THRILLS WITH THROUGH-LINES

 This post is largely just a terminological update, exploring the subject of what makes it possible for the launch of a spinoff character to qualify as a "proto-crossover." In the 2022 essay STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE, I explained my view as to why the early appearances of certain comics-spinoffs, such as The Black Panther, qualified as proto-crossovers while others, such as Adam Warlock, did not.

The logic set forth in STATUTE remains intact, but I came across the word "through-line" that serves to describe the difference in the two types of spinoffs. The Merriam Webster definition is as follows:

a common or consistent element or theme shared by items in a series or by parts of a whole

The relevant "element" is that of intentionality: whether or not one can show a probable intention of the creator(s) plan to use a character again in either a Prime or Sub role. In the case of the two heroes mentioned, there are numerous textual clues as to editor Stan Lee's plans to use the Panther again in a superordinate role, and those textual elements comprise a 'through-line" linking his early subordinate appearances to his slightly later superordinate status. In contrast, there are no such clues linking Warlock's subordinate appearances to his later starring status, so the former Sub appearances have no through-line and so do not have the status of proto-crossovers.

The same principle applies to the essay example of the Green Goblin. The Goblin is introduced as a new Sub in the cosmos of Spider-Man, while his partners, the Enforcers, are an ensemble-team who collectievly make up an "old" and established Sub. Thus, the initial story possesses a through-line to all of the Goblin's future appearances. However, he's an "old" villain by the time he encounters the "new Sub" Crime Master. But Crime Master will not make future appearances in the Spider-cosmos, so there is no through-line and his appearance alongside the Goblin may be called a villain-mashup but not a villain-crossover.   

In STATUTE I used Frasier Crane as an example of a character who was selected to be a spinoff character from CHEERS. Frasier made regular appearances in his Sub status on CHEERS, as opposed to the brief and scattershot appearances of Warlock in two separate Marvel features. Nevertheless, there's no suggestion of a through-line in episodes of CHEERS that Frasier was going to be launched in his own series.

The spinoff of the show ANGEL from that of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER program is arguably a little more complex. The character of Angel is introduced as a mystery-man who comes into Buffy Summers' life in the first episode of her eponymous TV show, and he functions, like Buffy's other confidantes, as part of her bonded ensemble. (In an earlier essay, I argued that Buffy was a Prime and that her confidantes were Subs, but since reviewing all of the BUFFY episodes I've reversed myself on that statement.) So Angel became a Prime in that first episode, as much as characters like Willow, Xander and Giles, and there's no need to see him as any sort of crossover, proto or otherwise, when he branches off into his own program. However, after he gets his own show, any appearance he or one of his ensemble-mates made on BUFFY became a crossover, and vice versa with respect to BUFFY characters on ANGEL.  

The BUFFY Sub character Spike is even more involved. He's introduced as a pure Sub in the show's second season and continues in that status. The character's enormous popularity led to his becoming a regular member of the ensemble in the fourth season, though he was in the nature of a "opposed ensemble-character" after the nature of those described here. The transformation of Spike to said status is first set up in the 1999 episode "Wild at Heart." This episode, loosely inducting Spike into the ensemble, is the only one to qualify as a crossover due to a new "through-line" that affects all of Spike's future appearances. But only the first such episode that changes Spike's status gains a crossover-vibe, since only the first "phase shift" foregrounds Spike's acquisition of collective stature, as described in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. 

SCRAPPY PRINCESSES AND ETHNIC ODDBALLS

 In the first part of TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM, I said that the essay-series would focus more on art than politics, though I had to set up some of the political background for the very idea of tokens. In that essay I concentrated only upon the political background for racial conflicts, but the series as a whole will address two other categories of conflict: those revolving around gender equality, which we usually label "feminism," and those revolving around sexual proclivities. The last of these three categories has no place in this essay, though, because sexual-proclivity conflicts essentially did not exist in the era I'm addressing: the era of 20th-century American art from roughly 1900 to 1960.                                                                                      

One might call this era "Before Tokenism," because there really wasn't an established practice of signaling one's virtue by appealing to marginalized groups. If the tendency did exist in politics, anything comparable in the fiction of the era seems nugatory, particularly in the new forms of media that blossomed during the 20th, principally movies, radio, comic strips, comic books and television. In that era as in eras previous, it was a given that creative authors wrote for the majority in most cases, and that meant that most American productions defaulted to the use of White characters, usually of Ango-Saxon extraction. This default in itself was not part of a dastardly scheme to keep "people of color" down, though there were specific narratives designed to promote racial disenfranchisement, as with Thomas Dixon's novel THE CLANSMAN. Dominantly the motive for authors to use White characters was that (a) Whites comprised the majority of the readership, and (b) White people in the real world had fewer restrictions on their behavior within many though not all possible story-settings. One may call this state of affairs a "status quo" but not entirely a conspiracy.                                                                                                                                       

 Nevertheless, White readers of the early 20th century were well aware that not all races or ethnicities dissolved into the melting pot of cultural assimilation. Though some ethnic characters outside the bounds of the Status Quo might be villainous, many were more on the level of "oddballs" who amused readers with their eccentricities. It's important to remember, though, that popular entertainment often targeted Caucasian characters as ethnic oddballs. In the BLACKHAWK cover above, the Chinese cook Chop-Chop-- whose status with the heroic pilots is ambivalent since he fought with them on the ground but did not fly a plane-- is clearly set up to look funnier than the other members. Yet some of the "straight" members evinced linguistic curiosities that was also used for humorous purposes, with Hendrickson the German expostulating "dunder" all the time or Andre the Frenchman making remarks about "mam'selles." Some racial and ethnic portraits were unquestionably as deprecating as those of Dixon's CLANSMAN novel, and Black characters in comics were drawn as almost non-human caricatures of actual Black people. But even if the majority of "ethnic oddballs" were not mean-spirited, the Status Quo probably discouraged a lot of authors from depicting ethnic types as anything but amusing curiosities. So in America there was hardly any movement against the Status Quo vis-a-vis ethnic depictions until the 1950s, though the larger wave of tokenism, good or bad, did not begin until the 1960s. We tend to remember the "good tokens" of the period, such as Alexander Scott of TV's I SPY, or The Black Panther as a member of Marvel's AVENGERS, because as I specified earlier, these "tokens" were unquestionable representations of the ideals professed by Classic Liberals. What the bad ones would be I leave open for speculation.                                                                                                                                 

Now the fictional emancipation of women followed more of a zigzag course. In the late 19th century there were a variety of prose fiction adventure-books so resolutely aimed at male readers that either women did not appear at all (Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND, Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA) or women only performed minor functions. Doyle's 1912 LOST WORLD exemplifies the latter pattern. Reporter Ned Malone only becomes involved in adventure because the woman he wants to marry claims he's not adventurous enough, and when Malone returns, covered in glory, the jezebel has married an entirely ordinary suitor. But reading prose was a single-person experience, and it seems that both films and comic strips sought to impress female patrons as much as male ones. Thus, when LOST WORLD was adapted to film in 1925, a female lead was imported into the story, making the movie more potentially popular with feminine patrons by the inclusion of a strong romance angle. I would not define any of these "princesses in need of rescue" to be tokens of belief in feminine equality. and even the more tomboyish heroines like Sheena and Nyoka don't necessarily represent any such belief. Only the William Marston Wonder Woman might be fairly seen as a pure token, since her character incarnates Marston's beliefs about female empowerment-- though I tend to doubt most of the comic book's readers engaged seriously with the author's theories.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm obviously skipping over many potentially pertinent examples in both of these categories, but this is only intended to be a sketch of the social realities of the Status Quo, which would begin to suffer its first real challenge in the decade of the 1960s.                                                                                                                 

PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2

 As a result of my refinements in Part 1 of this series, I'm overturning some of the conclusions I made in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 2:

Marvel's Inhumans debuted in a 1965 issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and the Black Panther appeared in the comic in the following year. It practically goes without saying that Lee and Kirby intended for both the Panther and the Inhumans to appear in serials at some point, but neither did for some time, and so for all of those appearances they register as Subs. In a special FF issue dated November 1967, both the Inhumans and the Black Panther crossed over with the Fantastic Four in fighting Psycho-Man. The Black Panther would not get a regular berth for another year, when he became a regular member of the Avengers in 1968, so within the compass of that story, he remained a Sub type. However, the special placed a more immediate push to see if readers wanted an Inhumans series, since in an issue of THOR, also dated November 1967, the denizens of Attilan received their first feature, albeit only a backup strip. So the FF ANNUAL would be a High-Stature crossover because the Inhumans had just become Primes around the time when the issue came out, while the equally enjoyable Panther had to wait another year for Prime status. 

This section is not incorrect with respect to the Black Panther and the Inhumans being Subs within the cosmos of the Prime stars, the Fantastic Four. However, the overall intent of the essay was to state that the debut stories of the new heroes did not count as crossovers because it took considerable time for any of them to get their own features. However, now I would consider that the debuts of both characters would count as "proto-crossovers," and so would any other stories produced before the "future Prime stars" got their own berths. 

Such a "proto-crossover" appears in a Captain America continuity from late 1967 through early 1968 (though all of the issues were dated1968). But Marvel did not wait to see whether or not the issues teaming up Cap with the Black Panther sold well, for the storyline culminated with the star-spangled crusader recommending the Panther for admission to The Avengers. The admission took place about a month or two later in AVENGERS #52, and this comprised the African prince's first role as a Prime in any series.

Now, all these "retroactive proto-crossovers" raise a question: if the debut of Black Panther in FANTASTIC FOUR is a proto-crossover, is the same true of an ADAPTATION of that story, such as the one that appears in an episode of the 1994-96 FANTASTIC FOUR animated series. But my answer to this question is NO. For one thing, within the corpus of existing episodes in this series, the Black Panther never had the chance to ascend to Prime status, so he's just a Sub within the series, in contrast to the comic book universe from which he comes.

Now, had the MCU adapted the FF continuity for a full-fledged FANTASTIC FOUR movie, and then spun BLACK PANTHER off into his own series, THAT would have made the hypothetical FF film a proto-crossover. CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR was the MCU movie that launched the company's version of the Panther, but it's not a straight adaptation, but a new story, and is therefore governed by a different set of rules. The MCU always had the intent to spin the Panther off into his own film, and since CIVIL WAR sets up the storyline for the 2018 BLACK PANTHER, I don't deem CIVIL WAR to be a proto-crossover, just a Full Crossover in which the MCU Panther is a strong template deviation of the one in the comic books.

However, when one is dealing with "strong template deviations" rather than the weak type seen in a direct adaptation, it isn't strictly necessary for a character to get his own feature. Nick Fury is a Prime star within Marvel comic books, though his career in the comics has probably put him most often into the role of a Sub support-character rather than that of a Prime. To date the MCU has produced a strong template deviation of Fury, and there are no indications that he's EVER going to be anything to the MCU but a Prime demoted to the level of a Sub. Yet thanks to his comic-book career Nick Fury has enough stature that even his first appearance in the 2008 IRON MAN qualifies as a Full Crossover. 

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 3

After formulating my distinctions of the longest structural forms in Part 1-- the compact novel and the episodic novel-- I should point out that a partial reading may be deceptive.

Last year, partly in response to the release of the film ALITA BATTLE ANGEL, I read some of the chapters of the manga. I rated IRON MAIDEN as possessed enough concrescence to qualify as a mythcomic, which is naturally predicated on recognizing it as a "long arc," but the following long arc, KILLING ANGEL, did not qualify for the same status.

To date, I still have not re-read all of ALITA, but it occurs to me that when I do, the entire series might qualify as an "episodic novel," and thus as a mythcomic in itself. If I made that judgment, then the fact that KILLING ANGEL lacked a certain level of concrescence would not affect my judgment of the whole series, any more than a mythically-weak chapter of (say) MOBY DICK would affect my judgment of the whole book.

In some cases, if a given work or series of works has been left incomplete, it's hard not to make a partial reading. I stated in Part 1 that I could have considered the eleven issues of Jack Kirby's NEW GODS series to be an episodic novel, even if the author had not been able to craft an ending for the series many years later. The ending that Kirby used in HUNGER DOGS was probably very different from anything he might have written had he concluded the series in 1971. Yet I would say that the mythic discourse of those eleven issues was strong enough to view them as a technically incomplete but symbolically complete novel.

Similarly, Steve Gerber's VOID INDIGO only enjoyed one large-sized graphic novel and two issues of a regular-sized comic book, before hostile fan-reaction to the series encouraged publisher Marvel Comics to shut down the series. Possibly I might not have liked whatever ending Gerber might have designed for the series, but I felt that the early part of his discourse was strong enough that I deemed VOID also to be akin (to borrow Aristotle's metaphor) to the acorn that, under the right circumstances, has the power to give rise to an oak.

It's hard to state with precision exactly when the discourse is strong enough to subsume any weak elements. The Don McGregor long arc "Panther's Rage" in BLACK PANTHER #6-17 is one in which I did not find a strong enough discourse overall, though I critiqued two of the McGregor stories, "The God Killer" and "Thorns in the Flesh, Thorns in the Mind" as possessing the same strong mythicity as an isolated short story, even though they're part of a larger arc. On a side note, I would probably rate the entire "Panther's Rage" highly concrescent in terms of the dramatic potentiality, since I'm of the opinion that interpersonal dynamics were the main focus of McGregor and his collaborative artists.

MYTHCOMICS: "THORNS IN THE FLESH, THORNS IN THE MIND" (JUNGLE ACTION #15, 1975)

As I stated in my review of THE GOD KILLER, Don McGregor's Black  Panther saga "Panther's Rage" was not unified enough to qualify as a mythcomic. However, "The God Killer" was a segment of the sage that possessed a complex unity, and so does the segment that followed two issues later, "Thorns in the Flesh, Thorns in the Mind."

Following the title, the first word in "Thorns" is "insecurity." Much of "Panther's Rage" revolves around the internal struggle of the Black Panther, a.k.a. T'Challa, King of Wakanda. Since the feature was a mainstream Marvel comic, the hero also had an external struggle, as he returns to his native land from an American sojourn and finds Wakanda in chaos, thanks to the activities of the revolutionary Killmonger and his many followers. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had conveived Wakanda as a technologized jungle, but McGregor placed less emphasis on technology and more upon Wakanda as a patchwork of exotic, hostile terrains-- deserts, snowy wastelands, swamps, a "lost world" full of dinosaurs, and, in this story, a "forest of thorns" dominated by cacti and brambels.

The story could be said to start off with a literal bang. T'Challa pauses in the thorn-forest during his pursuit of Killmonger to quench his thirst, and a Killmonger henchman, Salamander K'ruel, fires an explosive arrow at the hero. Though the main villain sports a number of underlings with super-villain names and even weird powers, K'ruel seems to have a name modeled on the odd cognomens of Ian Fleming, like Auric Goldfinger and Pistols Scaramanga. I have no idea what the apostrophe in the name "K'ruel" is supposed to signify, though as I recall apostrophized names were a big thing in the seventies, possibly due to the influence of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. As for the "Salamander" part of the name, McGregor later provides a loose connotation, if not an explanation.

When the Panther engages in combat with K'ruel-- who looks like an ordinary native, albeit with strange welts all over his body-- the hero finds that K'ruel is a seeming incarnation of the forest itself. The welts contains thorns, and by grappling with K'ruel, the Panther is stricken unconscious by overwhelming pain.

When he awakens, all of the thorns that had covered his costumed body are gone, and since it's not likely that the villain removed them, one may hazard that they simply dissolved on their own. K'ruel, like innumerable villains before him, chooses not to slay his unconscious adversary, but puts the Panther in a death-trap, the better to make the hero suffer. For once, the villain has a good reason to leave the premises, since the death-trap consists of tying T'Challa to a pair of cacti and allowing one of the local pterodactyls the chance to have a panther-dinner. It's in K'ruel's farewell speech that he draws a loose comparison to himself and the real salamanders of the forest, saying that by the time he returns, "the salamanders... will have swarmed over your body." This doesn't seem like much a threat compared to that of the pterodactyl, though once T'Challa is alone, the hero does find that even a swarm of one proves daunting to his sense of self-worth and security.

In this one-page sequence, one single salamander, of the newt species, starts clambering over the Wakandan king's bound form, and McGregor's prose, however purple, is never better than in his exposition of the utter strangeness of this experience.

The salamander goes its way, and then the Panther is obliged to face a more immediate physical threat as a living pterodactyl comes for its dinner. T'Challa is caught between the flying devil and the deadly thorn-forest below him, but he manages to clamber onto the reptile's back, banishing "self-doubt" as he somehow steers the creature in pursuit of his enemy-- resulting in a most satisfying comeuppance for Salamander K'ruel.

I should note that McGregor interrupts this struggle between the jungle-hero and a living incarnation of the jungle's mysteries with three segues into the lives of the feature's supporting characters. Though all three sequences also deal with "insecurity," none of them are especially mythopoeic. McGregor ends the story not by entirely banishing all insecurity from the hero, but by having him realize that "purpose and self-doubt hover over him as if gamblers waiting for the outcome." Arguably this part of the sage foregrounds the hero's only partial triumph at the end of "Panther's Rage," in which T'Challa makes his last stand against Killmonger, though he is not solely responsible for the evildoer's defeat.

MORE RACIAL STUFF

A CBR post alleges that some people had complained about BLACK PANTHER being "anti-white," albeit with no links to people actually saying this.

I've just posted this.
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Is BLACK PANTHER "anti-white?"

Well, certainly the politics of the film, positing an African fantasy-civilization that did not suffer the depredations of Europeans, is only viable because of "white guilt" over real-world depredations. (No mention of "brown guilt" on the part of the Muslim peoples who organized the majority of the slave trade, naturally.) But alluding to "white guilt" is not the same as projecting an "anti-white" attitude.

However, suppose you have a movie of dominantly white characters in which one of the sympathetic characters calls two full-grown black men "black boys."

That movie would be no more, and no less, "anti-black" than BLACK PANTHER is "anti-white."

That said, I'm glad this subject was raised. I just finished discussing political correctness with my brother-in-law, who took the position that the "P.C." mentality was really about politeness, about encouraging Americans to treat people the way they want to be treated-- an argument I've encountered on this forum a few times.

Had it occurred to me then, I could have brought BLACK PANTHER up as a perfect refutation. Mild though the film's reverse-racism is, it still demonstrates that for P.C. people, courtesy is a one-way street.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE BLACK PANTHER" (FANTASTIC FOUR #52-53, 1966)

Perhaps predictably, given that I reviewed the MCU BLACK PANTHER this week, I decided this week's mythcomic would be the original appearance of the Marvel character.

As I recall, both Lee and Kirby claimed they formulated the Panther character in response to the American civil rights movement. Though the political troubles may have been the proximate cause for the Panther character, the two-part story has less to do with American sociological myths than with those pertaining to America's relationship with the Third World. Even in 1966, the dominant attitude of Americans toward the Third World was often-- though not always-- characterized by paternalism toward what Kipling called "our little brown brothers." In the majority of pop culture, Black African culture had not changed since the 19th century, and it consisted of nothing more than assorted backward, often superstitious tribes. The creators had already depicted other exotic civilizations within the sphere of the FANTASTIC FOUR feature, such as the Atlanteans and the Inhumans. In both of these pocket-universes, the natives commanded super-technology beyond that of regular human existence. Lee and Kirby seem to be the first to depict such a hyper-advanced civilization dominated by Black Africans, though technically the fantasy-world of Wakanda is of recent vintage.

I'll pass quickly over the events of the first half of the story. The super-quartet receives an invitation to visit the African nation Wakanda, along with the gift of a super-scientific flying ship. The heroes accept, though the Thing, always the cantankerous type, speaks for the majority of readers in associating all things African with a certain Edgar Rice Burroughs creation: "How does some refugee from a Tarzan movie lay his hands on this kinda gizmo?" The team's leader Reed Richards wonders if the mysterious Black Panther has some ulterior motive. Sure enough, the heroes-- accompanied by Johnny Storm's college-buddy Wyatt Wingfoot-- reach Wakanda, and are immediately trapped in a "techno-jungle," a complex of machines concealed beneath the African vegetation. The Panther himself introduces himself by attacking them, even though he appears to be no more than a super-athlete armed with a handful of weapons. He calls it a "hunt," suggesting a "most dangerous game" motive, but in the ensuing issue, the Panther-- not yet given the proper name "T'Challa"-- reveals that his attack was a means of testing himself against an encroaching enemy. The African chieftain skillfully outmaneuvers the superior fire-power of the four Americans, often forcing them to encounter technological traps. Ironically, another POC hero, Wyatt Wingfoot saves the day, for while the Panther is busy with the foursome, Wyatt sneaks away, knocks out the Panther's henchmen, and frees the Human Torch from captivity, so that the featured heroes recover and force their host to surrender.

Issue #53 is the richer half of the narrative. According to the backstory, Wakanda was still a basically primitive land in the Panther's own childhood, and it's been largely through the chief's efforts that it's been brought into the 20th century, and a little beyond. And ironically, this advancement came about in response to an invasion from the West.

As the Panther narrates, when he was a child his father T'Chaka ruled the tribe, and the tribe venerated a "sacred mound" composed of the unique vibration-absorbing metal, vibranium. (As a side-note, though it's likely that neither Lee nor Kirby knew anything about bonafide African mythology, it's quite possible that one of them was drawing upon the Egyptian story of the primeval mound from which life sprung.)

In contrast to the current film, there's no indication that the tribesmen had any interest in developing the metal for technological use. The impertinent Thing interrupts the story to complain that he knows just where this story is going: that "everything wuz hunky-dory until the greedy ivory hunters made the scene." Though this line would be judged politically incorrect today, in truth it represents little more than a common strategy found in Lee's writing. Often Lee would reuse commonplace pop-culture tropes and make them seem fresh by having the characters remark on how cliche they were.

In place of greedy ivory hunters, the story posits greedy vibranium hunters, led by the European-looking Klaw. He's one of the more one-dimensional Marvel villains of the Silver Age, consumed by the monomaniacal ambition to use vibranium to master sound as a weapon, and with that weapon, to master the world itself. Klaw-- Lee calls him "the unsmiling," as if to indicate his lack of affect-- personally shoots the Panther's father, ending the young boy's "hunky-dory" womb-state.

The crude weapons of the tribesmen are no match for the weapons of Klaw and his men, but Kid Panther repels their assault by turning one of their own super-weapons against them, shattering one of Klaw's hands in the process.

The story returns to the present, with the Panther telling his somewhat abused guests that within the space of his twenty-something years, he managed to build Wakanda into a techno-paradise, as well as becoming "one of the richest men in the world." It's a point of minor irony that he did so by doing something akin to what Klaw wanted to do: the Panther derived small quantities of vibranium from the mound and sold them to other nations, thus amassing his uncharacteristic wealth and power. Yet he's always known that his nemesis would return someday. Not surprisingly, Klaw chooses to return just when the Fantastic Four are still around.

The main heroes are tasked with holding off Klaw's sonic creations: two crimson-colored colossi, respectively resembling an ape and an elephant. Both Lee and Kirby gave this section of the story short shrift, for neither Kirby's visuals nor Lee's captions explain why the apparently invulnerable sound-elephant fades into nothingness just when it seems ready to stomp the Thing into orange-aid.
Their focus was on giving the readers the satisfaction of vengeance, as the Panther corners Klaw in the evil scientist's lair, and causes the lair to blow up. (Naturally, Klaw comes back again and again, often crossing swords-- or rather, his sonic arm-- against the Panther's claws.)

Lee and Kirby clearly conceived of spinning off the Panther in some fashion, since at the closing he strongly implies his plans to pursue a superheroic calling. He didn't get the chance to do so until he joined the Avengers two years later. The team-berth didn't lead to much development of the character, though by coincidence it led to a major reassessment of his mythos when the Black Panther received his own series in 1973. But that's another story.

I GOT THE BEAT (POST) AGAIN

Responding to this BEAT-thread:

Heidi and I will certainly never be on the same page re: the quality of the MCU movies, since for me RAGNAROK is the "self-indulgent mess" and GOTG2 at least has a coherent story and better than average set design. In fact, the design of Ego's world, with all its faux-Hindu imagery, proves Heidi's point about the benefits of loosening the purse strings far more than any of the visuals in TR. 

I don't think that even with continued success MCU movies are ever going to permit a wide number of "individual directorial visions" or whatever one calls it. There's just too much damn money at stake. You want individual visions of Ant-Man; keep watching his latest comic-book outings. Maybe Edgar Wright will guest-author an Ant Man comic and we'll all finally see just what he might've done with a movie.

Moving to BLACK PANTHER, i'm going to play prophet and predict that, no matter how good or bad the film is, it will be one of the ten films nominated for "Best Picture" next year at the Oscars. I'm hypothesizing that the Academy will look upon the film as an opportunity to disprove the brain-dead accusations of the #OscarSoWhite crowd, and that the voters will see PANTHER as a superhero flick they can nominate, in the sure and certain knowledge that it, like DJANGO UNCHAINED, will have no chance to win.

While I don't really want to devote a lot of space to justifying my comment on the #OscarSoWhite mess, I'll toss out a few extra bon mots.

I'm constitutionally against the idea of using art primarily for the purpose of political issues, and that's why I deem #OscarSoWhite to be "brain dead."

Here's the tweet that started the Net-meme in 2015:

they asked to touch my hair.

OK, the author says that this was meant as a "cheeky" putdown of a mostly white nomination list. I suppose that this is an aspect of Afro-American humor that communicates best to other Afro-Americans. Maybe it's meant to imply that persons of The Unnameable Phenotype are always going to be nothing but curiosities to white people, that white people just want to touch the hair of black people, maybe in line with the old superstition-- that IMO no one is keeping alive except people like Reign-- that touching kinky hair brings good luck.

I've read nothing in any of Reign's online interviews that suggests that she cares about the quality of films or any other artistic medium. She cares, first and foremost, about representation of racial and sexual coteries, as if this representation is a good in itself. Clearly it would never occur to her that maybe the 2015 list of nominated films might have omitted POC nominees simply because the year had been bereft of outstanding POC works. No, in any such situation, the only solution must be a racist conspiracy.

And that, in my considered opinion, is brain-dead hyper-politicized thinking.

QUICK DOCTOR DOOM COMMENT

I recently defended Marvel's Doctor Doom from the imputation of racism on a CBR thread. I won't bother to cite the thread, since it's so freaking long no one who might read this will bother to seek it out, but here's the gist of my defense, referencing a two-part ASTONISHING STORIES (scripted by two separate authors, Larry Leiber and Gerry Conway) in which the master villain encountered the Black Panther and made some politically incorrect remarks about Panther's subjects being "vicious primitives:"

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I think the author is trying to say that Doom recognizes in the Panther the image of nobility that he himself has internalized. It's true that he has no respect for Panther's subjects, but keep in mind that he also has no respect for his own Caucasian subjects. Doom is generally portrayed as a supreme egotist: he resented the Latverian nobility not because they tyrannized his people but because they tyrannized him and his family. Lee and Kirby, focused on writing exciting adventures for juvenile readers, probably wouldn't have wondered why Doom never put his former people in positions of Latverian power. Yet the way Doom's (admittedly limited) psychology is constructed, it makes total sense that he wouldn't. Being a villain of almost solipsistic proportions, he cares only about his own suffering, his own ideology of success-- which means becoming an icon of aristocratic tyranny, like the nameless aristocrat who causes the death of Doom's father. Yet he also wants to believe that he's not a petty man. That's why he spares the Wakandan from further torture, not because he cares about the man's sufferings, but because gratuitous sadism lessens the majesty to which he aspires. In the Over-Mind arc, Lee memorably has Doom say that "many demons" rule him, but "not those of pettiness or fear"-- or for that matter, racism, which would also diminish his sense of personal majesty.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GOD KILLER" (JUNGLE ACTION #13, 1975)

It would almost impossible to consider the question of racial myths in the comics medium without mentioning its "first black superhero," the Black Panther, a.ka. King T'Challa of Wakanda.

As I'm dealing only one specific story. I'm obliged to pass quickly over the character's genesis, except in one context. When the Panther appears in his two-part introductory story in FANTASTIC FOUR #52-53, authors Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are thoroughly upbeat about the African lord's success in importing Western technology into his kingdom of Wakanda. I would guess that Lee and Kirby envisioned Wakanda's advancement to be indicative of the potential of all human races to reach the level of attainment seen in the United States.

Don McGregor, writing his "Panther's Rage" saga" in the post-Vietnam era, took a different point of view. McGregor's initial arc began with T'Challa returning to his "Wakanda wonderland" and finding that an old enemy, calling himself Erik Killmonger, has organized a revolutionary force to usurp the Panther's kingship. For the first time the Wakandan ruler sees that during his absence from his homeland-- during which he devoted himself to the role of superhero amid the Avengers-- his kingdom has fallen into chaos. Although during this series Wakanda remains a fantasy-world, sporting prehistoric monsters and meteors able to change humans into super-menaces, McGregor and his artistic collaborators Billy Graham and Rich Buckler revealed that many of the natives were still traditional tribal Africans, ill at ease with the intrusions of Western devices and culture.

"Panther's Rage" is rambling and episodic, and though it's never boring, its myth-themes are not integrated enough to make me list the entire arc here, as I did with the Pini's ELFQUEST and Jack Kirby's NEW GODS. Instead I've chosen one story, McGregor and Graham's "The God Killer," to represent the saga at its best.

"God Killer" follows an episode in which Killmonger stranded T'Challa in a wintry wasteland, hoping that the Panther would be killed by a pack of wolves. Having overcome the wolf-pack-- and I should note here that most episodes dealt with the Panther proving his mastery over animals by reluctantly slaying a particular beast-- T'Challa trails Killmonger and his retinue. But the hero is blocked by one of the villain's bizarre henchmen-- Sombre, who wears what resembles a traditional African mask over his features, and dresses in priest's robes. Sombre is one of a handful of men whom Killmonger exposed to the aforementioned "super-power meteor," and he's been cultivating a relationship with a band of titanic white gorillas whose very existence T'Challa never suspected. Specificially, Sombre has been feeding the corpses of men who died of meteor-radiation to the gorillas, with the result that he's able to command them to go after a live victim, the Black Panther. The Panther manages to stay clear of the regular-sized gorillas, who stand a mere twelve feet tall, but is forced to fight the largest white ape, who looks to be about twenty feet in height. The Panther manages to kick the giant creature off a ledge, where it's fortuitously impaled by the sharp rib-bone of some long-dead prehistoric creature. The story ends with the Panther meditating on the consequences of his act, though by the next issue he's hot on the trail of Sombre and Killmonger once more.

This bare-bones account leaves out a couple of "B-stories"involving the Panther's support-cast, but though these also delve into the trope of "traditional ways threatened by modernity," they're largely unimportant to the "A-story." Though this was the first story in which the white gorillas were shown to be a reality, their image had appeared before in a 1969 AVENGERS story. In this tale writer Roy Thomas posited that the Black Panther's crusade to modernize Wakanda was opposed by another Wakandan, the Man-Ape, whose people worshiped the implicitly imaginary white gorilla and advocated a Wakandan version of an "anarcho-primitivist" stance. Thomas followed Lee and Kirby by unilaterally advocating progress over tradition.

In contrast, McGregor emphasizes that the cult of the white gorilla is as much of a valid religion as T'Challa's veneration of his sacred black panther totem. On one level, the white-gorilla tribe is a continuation of the 20th century boogeyman of the "carnivorous ape" that is best exemplified by the 1933 film KING KONG, and thus it's fitting that T'Challa squares off against one giant ape rather than the whole tribe, even if the king-ape isn't quite as big as Kong. However, McGregor also sees them as figurative gods, simply by virtue of having been the subject of human adulation:

It would be a terrible agony for a man to meet his gods-- especially gods that he never believed in!

Though in a diegetic sense the gorillas are just animals, not gods, the fact that they have been worshiped by human beings-- just as the original Kong was as well-- lifts them above the sphere of the mundane. The death of the king-ape is thus a tragic outcome in the eyes of both McGregor and his viewpoint character:

The Panther is consumed by a sense of his own mortality. He has killed a myth... and his life is lessened by the act. He has lost a part of his past without anything to replace it in the future. It would be a terrible agony for a man to meet his gods. It would be hell if that man had to slay those gods.

McGregor has been criticized, sometimes fairly, for his florid prose, but these lines rate as some of the most cogent sentiments written for a Marvel comic. The writer occasionally evinced a rather touchy-feely attitude toward human relationships, something that might seem at odds with the animal-slaying motif throughout "Panther's Rage." In most jungle-hero narratives-- a tiny number of which concern non-white heroes-- the hero's slaying of jungle-beasts indicates his immediate dominion over his terrain, as well as the more general dominion of humankind-- or alternately, of white humankind-- over the beasts.

In contrast, we have the Black Panther. who is not the first nonwhite jungle hero, but is ineluctably the most mythically significant one, partly but not exclusively because of his race. In the McGregor mythos of the Panther, while the slaying of animals is necessary for survival, the beasts constitute an "other" beside which all human-centered "others" are nominal by comparison. Indeed, in a later episode McGregor describes the Panther's encounter with a particular animal-- one that's not even a literal menace-- as "profoundly alien." Ergo, even though no real gods appear here, the white gorillas incarnate a true "metaphysical myth."

NOTE: I'm aware that apes can and do eat meat, but I wouldn't consider them carnivores since meat-eating is generally an occasional deviation from their vegetarian tendencies.

A BEDROCK OF CHAUVINISM

"Too many people warp the word 'heritage,' Monica. They use it to mean superiority-- when it is only meant to give one-- identity."-- The Black Panther as written by Don McGregor, JUNGLE ACTION #8, 1974.

The situation that prompts this Panther-assertion is one in which his Black American girlfriend Monica has just intruded upon a sacred Wakandan rite, resulting in her being roundly condemned by the king's right-hand man W'Kabi.  One might fault the hero's sentiment for being a little too preachy, but I've always considered this one of McGregor's best stand-alone lines. I'd criticize its philosophical stance only in one respect. Unlike McGregor, I don't think "heritage" was essentially "meant" to be either benign or malign, though I find it easier to picture the phenomenon beginning in the latter phase, that of superiority, as in "Those Hill People aren't as good as us Rock People," etc.

In fact, I don't think that it is possible to express pride in one's heritage without making some degree of comparison to some other perceived group that doesn't possess the same traits. For my purposes I choose to express this range of ingroup-pridefulness via an adaptation of the familiar word *chauvinism."

To do so, I have to regard these meanings from Merriam-Webster as indicative of nothing but a negative form of ingroup-pride: (1) excessive or blind patriotism, (2) undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged.

It is, fortunately, possible to feel pride in one's own group and yet not actually disparage others, even if one doesn't necessarily feel any strong interest in the culture of the perceived others.  I recall an anecdote from a British doctor who worked amid East Indian tribes for many years. At one point, one of the old women, who wished to express her appreciation of his services, wished him what she considered the best possible fate: that someday he might be reincarnated as a Hindu.

From the tone of the anecdote (whose source I have forgotten), the doctor was not offended by this cultural temerity, nor do I think most persons would be. This is what I would term "benign chauvinism." There's no question that the speaker of the sentiment is entirely wrapped up in the pride felt for an ingroup, but only a noob would bother trying to correct the speaker's benign prejudice. The one exception would be if the speaker were a white person wishing that some person of color might be reincarnated as Caucasian, for that would be perceived as racism, though only by persons of limited intelligence.

Malign chauvinism, in contrast to the benign type, is not content with merely asserting ingroup-pride. Malign chauvinism is indicated by an overt attempt to claim or prove the superiority of one's group, not a mere expression of preference. This is actual racism, but contrary to the opinion of some pundits, it did not simply come into being with the rise of European colonialism. I won't deny that the earliest systems of "racism-as-psuedo-science" came into being as Europeans spread throughout the globe, seeking both profit and explanations of the racial variety they encountered. But the core of racism has always been in the human heart, and it traces from that desire to find one's own group unstintingly superior to all other groups.

Having defined chauvinism as a spectrum of possible responses, in my next essay I'll seek to define what this bedrock phenomenon means to a culture that should endorse pluralism.

KING KIRBY'S FOGGY FROGGY PT. 2

(Continued from part 1)

PAGE 4-- While the swordsman prepares to attack, Mister Little tells Panther that the little metal frog was the instrument that caused the death of Alfred Queely, the corpse occupying the chair. For some reason the Panther takes this assertion very literally: "Whoever killed Queely moved faster than that frog ever will!"

Y'think, T'Challa? Eventually Little will explain that he meant that the frog summoned Queely's assailant from some bygone time-era, but just then the Armored Hot Dog attacks, trying to shish-kebob the Panther. Despite the Panther's "cobra speed," the heavily-armored opponent breaks off the fight and outpaces the hero to the nearest window, where he crashes through it. Little tells the Panther to let the man go because "he'll be picked up by the police in short order." And the Panther, who presumably *could* overtake the armored guy, agrees to let him go, even though the guy's just killed one man and still has his sword in hand. Hey, King Kirby, what if the armored nutjob comes across a couple necking in the park and decided to do a Friday the 13th on them? Or, assuming the cops do come across the warrior first, how do they subdue the guy without either their bloodshed or his? But of course the armored guy is just a tool for some opening action, and is never seen again despite having been rudely plucked from his own era by the fellow he kills.

PAGES 6-10-- Once Little has detailed the frog's ability to open the "door of time," Little and Panther leave Queely's house by "jet-copter," and Little explains that he wants to return the frog to "its original resting place-- King Solomon's burial chamber!" But their dialogue is interrupted as a hostile aircraft attacks the copter. Little blows the attacker to bits and then continues telling his story. The brass frog was liberated from the burial chamber by a group of thieves, one of whom, name of Baba, unleashed another time-displaced being, this time a barbaric giant six stories tall, whose uncanny rampage led to the legend of "Ali Baba and the genie" (!)

PAGES 11-12-- Again Little's copter is attacked, this time by men in jet-packs. This time Little goes into hyperdrive and outdistances the men, who work for some unspecified "competitor." Little then lands his copter inside a mountain that is his own concealed hideaway from competitors like a certain "Princess Zanda." Not needing two more mentions of her name, Zanda and her henchmen promptly pop out of the shadows.

(So if as suggested the aircraft and jet-pack guys were both in her employ-- why did she bother making either attack? Waiting to surprise Little and Panther in Little's own retreat certainly works a lot better, as well as avoiding collateral damage of the coveted froggy.)

PAGES 13-16-- After a gunshot fells Mister Little-- whom a henchman claims to be dead-- the Panther fights the henchmen but is brought down by Zanda's nerve ray. After Zanda tries to sway the hero to her side, he breaks free again, and swipes back the frog. A hasty shot from a henchman hits the brass frog instead the hero, and causes the artifact to do the time warp. And the issue ends with a cliffhanger as a big-headed visitor from a far future-Earth menaces both the hero and his foes.

So in the space of one sixteen-page story, we have Kirby making by my count five major errors of continuity/verisimilitude:

1) a dead man somehow holds an object in the palm of his curiously-upraised hand
2) Panther makes a dumb remark about the brass frog killing someone (which would have been appropriate with a dumb character)
3) Panther lets a dangerous time-traveler run free even before he knows that he is a time-traveler, rather than a modern-day maniac in knight's clothing
4) the story of "Aladdin and his genie," which Kirby certainly knew as well as any of his contemporaries, suddenly becomes "Ali Baba and his genie" just so that Kirby can draw a line between a gang of thieves and a marauding monster (though Aladdin's genie isn't known for playing Godzilla and knocking down buildings)
5) Villainous Princess Zanda goes through all the trouble of breaking into Little's hideout and yet apparently is so impatient that she sends other minions to bring Little to heel

Further, the list grows to six if you include the lettercol, where Jack Kirby addresses his readers in an introductory letter. For though we find out in BP #2 that Mr. Little doesn't die of his wound (the old armored vest trick), we're not supposed to know it in BP #1. Yet here's Jack Kirby telling readers:

"You've seen the mysterious Mister Little (you thought he was dead, didn't you?)"

For me, though probably not for my opponents, a crazy-ass pulp tale like this one shows conclusively that when Jack Kirby was his own editor, he was capable of generating just as many problematic narratives as he was while under the editorship of Stan Lee. Thus attempts to whitewash Kirby as the Mistreated Artist won't, so to speak, wash.

In addition, such a flagrantly sentimentalization betrays Kirby's status as a great pulp-style artist, a master of what I've called "thematic escapism."

I've made a little fun of the oddball errors in BLACK PANTHER #1 (though I'm pretty gentle compared to some sites), but the errors don't bother me in the context of what is meant to be a wild-and-woolly adventure. In this essay I wrote of a Gardner Fox JUSTICE LEAGUE story:

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."

I don't think any of Kirby's vagaries of verisimilitude hurt one's experience of BLACK PANTHER #1, nor do they indict the superhero genre as a whole, as I can imagine some critics saying. The errors only hold importance for comics-criticism as a corrective to the fallacious fan-vision of Saint Kirby, Apostle of Comic Book Art.

Jack Kirby would not have been a better artist had he been more concerned with the probable. Often he took the simplest way, and for what he was doing, the simplest way was best. Kirby didn't want to deal with the time-traveling swordsman as a character, so he has his hero take the most expedient step and let the killer go free, using a justification as lame as (if not worse than) any of Stan Lee's. But lame justifications are much of the essence of pulp escapism. With such works their internal consistency is generated by a montage of expressive effects, not by obedience to Aristotelian mimetic unities, as must the case with works concerned with thematic realism, of which I've written here and here.

For comics-critics there will always be many grey areas to consider when dealing with matters as complex as the intersecting creativity that comes from collaboration. But the grey has to be explored for what it is, rather than solving it in "superhero" fashion, as a contest between black and white.

KING KIRBY'S FOGGY FROGGY, PT 1

Since Sean Collins brought up the theme of comics arguments that probably ought to be retired, I will add the whole "Stan Lee vs. Jack Kirby" argument to the heap.

Of course it won't end. For many fans, Kirby is the Mistreated Artist while Lee is Everyone's Evil Boss, two archetypes that have too much appeal to die easily. The reason that the argument *ought* to go away, however, is that even though there are a handful of stories about the collaboration of Lee and Kirby that are valuable to the history of comics and comics-criticism, too often these few stories are extrapolated to ridiculous lengths, and applied to situations regarding which no outsider to the Marvel Bullpen has knowledge.

For instance, here's one such story, originally published in the JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #24, which concerned creative friction between the two creators. As far as expatiating about the particular story discussed, the so-called "Beehive" two-part tale in FANTASTIC FOUR #66-67, the essay itself is a valuable piece of interpretation.

However, in recent weeks I've been on a private yahoogroup in which I've encountered fans who have extrapolated this particular story into the notion that every time one would encounter some narrative goof-up in a Lee-Kirby collaboration, it was because Lee changed his mind about the storyline or forgot what was going on. Thus again Kirby becomes the Mistreated Artist, whose stories are travestied by an irresponsible boss, and whose true unsullied works can only be found in a fantasy-library like that of Dylan Horrocks' HICKLAND.

Since my opponents' remarks appeared in a private venue, I won't quote them here. I've given them notice that I'm summing up my objections here and that they can either respond here or respond on the yahoogroup. If none respond here, other readers of this blog will have to take my representation of the opponents' arguments on faith.

To repeat, my opponents took it as gospel that any time Kirby's art seemed to make a narrative error, it was either Lee's fault for messing with the story or that Lee was culpable for not catching a minor gaffe (Reed Richards being drawn with two left hands). So I decided to turn to one of the works on which Kirby edited himself, to see if he was gaffe-free on his own. I randomly chose his tenure of BLACK PANTHER, beginning in 1977.


I honestly thought I'd find one or two problems with continuity or verisimilitude in an issue here or there. But as it happens, the first issue is so stuffed with them that I don't even need to go any farther.

PAGE 1-- Black Panther enters a room with a newly-introduced character, "Mr. Little," a midget whom we soon learn is notorious for collecting obscure artifacts. In the room is a seated dead man and in one dead hand he holds, raised slighly above his head, one such artifact: a brass frog referenced in the title as "King Solomon's Frog" (and which my essay-title references as well). But, cool though the visual is, how can a dead man be holding anything above his head? We soon find out on--

PAGE 2-3. This splash panel shows that as Little and Panther examine the body, learning that the man's been killed by a sword-thrust, a mysterious armored swordsman waits around a corner, preparing to pounce on the intruders. Since Kirby evidently did think he needed to account for the "dead man's hand," a caption tells us that "his hand is stiffened in rigor mortis." However, though we've all seen countless fictional images of people dying while tightly clutching objects, this dead guy is just holding the frog on his open palm. Wikipedia tells me that rigor mortis stiffening usually takes about three hours to occur, and since on the next page we learn that the wound is "fresh," I think it unlikely that our menacing swordsman has been standing around for three hours, waiting for Panther and Little to come in.

(Hmm, this is getting long. To be continued.)