was doing adventure (with barely any humor) while Capp was doing comedy, and usually spoofing adventure-tropes (like death-traps), both of them tapped into The Wellspring of what Paglia calls "energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice." Capp may seem to be mocking "emotionalism" while Gould is fully invested in his melodramatic tropes. But Capp was never a deep intellectual, or even a pseudo-intellectual. He clearly loved designing grotesques just as much as Gould did and found a way to exploit that penchant through comedy.

I have not read as many works by Foster, Raymond, and Caniff as I have of those by Gould and Capp. Still, from what I have read, I see hardly any grotesques in the Big Three Draftsmen. All three build up the glamorousness of the regular female characters-- with Caniff's "Dragon Lady" becoming a trope for "dangerous female" all by herself. But the glamour-girls of the Big Three were somewhere between Gould's mildly pretty women and Capp's anticipations of the Russ Meyer aesthetic. The draftsmen generally align with Paglia's description of Apollonian creativity harnessed for the delectations of the conscious dream: "Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought." 

Comic books, aimed at children, were not that invested in the distinctions of western personality, as embodied by chivalric knights or spacefaring crusaders. Many of the superhero artists of the early Golden Age emulated the draftmanship approach of the Big Three, though they frequently injected grotesques that were more typical of the caricaturists. In fact, the BATMAN strip began developing its cast of freak-villains a little before Chester Gould had fully committed to giving Dick Tracy more and more bizarre antagonists. 

I'm tempted to theorize that the Dionysian art-method allows creators to tap deeper creative energies than does the Apollonian method, while the reverse is true with respect to organizing material into coherent narratives. And that's a good place to leave this line of thought until next year.
                                   

  

 

 

 

 

NEAR MYTHS: [LI'L ADAM"], THE SPIRIT (1947)

 This seven-page SPIRIT strip, dubbed "Li'l Adam" in reprints, was one of many clever parodies Will Eisner produced in the postwar period. "Adam" is arguably somewhat mythic in terms of one narrative commenting upon the underlying propositions of other strips. 

Following an establishing page, the hero, preparing to leave on a fishing trip, is forced to return to the crimefighting grind when Al Slapp, creator of the popular "Li'l Adam" hillbilly-humor strip, is severely injured by an unknown assailant. The manager of Slapp's syndicate helpfully implicates two other comic-strip rivals of Slapp: Elmer Hay (Harold Gray) and Hector Ghoul (Chester Gould). The manager also mentions a "Maggie Malone," but as I'll discuss later, there was good reason that both Eisner and the Spirit did not pursue that particular quarry.

   Page 3 establishes one of Eisner's main conceits: all of the suspect-artists both look like, and hang out with, characters from the strips being parodied. Thus Elmer Hay, creator of the "Little Homeless Brenda" strip looks like Daddy Warbucks of "Little Orphan Annie," and has in his company doppelgangers for Annie's dog Sandy and Warbucks' Hindu aide Punjab. (Annie/Brenda is represented by a drawing on the wall.) After dispatching the minor threat of Punjab, the Spirit learns from Hay that he had no reason to attack Slapp, because "Adam" has so outpaced "Brenda" that the older strip only excites interest in the public whenever Slapp skewers the orphan-girl.   

The Spirit then seeks out the low-rent apartment of Harold Ghoul, who looks just like Dick Tracy, while in a flashback Slapp is seen to look roughly like Li'l Abner. Ghoul spins an even sadder tale of woe, telling the hero how he poured his heart and love into the exploits of hero-cop Nick Stacy-- only to see Slapp's parody, "Fearful Fooznick," reduce the heroic policeman to a publishing non-entity. The distraught artist tries to take his own life and is knocked out by the Spirit-- but by the time Slapp has emerged from his coma at some hospital, the Spirit has doped out that the syndicate manager tried to kill Slapp for reasons also related to economic disadvantage. For an end-joke Slapp gets clocked by a dead ringer for Li'l Abner's pappy, albeit a Pappy who's got bodybuilder-muscles like his "son."

I took these images from this extant but discontinued site. The comments-section contains some interesting speculation, that Eisner probably intended this story to be part of a phony "artist-feud" between him and Capp-- but if so, Capp never reciprocated by spoofing the Spirit. Other respondents mention that Capp also participated in a "phony feud" with Allen Saunders of "Mary Worth," and that Capp also spoofed "Peanuts" in addition to "Dick Tracy." However, the most consequential spoof in the history of "Li'l Abner" was Capp's attempt to spoof the popular novel GONE WITH THE WIND. Margaret Mitchell-- aka Eisner's "Maggie Malone"-- assailed Capp with so much legal firepower that, despite the law's protections of parody, the artist and his syndicate decided to discontinue the WIND parody, with Mammy Yokum explaining to the audience why the story would never be finished. Contrary to Eisner's pronouncement on Maggie Malone, Mitchell in real life had in fact shut down Capp's mockery and forced an independent syndicate to do her bidding. I'm sure in 1947 Eisner knew that Capp's mockery had nothing to do with Mitchell never writing another novel, since GONE WITH THE WIND was such a hit that not only was Mitchell made wealthy, she was unlikely to ever write anything that would not be overshadowed by that one big novel. But I doubt Mitchell ever read Eisner's toss-off joke-- and as one of the blog-respondents noted, Harold Gray probably took no notice of the fake feud.

     Perhaps less well known than the Eisner strip, however, was this "Hey Look" strip by Harvey Kurtzman, appearing one year after Eisner's strip. According to my recollection of a Kurtzman interview in COMICS JOURNAL, the artist, in addition to drawing assorted junky humor strips for Timely, got permission from Stan Lee-- who admired Kurtzman's turn of mind-- to do one-page, free-form humor strips under the title "Hey, Look." Usually there was almost no point to these strips from the creator of MAD Magazine (four years in Kurtzman's future). However, using a schtick not unlike MAD's habit of distorting the names of celebrities or characters for parodies, the unnamed speaker of this one-pager sticks the consonants "Shm" in front of every name evoked, beginning with "Shmill Shmeisner." There's not much question that the story Kurtzman is referencing is "Li'l Adam," though I doubt the majority of Timely's kid-readers knew what the monologist was talking about. They might have just barely grasped that "Shmill," whoever he was, had parodied Li'l Abner and Dick Tracy, which was true. Interestingly, Kurtzman does NOT mention "Shmeisner's" parody of Little Orphan Annie, though the figures of that strip would have been just as recognizable. 

Instead, Kurtzman makes it sound as if Chic Young's "Blondie" was somehow part of the mix. I don't think either Eisner or Capp ever parodied "Blondie." However, though I can't verify it from GCD, I have read somewhere that Kurtzman might have done some work for the Timely comic "Rusty," whose star "Rusty Rumple" was a knock-off of "Blondie Bumstead," complete with an idiot husband who was the series' goat. Whether Kurtzman worked on the "Rusty" strip or not, "Hey Look" also appeared in the "Rusty" comic, so Kurtzman had to be aware of the comic's existence. Maybe Kurtzman was implicating himself in the whole "knock-off/parody" concept-- though in 1948 he could hardly have guessed how dependent his own career would center upon parody.         

MYTHCOMICS: "ANYFACE" (LI'L ABNER, April 19-May 31, 1947)

 Rather than wasting time summing up how Al Capp's "comic-within-a-comic" FEARLESS FOSDICK evolved within Al Capp's LI'L ABNER feature, here's the Wiki writeup on the subject. 

The most interesting things about the 1942 introduction of Fosdick within the continuity of the ABNER strip are (1) the fact that what one can see of Fosdick looks almost indistinguishable from Tracy, without the pencil mustache seen on later versions, and (2) the short spoof concentrates only upon the idea that Fosdick's real-world creator "Lester Gooch" puts the fictional detective into death-traps without knowing how to extricate said hero. Jay Maeder's superlative survey of Gould's groundbreaking strip, DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, attests that on occasion Chester Gould did have to scramble to find some way to save Tracy from his final curtain. However, in retrospect the critique seems petty, given that Al Capp shared Gould's penchant for placing characters in cliffhanger situations and then getting them out with ridiculous contrivances-- probably more so than Gould ever resorted to.

Over the next four years Capp continued to develop new elements of the Fosdick character. He was just as much a moral ramrod as Tracy, but Fosdick had no brains whatever and so was incapable of anything like detection. He was sexually abstemious, telling one female pursuer that no woman's lips but his mother's would ever touch his (which would lead to some Freudian conclusions Capp might not have intended). And in one adventure, cartoonish Gooch learns that his new villain for Fosdick, a rock-headed crook named "Stone Face," actually exists in Gooch's world. The criminal wants to force Gooch to destroy the fictional Fosdick's reputation with adoring kids by forcing him to get married, a fate which particularly horrifies Fosdick's number one fan, Li'l Abner Yokum. After various contrivances, Stone Face encounters Abner and tries to kill the youth by hitting Abner with his rocky noggin-- and the hard-headed hillbilly wins the contest.

The first truly ambitious Fosdick story ran through May 1947, though it includes some setup in April within the "Abner universe." Gooch's publishers harangue the artist to create yet more grotesque villains to enthrall FOSDICK's readers, "the kiddies." (Two years later, Gershon Legman would republish some of his anti-violence essays in the book LOVE AND DEATH, saying in all seriousness the same thing Capp said for a joke.) Gooch's artistic insanity gets him put into an asylum. Further, when a rival publisher threatens Gooch's life, a certain hulking hillbilly is hired to guard the artist's welfare-- and to make sure that the strips keep coming out on time. This provided Capp with the excuse to have Abner periodically interrupt the FOSDICK continuity to remind readers, "it's only a comic strip about another comic strip."

"Anyface" seems to be the first arc in which Capp steps up the ultraviolence to epic levels, to parody DICK TRACYs legendary levels of mayhem. The detective, informed that a villain named Anyface can make himself look like anyone, comes to the random conclusion that the fiend would logically make himself look like the city's most beneficent philanthropist, so Fosdick immediately shoots the innocent man through the head. Further, the real Anyface was masquerading as the official who gave Fosdick the assignment-- though, contrary to his boast, Anyface doesn't do or say anything to the klutz-cop to suggest offing the victim. (BTW, nowhere in the narrative does Capp explain how Anyface duplicates the clothes of the people he imitates, since he can only change his physical form.)

             

Unlike the majority of ABNER villains, Anyface never seems to have any specific aim in mind. He seems to exist merely to torment Fosdick, as Mr. Mxyzptlk does Superman. Anyface hits on the idea that the best way to utterly humiliate the idiot officer is to pretend to be his long-suffering girlfriend (here named "Bess Backache" in emulation of Dick Tracy's girl Tess Trueheart) and inveigle Fosdick into marrying "her," his worst enemy. Capp does not drop even the slightest hint as to how Anyface presses his suit when the real girlfriend couldn't get Fosdick to the altar over the course of twelve years. The logical conclusion that modern audiences would make, that of premarital sex, might or might not have been an idea Capp toyed with. Still, he would have known he could not have even implied the subject in a family comic strip. So, he passed over the matter. In the "real world," Abner is deeply distressed by his "ideel" being turned into a pathetic fool. Daisy Mae and Mammy become concerned that Abner might "kill himself in grief." Mammy deduces that Gooch has come up with this "worse-than-death trap" because he's gone crazy, so Mammy lays plans to go straighten the artist out.

Unfortunately for Abner, Insane Gooch finishes one more insane set of strips before Mammy makes the scene and scrambles his brains back into normalcy. Abner is initially exultant to see that Fosdick, his brain possibly prompted into something like thought by his mortification, lay a trap for Anyface, though of course it's one that shows the super-cop's utter disregard for collateral damage. Fosdick forces 69 persons suspected of being Anyface (why?) into a single room and cranks up the heat to 500 degrees, believing that the heat will melt the fiend's taffy-like features. But in the last strip produced by Insane Gooch, Fosdick's features begin melting, revealing that he, the incorruptible lawman, is actually Anyface. Abner confronts Gooch and demands a rational explanation. But Gooch has had his brains "normalized," and now he has no idea what he was thinking while insane. Capp leaves his hillbilly star on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, implying the complete identity between good and evil--

--Well, for roughly two months. Capp probably never devised an escape-hatch at all but instead exploited the situation by encouraging his readers to invent some solution that would "save" Fearless Fosdick. Capp chose a suggestion that he printed in a single strip on June 28, 1947, and that was technically the end of the "Anyface" arc. Said solution was worse than anything either Gould or Capp had ever devised. While Anyface-Fosdick's face is melting, the real Fosdick walks into the hotbox-room and captures the felon. So-- if Anyface was just masquerading as Fosdick, why did he participate in Fosdick's trap, knowing that his face would melt in front of all those witnesses? It might've made a little sense if Anyface had caught and tied up the klutz-cop, planning to kill all of the suspects in the hotbox and blame the deed on Fosdick. But I doubt that Capp cared about anything but keeping Fosdick in play, and most of the readers who liked Fosdick probably held the same opinion.

Since Capp didn't really provide the lame solution, I'd argue that the Anyface arc really does end with the revelation that hero and villain are one, even though throughout the story they've been repeatedly seen as separate beings. These fourth-wall shenanigans remind me of the overpraised Berthold Brecht, but Capp was no Brechtian ironist, just a joke-teller who felt like taking shots at any target. If I had to choose which artist, Capp or Gould, devised the greater number of lame cliffhanger resolutions, I'd choose Capp. So it's puzzling that he would jab Gould over the practice of improbable death-traps. Capp was actually more on target in his implication that the world of DICK TRACY was one in which innocents constantly got killed as Tracy pursued his crusade for justice. Thus Capp's quibbling about "death-trap anxiety," as far as it expressed a comic inversion of something Gould's TRACY took for granted, was far inferior to the concept of Fosdick piling up hecatombs of dead citizens for the sake of his god of justice. Finally, when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

ADDENDUM: Though Capp wasn't shy about dealing out dire fates to his villains-- at least, no more so than Gould-- Anyface is still alive by the end of the story. Capp continued to use him in comic-book ads, wherein Fosdick fought crime while shilling for "Wildroot hair cream." In the 1960s the villain somehow showed up in the LI'L ABNER strip, without even the piddling explanation given in the "Stone Face" arc. That arc had not been reprinted, but I recall that Anyface pops up in Dogpatch and impersonates Daisy Mae Yokum. I don't recall what becomes of the villain in that story.   

 

 

    

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

Just a minute ago, I concluded Part 1 by saying:

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

I'll try to set down my theme statement as succinctly as I can, but some grounding for my use of the word "proposition" is necessary. 

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

Now, this is surely true when one is speaking of language as it is used in one-on-one discourse, or even in discourse between one and a multitude. However, literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. 

Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.

Further, even within literature, there's a hierarchy of strength between the concrete, lateral/literal meaning, and the abstract, vertical meaning of both overthought and underthought.

To return to the two LI'L ABNER sequences referenced in Part 1, it's evident from the way Al Capp works that his cycles-- usually running from four to six months-- could be unified in terms of their action, like "D. Yokum Visits," or simply a motley group of episodes, like "General Bullmoose Debuts." 

The propositional strength of the lateral meaning in both is equally strong, for the lateral meaning is identical with "everything that happens in the stories." Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

Yet the abstract vertical meaning is even weaker than the assorted vicissitudes associated with "the stories." Many readers can read past the symbolic discourses in LI'L ABNER without noticing their existence, while others will read them purely in terms of their alliance to didactic discourse, as in "Capp is a great satirist, because he makes fun of rich people").

Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions. 

At the same time, even though "Visits" is like a well-constructed brick kiln, while "Debuts" is sort of a tumble-down brick house, it's the latter, less organized work that gave birth to one of the strip's more recognizable characters, General Bullmoose, while Disgustin' Yokum is most probably barely remembered even by Capp's remaining fans.

Thus the weakness of weak propositions can be both a strength and a weakness at the same time.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.-- NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN, SON OF ODKIN.

This 2016 essay is the only one in which I adapted Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage to literature. I'm sure other critics have ventured the comparison, though I also tried to tie it to the Aristotelian concept of the "unity of action," which in two essays, here and here, provides my "line between fair and good." In the second essay I compared different examples of Jack Kirby's work, just as in ODKIN I had opposed two examples of Wally Wood's work. It occurred to me, though, that two of my essays on Al Capp's LI'L ABNER might better illustrate both bricolage and unity of action, not least because the two story-cycles-- ["D. Yokum's Visit"] and ["General Bullmoose's Debuts"]-- were produced right on top of one another, at a time when the artist's powers of expression were undiminished (in contrast, say, to Wood's debilitating condition at the time he completed ODKIN).

"Visit," starting in late December 1952 and lasting through March of the next year, is shorter than "Debuts," lasting from March to August 1953. Brevity sounds like it might be conducive to Aristotle's unity of action, since the philosopher argued that the most unified works should focus on one primary action, though not without the potential for assorted subplots. (For instance, the primary action of THE ILIAD is "the wrath of Achilles," though there's room for quite a few subplots about Paris and Helen, Hector and his family, et al.) However, in modern fiction brevity does not necessarily confer unity.

In the second part of THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I mentioned that the superior works were those that seemed to articulate a sort of "theme statement," though I was careful to distinguish between themes associated with discursive thinking, or "the overthought," from those associated with symbolic discourse, or "the underthought." I also specified that these themes could reinforce one another, though they did not necessarily have to do so. In the case of both Capp story-cycles, Capp succeeded in having them reinforce each other for the most part, though I consider the overthought and underthought weaker in "Debuts" as opposed to "Visits." Thus, since Capp's powers of expression had to be roughly equal when he produced the two sequences, I had to decide what if any factors led him to de-emphasize what I've started calling the "vertical meaning" of "Debuts." And back in RETHINKING THE OVERTHOUGHT, I identified the somewhat competitive partner of vertical meaning, "lateral meaning:"

The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened"...Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. Thus, I personally can still enjoy many narratives that don't have much in the way of abstract meaning, as long as they excel in terms of sensation, feeling, or some combination thereof. 

Thus it seems to me that Capp's approach to ABNER, from its genesis in 1934 to its conclusion in 1977, was one which, like most comic strips, privileged lateral over vertical meaning, as I mentioned in 2015's STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.... This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

While there's no inevitable conflict between vertical and linear meaning, any more than there is between overthought and underthought, such conflict can take place when the artist becomes a little too "workmanlike" in terms of how he assembles the "bricks" of his storylines. This is particularly true of Capp, who shows a particular fondness for piling one story-trope atop another, with no detectable concern for Aristotelian unities.

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

MYTHCOMICS: [GENERAL BULLMOOSE DEBUTS], LI'L ABNER (1953)

There are almost no scans online for me to pirate for this week's essay, except this one:

And it happens to be the same scan I used in an earlier essay: the cover of Kitchen Sink's nineteenth collection of LI'L ABNER strips, where I reviewed the continuity I entitled "D. Yokum's Visit." In contrast to the relative unity of "Visit," the next six months is something of a motley group of loosely associated plotlines, of which the most important one is the introduction of Capp's menacing magnate, General Bullmoose. There also aren't many scans of him, which seems odd given that he's one of the few support characters whom an earlier generation knew pretty well, if only thanks to the 1959 film.  Here's one not from the "Debuts" continuity:

Most of the plotlines are exemplars of what I've called "lateral meaning," for they have no point except to engage the reader in terms of both kinetic and dramatic potentialities: "If the Reader Likes Character D, he'll be interested in seeing how Challenge K affects him." They go like this:

(1) Shortly before the birth of the first child of Abner and Daisy Mae, perennial jinx Joe Btfsplk wanders back into Dogpatch. He's warned to keep away from the expecting parents, lest he jinx their unborn child. He descends into an underground cave, but the cave happens to tunnel down under Abner's house, so that bad things start happening to the Yokums anyway.

(2) To better support his future offspring, Abner tries to find work, without success. However, perhaps due to the jinx, two strangers from the quasi-Russian realm of Slobbovia show up in Dogpatch. One is female wrestler Tara Legoff-- one of Capp's many statuesque beauties-- and her manager-father, Rip Von Legoff. They want to find a quintessentially American female sparring partner for Tara, but for some damn reason, the only one who meets their requirements is Li'l Abner. So Abner dresses up in drag and goes on the road, and Rip helps him fake his death so that Daisy Mae won't miss him, or something like that.

(3) Thanks to the newspapers covering the gorgeous lady of wrestling and her dolled-up sparring partner, the great financier General Bullmoose decides that he wants his puny son Weakfish to marry whoever wins in a bout between Tara and "Li'l Anya." The Slobbovians, hot to marry into money, decide to have Tara use a killer-move on Abner, and though he doesn't die, he does lose. 

(4) His job terminated, the big lummox decides to go back to Dogpatch, only to find out that his bereaved wife has chosen to remarry, in order to give Baby Yokum a father. Abner faces assorted delays that keep him from Daisy Mae's side-- not least an encounter with Capp's zoot-suited evildoer Evil-Eye Fleegle-- but in the end, Abner returns and stops the wedding. Daisy Mae then gives birth without ever showing any visible evidence of being pregnant.

Now, all four of these plot-threads satisfy the reader's need for lateral meaning, but only in Plot #3 does Capp "go vertical." Some of his vertical meaning consists of discursive "overthoughts," like naming the manipulative multi-millionaire after the Bull Moose Party, which ran Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912, and having the character use a motto based on a saying attributed to General Motors: "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the country." But there's a deeper level of "underthought."

The Roosevelt reference is actually more meaningful than the motto, for Capp draws Bullmoose as a huge, muscular old man with a walrus-mustache. He's intensely turned on by the photos of Tara and Li'l Anya, but knows he can't mate with them anymore ("If only I were eighty again"). He chooses to defer his lust to his son Weakfish, a puny fellow who protests, "But father-- I'm only 52." What we have here, then, is a literary myth with both psychological and sociological ramifications: one in which a powerful father somehow gives birth to a sickly son. Oddly, Bullmoose never brings up the most logical motivation-- that he wants Weakfish to marry a "wild beast of a woman" so that he'll sire a son better than he is. The only motivation he gives is that such a marriage will supposedly make Weakfish capable of running Bullmoose's empire if Bullmoose should ever drop dead. Weakfish, however, is in love with a specimen of femininity as puny as he is: "Olivia de Backache." (Possibly this was Capp's little shot at Olivia de Havilland's portrait of Melanie Wilkes, the dishrag-like character from 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND.) Weakfish musters just enough courage to try eloping with Olivia. However, Bullmoose finds out, and with "two phone calls" he reduces Olivia's father to penury. Weakfish, agreeing with his father that the Bullmooses cannot "have a pauper's blood in our family." jilts Olivia-- though no one brings up the fact that neither of the "lady wrestlers" are of the moneyed classes.

While Abner/Anya has no desire to marry Weakfish, Tara is clearly interested in Weakfish's money. Thus the outcome of the match works out well for the two contenders, though not for Bullmoose's shrimpy son. He's last seen running out of the wrestling-hall as Tara chases after him. That's how Capp leaves them, the picture of an unmasculine man being pursued by a super-feminine woman. The only good thing in Weakfish's future is that, unlike the Dogpatch males who get ambushed and married by predacious women during Sadie Hawkins' Day, the scion of the Bullmoose line will probably get killed on his wedding-night.

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE WOLF GAL"], LI'L ABNER (1946)

Since I gave an example of a LI'L ABNER mythcomic this week, I decided to recycle a portion of an earlier FEMMES FORMIDABLES essay as a means of clarifying why Capp's "Wolf Gal" wasn't nearly as mythic as his Shmoos, despite possessing equal potential.

Here's the relevant excerpt from the original essay:

In 1946 Al Capp created a feral female with no such convenient inhibitions: the Wolf Gal, who lived in one of the forested areas neighboring Dogpatch with a pack of wolves.  She and her human-eating pack perpetually prey on any humans who venture too close to their territory, and though Wolf Gal could speak as well as any Dogpatch hillbilly-- which isn't saying much-- she thinks of herself as another wolf and considers all other humans her enemies.
Up to this point Capp had created many predatory females, but their mode of predation concerned attempting to seduce Li'l Abner Yokum before his true love Daisy Mae could link him to her in marriage.  Wolf Gal has some leanings in that direction, but the thing that gets her on Abner's trail was somewhat more involved.  When Wolf Gal turns eighteen, she and her pack manage to corner an old crone in her secluded cabin.  Bargaining for her life, the crone reveals that she knows Wolf Gal's nature: that at birth she was born with a "wolf's heart" despite the otherwise normal natures of her hillfolk parents.  A nearby wolf-pack senses that the child is a kindred spirit, so the pack attacks and devours her parents-- much to the delight of the infant child.  In addition to revealing Wolf Gal's origins to the lupine Amazon, the crone also makes a prediction: that Wolf Gal will only know the meaning of "love" under certain circumstances.  Wolf Gal, stung by curiosity, begins to study human mating rituals, as well as catching her first sight of Abner.  She interprets the prophecy to mean that she must kill Abner to learn what love is.
There follows one of the quickest transformations from "nature" to "culture" ever shown in fiction.  Wolf Gal decides that the only way she can get close to Abner in his Dogpatch milieu is to educate herself in the ways of women-- and not hillbilly women, but "sassiety ladies."  She journeys to some big city, locates a finishing-school, and by threatening the teacher's life forces the woman to give Wolf Gal the appearance of a well-bred woman. 

There are three strong myth-kernels here: (1) the continuing opposition of "nature" and "culture," (2) the association of hillfolk with all manner of deviant practices, including cannibalism, and (3) the association between love and death. Yet, there's something blandly functional about Capp's treatment of Wolf Gal's initial arc. It's as though he couldn't quite deal with the blatantly transgressive aspects of the wolf-child myth, and so he reduced it to just another of his many plotlines involving either the romantic seduction or attempted murder of Li'l Abner. I've found this to be an almost syndromic fault among classic American comic strips, in that they so often focus only upon "lateral meaning" as opposed to either "overthought" or "underthought:"

...  my verdict on the narrative story-strips of the classic era is that though they had greater potential for complication-- which I've elsewhere called "amplitude"-- because they could run at great lengths, they often did not use it  because they were so concerned with "straightforward linear narrative." -- STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY, PT. 2.

Thus, following the line of thought I've established in the LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD essays, the "Wolf Gal" sequence is only "fair" because it too is akin to "a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement."

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE MUSIC OF THE SHMOOS"], LI'L ABNER (1948)

In STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY PT. 2, I wrote:

My re-reading of ABNER is by no means complete. However, in the upcoming "mythcomic of the week," the sequence I have chosen is not the sort of thing most comics-mavens would have chosen. Most would probably have selected one of Capp's overt satires, like those involving the Shmoos. The Shmoo storyline is a pretty good example of a strong "overthought," but I don't think it displays the mythic "underthought" that I've been searching for.

I have not yet tracked down what Shmoo-strip I'd read when I made this comment, but it's now clear to me that I had not read the original sequence from 1948. My source for the original story-- the 1998 Kitchen Sink reprint-- mentions in passing that creator Al Capp returned to his Shmoo-theme a few other times, so I assume I saw some later Shmoo-outing.

I also mentioned in the cited essay that a lot of Capp's storylines were too haphazard to generate "significant mythicity." The storyline I'm calling "Music of the Shmoos"-- a bad pun I consider worthy of Capp's own bad puns in the sequence-- is no less haphazard than the average Capp continuity. However, in giving birth to the Shmoos, Capp came up with a concept strong enough to unify all of his humorous schticks.

The reason I thought that the Shmoo-sequence might boast nothing more than an over-intellectualized overthought was because I'd seen much commentary about the political reactions to the concept. According to Dave Schreiner, whose essay on Shmoo-history appears in the Kitchen Sink volume, Capp got complaints from factions identified with both "the Right" and "the Left." The objections of the Right seem more immediately justified, for the Shmoo-- a creature who looks much like a walking penis with a cartoon-walrus face-- directly threatens the forces of capitalism. The Shmoos, who have existed "since the dawn of time," inhabit a lonely valley near Dogpatch. Li'l Abner Yokum seeks out the valley, guided by some strange music he alone hears. Once he gets into the valley, he meets a hairy old man, who tells him that the Shmoos are unique, self-sacrificing creatures who can provide for all the creature comforts human beings desire.

This means, of course, that anyone who makes money off providing such comforts is out of luck.

There are no explicit barbs at the Left in the sequence. Still, it's not hard to see why persons of any strong political persuasion would resent the idea of the Shmoos. In my analysis IDEOLOGY VS. MYTH, I extrapolated the position taken by Northrop Frye: that all ideologies are rooted in their ability to deliver the Good Things in Life:

Name any ideology out there and at base it's just another way for its adherents to maximize their chances of getting those things that make life pleasurable and fulfilling.

I suggest that this is the reason the Left didn't like the Shmoo any more than the Right did. If you've got magical creatures who can provide for your every need, why do you need socialism any more than you need capitalism?

Schreiner covers two of the great appeals of the Shmoo for postwar audiences: that the creature spoke to Americans who had been forced to do without many creature comforts during World War II, and the fact that the Shmoos look like living penises, making them intrinsic symbols of plenitude. (That said, we learn late in the sequence that there are both male and female Shmoos, though elsewhere Capp himself says they're asexual.) Schreiner also points out that Capp the consummate businessman almost certainly planned to make the Shmoos into a multi-level merchandising property even before the August 1948 sequence appeared. That said, the fact that Shmoo merchandise did become phenomenally popular for the next few years suggests that Capp knew the temper of his audience, knew that the American people would respond favorably to this image of living "Horns of Plenty." At the same time, Capp is enough of a satirist-- even though the sequence as a whole is more comedy than satire-- to paint human beings almost in the light of cannibals, despite the invariable willingness of the Shmoos to be eaten.

Capp clearly knew that he, as much as the businessmen in the strip, needed to put an end to the Shmoos so that his comic strip could return to what passed for "normal." Thus the artist has a squad of hitmen descend upon the hillbillies and use high-powered guns to wipe out all known Shmoos in Dogpatch. However, two Shmoos-- one male and one female-- remain.

At this point, most sane artists would have the couple speed back to their hidden valley to repopulate, never to be seen again. Instead, in one of his daffiest sequences, Capp decided to intermingle the successful Shmoo-myth with the other famous trope of the ABNER strip: the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.

As some readers of the blog may know, this annual competition featured a literal "manhunt. " Dogpatch bachelors are given a head start, after which they're chased down by the unmarried women of Dogpatch-- who range from the ghastly to the gorgeous-- and any man who gets caught has to marry his captor. From the genesis of the strip, this provided Capp with an excuse to have incorrigible bachelor Abner chased down by assorted women, particularly the smitten Daisy Mae, who alone truly loved the big hillbilly lout.

This time, Abner is chased not only by Daisy, but also by an unnamed woman  who looks almost exactly like Abner, though she's apparently not related to him.To complicate Abner's predicament, he has charge of the male Shmoo, while Daisy has custody of the female one-- and while Abner doesn't want (consciously) to be caught by Daisy, the male Shmoo certainly wants to be caught by his opposite number. Many slapstick antics ensue, and Capp almost seems to be competing with himself by wedging in pleasant but irrelevant appearances by two of his most buxom female creations: Moonbeam McSwine and The Wolf Gal, Finally the two surviving Shmoos are united and sent off to breed, while Abner escapes marriage by the usual hairsbreadth.

I've saved the best for last, even though it's actually the first part of "Music." When Abner hears the mysterious, never-explained music, he draws near a place called the "Valley of the Schmoon." Later in the story Capp uses the same plural for "Shmoo" that I've been using here, apparently he used "Schmoon" as a plural in the first few strips just so he could make a couple of goofy puns with the made-up word (like talking about"the light of the silvery schmoon.") I neglected to mention that before entering the Valley, Abner encounters a threshold guardian who tries to keep him from entering.

"She's a big one!! Fire is a-flashin' fum her eyes, an' she's a-flexin' her (gulp) MUSCLES."

The guardian-- whom Abner addresses as "Large Gal"-- forbids Abner to enter the Valley. When Abner insists on entering, the statuesque woman-- clad for the most part like the usual hillbilly-- attacks him. Abner won't fight a woman and so gets knocked out. Daisy Mae comes running up, trying to save her beloved, but the valkyrie tosses Abner into the valley, apparently assuming that the fall will kill him, Abner survives, and goes on to find his way to the Shmoos, and that's the last anyone sees of "Large Gal."

So why did Capp bother to introduce Large Gal at all? She only extends the sequence about three strips, and her sole plot-function is to make Abner's quest a little more suspenseful by offering brief opposition. It's not impossible that Capp simply wanted an excuse to introduce yet another buxom female into the strip: throughout the run of LI'L ABNER Capp rarely ever missed an excuse to perform his version of Raymond Chandler's famous advice, though in Capp's case the advice was more like, "When in doubt, have a hot girl come through the door."

And yet, there are three interesting psychosexual touches to Large Gal's appearance. The first, in line with the above quote, is that Abner is initially intimated by her "muscles"-- which would not be that unusual in the modern days of women's bodybuilding, but which was a pretty rare sight in 1948. The second is that even as Large Gal prepares to execute Abner by tossing him off a cliff, she praises his manhood, calling him "a fine young specimen," and the third is that Daisy Mae associates Large Gal's aggression with romance: "Ef yo' don't want him-- toss him mah way!" Further, given that Abner's near-murder results in him leading a swarm of ambulatory penises out of a vaginal valley, I think I'm justified in saying that Capp distilled some uniquely weird underthoughts into his most pervasive comic myth: that of animals who ceaselessly sacrifice themselves for the benefit of humankind, and who must be slaughtered to prevent their interference in human commerce.

MYTHCOMICS: [D. YOKUM'S VISIT], LI'L ABNER (1952-53)

One of the biggest events in the history of Al Capp's LI'L ABNER appeared in 1952, when the titular bachelor hillbilly-- who had been fending off the marital advances of neighbor-girl Daisy Mae for eighteen years-- finally "got hitched." The actual marriage, however, was less of an occasion for mythic matters than what happened afterward, when Daisy Mae became, as the hill-folk called her, an "expectorant mother."

Throughout his comics-career Capp became famous-- and sometimes infamous-- for his depiction of incredibly voluptuous women, who were invariably well-coiffed even when they lived in the hillbilly domain of Dogpatch. At the same time, Capp allowed for some "female gazing" as well, depicting Abner Yokum and a few others as prodigious muscular swains. But just as Capp was a past master of using beauty to entice readers, he also knew that he could use ugliness to titillate readers in a very different manner. One such female horror appeared in 1939: Mother Ratfield, a woman so ugly she caused Mammy Yokum to faint at first sight. More famously, in 1946 Capp introduced into the strip a character named "Lena the Hyena," but he deliberately didn't show her features, challenging his readers to depict "the world's ugliest woman"-- a contest won by professional artist Basil Wolverton.

Shortly after Daisy Mae has become "expectorant," the Yokums receive a letter from a distant relative, "D. Yokum." Abner and Daisy have never seen the man, but Abner's parents have, and it's all they can do to avoid running out of the hills in fear of seeing the face of "Disgustin' Yokum." The young couple can't avoid D.'s visit, but they're fearful that if pregnant Daisy sees his revolting features, it will have an evil effect on the unborn infant. Or, as Abner puts it to the hideous fellow-- who considerately keeps his back turned to them-- "Ef Daisy Mae sees yore face, our baby might look like 'yo!"

Disgustin' has come to Dogpatch to warn the couple that a spectre from the past is on his way to kill them and their child. One hundred years ago, one of the Yokums, a judge by profession, condemned a Wild West outlaw, "Wild Bill Hiccup," to a century in prison. Hiccup-- a manic, wizened little man who has somehow survived in prison even after his cellblock was condemned and sealed off-- is duly released by the law. On his way to Dogpatch, the galloping geezer shoots up various banks and movie-theaters, but evades capture until reaching the home of the Yokums. At this point D. Yokum challenges Hiccup to a duel, pitting his hideous appearance against Hiccup's six-guns. Not only does D. Yokum win, he duplicates the feats of Medusa, turning Wild Bill Hiccup into a stone statue.

The Disgusting One leaves Dogpatch, but a local photographer manages to snap a photo of the forbidden face, planning to sell it to "sordid curiosity seekers." Mammy Yokum knows that even a photograph could have fatal consequences, so she clobbers the photographer and takes possession of the photo. However, Mammy can't simply throw the photo away; she's consumed by her own curiosity. She decides to bury the photo until the day she's on her death-bed, when it won't make any difference whether she dies of age or the forbidden sight. However, as she does so, Daisy Mae overhears her mother-in-law's ruminations, and she too is consumed by feminine curiosity.

That Capp means to address a specifically feminine curiosity is denoted by the strip immediately following this event, when a local fellow predicts that Abner's wife, now that she's pregnant, will "almost go out outa her mind wif nosiness!" Although the subject is still treated as a running joke, Capp is clearly teasing the reader with yet another threat to Daisy's unborn child, but this time it's a menace "from within," rather than a male menace "from without." Mammy and Daisy Mae go back and forth, digging up the forbidden photo, and then putting it back. Mammy goes so far as to starve herself, hoping to bring about her death-bed all the sooner, so that she can satisfy her morbid desire. Finally, when Daisy Mae is on the verge of seeing the sight, Mammy grabs the photo and leaps into "Bottomless Pit," intending to see the picture before she strikes the ground below. The superhuman hillbilly woman survives the fall, but never sees the phoro. In a typically melodramatic contrivance, somehow D. Yokum became aware of the photo's existence, dug it up, and left in its place a note informing both ladies of what he's done.

Beneath all of the standard jokes about female inquisitiveness, Capp is playing around with the essence of the *apotropaic effect,* which appeared when tribal cultures set up hideous icons or images designed to repel evil. The severed head of Medusa was one such image, and in one narrative Athena adapts the head to use as a weapon. It's interesting that whereas Capp does finally show female ugliness in my examples of Lena and Mother Ratfield, D. Yokum's face is never revealed, and most of the time, when he talks to his relations, he does so by bowing down and presenting his buttocks to them. This wasn't the last storyline Capp did to imperil the unborn Yokum baby: the very next tale involves the walking jinx Joe Btfsplk. performing the same narrative danger that D. Yokum did. But this story-line was not nearly as provocative as the D. Yokum tale, which may have benefited from its relative brevity.

STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY PT. 2

In GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC I said:

I want to be very careful in evaluating what if any ways that the "long melodrama" strips of the classic comic-strip era-- PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN, FLASH GORDON, WASH TUBBS-- have to being any sort of "graphic novels." While the individual story-lines of these strips do have greater potential for complication in the sense of being mythic, they don't have much of the "scope" often applied to the general idea of the novel. Since each of these storylines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development, such arcs might be better compared to the novella than the novel proper.

I also had some critical words for the narrative tendencies of the "long melodrama" strips in STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic.

Combining these observations, my verdict on the narrative story-strips of the classic era is that though they had greater potential for complication-- which I've elsewhere called "amplitude"-- because they could run at great lengths, they often did not use it  because they were so concerned with "straightforward linear narrative." Thus the long narratives of comic strips often lacked the conceptual "scope" present in long novels-- a scope that I tend to identify with (1) Jung's functions of thinking and poetic intuition, and (2) my modification of Gerard Manley Hopkins' concept of "overthought" and "underthought." The "straightforward linear narrative" characteristic of story-oriented comic strips approximates to what I called "lateral meaning" in the above essay.

Story-strips tend to generate stronger tendency toward continuity than their opposite number, the gag strips. That said, when I was seeking a long story in Chester Gould's DICK TRACY strip, I said that I "found it hard to isolate particular sequences that I consider[ed] symbolically complex." Gould tended to spin off his narratives in an eccentric manner, and critics have attested that he usually did not plan his stories out in detail. Gould seemed to favor the dictum of Dashiell Hammett: "when in doubt, have a man with a gun walk into the room." The sequence I labeled JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD provides a marked exception to this tendency, for throughout the story Gould's narrative is informed by one psychological pattern: to join together a man and a boy who are father and son in spirit. Moreover, to do so, Gould reached back into his previous story-lines, melding together the separate careers of Stooge Viller and Steve the Tramp as major players in his melodrama.

I found a similar "eccentric manner" as I read through several sequences of Al Capp's LI'L ABNER, and thus for the same reason ABNER's long stories are marked by a plethora of melodramatic plot-incidents. These incidents serve to give the reader the sense of linear progress, but they're usually so haphazard that they don't generate any significant mythicity.

My re-reading of ABNER is by no means complete. However, in the upcoming "mythcomic of the week," the sequence I have chosen is not the sort of thing most comics-mavens would have chosen. Most would probably have selected one of Capp's overt satires, like those involving the Schmoos.
The Schmoo storyline is a pretty good example of a strong "overthought," but I don't think it displays the mythic "underthought" that I've been searching for.

FIFTY-ONE PHENOMENALITIES, OR FIGHT!

I've been giving more thought as to how my "51 percent rule" applies to the form of serials and related formats.

Any regular readers of this blog shouldn't be thrown by this reference, for I've only brought up the rule three times over the years, and only once did I use the concept to discuss the intermingling of pheomenalities in a serial format. In ABNER ORIGINE I remarked upon the fact that the comic strip LI'L ABNER had made copious usages of marvelous concepts, though it was not usually classed as a fantasy-comic. I put this down to the fact that marvelous concepts only appeared in ABNER in an irregular fashion, and that the strip was better known for naturalistic tropes, like having its hillbilly characters run into society snobs and gangsters. At the same time, I mentioned that one of Al Capp's running gags was to portray both the strip's star Abner and frequent support-character "Mammy" as possessing inhuman levels of strength.  I opined that if this running-gag appeared as frequently as I thought that it did, then LI'L ABNER deserved to be considered a metaphenomenal strip, even if it wasn't as open about its fantastic nature as LITTLE NEMO and FLASH GORDON.

I conceived of the "51 percent rule" in keeping with the phenomenological considerations covered in the essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS. All works with dominantly metaphomenal content-- whether they are stand-alone works or parts of an ongoing serial narrative-- cannot help but reference the phenomenal principles typical of naturalistic narrative: that there must be some degree of causal coherence and intelligibility, if only to provide contrast to the violations of one or both of these two principles.

That said, there are serials that only very rarely stray into metaphenomenal territory, which is what originally caused me to formulate the rule. Over the years Marvel Comics reprinted, to the best of my knowledge, all of the adventures of 1950s western hero "The Ringo Kid." Of those adventures, only one possessed metaphenomenal content, a story from RINGO KID WESTERN #8 (October 1955). In this issue the heroic Kid encountered a mad scientist, Doctor Saturn, who invented a super-scientific device with which he temporarily blinded people, whom his gang then robbed.

I'm reasonably sure that no one would induct the Ringo Kid into the ranks of metaphenomenal heroes on the basis of one lousy adventure. But things get a little more dicey with a serial concept like LI'L ABNER. The strip lasted several years, and even if I had access to all of the ABNER strips, I wouldn't have any interest in sedulously noting exactly how many metaphenomenal storylines appeared in all of the strips, and what percentage of all the story-arcs possesses such concepts. Yet I wanted to formulate the rule as a *theory* that could account for the dominant proclivities of any series, no matter how long-lived. Once more, from the essay where I first propounded the term:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  

As I've noted elsewhere, the context in this essay has to do with sorting out the Fryean mythos that dominates a given serial narrative, but the same logic applies to its phenomenality as well, and I've been using it in this manner in my informal determinations, though not so much on this blog.

Still, even with this "rule of thumb" in place, it should be obvious that even if LI'L ABNER's metaphenomenal storylines did not make up over fifty percent of the total storylines, it's obvious that Al Capp possessed a creative passion for coming up with metaphenomenal concepts on a regular basis, while the guy who put a mad scientist into a RINGO KID story may have simply been tired of the usual cowpoke sagas, and so elected to "bend the Kid's genre," so to speak.

I said in the except above that "51 percent" didn't give the holder of such stock an "unqualified dominion," and the same applies to serial concepts. Sometimes one can see that a given author has a real passion for playing with metaphenomenal concepts, while another author may just be tossing out whatever seems to work.

To draw once more upon comic strip examples, DICK TRACY debuted in 1931, and if it had been cancelled in 1940, we would hardly remember it as having any metaphenomenal content, as Chester Gould only rarely used weird, freaky crooks in his 1930s stories. However, from the 1940s and on, TRACY became famous for its "rogue's gallery" of bizarre criminals. TRACY might or might not exceed the formal "51 percent rule" in terms of metaphenomenal content, but as with ABNER, one can hardly doubt the influence of said content on the strip as a structuring principle.

ABNER ORIGINE

Since I'm about to do a review of the 1959 film LI'L ABNER, I decided to take a quick look at the phenomenality of Al Capp's original 1934-77 comic strip.

During its long run the strip featured a considerable number of marvelous entities in assorted adventures, such as the Wolf Gal (seen above), the Schmoos (a race of creatures that love to be devoured by mankind), and Joe Btfsplk, the "world's world's jinx."  However, despite the presence of these and other bizarre characters, ABNER might not be considered a "fantasy comic strip" in the minds of its readers, in contrast to a literal science-fiction comic like FLASH GORDON or even a strip dealing with outre dream-fantasies like LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. 

Of course, I too might hesitate to deem ABNER a marvelous strip.  In this essay I put forth my "51 percent rule," which I applied not to the phenomenalities of features but to their alignment with particular Fryean mythoi.  Still, the principle remains the same.  If it's the case that the majority of Abner's adventures legitimately fall within the domain of the naturalistic, then ipso facto it must be judged a naturalistic feature. And when one looks at the first ten years of the strip as reprinted by Kitchen Sink, one may tend to consider the bulk of those adventures to be naturalistic, concerning the comic confrontations of Abner Yokum and his hillbilly kindred with snooty society and big-city gangsters.

There is, however, one element that, though it was not *constantly* referenced, might tip the strip into the domain of the uncanny, and that would be the unusual levels of strength attributed to Abner and his mammy, a.k.a. "Mammy Yokum" (seen below).

Indeed, within the first year of the strip, Li'l Abner undergoes an unexplained transformation.  In his first sequence in 1934, he's just a big brawny guy, capable of being knocked down by another brawny guy.  By 1935, he's taken on a near-Herculean level of power, amazing ordinary audiences when he beats down an angry gorilla.  Though Abner does this without full knowledge-- the fight takes place in a dark room, causing the hillbilly to mistake his opponent for a fellow in a fur coat-- clearly artist Capp was extending the limits of what Abner could do for comic effect.  Later episodes make Abner practically invulnerable, at least in the head region, as items like safes and concrete blocks bounce off the hillbilly's skull without giving him more than a headache.  This might not be quite the level of the mythic Hercules, but it's on the same uncanny level as many of the less extraordinary cinematic versions of the Greek hero, two of which I reviewed here.

The one objection that might be made to this observation is: did Capp keep referring to this "trope of the uncanny," or did he drop it over time?  If it ceased to be utilized at all in the strip's later days, then it might not be applicable to judging the overall fantasy-content of the strip, any more than the frequent fantastic guest-stars.  But that question is rendered moot until such time as the entire run of the strip becomes available.

I'll note that I tend to believe that once an author has established this sort of phenomenality-trope, it usually still has applicability unless expressly contradicted.  On my movie-blog I've been slowly reviewing episodes of the 1972-75 KUNG FU teleseries.  Some episodes show the hero Kwai Chang Caine as being capable of feats that belong to the uncanny-phenomenality; some episodes do not show him as anything but a skillful man.  But I tend to believe that once an author establishes that heroes-- even those as unalike as Caine and Li'l Abner-- possess such unusual properties, they should tend as narrative properties that don't disappear simply because the author isn't using them every time.