ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

             

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

    

MYTHCOMICS: [“THE MOUTHWASH BOOTLEGGERS”], DICK TRACY (1946)

[Given that the original Gould continuity had no title, I’ve chosen to label the sequence after a phrase used by Tracy to describe his opponents.]

In Jay Marder’s definitive study of DICK TRACY and the strip’s author, it’s mentioned that Chester Gould tended to script his storylines in a rather free-form fashion, making things up as he went along. This may be one reason that even when Gould conceived compelling villains, their stories all follow the same pattern: (1) exposition on the type of crime being committed, (2) the detection of the crime by Tracy, another cop or some witness, (3) the criminal’s exposure, pursuit, and capture or demise.

Since the only comics I read up to age 10 were the kiddie-types, I don’t know that I saw anything comparable to a “rogue’s gallery” in such entertainments as Popeye, Mighty Mouse, or Uncle Scrooge. But I *may * have got my first taste of such an assemblage of diehard fiends in the 1961 DICK TRACY TV-cartoon. At a time when the ongoing TRACY strip wasn’t coming up with any decent do-badders, the cartoon culled weird crooks from assorted periods of the comic—most memorably, Flat Top, the Brow, the Mole, Pruneface, and Itchy. Even as a kid I knew that the cartoon was terrible—Dick Tracy barely appeared, serving only to introduce the hijinks of lesser comedy-cops—but I liked the villains. Eventually, the mass reprinting of the TRACY strip gave me a chance to see all of the great villains in their original storylines.

Having read the original stories now, I find that most of the famous villains boasted only fair-to-middling adventures, lacking the concrescence that makes mythicity possible. Flat Top, the Brow, and Pruneface were all masterpieces of visual design, but one was just a contract killer and the other two were just spies. Gould just didn’t give them personalities to match their physical attributes.

Gargles, principal villain of THE MOUTHWASH BOOTLEGGERS, is not as memorable as the more famous TRACY rogues. He doesn’t have a freaky physique like the Brow or Pruneface, or even a vocal peculiarity like Mumbles. Gargles is most like Itchy: defined by a weird habitual activity—Itchy scratches himself all the time, and Gargles habitually gargles at every opportunity. And though this felon doesn’t have a backstory, and barely anything like internal thoughts, it’s possible to imagine that at some point in his life he decided to channel his personal obsession with mouth-cleanliness into a racket, albeit the unlikely one of bootlegging mouthwash.

But BOOTLEGGERS doesn’t start with Gargles. Rather, Dick Tracy stumbles across a man who gets choked to death in a revolving door, apparently because his drunken girlfriend keeps pushing on the door, not comprehending that she’s killing him. On the face of it, the incident sounds like a candidate for “The Darwin Awards.” But it doesn’t take the master detective long to figure out that the dead man—George Empire, head of a pharmaceuticals empire—fell into the revolving door because some third party slugged the victim from behind. Tracy is uncommonly generous toward the drunken woman—a local radio celebrity with the bizarre name of “Christmas Early”—in that she’s never charged with accidental manslaughter. Later on, she even helps the top cop track down the real murderer of George Empire.

Though Christmas didn’t witness Empire’s assault, nor catch sight of the assailant, she later remembers that the rich man was complaining about trouble with a “mouthwash salesman.” But even before Christmas makes this recollection, the reader has the privilege of seeing said salesman in action. Gargles, who apparently doesn’t mind the nickname given that he’s seen gargling at every opportunity, runs an operation in which his confederates concoct phony mouthwash consisting of colored sugar-water. Gargles’ thugs then extort small druggists into buying the bogus germicide by damaging their stores—most often, by smashing their store windows (which will prove an important point later).

Here it should be interjected that it’s extremely unlikely that any crook anywhere ever made money with a “mouthwash protection racket.” Almost certainly Gould simply wanted to rework some of the story-tropes associated with the Prohibition years—during which time gangsters did force vendors to carry cheaply made, often dangerous liquor—so the author just transferred said tropes to the idea of “mouthwash bootlegging.” Probably the idea of Gargles and his freaky habit came first, and Gould tailored the crime to fit the villain’s compulsion.

Toward the end of the story, Gargles admits that he personally assaulted George Empire, but at the story’s opening, the reader does not see this, nor does Gargles see clearly the face of the woman in Empire’s company. However, by the God of Comic-Strip Coincidence, he happens to be very fond of Christmas Early’s morning radio-show—so much so that he writes her a fan-letter. At roughly the same time, one of Gargles’ victims makes a complaint to Tracy’s department. Christmas just happens to be on hand when Tracy reveals a clue that the analysts found going over the phony mouthwash, and the radio-star connects the clue with the fan-letter. Having determined that the unidentified bootlegger listens to the radio show, Christmas decides she’s going to “wring a dinner date out of a murderer” by pitching woo to him on-air. However, Chirstmas is spared this dubious date when Tracy tracks down Gargles’ current residence. But though Tracy’s squad exchanges gunfire with the bootlegger’s henchmen, Gargles himself escapes, hiding inside a rigged-up flower-box display.

Throughout this narrative, Gould also re-familiarizes readers with characters from a previous arc: professional singer Themesong, one of Gould’s many precocious brat-kids, and the kid’s mother. In the earlier arc Themesong and her mother lived in poverty while the little girl sang for pennies on the street while covering for mobsters. But like other such sinning juveniles, Tracy converts the child to the ethics of law and order, so that in BOOTLEGGERS Themesong supports herself and her mother with her singing-talents. However, being on the side of law and order doesn’t protect one from the vicissitudes of evil. Gargles, having temporarily eluded the police, wishes dearly for the chance to kill Christmas Early, having overheard that she was complicit with Tracy. However, the gangster realizes that he has to lay low, probably in “some germ-ridden dump”—and who does he choose to rent a room from?

For some days, neither Themesong nor her mother notices anything odd about their new renter, except that he gargles a lot. However, Themesong gets a new camera and snaps photos of several locals, including one of Gargles. Instead of simply ignoring the incident as any smart crook would, the bootlegger becomes hyper about re-acquiring the photo, even without knowing that Dick Tracy is acquainted with Themesong and her mom. As if to goad him further, Themesong and her mother just happens to take her film to a local pharmacy for development—and it’s one of the pharmacies Gargles shook down. The pharmacist only has a minute to recognize the photo as his earlier tormentor, when Gargles enters, killing both the druggist and Themesong’s mom. Themesong escapes with the photo, but Gargles escapes the cops by hiding in a coffin-sized tool box belonging to a repair truck. The repair truck is only nearby to fix the drugstore-window smashed earlier by Gargles, but this bit of good fortune proves deceptive.

While Gargles gets transported to the truck’s destination, a glass factory, Themesong mourns her mother. Christmas Early shows up, giving Themesong the chance to air her grievances on the air, warning Gargles to give himself up. The radio broadcast does reach the glass factory, but if it doesn’t soften Gargles’ hard heart, the girl’s description of the fleeing felon helps the factory-workers identify the fugitive. At the same time, Tracy’s squad arrives on the scene. Gargles takes refuge in a high room, but when Tracy makes a frontal assault—the detective being protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass—the villain loses his footing and falls. In addition, several sheets of breakable glass fall as well. Thus the glass-breaking thug—who, incidentally, complains twice about “cracked glass” being a source of germs—gets turned into the equivalent of veal cutlets. However, his throat remains whole long enough for him to confess to the killing of George Empire—a very uncharacteristic generosity from this brutal gangster, but one which Gould evidently wanted so as to tie things up 

neatly.

One impressive aspect of BOOTLEGGERS is that Gould evidently gave some thought to the ironic way in which he would kill off this particular transgressor. All of the early references to glass in Gargles’ life seem inconsequential until the reader sees that he’s destined to be impaled by glass shards. Another impressive aspect is that not until the end does Christmas Early’s name take on possible significance. The dominant connotation of the words “early Christmas” is that someone receives a gift ahead of the Christmas season. If as I believe this notion was being directed at the character of Themesong, then the “gift” is also steeped in irony, for Themesong loses a mother before she gains a musical mentor. “I’d like to get into radio like you are,” the grieving tyke informs Christmas, and although neither character made many more appearances, it’s suggested that Christmas becomes Themesong’s manager, and perhaps substitute mother. This scenario does not fulfill as obvious a wish-dream as the one in JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD, wherein Junior’s natural father, a blind old man, gets killed off so that it becomes convenient for Junior to be raised by his ideal dad, tough cop Tracy. Still, even without wish-fulfillment as such, Gould orchestrated a rather strange three-part harmony between a clean-freak gangster, a celebrity implicated in manslaughter, and a good-hearted brat-girl with talented tonsils and a termagant tongue.  

MYTHCOMICS: THE CABBIE (1987)

Since some years had passed since I'd read THE CABBIE, Marti Riera's ironic satire of DICK TRACY, I decided to peruse some randomly chosen Chester Gould continuities before I put forth any comments on Riera's work. I found that not only did Riera successfully ape the cartoony grotesqueries of Gould's work, he also successfully riffed on Gould's righteous "crime does not pay" nostrums.

To my knowledge CABBIE seems to be Riera's best-known work in the United States. I saw some talk online about a possible sequel to the one-shot work from 1987, but I had no problem with regarding this comics-album as a stand-alone work, despite an ending that's mean to frustrate the average reader's desire for closure.

No actual name is given to the titular protagionist. A spirit-voice calls him "Cabbie ForHIre" once, but I think this was probably a pun. Even his sister just calls the blond cab-driver "Cabbie." He's just an ordinary working-stiff, but his life changes when he thwarts a thief trying to rip off one of the Cabbie's passengers.

The Cabbie gains a measure of social approval for his brave act, but his home life shows that he's no hero. He lives a macabre existence, for his mother has kept the dead body of Cabbie's father inside a coffin in their apartment. In addition, she holds over his head the promise of a great inheritance Cabbie's father left behind. It seems likely that the mother takes this action to make sure Cabbie keeps her with him, rather than packing her off to an old-folks home.

However, the criminal whom Cabbie sends to jail, the aged John Smith, just happens to encounter his equally crooked son while in prison. John Smith Junior-- whose name reminds one of Dick Tracy's faithful adopted son Junior-- swears vengeance on Cabbie. Once Junior is out of stir, he finds Cabbie's apartment and takes out his wrath on the driver's mother. This accidentally works to Junior's advantage. When Cabbie comes home, Junior hides in another room, and he overhears the mother-- albeit reluctantly-- reveal that the inheritance is hidden in the father's coffin.

Junior and Cabbie then begin a long battle over the bounty in the coffin. Cabbie plays detective and follows the thief to a shack near a sewage dump, where Jones's white-trash family lives. However, though Cabbie overtakes Junior, the would-be hero lets his guard down when Honey, Junior's under-aged sister, comes on to Cabbie and slips him a mickey. Thus Cabbie ends up in a standard Gould death-trap, though with a modernistic touch in that the hero is doomed to be drowned in sewage and shit.

Cabbie escapes, of course, and in a very roundabout way he crosses paths with Junior again, which also aligns with Gould's frequent utilization of wild coincidence. However, Riera uses coincidence to undermine Gould's adventure-mythos. Cabbie's sister Mary-- who is a "working girl"-- comes back into his life after the mother's passing. At the same time, Junior, despite having gained Cabbie's fortune, thinks it's a great idea for his dimbulb little sister to get trained in the arts of prostitution, just as if it was a perfectly respectable profession. And guess who gets tapped to train Honey?

Other developments: Cabbie kidnaps Honey, which results in Junior half-killing Mary, and John Smith Senior busts out of jail. I mentioned above that there's a moment where a spirit-voice, claiming to be from Saint Christopher, patron of motorists, speaks to Cabbie, and the voice does so a second time, but from the mouth of the unconscious Honey. But because the voice never has any great effect on the narrative, I tend to dismiss these spiritual manifestations as hallucinations on Cabbie's part, as well as sarcastic send-ups of Chester Gould's tendency to wrap his sympathetic characters in Christian pieties.

After tons of blood-curdling violence and suffering, most of the Jones family perishes, and Cabbie pursues Junior back to the sewage dump. There's no final battle, though, and it's just chance that allows Cabbie to survive while Junior is consumed by the earth, as is all the money he stole from Cabbie. (I suggest that Riera was promoting some equivalence between money and shit.) That lack of closure I mentioned suggests that Cabbie and Honey, the last survivors of their respective families, may cross paths once more, but Riera frustrates that possibility, and leaves the Cabbie amiless and impoverished, "a straight-arrow hero [who] ends up on the zig-zag path of disorder."

STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY PT. 2

In GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC I said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MYTHCOMICS: [JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD], DICK TRACY STRIP (1932-33)

When I listed the entirety of the DICK TRACY comic strip in my ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, I asserted that "this list will mix together whole runs of continuing titles with particular stories or sequences that best exemplify the nature of the mythopoeic." From that brief sentence, some readers could have taken the broad implication that I deemed everything in the "whole runs of continuing titles" to be exemplary in terms of utilizing the mythopoeic potentiality-- as opposed to the specific stories or sequences from other serials that didn't measure up. In truth, whenever I cited whole runs, I just meant that they had a statistically better chance to trade in mythopoeic symbols, often because of a creators' unique outlook, as with Marston on WONDER WOMAN, Morrison on DOOM PATROL, or Chester Gould on DICK TRACY.

I must admit, though, that even though the TRACY strip displays great potential thanks to Gould's harsh, black-and-white morality and his genius for devising weird villains, I've found it hard to isolate particular sequences that I consider symbolically complex. In a lot of these sequences Gould relies heavily on standard melodramatic tropes-- Tracy goes on a manhunt for 88 Keys, B-B Eyes sets a trap for Tracy. Kinetically stimulating, yes. Mythic, no.

Ironically, from my re-reading it seems to me now that Gould's greatest mythopoeic work-- and a major contender for my idea of the "graphic romance"-- takes place after the strip had only been running for about two years. This was long before Gould began evolving his famous rogues' gallery of villains, which Jay Maeder perceptively called "the Grotesques" in his superlative DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY. In the first years, Gould patterned his cop's adventures closely after real-life crime-stories like the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. In addition, Gould had to answer to the editorializing input of his publisher, "Chicago Tribune" bigwig Joseph Patterson. According to Maeder, Patterson saddled Gould with an "origin" in which Tracy only vowed to devote his life to crime-fighting after he witnessed some hoods heartlessly gun down an old man, who also happened to be the father of Tracy's fiancee. The old man was scarcely if ever referenced again, but the girlfriend stuck around, though there would be suggestions in the involved story to come that Gould didn't have much use for her. Not only did she sport the name "Tess Trueheart"-- a name so blatantly melodramatic that Charles Dickens would have scorned to use it-- but Gould began dropping hints that her name didn't particularly fit her character.

In the title to this blogpost I've made up a name-- "Junior Tracy Finds a Dad"-- for the set of interrelated arcs I'm analyzing here. I based this title roughly on that of the 1939 film TARZAN FINDS A SON, largely because this set of arcs focuses on the same problem as the film: how to give a popular adult male character a male offspring without actually getting into the messy matter of conception. My faux-title is partly necessary because the four arcs of the story aren't continuous: when necessary, Gould put one storyline aside to concentrate on something else.

ARC ONE: Gould almost certainly channels Dickens' OLIVER TWIST when he begins the "Junior Tracy" continuity. In the Dickens novel, orphan Oliver suffers great deprivations until he falls in with a juvenile gang of pickpockets, but he accidentally encounters a future benefactor when Oliver is implicated in the activities of his cronies. Gould begins by having "the Kid"-- the only name given to the nine-year-old urchin who will become Junior Tracy-- lift a watch from Dick's comical colleague Pat Patton. Before Tracy ever meets the Kid, the reader sees that the boy has been forced into his criminal endeavors by an adult hobo-- an individual who is clearly not the Kid's father, even though he's the only person the Kid has ever known since infanthood. The hobo's last name is almost never cited; he's almost always called "Steve the Tramp." While he's not exactly a Grotesque, Steve does incarnate a sociological myth. Since the Tramp appears at the height of the Depression, when many out-of-work men wandered throughout the States looking for work, Gould may have used Steve to play upon square citizens' fears of these homeless wanderers. Gould portrays Steve as a shiftless, heartless lowlife who uses the Kid as a pawn and barely feeds the boy for his efforts. Tracy eventually comes across Steve trying to kill his charge, trounces the hobo and jails him, after which the detective takes the boy under his wing. The Kid immediately admires the "Good Tough Father" who has defeated his "Bad Tough Father" and declares that he wants to take the name "Dick Tracy Junior."

In the very next strip after the newly-dubbed Junior says this, he meets Tess Trueheart-- and though she's personable enough, it's clear that he definitely does not want a new mother to go with his new father. ("Chee, I hate dames.") He also rejects the old "father," for when Steve gets out of jail, the Tramp makes a couple of attempts to liberate Junior from Tracy's informal custody. These efforts fail and Steve leaves town for a "vacation"-- the better to give Gould time to decide whether he would use the Tramp again, one may hazard.

(I note in passing that though later strips establish that at some point Tracy adopts Junior, the two males are not generally depicted as a father-and-son family; rather, they are a young boy's idea of a "crimefighting family," where all the youngster has to do is help his mentor catch crooks-- much like the Batman and Robin relationship that evolved eight years later.)

 ARC TWO: This arc, beginning on Jan 2, 1933, begins after two other intervening arcs concerning Tracy's pursuit of other crooks. Neither arc involves the subject of Junior's paternity, though the youngster manages to further prove his loyalty to his new mentor.

This arc introduces Stooge Viller, whom was among the TRACY villains to be adapted on the 1961 animated cartoon. Viller, a dead ringer for Edward G. Robinson during the height of the actor's gangster-roles, was the epitome of the Smooth Operator, and thus the antithesis of the brutish Steve the Tramp. Viller had one interesting resemblance to Junior, in that the adult crook was a practiced pickpocket. Paid to ruin Tracy's career, Stooge plants counterfeit money in Tracy's home and on the detective's person. From a modern point of view this sounds like a child's idea of a criminal frame-up, but it works, and the department fires Tracy. Even more devastating than this, Tess-- to whom Tracy has just become engaged-- shows herself a "false heart," refusing to believe the cop's protests of innocence. Gould spends no time showing things from her viewpoint: she merely refuses to believe him because she, like the male police, can't even imagine such an extensive frame-job.

She finds out differently thanks to the instigator himself. During Viller's surveillance of Tracy, the gangster has seen her and taken  a shine to her. Viller manages to approach Tess and even make a date with her. She finds out his true nature through that favorite melodramatic device, the Letter That Tells All. Viller shoots her, albeit nonfatally. Tess does manage to get the word out, but it's Junior who helps Tracy pinpoint Viller as a suspect, because the sharp-eyed boy sees the crook at a train-station and belatedly remembers seeing the pickpocket hanging around the detective. Viller is jailed, while Tracy is exonerated and returned to his former status. Tracy more or less forgives the recovering Tess' transgressions, though a line of dialogue suggests that he's affronted at her fling with a black-hearted villain.

There are no more interruptions at this point: Gould was clearly warming to his theme of Junior's paternity, Having forged a bond of loyalty between faux-father and faux-son, what better drama, than to break that bond?

ARC 3 brings back Steve the Tramp, who's somehow wandered from the vaguely Chicago-like city of Dick Tracy to the mountains of Colorado. Happening across a lonely cabin, the hungry hobo gets a job with a blind old miner named Hank Steele. Hank tells the tramp his story: once married to a woman much younger than himself, Hank sired an infant son by her. The wife, weary of the demanding life of a miner's camp, deserted Hank when she met a "city feller," and she took her son with her. Hank mentions that he spent a lot of money trying to locate his lost son, who would be nine years old now. Not surprisingly, Steve thinks of nine-year-old Junior to be his pawn in a scam.

Though Steve flubbed his early attempts at kidnapping, he's fantastically successful this time. Not only does Steve grab Junior almost as soon as he returns to "Tracy-city," the virulent vagrant manages to take Junior all the way back to Colorado. However, Tracy, a demon clue-finder, manages to reach Hank's house first, and he warns the old blind man of the deception. However, Tracy allows Steve to attempt his hoax, so that the detective can witness the crime and add yet another charge against the horrid hobo.

This doesn't turn out so well. Because Tracy doesn't simply arrest Steve right away, the Tramp escapes (though only temporarily) and an old mammy-style maid dies-- more on which in a separate essay, if I get the time. But Gould has a Melodrama 101 reason for allowing the hoax to play out, for it serves to reveal that Junior really is Hank Steele's lost son. Much later, Gould will assert that Steve the Tramp was the "city feller" who stole away Hank's wife, and then left her behind while keeping her young son to be his accomplice. There's no evidence Gould had this improbable scenario in mind during ARC 3, but it has an admirable symbolic symmetry: "Bad Tough Father" steals the Kid from "Good Weak Father," only to bring the youngster by accident into contact with the "Good Tough Father," who will be the worthiest parent possible. However, once Junior's paternity is proven, duty requires that he stay with his natural father, and be tearfully separated from the dad of his heart.

Not for long, though. ARC 4 commences with one of the first "villain team-ups" of pop culture, when Steve gets jugged in the same prison as Stooge Viller. United by a hatred of Tracy, the brainy crook and the brawny thug break out of prison. Hoping to get an advantage over their foe, they decide to kidnap Junior and use him to bait a trap for the policeman. However, Tracy anticipates their strategy. He travels back to Colorado, where he's ecstatically greeted by Junior. Tracy forces the old man to leave his home to preserve his safety and that of Junior, so that when the two felons arrive, they only find a deserted cabin. After further encounters with straight citizens, the crooks travel back to Tracy-city, where Viller and Steve take shelter with his equally crooked sister Maxine.

At this point Gould must've decided that Steve was no longer useful, for the Tramp is sent on a minor errand by Maxine, and promptly gets caught by Tracy. Viller drops his plans for revenge after another encounter with the super-cop. He and his sis flee to Halifax, hoping to leave the continent for a while.

The web of coincidence stretches particularly widely, for though Tracy has sent Blind Hank Steele and his son on an ocean-voyage to keep them safe. Hank decides to abort the voyage and take a new ship back to the States, because Junior is so mopey without his ideal father. The new ship founders in a storm, but Hank and Junior are among those rescued in a lifeboat that ends up in-- Halifax.

Without knowing it, Viller accidentally commits an act that serves Junior's heartfelt needs-- though to Gould, it was just another fateful coincidence. Viller spots Junior and wants to use him to get at Tracy, so he waylays the boy, his father and their protector, the invariably bungling Pat Patton. Hank tries to protect the boy and gets shot dead-- an act of such transgression that even Viller is shocked at having done it, so that he and his sister flee without Junior.

Another arc then commences, involving Tracy's long manhunt for Viller. Inevitably the Smooth Operator is jailed again, resulting in a less than tearful reunion of the Stooge and the Tramp. But the story of Junior Tracy being liberated from two unsatisfactory fathers, and being reunited with his true role-model, ends here. Tracy and Junior solemnly attend the old man's funeral, and after that, Tracy's role as paterfamilias is unchallenged, even when later sequences introduce Junior's lost mother.

Six years later Gould belatedly terminated the crime careers of both of these seminal villains.

Arguably Steve the Tramp gets the worst fate, for when he gets out of prison, he's become a utterly reformed man, and he fades from the strip as a pious reminder of the futility of crime.

Viller, in contrast, remains dedicated to killing Tracy when he gets out of stir. However, he suddenly remembers that he has a grade-school daughter, and he makes a futile attempt to win her heart, though she despises him for his criminality. The man who made possible the reunion of Junior and Tracy gets one last chance at killing his foe, but he's accidentally shot to death by his daughter-- though it's Viller's own fault, for trying to kick her gun from her hand. He dies somewhat nobly, asking Tracy to keep his death secret, so that his daughter won't know that she partly caused his death.

Gould had many "long melodrama" sequences ahead of him, consisting of dozens of traps, manhunts, and mayhem. But though I've yet to read everything in the series, I suspect that this first great sequence is his greatest "graphic romance," if only for its perverse psychological acuity.

FIFTY-ONE PHENOMENALITIES, OR FIGHT!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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