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.                                                                                                                 

CURIOSITIES #34: 'THE KILLER SHARK" (BLACKHAWK #50, 1952)

I found most of the DC BLACKHAWK comics of the 1960s easy to acquire without much expense, and never thought they were anything but slightly entertaining formula-fare. I don't imagine I knew anything about the Blackhawks' earlier incarnation under Quality Comics until sometime in the seventies, which was both the era when DC began reprinting some of those adventures, and when I obtained a copy of the two volumes of Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS. 

Even without knowing anything about Early Blackhawk, I could tell that DC's version was dependent on the same sort of menaces I saw in other Silver Age titles: lots of space-aliens and costumed super-villains. Not many in either category ever made return appearances, but the one exception was a costumed fellow named Killer Shark. Once or twice, I remember wondering if DC kept giving this character exposure because he'd been a familiar face at Quality.

I never made any deliberate attempt to find out, not even by consulting online resources. But I found out, by accident, that Quality Blackhawk did have just one encounter with a version of Killer Shark. Artist Reed Crandall's design for the villain-- shark-fin cowl, goggles, and sharp teeth-- was pretty much followed by DC later. However, Quality only used the character once as far as I can tell, killing him at story's end-- probably because that Killer Shark was a literal killer, inviting a certain rough justice.

I'm not minded to search out DC's first usage of the character, but I think that, aside from costume modifications, he stayed much the same throughout the Silver Age: a sea-raider who kept coming up with gimmicks to confound the heroic aviators. The above scene is from BLACKHAWK #170 (1962), and involves Lady Blackhawk getting turned into a mermaid for some reason. 

It's likely that Killer Shark is the only villain DC transplanted from Quality, and the DC editors probably brought him back into use only because the original series did not use costumed villains very often, and it was easier to rework an earlier character than make a new one. Though no versions of Killer Shark rate as great villains, he has some distinction for another transformation: he brainwashed Lady Blackhawk into becoming his mate, Queen Killer Shark, which gave Blackhawk and his partners more than a little aggravation. And these are probably the only sixties BLACKHAWK stories that have any dramatic oompf.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #24: "NOAH'S ARK FROM SPACE" (BLACKHAWK #162, 1960)

 Largely by accident I chanced upon this forgotten issue from the generally forgettable DC BLACKHAWK title that lasted roughly from 1956 to 1970. "Noah's Ark" features a nuclear family of aliens who come to Earth seeking a new home, and who get aid and comfort from the justice-loving Blackhawks. For no explicit reason the three aliens bring along some alien beasts from their dying world, which of course cause some of the story's conflict. Arguably the story's raconteurs did come up with a menagerie of monsters that was slightly more imaginative than the average. 

Not so much the Dridath Bull:

But rather the Lightning-Lion--

And more importantly for Students of DC Anthropoidology, an "Octi-Ape" on the cover.

But what's curious about this 1960 story is that the three aliens are opposed by hostile, prejudiced Earthlings, who call the ETs "Greenies." 

By story's end, exigent circumstances force the ark-aliens to depart. Still, minor though the story is, I'm not aware of any DC superhero stories between 1955 and 1965 that even address any sort of prejudice. Yes, some war stories and PSAs, but not so much the fantasy-content books.

PROVING YOU HAVE THE CHOP-CHOPS

Probably the last time I addressed the matter of ethnic sidekicks in the comics was my 2015 essay INCORRECTLY CORRECT. I noted in part that, because it's traditional for hero's sidekicks to use bad English and to have homely faces (the better to make the hero look good), it wasn't necessarily racist for an author to use an ethnic character who either used bad English, looked funny, or both.

That said, though I have a strong liking for the BLACKHAWK comics-feature, at least during the early 1940s, the character of the Blackhawk team's "mascot" Chop-Chop proves a bit of a strain. Chop-Chop's fractured English is not nearly as tortured as that of Milton Caniff's "Connie," as I mentioned in the earlier essay. Still, when one sees the original, pint-sized, pigtail-wearing Chinese character running around with amidst the tall, chiseled-jaw Caucasian heroes, it's hard not to think that Chop-Chop is being ridiculed for both his height and his foreign-ness. I would part company with the ultraliberals who would claim that ANY such depiction is automatic evidence of racism. For me, the *continuous* nature of this particular "sidekick-trope" is more worrisome.

Here's the character in his first comics in MILITARY COMICS #3, where he looks more transparently like a dupe of Caniff's Connie, in that he wears a similar hat and is not overly fat, but he seems to be far more dim-witted than the Caniff character.

Within a few months, Chop-Chop took on his more familiar portly shape, plus his signature weapon: a large meat-cleaver, though I doubt he ever actually used it to chop human opponents.

This version of the character persisted into the very late years of Quality Comics' run of the BLACKHAWK comic. In addition to providing comic relief in the Blackhawks' adventures, Chop-Chop appeared in his own solo strip, which was always oriented on buffoonish comedy. Here's the first page of the next-to-last solo Chop-Chop tale from BLACKHAWK #94, slightly redeemed by the excellent art of Paul Gustavson.

In the very next issue, Chop-Chop is less cartoonish in the lead adventure in BLACKHAWK #95 (1956), wherein the heroes contend with a Chinese lady pirate, one Madam Fury. It's noteworthy that all of the other Chinese characters in the story are drawn realistically, and that even Chop-Chop has lost some of his bigfoot characteristics.

Oddly, this issue also sports the last of the solo Chop-Chop stories, and for what is probably the first time, he's missing his trademark pigtail, though it's present in all of the Blackhawks stories within that issue.

The next issue, #96,  is the first to totally abandon both Chop-Chop's pigtail and his solo feature, which is replaced, for the remainder of the Quality BLACKHAWK run, by stories about wartime conflict. He does continue to wear his traditional "coolie costume" while the other Blackhawks all wear their blue outfits.

As for the character's infamous hatchet, I didn't study all of the Qualities leading up to issue #96, but I did see the weapon present in some of the early 1950s tales. While the early Chop-Chop usually fought criminals in comic ways, like bonking them on the head, the version from #96 on uses his fists as ably as any Blackhawk, even though he's still short, rotund, and a mangler of English. Plainly some editor decided to update the Chinese Blackhawk's image for some reason. The changes to Chop-Chop may be connected to the eventual sale of the BLACKHAWK property to DC about a year later. Alternately, the alterations may have come about if someone who administered the Comics Code took a dim view of this sort of ethnic humor.

DC Comics took over the magazine with issue #107, and Chop-Chop stayed roughly the same for some years. The biggest change was that under editor Whitney Ellsworth, the stories emphasized science fiction and costumed villains far more than real-world political threats. After scanning a number of these, my blanket conclusion is that the English-mangling was gone by the late 1950s, but that Chop-Chop was just sort of "there," neither funny nor particularly dynamic. Only in 1964-- long after Jack Schiff had assumed editorial duties-- did Chop-Chop finally abandon his traditional "coolie colors," when issue #197 decided to give all of the Blackhawks red-and-black uniforms. In this issue he evidently took a "slenderizing" course, for now he looks as good as the rest of the heroes, except, of course, for being a shorty.

Issue #203 then gave Chop-Chop an origin-story that explained his name as connected to his martial-arts prowess, in keeping with American pop culture's growing enthusiasm for Oriental fighting-styles. Here he's seen defeating the hulking Stanislaus.

I don't know whether or not later versions of the Chop-Chop pleased comics fans or not. At any rate, 1964 marks the death knell of the "Chinese mascot" trope from the Golden Age series. I was raised on the BLACKHAWK of the 1960s, which always consisted of very ordinary formula-stories. But even though the Golden Age stories feature a more freewheeling, pulpish form of adventure, I certainly don't mourn the passing of buck-toothed, English-mangling Chop-Chop-- which may be about the only good thing ever to come of DC's Silver Age BLACKHAWK.

MYTHCOMICS: "TONDELEYO" (MILITARY COMICS #14, 1942)

In Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS, the author records a statement from Golden Age comics-writer Bill Woolfolk, in which Woolfolk admits having ripped off the story of the 1942 film WHITE CARGO (reviewed here) for the story "Tondeleyo." If Steranko correctly quoted the former comics-writer-- and Steranko's quotes are problematic, since he didn't cite sources-- then Woolfolk didn't really remember the story he'd written, since the only thing the Blackhawk-tale takes from the movie is the name and alluring appearance of the title character.

The 1942 movie is an entirely naturalistic story of a white trader who "goes native" in Africa when he succumbs to a dark vixen's charms. The Tondeleyo of comics is also a temptress, but it's implied-- without any outright verification-- that she may the incarnation of some metaphysical evil. Since her nature and even her final fate remain ambiguous, the adventure falls into the sphere of the uncanny, as determined by the trope I term "phantasmal figurations," similar to the films reviewed here.

For one thing, even though the splash suggests an alliance between the sarong-clad woman and the Master of Evil, Tondeleyo plays no favorites in the game between the Allies and the Axis. The first page depicts the unexplained suicide of a famed German flyer, Oberst, and the only clue left behind is a white rose, identical to one Tondeleyo wears in her hair.

As for Blackhawk, he's first seen issuing a challenge to a whole German compound, tossing around Nazis as he invites them to come for a dogfight above Blackhawk Island. The hero gets away with ridiculous ease, while the Nazis plot to attack in force, rather than in an honorable equal combat.

When Blackhawk gets back to his refuge, though, he finds a surprise: a sarong-clad young woman, Tondeleyo, has showed up on the island. Her beauty has such an effect on Blackhawk and his subordinates (except, as will be seen later, the comic-relief Chop-Chop) that they agree to let her intrude upon their all-male ranks. The heroes aren't portrayed as eager to prey on a beautiful woman, for they barely if at all make any passes at the mystery girl. Possibly the writer meant to imply that their initial motive is chivalry to a helpless woman. Then the news comes that their aerial challenge will be met. The pilots are all glad to meet the foe, but Tondeleyo suddenly begins to exert her insidious will upon the oldest member of the Blackhawks, Hendrickson. While the others go out to meet the foe, Hendrickson loses the will to fight, makes a lame excuse, and remains behind.

An air battle ensues, complete with some comedic action from the Chinese mascot. The victorious heroes return to their HQ, and Blackhawk arrives just in time to keep Hendrickson from killing himself-- the same way Oberst did, out of fear that he'd turned into a coward.

Blackhawk then interacts with Tondeleyo, who turns on her full charms. He almost kisses her-- which is the closest the story comes to anything overtly sexual-- but is interrupted. In the "days that follow," Tondeleyo slowly saps the fighting-spirit of all the pilots. In WHITE CARGO, it's clear that the victim of the vixen's charms has been physically seduced by her, but this story portrays more a seduction of the spirit, since it seems unlikely that this Tondeleyo has actually slept with any of the Blackhawks. Chop-Chop seems immune, but it's not clear whether or not she troubled to turn her charms his way.

Finally, when another German air-attack approaches, only Blackhawk is able to summon the gumption to get into a plane and meet the enemy. His plane crashes into one of the German crafts, and the other heroes, enraged by his apparent death, are mobilized to charge into their planes and handily defeat the enemy.

Blackhawk, however, has not died-- though the story doesn't trouble to explain just how he survived a mid-air crash. He's evidently sussed out, on some dim psychological level, that Tondeleyo is the seed of his men's ennervation, even though there's no attempt to portray her as a literal spirit, demon, etc. In a last act of quasi-chivalry, Blackhawk prevents Chop-Chop from killing the native girl. However, as she flees male wrath, she's apparently killed by one of the crashing German planes, very indirectly avenging her murder of Oberst. The story ends with Blackhawk musing, "She was evil-- who can say when evil really dies?" Earlier Blackhawk intuits some deeper aspect of her nature-- as witness his unusual idea that he's met her somewhere before-- so he's apparently realized that she was either a spirit or a mortal possessed by such a spirit. In any case Woolfolk's story gains considerable symbolic amplitude by refusing to put a name to her nature, and thus transcends the narrow racism of WHITE CARGO.

The entire story, with all of the meticulous Reed Crandall art, can be read here.

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PT. 2

In Part 1 I grappled with the problem of establishing "standards" for Golden Age comics, even with the knowledge that most of them were produced without formal standards in mind. Many creators simply cranked out features as quickly as they could, of course. And even artists and writers who showed conscious care in their work-- Reed Crandall and Fred Guardineer for the first, William Woolkfolk and Bill Finger for the second-- may have been primarily motivated by creating a reputation for being able to produce quality work so as to earn sustained employment.

Yet even with this in mind, I still disagree with the tendency of the bloody comic book elitists to value only the Golden Age work that simply suggests greater sophistication; i.e., the sophistication found in "good literature." This leads to a tendency to lionize, say, PLASTIC MAN, as a sophisticated satire-- which it is not-- and to ignore talents who were formally Jack Cole's equal, but simply didn't come up with a famous character like Plastic Man.

Using Jung's "four functions" as a guide, it's possible to validate Golden Age comics along any of the axes Jung provides: sensation, feeling, thinking, or intuition. Comic book elitists are usually impressed only by works that show evidence of rational activity: hence their general enthusiasm for EC comics, which is strong in both the thinking and feeling departments. In Part 1 I mentioned in passing two Golden Age stories that I found noteworthy from a historical crossover-standpoint: an AIRBOY issue from Hillman and a DAREDEVIL story from Lev-Gleason. No reader could accuse either story of being heavy in terms of thinking or feeling, but both are extremely strong in producing sensational effects. However, though they both boast some interesting myth-motifs, neither one would quite come up to my personal standards for a really complex symbolic discourse, unlike this recent Golden Age selection.

Even with the most pluralistic will in the world, it's likely that one could find within the corpus of Golden Age comics a cornucopia of works that emphasize either the didactic, dramatic or mythopoeic potentialities. So if I were to attempt a list of "the hundred best Golden Age comics," and wanted to keep faith with my system of four potentialities, I'd probably have to list 25 comics that provided the best sensations, the best thoughts, and so on-- much as I did back in 2009, when I decided to list a series of "best movies derived from comics," but wanted to arrange it in line with Frye's theory of the four mythoi, the better to test out that particular line of thought.

However, the fact that I might have search pretty hard through the Golden Age for examples of good symbolic discourse-- far more than I would in the Silver Age-- suggests to me a reigning principle about the priorities of comics-readers in that period-- and perhaps those of all readers of popular fiction in general-- more on which in Part 3.

On a side-note: I'm tempted to mention the high quality of Quality's early BLACKHAWK title to the fellow doing the survey of important Golden Age comics. I will predict here that if I do so, the fellow will either be non-committal on the subject of that Quality title, since so few elitists have investigated it, or disdainful for some non-aesthetic reason-- like, say, because the Blackhawks' uniforms are reminiscent of certain Nazi outfits.

MYTHCOMICS: "KARLOVNA UNDERWORLD" (BLACKHAWK #14, 1946)

Years ago I named the above story-- a shortened form for the untitled tale's first line, "Karlovna Had a True Underworld"-- in my 2008 post AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY. I've often thought about expanding on those brief remarks: 'Another weirdo racial myth about a modern-day country being subverted from beneath by a horde of dusky "dragon dwarves." This one was reprinted in the original edition of Les Daniels' COMIX.' There's no surviving record of the story's writer, but the artist has been pegged as Bill Ward, and any attributions I make in this essay will be treat Ward as the author, purely for narrative convenience.

Quality's Blackhawks were seven daredevil, freedom-loving pilots who roamed the world fighting evil-- though in the early days their comedy-relief Chinese member Chop-Chop wasn't consistently depicted as being able to pilot a plane. They principally battled the forces of the Axis during their genesis during World War Two, and after the war's conclusion they continued to battle any evil that seemed to threaten what they generally called "the democracies."

In this story, the Blackhawks are summoned to Karlovna-- an East European country that sounds like it took its name from a certain horror-film actor--  when a policeman colleague of Blackhawk's has been murdered, along with two other supporters of democratic rule. To keep Blackhawk from straining his brain with mundane detective work, one of the assassins-- a dark-skinned dwarf-- shows up on the scene, tried to knife the policeman's pretty blonde daughter Vereen, and then kills himself to escape interrogation.

While Vereen takes Blackhawk to confer on the problem with a respected banker-friend, one Rambin, the other Blackhawks stumble upon a whole race of dwarf-people, who live in the sewers beneath the city. The little people, later called "dragon dwarves," capture all of the Blackhawks except Hendrickson, who summons Blackhawk. At the same time Blackhawk and Hendrickson investigate the sewers in seatch of their comrades, the banker Rambin lures Vereen to the same location-- which should be enough for even the least skilled mystery-solver to figure out his role in the story.

Vereen and Rambin are captured without a fight, while Blackhawk and Hendrickson are overpowered. The dwarves are now accompanied by their two leaders: a fellow named Grotesko (whom Andre calls "ze biggest dwarf in all ze world") and a costumed woman named the Dragon Queen, The leaders explain to their captive audience that the dwarves "once owned Karlovna, until the weak civilized people took it from them! For generations, these rightful owners of the land have hidden underground, venturing forth only at night!" Thanks to the influence of the Dragon Queen-- who is secretly partnered with Rambin the banker-- the dwarves are using terrorist tactics to frighten the populace into submission.

With their usual aplomb, the heroes break out of their prison in double-quick time, and the dwarves scatter. Blackhawk, being the leader, figures out the conspiracy and accuses both Rambin and his female assistant Wilna, who is of course the real face behind the Dragon Queen. Rambin reveals that he was using the "stupid underground dwarves" to block his country's alliance with the democracies, since such an alliance would cost him money. He has no loyalty toward the "wild claims" of the dragon dwarves, but tries to use them in a last-ditch battle with the heroes. When that gambit fails, Rambin tries to put the blame on Wilna, She kills him and then herself, and the Blackhawks fly off, ready for their next foray against tyranny.

What makes Ward's story more mythic than many similar tales is its emphasis on symbols of what the Greeks called "the chthonic," defined by Dictionary.com as being:

"of or relating to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth."

Any beings, mortal or spiritual, that dwell beneath the ground can't help but be associated with the bodies and spirits of the dead as well. Snakes are one example of living animals that frequently take on chthonic associations, as do dragons, who take their name from the Greek word for snake. Thus, when Ward styles his little people "dragon dwarves," he's combining two figures that share chthonic properties, given the fact that folkloric dwarves, unlike real little people, are often pictured as living beneath the earth.

In the Celtic tradition dwarves have come to be viewed as one of the many divisions of "faerie," meaning, in essence, any supernatural creature that's less than a god yet more than a mortal. The medieval, psuedo-historical myths of Ireland describe successions of mortal peoples who come to settle Ireland-- Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha-- only to be crowded out by new arrivals. The psuedo-histories, rather than simply saying that the earlier tribes were wiped out, often picture them as retiring to underground "barrows" and similar retreats.

I'm not imputing to Ward or any collaborator a great knowledge of Celtic tradition, but most persons of the period were aware of the basic notion of tribal displacement. The story, by inserting a "giant dwarf' named Grotesko, also suggests some authorial familiarity with the Nordic tradition of opposing the light-skinned Aesir with two principal foes: "giants" and "dwarves." Grotesko's name is transparently a pun on the word "grotesque," but the origins of this word take us further down into the chthonic as well, since "grotesque" evolves from the Italian word for "cave."  European art critics labeled certain Roman artworks "grotesque" because the artworks reminded the critics of art that appeared in grotto-like settings, and the word later came to connote anything bizarre and unsettling.
Finally, as anyone well read in Robert E Howard knows, some European tales suggest the idea of "dark precursors" that inhabited parts of Europe before being ousted by light-skinned invaders.

Clearly, even though Karlovna is a phony-baloney country, Ward wanted to draw on the nightmarish implications of a "normal" (i.e. white and civilized) country with a "dark underbelly." At the same time, it should be noted that the dragon dwarves' claims to being the original inhabitants of the land aren't validated-- Vereen, for instance, doesn't suddenly start talking about dwarf-legends even when she sees the dead body of her attacker. So although Ward's story might suggest a degree of civilized guilt about the marginalization of an earlier people, the story as written leaves open the possibility that the dwarves' claims are deluded; an attempt to rewrite history to their own advantage.

A writer living in the era right after WWII probably wasn't deeply concerned with the actual existence of "dark little people" in European prehistory. But as figures of the chthonic, the dragon dwarves may symbolize the forces of irrationality that continually threaten to overwhelm the rational rule of democracy-- so that even though the dwarves are dark and stunted, they may well symbolize the Nazi veneration of the irrational, for all that the Nazis venerated idols of blonde Aryan health.

A final complication is that there are no indications as to how the all-male dwarves have perpetuated themselves over the years, since no female dwarves are in evidence. One can easily imagine them stealing women to act as breeders, but again, one would think that their doing so would give them a folkloric presence in Karlovna-- and, as I said, the story's only reliable Karlovnan doesn't have the first idea as to who or what the dwarves may be. Since they venerate a Dragon Queen who is actually a light-skinned, normal-sized woman, I tend to wonder if the most appropriate reading might not be one in which the Queen is actually a queen of hell, whose progeny are these hideously deformed creatures, as seen in Milton's memorable description of Hell's queen Sin:

These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth 
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.


NOTE: The entire story can be read on this site.

SOLO AVENGERS, MIRACLE TEAMS PT. 4

In my examination of Golden Age hero-teams in Part 2, two facts should be evident:

(1) Most of the ongoing superhero teams are dominantly "co-ed." Miss America is an equal member of the All Winners Squad for its two paltry appearances, and Mary Marvel usually appears alongside her male counterparts in all or most MARVEL FAMILY teamups.  The use of Wonder Woman in JUSTICE SOCIETY was somewhat spottier, as she sometimes only appeared in a story to serve as the society's secretary. Some fan-critics have asserted, though, that the legal agreement between William Marson and DC Comics may have affected Wonder Woman's appearances in that august body.  It must be noted that when Black Canary was admitted, she was used without reservation, and to my knowledge never had to bring anyone their coffee. 

(2) In contrast, few other hero-teams-- some of which mixed together the "kid-gang" and "superhero" genres-- included girls in the mix.  Holyoke's "Little Leaders" feature was a necessary exception, in that it re-utilized "Kitten," sidekick to Catman, who was the star of the title in which the "leaders" appeared.  Generally, if female characters appeared at all in such teams, they were more like hangers-on than full-fleged members.  A possible model for this "hanger-on" type would be the character "Pat Savage" from the DOC SAVAGE pulps, who occasionally broke into her male cousin's "boys' club" but was never a regularly featured participant.  In pre-Code comics, one example of this was "Palomino Sue," who showed up in a few stories in the 1950 Simon & Kirby title BOYS' RANCH.

Why would the superhero teams, few as they were, of the 1940s have been dominantly "co-ed" when other types of teams were not?  The most likely reason is that the idea behind all three superhero teams was to form a "more perfect union" of costumed characters who had appeared separately in anthology-comics and occasionally met one another (Human Torch/Sub-Mariner, Captain Marvel/Spy Smasher).  In contrast, each of the non-superheroic teams was its own individual animal, created to play off a particular set of genre-trope, as well as being responsive to the perceived demands of reality.  That is to say: WWII adventurers like the Blackhawks, roughly based on the Foreign Legion, had no girls in their ranks because real-life combat troops were usually all-male.  Fictional kid-gangs occasionally allowed for female members, but they too were in part copied from real-life boys' clubs, whose raison d'etre was almost always "no girls allowed.  Oddly, one of the few teams that recycled a character from an earlier feature-- a practice that would become common following the Silver Age-- was that of the Girl Commandos, wherein a starring character named "War Nurse" decided to ally herself with a distaff band of "lady Blackhawks," and even dropped her superheroic name in order to blend in better.

But I said in the last essay that I would address the first hero-team of the post-Code era of American comics, which also begins the so-called Silver Age.  This was not a superhero team, but a close analogue: Jack Kirby's CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN. (Though Kirby was not the sole creator on this feature, he was the dominant force, so I will speak as if he alone created CHALLENGERS.)

Kirby's CHALLENGERS was in essence an adult version of the kid-gang concept, and probably owes something to an earlier Simon/Kirby work for Harvey Comics, THE BOY EXPLORERS (1946). This short-lived feature concept involved a band of kids, with one adult supervisor, traveling the world in search of bizarre phenomena.  It ptovides an illustration of the rather loosey-goosey way Golden Age comics generally approached their miracles: a heavy emphasis on the visceral elements and not much sustained examination of any fantasy-logic to support said wonders.

Kirby's CHALLENGERS is a different type of science-fiction adventure.  To be sure, just like Golden-Age Kirby, Silver Age Kirby was still oriented on providing a great deal of frenetic action, in contrast to many DC comics of the period.  But for whatever reason the stories also allowed for a small degree of contemplation of a given story's wonders.  In the second CHALLENGERS story, the group encounters a colossal intelligent robot named Ultivac.  Though there's a great deal of action, Kirby devotes more time here than he would have in a BOY EXPLORERS story to delineating the nature of Ultivac's self-generated intelligence and the robot's scornful opinion of humanity.

CHALLENGERS's tryout appearances in DC's SHOWCASE magazine were popular enough to spawn a regular magazine that lasted until 1971, though Kirby's last issue was #8.  Arguably CHALLENGERS also influenced a host of other non-superhero team-books at DC.  It may be noted that Quality's long-running Blackhawks were leased (later sold) to DC Comics in the same period, and that DC's first issue of BLACKHAWK, #108, was published in the same year as the debut of the Kirby work in SHOWCASE #6.  However, while BLACKHAWK soldiered on with an all-male crew until 1959, when the Hawks acquired a female hanger-on in the form of Lady Blackhawk, the Challengers acquired their female almost-member in their second appearance, the Ultivac story in SHOWCASE #7. Though at certain points during the story Kirby places new addition June Robbins into a position not unlike that of Fay Wray in 1933's KING KONG, June seems far more strongly patterned after the image of the female professional scientist familiar with giant-critter flicks like 1955's IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA.

June was made an honorary member in that issue, and was thereafter used with a frequency I term "semi-regular" rather than merely occasional, and though in her earliest version she wasn't a combative type, it was clear that the Challenger guys respected her smarts and daring. 

This was rather a contrast to Lady Blackhawk, whom the Blackhawks couldn't even find time to nominate to the "honorary member" position

Even though the Challengers didn't have a regular gal-member for many issues, it would seem self-evident that their girl-friendly structure influenced DC to launch other adventure-teams in which girls were regular team-members, as with THE SEA DEVILS, the original SUICIDE SQUAD and the crews associated with RIP HUNTER and CAVE CARSON. 

As for how much this pattern in turn influenced the superhero teams-- stay tuned for the final installment of this series.

TAKE THE COMIC BOOK "SEXUAL EMBODIMENT" TEST, PART 2

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I observed with incredulity the way a certain contingent of comics-fandom gave Kelly Thompson a free pass re: the evidence she presented with regard to the “hyper-sexualization” of female comics-characters. Despite the fact that Thompson constructed her case on the assertion that this or that character was “regularly unzipped” and so on, she gave no indication as to what time-frame these representations regularly took place, be it in the last ten months or the last ten years. It was entirely OK for Thompson to present what one respondent to my essays called “anecdotal evidence.” However, when I presented a point-of-view that mitigated Thompson’s one-sided perspective on gender representation, more than one respondent wanted chapter-and-verse, scientifically redundant, DNA-tested evidence coming out the wazoo. If I didn’t present same, that lack proved me a no-good ultraconservative defender of sexual oppression.




All this supposed demand for rigor, of course, was merely a cover to reject any observation that might mitigate the narrative of female victimization via so-called “objectification.” From a rhetorical standpoint, there’s nothing a preacher loves better than the devil against which he preaches. Without that object of scorn and detestation, the preacher’s got no audience. For most ultraliberals, the objectification of fictional female characters is one of their personal devils, and perdition help the critic who dares suggest that sexual representation, whether in comics or any other medium, might be a two-way street.



One of those respondents challenged me to show evidence of my claim that male characters in comics were also sexually embodied—apparently with the sense that even if I could show such, it would be meaningless unless I could show total parity with female sexual embodiment. I imagine he thought that the only possible rebuttal to Thompson’s imputations of inequality in “No, It’s Not Equal” would be to prove such parity. At no time did I claim that fiction aimed at a male audience would not contain a disproportionate quantity of sexualized depictions of females. What I did claim was that there was an ongoing process of embodiment that applied to both male and female character-construction, and that male characters were constructed to be appealing to female characters within the comic-book diegesis.



I mentioned on that comments-thread that I was meditating on a possible way to take a fair sampling of a batch of contemporary comic books and examine them for both male and female sexual embodiment, in contradistinction to Thompson’s skewed analysis. Given that I had in another essay touted some titles in DC’s “New 52” as representing a new development in the formulation of adult pulp, it occurred to me, “What if I performed such a survey on every New 52 title within a given month?” Limited though such a sampling would be, it would be better than Thompson’s “anecdotal” overview.



But, given the righteous attitudes displayed by most of my respondents, I thought twice. “Why bother with a full month survey, given that most fans are so in love with being blinkered and judgmental that they’ll never alter their opinions no matter what evidence is produced?” So I saved my money and, when a sale came round at a local comics-shop, I simply bought the back issues I wanted anyway and decided to use that as my sampling.

As explained in Part 1, I’m breaking down the sexual representations in each comic surveyed in terms of my deductive categories, GLAMOR, TITILLATION, and PORNIFICATION. I imagine that another easy way to dismiss my formulations would be to simply disagree with these divisions. A thoughtful critique is certainly possible.  However it's more likely most fans would just fall back to the victimization position, implying that a costume showing bare legs (an example of GLAMOR, usually) is exactly as bad as a costume that looks like Victoria’s Secret lingerie (PORNIFICATION, of course). Should anyone make this assertion, assume that I've already deemed it unilaterally stupid and move on.



I’m not counting every sexually embodied image in every one of these titles. Rather, I’m going by page-count. A book with “5 counts of GLAMOR” means five pages on which some GLAMOR-ous image is presented for the reader’s possible delectation. Covers count as only one page, though ads are not counted.
It's impossible to state that a given drawing carries the concept of sexual embodiment for everyone.  However, I focused on those drawings that at least showed enough of at least one face, one figure or the two together to connote sexual attractiveness.


Here goes.



BATGIRL #7— No counts of male sexual embodiment. 8 counts of female sexual embodiment of the GLAMOR type.

BATGIRL #8—No counts of male embodiment. 6 counts of female GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #1 – 13 counts of female TITILLATION. 7 counts of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #2 – 17 counts of female TITILLATION. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #3 – 14 counts of female TITILLATION. No counts of male embodiment.

BLACKHAWK #1 – 6 pages male GLAMOR. 7 pages female GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #5 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #6—11 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 4 counts of male PORNIFICATION. (And yes, they’re all Batman.)

CATWOMAN #7 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male PORNIFICATION.

RED HOOD AND OUTLAWS #2 – 1 count of male TITILLATION. 2 counts of female TITILLATION. 3 counts of female PORNIFICATION.

SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1—11 counts of male GLAMOR. No counts of female embodiment.

SUPERGIRL #1—11 counts of female GLAMOR. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

SUPERGIRL #2 – 16 counts of female GLAMOR. 16 counts of male GLAMOR.

If I wished to invest in a scanner to reproduce all the relevant pages, I could make arguments for all my categorizations—but again, that would involve spending money to prove my conclusions to an audience in love with defending victims—or what they like to imagine as victims.

Will that be my final word on the mélange known as “No, It’s Not Equal?”


Magic eightball says, “Maybe for now.”