MYTHCOMICS: "THE GREAT OXYGEN THEFT" (THE MARVEL FAMILY #41, 1949)

 For a change, here's a Golden Age story in which the name of its artist is lost to time, but GCD attests that the writer was Otto Binder, known to Fawcett fans as having been responsible for a great quantity of stories about Captain Marvel and his kindred. "The Great Oxygen Theft" is not one of Binder's more celebrated stories, but it merits a little notoriety for rendering elementary-school environmental science into a decent cosmological myth.

  

THEFT wastes no time in setting up the action of this 10-page tale. A radio summons from the evil Doctor Sivana lures the Marvel Family to an unnamed, inhabited world in the star-system of Sirius. Sivana gives the heroes a story about his having reformed and directs their attention to the fact that the world's plant life is almost gone thanks to a plant-killing blight. The inhabitants haven't noticed this mass extinction, but they start paying attention when they start finding it hard to breathe, due to the lack of plants generating oxygen. Sivana then leaves the good guys to sort things out while he jets back to Earth, revealing that he created the blight just to keep the Marvels out of his non-existent hair.

   The Marvels' first task is to save the populace. Mary Marvel purifies the soil of Sivana's poison, Captain Marvel Jr disperses the excess carbon dioxide that has built up in the absence of plant life, and Captain Marvel brings in a glacier of frozen oxygen to give the air-breathers temporary relief.

The Marvels then play Johnny Appleseed, transporting Earth-plants to the Sirius-world. Naturally, Binder doesn't trouble with ALL the scientific niceties regarding the practicality of one world's vegetation adapting to a totally different environment. However, on one of the heroes' trips to Earth, they find that certain areas of their own world have been hit with the plant-blight. Before they even have to wonder if the blight might have travelled back to Earth on their boots or capes, Sivana announced that he's responsible, and that he wants supreme power to keep Earth's plants healthy.

  Since THEFT is as I said just a ten-page story, Binder needed a quick wrap-up, so he cheats a little. Captain Marvel gets the bright idea that just as miners had used canaries to test for bad air inside mines, he and the other Marvels can just pick up a random potted plant and use it to "detect" the presence of plant-poison in Sivana's ship. It would probably made just as much sense for the Marvels to race all around the world until they made a visual sighting of the ship-- which, after all, they all got a look at, back on the unnamed planet. But Binder also knew his audience would like a little ironic touch at the end, in which a villain who poisoned a world's plants gets defeated by the use of another plant. The unknown artist even shows, in the penultimate panel, Sivana "wearing" the potted plant atop his bald head, leading one to assume that some hero "crowned" him with it. THEFT probably violates as many scientific principles as those that it gets right, but the payoff at the end, with the Marvels expressing their appreciation for plants and the order of nature, is not diminished by said violations.    
  

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DEMOCRACY SMASHER" (MARVEL FAMILY 67, 1952)

 In the last few years of Fawcett Comics' existence before the lawsuit with DC forced them to shut down their superheroes, premiere writer Otto Binder showed no sign of flagging creative powers. In CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES #125 (1951), Binder and artist C.C. Beck introduced a new villain, King Kull, the last survivor of a race of ancient beast-men. 

He was also supposedly the source of all mortal legends about "boogiemen," though I have to say that this character-- whose name may owe less to the Robert E. Howard hero than to a traditional king of Irish myth-- doesn't really look like he could terrify anyone. In his original appearance, Kull pops out of the Earth for the first time in decades and immediately starts trying to kill off modern mortals, the descendants of the ancients who slew his people (admittedly in self-defense). Kull, who possesses incredible technology for a caveman type, starts unleashing a cataclysmic doom on the world, and Captain Marvel comes to the rescue. The hero wins but the villain escapes.

I'm not sure if "The Democracy Smasher" from MARVEL FAMILY #67 was Kull's second outing or not, but the book-length script shows a much greater concentration by Binder on the thematic thread of ancient horror menacing modernity. 

This time, before Kull strikes, the three members of the Marvel Family just happen to be taking part in a newly minted local holiday, "Democracy Day," in which Billy Batson and his buddies celebrate the historical tradition of democracy. Slightly later, Old Shazam summons the Marvels to his sanctum, claims that he gave Billy the idea for the new holiday, and shows the heroes three statues of "three torches" that "are the world's hope for democracy and peace."

Kull, once again emerging from the chthonic womb of the Earth, swears to destroy the democratic way of life, and tries to make the statues of mankind's great evils help him crush his enemies. 

Batson and friends transform into their heroic identities, but while they're saving themselves, Kull not only steals the torches, he extinguishes them with a pill filled with "distilled evil" in a nearby subterranean river. Kull escapes and lights a "torch of evil" that makes modern humans despise their democratic traditions. 

The Marvels figure out that the only way to re-light the three beneficial torches is to travel back in time to each of the three times when democracy's light was kindled. First, they go back to Athens, and manage to ignite one of their magical torches from the original one, though they have to fight an earlier incarnation of King Kull to do so. Binder of course was writing for children, so he oversimplifies the extent to which Greek philosophers championed democracy, to say nothing of conflating that supposed tradition with the practice of "torch races" in the early Olympics. 

While Mary Marvel takes her lighted torch back to 1951, Captain Marvel and his junior partner journey to England to light another torch during the signing of the Magna Carta. Naturally this idea of a "flame of freedom" from that historical period is based in nothing but Binder's imagination, and thus this is the least interesting of the three voyages. Still, Marvel Jr gets to light his fire and he also returns to 1951.

Captain Marvel soldiers on alone to 1776, for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and we finally get to the heart of all this torch-imagery: that of the torch held by the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps to get around the fact that the authentic statue was not erected until 1886, Binder imagines that three of the grey eminences supposedly present at the signing-- Ben Franklin and the country's first two presidents-- just happen to have a simulacrum of the Statue of Liberty there in the room. Kull raises his beastly head again, but the hero sends him packing and re-lights the last of the magical democracy-torches. (One witty line: Washington remarks that they've been "saved by a redcoat.") Then, back in 1951, all three heroes return and douse Kull's torch of dictatorship, but can't prevent the sub-man from returning to his subterranean domain. The story ends on a predictable but still pleasing denouement, in which the heroes once more affirm the traditions they hold sacred.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE BATTLE OF THE GODS" (ACTION COMICS #351-353, 1967)

My recent re-examination of the Golden Age Captain Marvel series-- unquestionably sparked by the appearance of the SHAZAM movie, though I've not yet seen it-- reminded me that I had one unused essay from years ago, based on an Otto Binder-Wayne Boring SUPERMAN story in which Binder recycled some of the tropes he'd used during his Captain Marvel tenure.

This is definitely the last of the essays I wrote in this format: starting out with a summary of the narrative's action and then analyzing said action separately, like the first "official" mythcomics I produced for this blog.

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QUICK SUMMARY: Superman encounters Zha-Vam, a mysterious eight-foot-tall villain whose name is an anagram of six Graeco-Roman gods—Zeus, Hercules, Achilles, Vulcan, Apollo and Mercury—whose powers the villain possesses.   In addition, Zha-Vam wears a belt studded with “buttons," each of which is inscribed with a letter (in English!) When a button it pressed, it temporarily gives Zha-Vam an extra power associated with some myth-entity whose name starts with that letter (for instance, the first button he presses is “T,” which makes him a gigantic “Titan” who flings Superman out into space.)  Zha-Vam shows no interest in power or gain, but merely exists to constantly one-up the Man of Steel.  Superman finds himself unable to cope with the vast array of powers the villain can call forth, but determines that Zha-Vam not only possesses the invulnerability-power of Achilles, but the “Achilles Heel,” as well.   But when Superman seeks to vanquish the “Super-Olympian” by attacking his heel, the hero finds that Zha-Vam has protected it with a “sock” of Kryptonite beneath his leaden boot.   Zha-Vam almost kills Superman, but decides to spare the Man of Steel for further humiliations.   At last Superman journeys back to ancient Olympus and learns that Zha-Vam was created from a body of clay by certain Greek gods who foresaw that their glorious legends would be obscured by the Man of Steel’s great fame.   To counter Zha-Vam’s advantage, Superman seeks out other gods who have quarreled with the Olympians, and these gods bestow on Superman a belt containing their powers.   Superman and Zha-Vam duel until Zha-Vam resorts to his Kryptonite weapon. However, Superman calls up Atlas, who having lifted the Earth is stronger than Zha-Vam.   After disposing of the Kryptonite and knocking out the villain with a blow to his heel, Superman returns Zha-Vam to Olympus, whereon the gods turn the villain back into clay and resolve not to attack Superman again.

If one knows something of the history of the story’s writer Otto Binder, one might be tempted to ask, “What the SHAZAM got into Binder when he created ZHA-VAM?”

The simple explanation is that Binder, one of the most prolific contributors to the mythos of the Golden Age Captain Marvel, was doing what all longtime writers do: re-visiting old concepts, whether out of sentiment, creative economics, or a little of both.   And in this case the concept was one of the keystones of the Captain Marvel mythos—though not one Binder originated—that is, the anagram of “Shazam” that gives Captain Marvel his god-derived powers. For the uninitiated, Cap Marvel’s mythic donors were Solomon, Hercules, Achilles, Zeus, Atlas, and Mercury.  Four of them also appear in the name of Zha-Vam, and one is invoked by Superman, but tellingly neither Solomon nor any other Judeo-Christian figure makes an appearance in the Superman tale.  Still, creative economics aside, one cannot help but think that Binder would’ve found it ironic to invent a character based on Captain Marvel to battle Superman, since Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and DC’s Superman also contended during the Golden Age—albeit in a legal battle, in which DC claimed that Fawcett had derived the Captain from the Man of Steel.   Indeed, the lengthy suit certainly contributed to Fawcett ending its use of adventure-characters in 1953 (the company dabbled in comics in later days, most notably with a DENNIS  THE MENACE line). Fawcett’s capitulation was the first “victory” of Superman over the “World's Mightiest Mortal”—a victory recapitulated by the Zha-Vam saga.  However, such was Binder’s mythopoeic imagination that he made much, much more out of this faux “battle of the comic-book gods” than one could ever have expected for what seems a simple children’s comic.

Even discounting legal wranglings, the literary process by which characters derive from one another, play off one another, and sometimes even cannibalize one another are not far different from the way archaic gods frequently absorbed one another’s characteristics, occasionally making a total turnabout from their original natures.   Not a few critics have pointed out that during the Golden Age Captain Marvel’s magical origins allowed for more fairy-tale-ish whimsy in the Captain’s adventures than were seen in those of the SF-based Superman.   And yet, with the demise of the Captain, some sort of cannibalization did seem to take place, as during the late fifties and early sixties Superman’s mythos became much more consciously “mythic” than it had been in the forties.   But though some critics have credited Binder with this rennovation, he was only one of several writers employed by editor Mort Weisinger, and for that matter, other extrinsic sources may have helped midwife the change in emphasis.  Indeed, one could as easily say that, if Hercules and cognate figures began to appear more often on Superman covers, it could also stem from the growth of fantasy-films of the period, also aimed at the same juvenile audience—Harryhausen’s “Sinbad” and “Jason” films, the Italian “Hercules” movies, and so on.   But, even having said that, Binder was one of the key figures in putting new wine in the old bottle that was the Superman mythos.

Oddly, though Superman and Captain Marvel were both figures with multitudinous wondrous powers (one of the aspects that Zha-Vam plays upon), they developed in diametrically opposing ways.   According to an anecdote in Steranko’s history, Captain Marvel was first conceived as a team of heroes with varied talents, but the success of Superman led to the “team” being re-conceived as a solo hero with assorted powers of mythic donors.   However, once conceived, Marvel’s powers remained fairly steady, while Superman, who started off as simply an embodiment of strength (including super-tough skin and super-strong legs for jumping), accreted over the years a veritable cornucopia of wild powers.   In the Binder story, Superman seems outclassed by a foe with powers far more multitudinous than his; powers drawn from the storehouse of archaic myth of many lands (although most of those named are from the Norse or Graeco-Roman pantheons, excepting only one Hindu deity).   It might even be said that Zha-Vam is that very storehouse, from whom both Superman and Captain Marvel take their natures, even as modern-day myth-figures.

To be sure, Binder plays fast and loose with many of the myth-figures he invokes. (He sometimes even footnotes his own changes, such as noting that Zha-Vam’s “Jason” power allows him to sow dragon-teeth that give rise to real dragons, not human warriors as in the Argonautica tale).   And the device from which Zha-Vam draws his powers, though possibly indebted to the archaic Thor’s “belt of strength,” could as easily be derived from the precedent of Batman’s utility belt.   (The 60’s show was still on the air when this saga debuted in 1967.)   Yet the way Binder uses the belt is more resonant of archaic myth-stories than most comic-book uses of such gimmickery (such as the aforementioned utility belt).   For instance, the first part of the three-part tale, Action #351, merely establishes for Superman the endless variety of his opponent’s powers, but the middle part, in #352, Zha-Vam invites Superman three times to press a belt-button himself, to choose which of Zha-Vam’s powers the hero will grapple with.   This motif aligns Zha-Vam with the myth-figure I call the “Task-Setter,” since he/she often gives the hero some impossible task to achieve (sometimes even associated with the task-setter’s own defeat).   Two times Superman tries to choose an “easy” power to contend with, but he is bested and humiliated both times.   The third time, though, he tries to circumvent the task and attack the villain’s Achilles Heel, not unlike Alexander “solving” the puzzle of the Gordian Knot by cutting it.  Though the hero is defeated thanks to Zha-Vam’s kryptonite back-up plan, it does get the superhero thinking “outside the box,” so that his next major move, in #353, is to discover Zha-Vam’s origins.

Said origins are perhaps the most symbolically resonant of Binder’s hidden mythopoesis.   For instance, nowhere in the story does Binder mention the story of how the Olympian gods overthrew their forbears the Titans (even though the name “Titan” is the first power conjured by Zha-Vam).  But clearly Superman (whom the gods call an “upstart”) is to the gods what they themselves were to the Titans; the new kid in town.   And even though Binder could have had any or all of the six donor-gods actually create Zha-Vam (indeed, the classical Vulcan/Hephaestus was said to have had his own “manmaking” talents), the script has Zha-Vam brought to life from clay by the Titan Prometheus (drawn by artist Wayne Boring to be physically taller than the gods, and as tall as his “offspring” Zha-Vam).   Apparently, though the Prometheus of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound is best known as an arch-rebel against Zeus, this Prometheus is reconciled to serving Zeus (an event loosely foreshadowed in the same Greek play).   Or, if Binder did not know his Aeschylus, he may just as easily have patterned his villain’s creation on a less far-removed invocation of the Prometheus myth, for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.”  Certainly the visuals of Zha-Vam’s birth from a clay body recall the filmic birth of the Frankenstein Monster--  who is, like Zha-Vam,  a “man of parts.”

Perhaps the most mythopoeic theme of the story’s third section, though, is that, though Superman wins the battle, he does not do so with his own powers, but by taking on powers analogous to Zha-Vam’s.   Faced with a villain who uses a Zeus-given belt full of powers, Superman seeks out a similar belt from Neptune, brother to Zeus.   And the last figure Superman calls upon is the Titan Atlas, whose feat of “supporting the world” is a punishment for rebellion against Zeus—in other words, it takes a Titan to defeat the creation of a Titan (note: in Aeschylus, Atlas is brother to Prometheus.)   But perhaps the most telling trope is that Superman’s calling upon the reservoir of myth to defeat his enemy could be viewed as a comment on the aforesaid “cannibalization” of Captain Marvel’s mythos, by Binder and others, to feed the mythos of Superman.   Personally, I consider the melding of the Shazam-style whimsy with Superman’s science-fictional settings to have resulted in the best version of the character yet seen.  And while not all critics equally esteem the Weisinger-edited period of the Superman feature, most are agreed at least that this period birthed the greatest number of characters and situations that are still considered to be the touchstones of the Superman mythos, making the Weisinger years the feature’s most “myth-friendly” period.

Admittedly the Zha-Vam saga may in some particulars appear a bit too whimsical  to many contemporary critics (I found myself chuckling a bit at the notion of the kryptonite sock).   But one can also read the saga as a sort of a comic-book version of Star Trek’s “Who Mourns for Adonais,” in which an ancient deity makes a bid to regain lost fame in contemporary times.   It’s a given that by the story’s end such gods must pass away, but in the Star Trek tale, one is still filled with regret for the lost glory of the gods.  Superman himself does not mourn the demise of the gods.  To him, they are dangerous menaces to his career,  rather than being the perceptors they were to Captain Marvel. Yet it’s hard to believe that Binder didn’t script this story as a way of delving into the phantasmagorical creations of archaic myth-makers.   As a modern writer, he might never truly be among their company.  But he does, in this critic’s opinion, hew closely to their spirit.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SIVANA FAMILY STRIKES" (MARVEL FAMILY #10, 1947)

During the Golden Age of Comics (1938-54), DC Comics' Superman and Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel competed on newsstands for the dimes of juvenile readers and in courts for the right of the Big Red Cheese to challenge the Man of Steel. But who won the aesthetic battle, if one concentrates only on the stories that appeared up to 1954? (Partly in response to the court-case, Fawcett quit publishing Captain Marvel and its other adventure-characters in 1953.)

Both of these super-powered characters had extremely resonant origins, as I've analyzed here and here. However, later adventures of Superman, Captain Marvel, and the various starring characters linked to the Captain tended to be very simple, gimmick-oriented short stories. This shouldn't be surprising, since the majority of all Golden Age stories in all genres are on the same aesthetic level. The most one could say is that the level of writing and artwork in the Captain Marvel universe was probably a little higher than was seen in the Superman mythos.

The Fawcett universe builds up some features of the hero's mythology-- the role of the Captain's literally spiritual mentor Shazam, the role of the ancient gods in assorted stories-- while, in contrast, DC only rarely used the world of Krypton to give Golden Age Superman a mythic background. Yet even though mythic elements were more present in the Captain Marvel cosmos, they still weren't all that well developed-- with the exception of this 1947 story, authored by Otto Binder and drawn by a bevy of artists, including C.C. Beck, Pete Costanza, Jack Binder and Bud Thompson. Binder may have striven to come up with something a little more elaborate this time, given the momentous nature of the encounter between the heroes (the Captain, his sister Mary Marvel and buddy Captain Marvel Jr) and the titular "Sivana Family." Although Doctor Sivana had appeared in Marvel's first outing, while his evil offspring Georgia and Sivana Junior had shown up in separate stories, this was apparently the first time all the Sivanas joined to fight all of the Marvels. In many ways this story combined both a "brains vs. brawn" theme and a "science vs. magic" theme, with the result that magic is represented by good-looking brawn (including the demure-looking but powerful Mary Marvel) and science by ugly nerds.

Sivana starts the hostilities by informing his kids that he can soon destroy the Marvel Family with a special machine, though his machine needs "power even greater than that of the atomic bomb." Binder, building on erroneous research to the effect that atom bombs back then used two existing elements (plutonium yes, neptunium no), has Junior tell his papa that there's another powerful element capable of yielding the power they want. The element exists in three different forms-- electrium, neutrium, and protium, which Binder has transparently named after the traditional three particles of the atom-- but these forms don't exist in the same temporal era. Protium is the earliest form, which will transform into neutrium in 10,000 years, and then into electrium in another 10,000 years. None of the element-forms alone will give the Sivanas the power they want, but the villains can obtain all three forms by using time-travel.

Here's one of two places where Fawcett's concepts of magic and science overlap willy-nilly. Sivana and his kids board a spaceship, for the good doctor has already invented FTL travel. "According to Einstein"s formula," the mad scientist exults, going at light-speed will throw the ship "out of the universe, into Eternity." I rather doubt Einstein said anything like this, especially since Fawcett's idea of this realm of space-time is that it's dominated by Old Shazam's personal mountaintop, the Rock of Eternity. Unscientific though the trope is, it provides one of Fawcett's most mythic uses of the mountain, as a cosmic axis around which real space-time revolves. Once Sivana's ship lands on the Rock, it's easy for him and his kids to employ three separate space-crafts to zoom through time to the respective eras where they'll find the necessary element-forms.

The spirit-form of Old Shazam, seeing the villains' advent, alerts the Marvels. The heroes change from their mortal forms into the Marvel Family and each of them pursues one of the time-ships.

Now, Binder could have simply sent the Sivanas and their pursuers to three unrelated locations. Gardner Fox had done something similar in a 1942 JUSTICE SOCIETY story. Instead, Binder links the element-quest to one of the West's enduring legends, that of the sunken city of Atlantis.

Mary Marvel follows Georgia Sivana to the ancient era when Atlantis had not yet sunk beneath the ocean-waves, so Mary's segment gets to explicate the pattern for the next two segments. Georgia uses archaeological remains to track down the element protium to a scientist, Chal-Patzun, who, like another Jor-El, has failed to convince his fellow Atlanteans of their common danger. The scientist plans to use the protium to prevent the city's inundation, but Georgia interferes by trying to steal the precious element. Mary Marvel arrives to stop the nasty girl, and then finds out that Chal-Patzun has laid plans to assure that, even if he can't save Atlantis, future members of his family will revive the sunken city in a far-off era.

Binder's attempt to extend the family-metaphor not only to the scientist and his descendants but also to the element-forms is a bit strained, but better too much ambition than too little. Since Mary can't be allowed to win this easily, she suffers a reversal when she transforms into her mortal form. Georgia gets hold of one vial of protium, but leaves two others behind, so that over thousands of years they will take on the forms that Sivana and Sivana Jr, will seek. Georgia also absconds with the bound Mary and leaves Atlantis to its historical doom.

The segments devotes to the exploits of Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr inevitably follow the same progress. Sivana seeks out the 20th century, where a scientist named Patterson, descended from Chal-Patzun, rather improbably knows all about the situation with the three elements, and even knows (but has never revealed) the location of the sunken city. Sivana forces Patterson to seek out Atlantis, and once there, the villain promptly steals a second vial of the element, which has now converted into neutrium. Captain Marvel shows up, but Sivana uses an artificial means of transforming the hero into his helpless mortal form. For good measure, Sivana shoots Patterson dead, but since the scientist was too good a villain to lose, there are never any consequences for this murder.

And much the same happens in the far far future to the two Juniors. In the future a young scientist, Chass Passon, finds his way to sunken Atlantis after locating the records of his ancestor. Miracle of miracles, the ancient machine built by Chal-Patzun, and it even works with the one remaining vial, which now contains electrium. Captain Marvel Jr attacks Sivana Jr, but can't keep the wily youth from getting away. In due course, this hero too reverts to his mortal form and gets knocked out by Junior, who gets away with the electrium and with his captive. Chass Passon is injured but apparently not slain, and perhaps lives to enjoy the repute of re-discovering Atlantis.

The evildoers converge on Sivana Senior's laboratory and power up his mystery machine with the three element-forms. Then Sivana twists the knife on the three de-powered heroes, revealing that they can no longer call down their magic lightning because the machine sets up an "electron shell" around the planet Earth.

For the second time, magic and science overlap in a way that another junior, John W. Campbell, would never have countenanced. And for the capper, the Sivanas-- who believe that their great science will make them lords of the world once the Marvels are gone-- decide to execute their enemies through the supposed "sport of kings"-- which should really have been called "the most dangerous game."

However, even if the Marvels don't have deep-thinking brains, they possess as much if not more cunning than the villains, and in due time the Sivanas are once more defeated and imprisoned.

Golden Age Superman stories often avoided the fantasy-potential of their heroic character in favor of mundane mysteries and romantic melodrama. In contrast, the Captain Marvel line never suffered from a shortage of fantasy-concepts. Yet it was rare for the fantasies to be given the symbolic density of this Binder story. All too often, Fawcett authors "coasted" on the general sense of fairy-tale whimsy. Ironically, after Fawcett was out of the superhero business, DC's Superman line began employing ex-Fawcett people like Binder, and the Super-Universe began using more fairy-tale elements. However, perhaps because Superman had more of a romantic tradition-- in contrast to Fawcett, which usually avoided romance-elements-- the Silver Age super-books crossbred fantastic whimsy with the deeper emotionality of melodrama, yielding a product superior to either of the Golden Age concepts.

Here's the entire "Sivana Family" tale.

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERDUPERMAN" (MAD #4, 1953)

Looking through the seminal early MAD issues, one often finds a lot of clever puns and inversions of pop-culture tropes. However, the famous "Superduperman" story goes a little further into the realm of psychological myth than its contemporaneous fellows, like "Plastic Sam" and "Batboy and Rubin." At a time when the superhero genre was at its arguably at its lowest ebb in the history of American comic books-- when said genre certainly was nowhere near dominating the medium as would be the case from the 1980s onward-- Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood crafted a story that embodied the anti-mainstream arguments of Adorno and Wertham: the argument that I summarized thusly:

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

Kurtman and Wood, being concerned with gonzo slapstick and puns, don't put forth any grand schemes of meaning in "Superduperman," but by making their spoof-hero a real nebbish instead of a pretend-one, they cast a critical eye upon the idea of superheroes as compensation for one's failures in life-- a fair enough subject for satire, given that creator Jerry Siegel himself framed Superman's appeal in such terms:

Clark Kent grew not only out of my private life, but also out of Joe Shuster's. As a high school student, I thought that someday I might become a reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed.-- Jerry Siegel.

In addition, over ten years before Julies Feiffer suggested that Superman might be a "secret masochist," Kurtzman and Wood present their nebbishy ne'er-do-well "Clark Bent" as the helpless thrall of "Lois Pain's" charms.

Shortly after this encounter, Bent changes into Superduperman and goes looking for the story's mystery thief, "the unknown monster."  The heist artist obligingly reveals himself to be a fellow superhero, Captain Marbles, who has decided to quit fighting crime and to begin looking out for number one. Countless critics have mentioned that the year of this story's publication was the same year Fawcett Comics quit publishing Captain Marvel features as well as discontinuing their comics-line, largely in response to the expensive plagiarism suit DC Comics had filed against Fawcett. It's hard to tell whether or not the outcome of the super-dudes' battle is a comment upon the legal battle, but it's at least significant that Superduperman must resort to a dirty trick in order to win.

Lastly, Kurtzman and Wood undermine the wish-fantasy implicit in the Superman mythos, and in many-- though certainly not all-- superhero narratives. Instead of responding to Superduperman's bulging muscles, Lois rejects the hero and knocks him on his ass just as she did when he was Clark Bent, averring that his super-bod doesn't obviate him still being "a creep."

 I might argue that no single comics-story of the period-- not Kurtzman's war-stories, not Barks' duck-stories-- had more effect on the intellectual development of comics-fandom than "Superduperman." I can't say that it was always the *best* effect. But "genre politics" aside, it's no less a masterful story of its kind.

NULL-MYTHS: "THE SURREALIST IMP" (CAPTAIN MARVEL ADVENTURES #84, 1948)

Though I've labeled some features as "null-myths" because of their failure to emulate the better aspects of the Fawcett Captain Marvel, I should note that the Big Red Cheese had his share of blah stories.

While the titular character in the story "The Surrealist Imp" sounds a bit like an attempt to give Captain Marvel a pesky imp-foe along the lines of Mr. Mxyzptlk. the Imp never makes another appearance. He seems to have been created by writer Bill Woolfolk and artist C.C. Beck just to kick at the Surrealist Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. The story starts off by depicting a world where artistic works gestate before being "delivered" to their earthly creators, roughly along the same lines as storks taking charge of unborn babies before depositing them within earthly wombs.

As the Imp's dialogue makes clear, he's not going to be content for long simply delivering artistic conceptions to their mortal makers. He decides that it's tedious for artists to simply paint what they see, so he decides to make the "real world" reflect the non-representational world seen in surrealistic artworks.

I'm honestly not faulting this story for its failure to provide an even-handed treatment of non-representational art. It's almost axiomatic that a comic book story of this period would not be able to handle such arcane aesthetic questons. But I do rate it as an inconsummate story because Woolfolk and Beck don't follow through on the logic of their own fantasy.

I suspect that the story mainly reflects Beck's preferences for utilitarian art; preferences the artist used to express in vitriolic essays of the 1970s, some of which saw print in the COMICS JOURNAL of that era. After the Imp runs riot in the real world for a few pages, Captain Marvel settles his hash with a quick bop on the noggin.

I would probably have preferred it if Woolfolk and Beck had simply forced the Imp to undo his magical distortions, rather than suggesting that his aberrant attitude could be "fixed" with a concussion. Moreover, while I don't expect two comics-makers in 1948 to know beans about aesthetic theory, they're the ones who claim that all of the artworks from the "ultra-dimensional world" are "masterworks"-- and then turn around and try to imply that there's something deficient in the surrealist viewpoint, with its "horrible garishness."

The full story can be read at this address.

MYTHCOMICS: WHIZ COMICS #2 ("CAPTAIN MARVEL," 1940)

“For … various offenses Tantalus was punished in Tartarus.   For he was kept perpetually famished and parched, standing chin-deep in water and with laden boughs of fruit just above his head … Alternatively (or additionally) a great stone hung over his head, suspended by a thread, so that he lived in everlasting terror.”—Grant and Hazel, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology, p. 309.

By way of following up on my assertions in STRIP NO-SHOW, I find that the origin story of Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel provides the best-known example of a comic book story which conjures up a wild set of mythopoeic images to support a fairly simple story.

The earlier success of DC's Superman was the proximate cause for Captain Marvel to come into existence. However, as chronicled in Jim Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS, writer Bill Parker's original idea was to present a team of characters with powers derived from the Greek gods. Thanks to Superman, this idea was converted into the notion of a single superhuman who could draw on an assortment of powers from mythic personages.  Yet this particular Superman-imitator-- which in its genesis at least, seems mostly the creation of scriptwriter Parker rather than artist C.C. Beck-- ventured more deeply into what I've called "the realm of intuition and its mythic images."

Consider the opening, in which homeless preteen Billy Batson is approached by a dark stranger.

In the hands of most uninspired imitators, the stranger would have quickly doffed his hat and coat and revealed that he was X of the planet Y, and that he planned to give Billy fabulous new powers. Instead, Parker troubles to imply that Billy's descent into the subway is also a descent into a figurative underworld, with a weird subway train taking the place of Charon's boat. Parker's description of the car having headlights "like a dragon's eyes" inevitably suggests that Billy is traveling within an analogue of a living creature. It's significant that one of the figures from whom Billy will derive power, Hercules, survived passing through the belly of a giant beast.

The journey, though short by comparison with Dante's subterranean tour, brings Billy into contact with devil-like figures: the "Seven Deadly Enemies of Man," who are in essence a reshuffling of the Seven Deadly Sins of early Christianity.

Billy then finds himself in the company of the beneficent-looking old wizard, while his shadow-guardian-- possibly patterned on the Greek notion of the *psychopompos*-- simply isn't around any more. The old wizard Shazam shows Billy the personages from his name is derived, and then informs the boy that he knows how the boy was flung out into the cruel elements by his nasty uncle following the death of his parents.

Immediately following the scene of the evil uncle counting his ill-gotten gains, the story reveals that Shazam is standing under a stone block, suspended by a thread close to breaking. Shazam's only explanation of this extraordinary circumstance is to say that his time  is almost up, which is the reason he's summoned Billy to his domain, so that Billy will take Shazam's place as a fighter against evil-- in essence, replacing Shazam as the younger generation inevitably replaces the older. By pronouncing the wizard's name, Billy can become Captain Marvel:

After a quick demonstration that this transformation is reversible, the wizard asks Billy to transform into Captain Marvel a second time-- and just as the youngster does so, the stone block drops down. Shazam's implicit death is concealed by decorous thunderclouds. In addition, as soon as Shazam dies, Billy finds himself back on the city-street, where he remarks that his experience seems like a dream.
However, by the end of the story, Billy finds that he can bring the power of Captain Marvel into the real world as well.

Not only does Billy use his new power to thwart the designs of the mad scientist Sivana-- who bears a slight resemblance to Billy's evil uncle-- the hero's altruism is rewarded when he's given a job as a radio-reporter, a job which to my knowledge the character keeps for the entirety of the feature's run. It's interesting that though the main narrative function of Billy's job is the same as that of Clark Kent, being a means of keeping the hero on the scene for various troubles-- it also alleviates the boy's poverty-stricken condition. In essence, the much later origin of Spider-Man recapitulates the same pattern, in which the path of heroic altruism also rewards the hero with a source of remuneration for his efforts. Unlike Captain Marvel, Spider-Man even contemplates finding a job that will pay him for his exploits, but that somewhat non-heroic notion was quickly squelched.

I haven't come close to reading all of the fantasy-oriented comic strips of the early 20th century, but I have sampled most of them, and I've not come close to finding any strip-- "Little Nemo," "Popeye," or the overrated "Krazy Kat"-- that displays this density of mythopoeic images for a given sequence.
Admittedly, those three strips are probably on the whole better than Captain Marvel in a formal artistic sense. But by my lights none of these three really commit to their fantastic concepts in a manner that Parker and Beck do here.

Further, though most stories headed by either the Captain or his "Marvel Family" relations are not this dense in their imagery, there always seems to be a total commitment to whatever fantastic entities, events or objects come into the heroes' purview. This may have been the key to the long success of the Fawcett "Marvel Family" line. If so, it was a strategy that DC's Superman titles did not manage to pursue with any regular success, as noted in this essay on the Weisinger-era titles. Though Fawcett closed its doors in 1953, it seems it took roughly five years for the DC editor to feel that he had the freedom to bite the Fawcett style.

BE BRIGHT OR BE DUMB

In future I may taper off on my assaults against HOODED UTILITARIAN after finishing ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW.  But though I didn't bother informing NB of my response to his essay BE WHITE OR EXPLODE, I did waste a little time the other week trying to wring out of Berlatsky a more precise definition of a word he tosses around too freely: "parody." In my series essays entitled THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, starting here, I noted that NB painted a very one-sided picture of comics-fans' desire for serious heroes, as against the quasi-satirical elements of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. Not surprisingly, NB wasn't willing to admit any failing in his analysis-- a recalcitrance common both to ultraconservatives and ultraliberals, as I noted in STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY. Thus as usual the only thing produced by the "discussion" was a few definitions of my own that I choose to reproduce here. It also sparks some considerations on the question of my influence by Jung, something that NB chose to bring up for no stated and/or logical reason, but I'll deal with these in a separate essay.

I opened with:

Re: “superhero parodies”– there has to be a difference between a thoroughgoing superhero parody and a regular superhero story with its fair share of humor. There may never a way to break it down beyond “I know it when I see it, but otherwise, if you say Fawcett’s Captain Marvel is a parody because it had ludicrous elements, then the same criterion applies to various Superman and Batman stories– particularly the Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite stories.

NB apparently couldn't get that I was saying he was being too general in identifying items like the Fawcett CAPTAIN MARVEL as parody, because he simply repeated his statement that parody was central to the genre:

There are some genres where a parody does mean you’re not really in the genre any more, or where parodies at least aren’t quite so central to the genre. But superhero parodies are really dead center in the superhero genre, and always have been. 

When I repeated that it wasn't enough to have humorous elements in a story to make it a parody, which I said was also the case with PLASTIC MAN, NB tried to find a way to make the non-humorous elements of the superhero genre subordinate to those that he finds humorous and/or parodic:

Superhero stories are about empowered individuals, often. And then they’re often also about parodying the idea of empowerment, and making fun of the idea that silly guys in tights can save the world. 

I was glad to see him admit this agenda, even if he wanted to promote it as sober fact:

I suspected you were favoring a definition that was short-hand for “anything that seems to contradict narratives of empowerment,” so thanks for confirming it. I for one don’t think that Superman’s machismo is nullified in any significant way as long as he keeps booting Mxyzptlk back to the imp-dimension, but I assume your mileage varies.
Here’s the problem with such a broad definition of parody: it doesn’t sufficiently take into account the fact that “the other side” can do parodies with the opposite meaning. THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS contains a parody of a touchy-feely psychologist, who is rendered ludicrous through the lens of Frank Miller’s endorsement of Bat-machismo. I would hope that you’d consider this parody, even though it has nothing to do with satirizing heroic empowerment.
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NB had to admit that the sequence in TDKR is parodic, but chose to believe that Miller's ode to heroic empowerment was still a self-parody. Tautology, thy name is Berlatsky!

Skipping across most of the rest of the back-and-forth, I will end with my own remarks regarding NB's political agenda, to which he did not respond and which he claimed not to have read:

When I first posted, I knew that we would not agree on the subject of humor, but I thought you should at least acknowledge that not all humorous elements are “elements of parody.” That’s still the way you’ve chosen to define parody, though, because you’re not concerned with the intrinsic meaning of the word, but with some extrinsic, politicized interpretation of the word. As per your Sedgewickean argument in “Comics in the Closet,” you’re content to interpret all humorous elements as weapons in your campaign to strike down the hated “serious superhero.” This project doesn’t have anything to do with making superheroes more “complex,” as you claimed earlier. it has to do with promoting your own distinctly limited vision of what superheroes ought to be. 

The most bizarre aspect of the exchange, however, was that though I didn't bring up anything about the analytic psychology of Carl Jung, NB kept insisting that not validating his faulty definition of parody was tantamount to being-- a Jungian?  At least this time he was a little more correct than when he condemned me for being an exclusive devotee of Joseph Campbell, as I recounted in BATTLING THE ELEMENTS. I do draw upon Jung more often than Campbell, because I think Campbell was not as organized a thinker-- though of course he's Immanuel Kant in comparison to Noah of the Many Wandering Thoughts.

Contrary to NB, there's nothing about Jung or Jungianism that contravenes the spirit of humor. What NB is seeking to defend is his specific notion, probably derived from Eve Sedgewick, that "the idea of empowerment" is unstable and incoherent. Jung makes assorted references to male empowerment in his writings, but it would hardly be correct to deem him a monolithic defender of standard sex-roles. I demonstrated the exact opposite in my analysis of his "anima/animus" terminology in the essay WHAT WOMEN WILL PART 3.  Like Gary Groth before him, NB wants a "devil" to scapegoat, and his devil happens to be "male empowerment." Jung, being one of the foremost exponents of psychological pluralism, is not opposed to humor, but he is opposed to the idea that some archetypes are good and others are bad. Thus, though we can only guess what Jung would've made of American superheroes, there's no way that he would have validated NB's ideological reasons for touting the Adam West Batman over, say, that of Frank Miller.

Superheroes profit from good humor, as much as any genre. But to centralize the element of humor-- or whatever one likes to call it-- is more nonsensical than anything in a Mxyzptlk story.

ADDENDA: I should note that if I've been influenced by any authors who validate the archetype of the "serious hero"-- be he "super" or otherwise-- it's not from either Jung or Campbell, who only address the concept infrequently. Frye is probably most responsible for giving me the logic for that validation, though Fiedler and Paglia have provided interesting viewpoints on the topic.

ADDENDA TO "HEROES VS. HORRORS"

After I posted in "H vs. H" that the earliest "villain rally" known to me was in STAR-SPANGLED COMICS #7 (1942), I had the nagging feeling that I had indeed seen mention of an earlier team-up of comics-criminals.

A dim memory led me to reread Mike Conroy's 500 COMICBOOK VILLAINS, and sure enough, there was an earlier story-- sort of. It was a "Mr. Scarlet" tale appearing in Fawcett Publications' AMERICA'S GREATEST COMICS #1, dated 1941. That would beat the Needle/Doctor Weerd tale from SSC (though not the Joker/Catwoman crossover in BATMAN)-- except that, according to what Internet evidence I could find, none of the villains appearing in AGC #1 had appeared before. These villains were apparently created for this one appearance, as a team called "the Death Batallion," and so I'd hesitate to consider their teamup as a true "villain rally."

Incidentally, the Wikipedia writeup for "Mr. Mind and the Monster Society of Evil" rates that group as "the first supervillain team in comics to contain villains that a hero had fought previously," which is obviously incorrect given the SSC example. So, even though Fawcett can probably lay claim to the first BIG "villain rally," I'm rather glad that Jerry Siegel, founder of the whole damned ball of superheroic wax, can lay claim to the "villain rally" idea (so far as I can tell at this time, anyway).

Also incidentally: though in BATMAN #2 the Catwoman isn't costumed and doesn't seem to function as anything more than one of Milt Caniff's "shady ladies," in her very next appearance in BATMAN #3, she does join the rank of the costumed, wearing a gaudy orange dress and a big cat's-head mask. Still, not until 1946, in a tale titled "Nine Lives Has the Catwoman," does she get refitted into her familiar (and un-catlike) purple-and-green garments, and starts committing "cat-crimes" with various catlike devices.