CRISES AND CONTINGENCIES

 Though I don't follow any regular serials from "the Big Two," the TPB market makes it quite evident that both companies remain as heavily invested in "multi-feature crossovers" in 2024 as they were in 1986, when such rival serials as SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS duked it out for sales supremacy. In fact, because "multi-feature crossovers" is an unwieldy mouthful, I'm considering a new term,"clusterfubars." The whole purpose of most crisis-events since 1986 has been to fuck up the status quo beyond all recognition, even if the original status quo later reasserts itself or is replaced by some other manageable state of affairs.

I have not written a great deal about clusterfubars here, though the most involved essay is probably 2008's EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE. I argued that the commercial comics-medium's penchant for "earth shattering changes" was nothing new. In fact, though I didn't explore the topic in a more systematic manner, I quoted anthropologist Lee Drummond on the subject of crises in fiction, be they in myth or in popular fiction:

...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?

Before examining the applicability of "crises" to myth and fiction generally, though, I would be remiss not to define what would be the opposite of "crisis narratives" (especially after one of my recent essays  faulted Joseph Campbell for not providing counter-examples to a proposed term).

I duly looked up antonyms for the word "crisis," and was surprised to find "contingency" listed as a SYNONYM for the word. Every connotation in which I've heard the two words suggests the opposite. A crisis is some event that few if any participants can foresee or avoid. A contingency is some event with which forethought can cope, at least up to a point. The application of each term may also depend on a given subject's span of knowledge. For the majority of persons around the globe, the appearance of the Covid virus was a crisis. For Anthony Fauci, who coordinated the use of gain-of-function research with the Chinese lab in Wuhan, the virus' appearance would have been a contingency, something he could anticipate happening if things went south.

Drummond is broadly correct that a lot of fiction of all genres and mediums depends on "crisis narratives." The theatergoer who views OEDIPUS REX learns nothing about the day-to-day life of King Oedipus or his family. Everything in that play and its sequels is defined by an unforeseeable crisis. And comedies are no different from tragedies in a structural sense. The AMPHITRYON of Plautus centers upon the merry mix-up that ensues when the title character returns from the wars, and must be prevented from finding out that the supreme god Jupiter is schtupping Amphitryon's wife, at least until Jupiter successfully impregnates the woman with Hercules.

But what would be a "contingency narrative," which is to say, a narrative whose conflict does not hinge upon some larger-than-life crisis? There are some archaic examples of such narratives in theater and in folklore, but it's correct to stress that contingency narratives really took off with the rise of naturalistic literature, particularly in 18th century Europe. I deem Daniel Defoe's two best-known works, ROBINSON CRUSOE and MOLL FLANDERS, to be novels built around a constant flow of contingencies relating to what the main characters must do to survive and/or prosper.

And since I'm primarily concerned with the medium of comic books, where do contingency narratives appear in the history of comics? Even most of the celebrated comics-stories, as agreed-upon by elitist critics, depend largely on types of crisis, even when they may be predicated on such low-level "crises" as mistaken identity (which is a not infrequent "gotcha" in a lot of one-shot horror stories). Teen comedies like ARCHIE are probably the least "crisis-like," being usually predicated on simple formula situations that the thoughtless protagonist fails to foresee (Archie makes a date with two girls on the same night; they find out and beat him up or the like.) Most such stories are one-shots, too. Some continuing comic strips, such as GASOLINE ALLEY, presented an ensemble of characters having low-wattage adventures without any dire consequences. The first superhero to regularly exploit both narrative forms was the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, who would support himself and his ailing aunt with money (contingency) made from photographing his own heroic actions (crisis), quelling the rampages of Doctor Octopus or The Lizard.

At some point in the eighties, many superhero fans-- those that dominantly embraced the superhero genre above all other genres-- clamored for low-wattage incidents in the lives of the characters they liked. These pleas brought forth various "day in the life" contingency narratives. Arguably, in subsequent decades, this fannish preference increased the frequency of other stories in which slow-paced drama took the place of fast-paced adventure. However, the same decade, as noted above, also cemented the new business model of the clusterfubar. The Big Two sought to monetize crises by having them affect numerous features at the same time, on the theory that interested readers would purchase titles they didn't normally buy in order to keep apprised of all segments of the extended crisis narrative. I have no idea as to how well this practice works as an overall sales strategy, but it's been in place for about forty years, so someone must be making money from it.

Single features like the venerable SPIDER-MAN appear to be far more guided by crisis narratives overall, rather than by a balance of both narratives. Features with large character-ensembles-- X-MEN, TEEN TITANS-- are even more awash in constant fervid crisis narratives, so that what used to be called "soap opera" is more like "disaster opera." 

More observations on this theme to come later, possibly.

CRISIS OF INFINITE ENSEMBLES

 

Earlier I broke down the superordinate ensemble of DC THE NEW FRONTIER, separating off some characters from the others in the narrative on the basis of which ones had what I’m currently calling “stature,” which I may or may not further define as stemming from a sort of “motive force.” I said that I’d contemplated doing the same for CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

The problems of CRISIS are more formidable than those of NEW FRONTIER. In executing the 12-issue series, Marv Wolfman and George Perez were in effect providing a “send-off” for the often inconsistent “continuity” of DC Comics that had grown, Topsy-like, since roughly 1938. Thus, partly as an appeal to hardcore fans, they included countless DC characters who had enjoyed at least a brief series, though in the case of long cancelled heroes Wolfman and Perez limited themselves to those with whom their fans were somewhat familiar through revivals and retcons. (In other words, obscurities like Nadir the Magician and the Gay Ghost got no exposure here.) The creators also introduced a few new heroes who then went on to appear in post-Crisis features, though none of these proved especially popular.

Basically, Wolfman and Perez chose two methods for assembling their hundred-plus protagonists into action against the evil Anti-Monitor. Either a small group of heroes went on a mission of some sort, or a larger group participated in some big fight-scene. These tended to use characters purely for quick shots, making them functionally indistinguishable from the roles of “spear carriers” in theater. Of all those in CRISIS, only two fight-scenes focused on events that would carry over into extrinsic stories: the killing of the Dove, which would affect all future depictions of his brother/partner the Hawk, and Doctor Fate’s interaction with Amethyst Princess of Gemworld, which would give rise to a rewriting of Amethyst’s backstory, as I chronicled here.

Most if not all of the heroes who went on missions together, though, had sufficient stature in the narrative to be deemed part of a superordinate ensemble. Thus, in addition to the four characters mentioned above, this would include:

The Earth-One Superman, the Earth-Two Superman, Batman, the Earth-One Wonder Woman, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, Firestorm, Geo-Force, the Jay Garrick Flash, the Barry Allen Flash, Kid Flash, Supergirl, the second Doctor Light, the Red Tornado, the second Wildcat, Captain Marvel, Power Girl, Uncle Sam, The Spectre, Captain Atom, Dawnstar, the second Firebrand, Mon-El, Jade, The Ray, J’onn J’onzz, the John Stewart Green Lantern, the Guy Gardner Green Lantern, the Blue Devil, Zatara, Madame Xanadu, the Thunderbolt, the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, Deadman, Fury, and possibly the three characters created especially for CRISIS: Harbinger, Lady Quark, and Alexei Luthor.

A few villains took part in missions as well, such as Doctor Polaris. But since there was no substantive “team-up” between any of the DC heroes and villains for any length of time, I would not deem any of the villains to possess ensemble-status. As in the features where the criminals usually appeared, they exist to oppose the ensemble, not to enhance it.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2

                               

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread.

Case in point: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona, and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.

On the more positive side, some master-threads receive support in unpredictable ways. Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga, reviewed here, has one obvious master-thread: the prophecy of an eventual confrontation between the tyrant Darkseid and the hero Orion. I wasn’t entirely pleased with Kirby’s years-later wrap-up of his epic series. But even though the author went down a somewhat unsatisfying path, HUNGER DOGS wasn’t without mythopoeic meaning in itself.

But I’ve recently noticed one particular subordinate thread, one so subtle that one could barely even assign a didactic meaning. In my review I had no space to examine the curious relationship between Darkseid and his mother Heggra.

The reader only three things about the wizened queen: (1) that she rules Apokolips before Darkseid ascends to the throne, (2) that her influence obliges Darkseid, against his will, to wed a noblewoman named Tigra, who ends up being the mother of Orion, and (3) at some time, Darkseid has his mother killed, probably because she blocked his rise to power.

But in recent months, I noticed that the given names of Heggra and Tigra are not dissimilar, suggesting a symbolic identity between them. Visually, they’re opposites, for Tigra is lean and given to overt violence, while Heggra is sedate, like a brooding hen sitting on her “hegg.” But despite these differences they collude to create Orion, whom Darkseid will make the mistake of casting out. The result is that Orion becomes dedicated to his father’s defeat, and though Orion’s primary mission is to keep Darkseid from gaining the Anti-Life Equation, it would not be incorrect to say that the conflict of father and son ends up avenging the maltreatment of two maternal figures. It’s a subordinate vertical thread that in no way diminishes the master thread of the father-son conflict, but because of this mini-discourse, the master thread is made yet denser and richer.

MYTHCOMICS: "A DREAM OF MONSTERS" (THE WANDERERS #1-5, 1988)

Most comics-fans are more than a little familiar with the many revisions of major DC Comics characters like Superman and Wonder Woman following the 1985 "Crisis" mega-event. But of all the characters revised following the Crisis, the team of future-heroes known as "the Wanderers" may be the most obscure. Prior to 1988, the team had only appeared a couple of times as guest-stars in DC's successful LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature, and there were no indications that anyone had designed the seven characters of the team to be a continuing franchise. I would guess that when writer Doug Moench and artist Dave Hoover pitched the idea of THE WANDERERS as an ongoing series, their interest had less to do with their fascination with the characters than with the chance to promulgate a somewhat darker vein of science fiction than what usually appeared in the LEGION's "space opera with superheroes."

Most of the Crisis-era revisions didn't necessitate killing the original version-- the pre-Crisis incarnation of Wonder Woman proving the exception to that rule-- but WANDERERS #1 starts out with the deaths of all seven heroes by forces unknown. The dead bodies of the heroes, floating around in their derelict spaceship, are discovered by a being belonging to the race called "Controllers," said race being a familiar presence in the LEGION cosmology. This individual, eventually dubbed "Clonus-Prime," finds the slain heroes while he's in the midst of tracking the monsters responsible for attacking both the Wanderers and various other alien races. (These creatures are not given a specific name as such, so for the rest of the essay I'll call them "the Hatchlings," a name given to one of their intermediary development-stages.) Clonus-Prime takes time out from his pursuit to arrange a rebirth for the deceased stalwarts, but only in an indirect (and somewhat confusing) manner. He intends to bring the Wanderers back in new bodies cloned from their corpses. However, since Prime doesn't want to get off the trail for too long, he first clones himself. This results in an identical twin, usually named just "Clonus." Clonus-Prime downloads some or all of his memories into Clonus, and then leaves. Clonus, who possesses all of his "parent's" scientific skills and also inherits the immortality common to all Controllers, gets to work and tries to clone new bodies for all seven. One of the seven clones does not take, but the other six prove viable, although for reasons not well explained, Clonus modifies most of their powers and appearances, as well as growing them to adult status in a matter of weeks. 

Once they "come alive," the six clone-heroes possess all of the memories of their "primes," or originals. Yet they're more than a little alienated by their new physical forms, and some of them are angry to have been made into lab-rats by their new "father." For the first five issues, the heroes' main mission is to learn what forces destroyed their primes. None of them seem to have any memories of their predecessors' final moments, which is perhaps just as well, since the saga of the new Wanderers is already fairly confusing, owing to its being started in media res. Moench puts forth a familiar but still appealing idea-- that of giving a murder-victim a second chance to find his murderer-- but whereas this is given an elegant simplicity in a feature like DC's DEADMAN, the concept becomes vitiated by the demands of a team-book. Team-concepts flourish when the team-members all have separate concerns and thus butt heads over their respective priorities-- but with a few exceptions, the New Wanderers all share the same overall problem: that of being reborn in mutated forms, and of finding their murderers.

Further, even in the first five issues-- easily the best arc in the feature's 13-issue run-- Moench does not succeed in creating strong interpersonal dynamics for the members, despite a transparent attempt to make two of the heroes look like, respectively, Nightcrawler and Wolverine of THE X-MEN. The two female team-members keep the names they started with, Psyche and Quantum Qneen, but the four males all assume new monickers-- Elvar, Dartalon, Aviax, and Re-Animage-- none of which are any better than their primes' cognomens. The heroes get a little time to experiment with their powers before the next catastrophe: an assassin from the Controller universe. Clonus reveals to his "children" that in that universe, cloning is expressly forbidden, which is why Clonus-Prime fled his own cosmos in order to perfect his cloning-procedures. So the Wanderers must continue their own quest for their murderers while a stalker pursues them. For good measure, both Clonus-Prime and Clonus perish, though the latter survives as a computer-program in the Wanderers' starship. One of the heroes, the intuitive Psyche, discovers an infant Hatchling in the ship and hides the imp from the others, seeking to use her mental abilities to purge the Hatchling of the violence inherent in its species.

To say the least, this overplotted narrative proves ponderous in the extreme. The mythic meat of the story, though, might be called Doug Moench's subversion of the novel FRANKENSTEIN. Clonus-Prime's obsession with cloning bears some comparisons with the obsession of Shelley's character to make a "new Adam" out of diverse body-parts, and many critics have commented that Frankenstein's primary sin was to attempt to create a human being through science rather than using the tried-and-true organic methods.

Clonus-Prime, though ultimately responsible for the genesis of the Hatchlings, does not make his monsters exclusively through science. Before he's even created his first clone, he meets a human woman of the Legion-verse, and the two of them fall in love. Clonus-Prime and Velissa repeatedly try to conceive the old-fashioned way, but they fail to bear any children due to biological incompatibility. Unlike Clonus-Prime, Velissa ages like all mortals, but rather than simply letting her perish naturally, he prolongs her life via cloning, making new young versions of Velissa and then euthanizing the aged bodies. For generations Clonus-Prime keeps making new versions of Velissa, as well as continuing to try biological reproduction. But as the Controller-assassin eventually reveals, clones can't be allowed to reproduce, or they will produce monsters. It's not clear as to why Clonus-Prime never knew this, but it's due to his ignorance that he and Velissa eventually do bear children: the Hatchings, who reproduce asexually and are hostile to all species save their own kind. Thus in a sense Clonus-Prime is ultimately responsible both for killing and for re-birthing the Wanderers (sort of like series-creators Moench and Hoover).

The climax of "Dream" also touches on Frankensteinian themes, for the Hatchlings not only escape their father, they take their mother Velissa with them, and she's kept alive by their will, as a sort of zombie-queen. Though her husband has the greater responsibility for the Hatchlings' depredations, the image of Velissa presiding over her ravening offspring reminded me of Frankenstein's fears that if he created a bride for his monster, she would become the mother of a new race of monsters. In contrast to Velissa, Psyche is the "good mother," in that she's successful in using her emotion-based powers to purge her adopted Hatchling of its violent tendencies. But Psyche can't save the whole nest of Hatchlings, and thus the arc I've named "Dream of Monsters" comes to a cataclysmic conclusion. 

For the remainder of the series, Moench and Hoover, rather than working on the dynamics of their ensemble, placed more emphasis in showing each of the Wanderers trying to find their individual destinies in various new situations. Even the best of these stories are rather predictable and unaffecting, despite the creators' attempts to play up the melodramatic angles. As a team the "X-Wanderers" were a failure, but the initial arc, however tortuous, does have a few memorable myth-moments.

ENSEMBLES DISASSEMBLED

In TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES, I explored some of the ways in which various characters did or did not belong to ensembles occupying a work's narrative center. For instance, I regarded Captain America to be the only centric star of CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR. while the Avengers and other superheroes were all "guest stars." Yet in AVENGERS: INFINITY WARS, it's not just the Avengers, but most of the heroes, including Doctor Strange and the Guardians of the Galaxy, who provide the ensemble. Only a smattering of goodguy protagonists, like Wong and Nick Fury, don't qualify as members of the centric ensemble,  because they function largely as support-cast

This line of thought was designed to cope with the extended casts of multi-character smorgashbords, such as the Jim Starlin mashups that influenced INFINITY WAR. Generally speaking, I think most of these mashups follow the same pattern as INFINITY WAR, with one big exception: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. 

I scanned through the twelve-issue series recently, and found that it was not structured quite the same as the usual superhero smorgasbord. Marvel's competing project of the time, SECRET WARS, included a huge ensemble-cast, most of whom were Marvel's most popular heroes. That said. as I commented in TRANSITIVE, one of the participants in the "Wars," Lockheed the Dragon, still rated no more than support-cast status.

CRISIS, however, was much more ambitious than SECRET WARS, given that it was a sendoff to DC Comics' complicated continuity. Whether for reasons of sentiment or marketing, Wolfman, Perez and whoever else worked behind the scenes attempted to work in not only all the DC heroes being published at the time, but dozens of characters without a current berth, ranging from Rip Hunter Time Master to Detective Chimp. I didn't even attempt to count all of the heroes who participated in the battle against the Anti-Monitor, but it seems obvious that, in order to function as part of the ensemble, a given character would have to "stand out" from the madding crowd.

Some characters are clearly front-and-center. like Superman and his dead cousin.

And the Flash, who also bites the big one here.

But when Wolfman and Perez kill off an almost forgotten western hero, the Nighthawk, within one page, I would have to say that the late, not-great Nighthawk is no more than a guest-star.

Ditto more celebrated heroes who just participate for a panel or two, like the Metal Men.

Even getting a few pages to themselves, as happens with this motley crew (one of whom is the Atomic Knight, an unsuccessful reboot of a John Broome concept), doesn't serve to make the likes of Dolphin and Captain Comet part of the centric ensemble. I seem to remember that Animal-Man (seen there behind Atomic Knight) plays a little more central role in another section, but this raises the question: what criterion here does separate the assembled from the disassembled?

In features with regular characters-- like, say, the MCU's Captain America series-- guest-stars are narratively subordinate to the starring characters. I've made similar arguments in regard to horror-stories, arguing that Doctor Moreau, not his animal-people, is the star of Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU , while Stevenson's Edward Hyde assumes more narrative importance than his alter ego Henry Jekyll. So clearly, if I were ever moved to list exactly which characters in the compendious CRISIS belonged to the ensemble, I would probably include only those that had a very strong influence upon the outcome of the overall plot.

Not that I anticipate doing so at any near point in the future, though.

MYTHCOMICS: "FIVE BILLION YEARS" (GREEN LANTERN #200, 1986)

I noted in my mythcomics analysis of "The God Killer" that it was only a part of a greater saga, but that I didn't find the entire story to have the necessary symbolic density necessary for a mythcomic.

"Panther's Rage" is rambling and episodic, and though it's never boring, its myth-themes are not integrated enough to make me list the entire arc...

"Five Billion Years" is a similar case. It's the culmination of a long arc involving DC's space-opera superhero and many of his fellow Green Lanterns from assorted planets. If that wasn't complicated enough, the greater arc is tied into DC's multi-feature epic, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, and works in a lot of DC history seen in stories like THE SECRET ORIGIN OF THE GUARDIANS and THE SECRET LIFE OF STAR SAPPHIRE. (Below is a quick contemporaneous recap of Star Sapphire's origin.)

 In addition, this arc proved notable for building up the character of Guy Gardner, the Bad Boy of the Lantern Corps:

Most of these developments, however, relate purely to lateral meaning as I described it in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT. The symbolic density of myth comes into being through the mythopoeic potentiality, which aligns itself with a narrative's "underthought" and frequently, though not invariably, is granted greater profundity by its interaction with the "overthoughts" of the didactic potentiality. Lateral meaning describes what the characters experience physically and what readers should understand of its emotional meaning, and so the lateral elements of this story-- things that relate purely to Hal Jordan's romantic problems or his duels with old and new enemies-- are irrelevant to the matter of myth.

The underthought of "Five Billion Years" reveals yet another "secret origin" for the Guardians of the Universe. Although Green Lantern's mentors spend most of their career looking like sexless, hyper-intellectual dwarfs, "Five Billion" hearkens back to their origins as gendered entities-- which begs the intellectual question, "what happened to the other gender?" In short, the Zamarons-- who, since their introduction in John Broome's Star Sapphire origin, were always depicted as all-female-- are called upon to be the missing "other half" of the mortal race that gave rise to the Guardians.

The confrontation of the Guardians and the Zamarons has one extrinsic purpose, to link the events of the GREEN LANTERN comic to upcoming, post-Crisis events like the MILLENNIUM mini-series. However, Englehart is skillful enough to give this "big event" a strong intrinsic meaning, in that the reunion of the two sexes is touted as an evolutionary necessity. One Guardian says:

The race born on Malthus and and developed on Oa and Zamaron must be regenerated to create a new breed of immortal...

But before this can happen, the most prominent Guardian must duel the most prominent Zamaron to prove the former's fitness to mate with the latter. Since the duel takes place in terms of energy-blasts, the event shouldn't convey any anti-feminine sentiments except to those determined to find that sort of thing.

After the head Guardian proves, at least by implication, that he and his fellows still have the Stuff, they and the Zamarons fly off to some celestial plane, telling the Green Lanterns that they too must evolve, so as to be their own masters. Their own personal "devil" Sinestro attempts to tag along in the guise of a Guardian, but he's caught, and confesses, in very Earth-centric terms, that his intention was to become "a lurking serpent in your new and secret haven."

From what memories I have of MILLENNIUM and the somewhat related NEW GUARDIANS title, I don't think the Guardians succeeded in coming up with their "new breed." In any case the little blue men didn't stay away very long, but returned to the GREEN LANTERN within the next twenty issues, prior to its cancellation.

On a minor side-note, Englehart tries to extend his evolution-metaphor into one of Green Lantern's battles, as the hero bests the mentally endowed super-villain Hector Hammond, telling Hammond, "You've reached the far end of your evolution, while I'm still going." But it's at best a forced metaphor at that point. Whatever the long-term execution of the "Guardians have sex" concept, "Five Billion Years" does manage to impart a sense of space-opera grandeur to the proceedings.

MYTHCOMICS: "SECRET ORIGIN OF THE GUARDIANS" (GREEN LANTERN #40, 1965)

In my discussion of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, I observed that the series was greatly indebted to the use of parallel universes in the Silver Age DC titles FLASH and GREEN LANTERN, both written by John Broome and edited by Julie Schwartz. I didn't note that CRISIS also derived much of its continuity-shaping concepts to a single Broome/Schwartz issue of GREEN LANTERN-- illustrated by Gil Kane-- which not only gave, as the title suggests, an origin to the title hero's Guardian mentors, but also touched on the origins of the DC Universe and the provenance of evil in that universe.

Though this sounds like the stuff of comic-book epics, "Secret Origin of the Guardians" is wrapped up in one issue, and for good measure throws in the first meeting of the Golden and Silver Age Lanterns, outside the pages of their initial Justice League encounter. A bare summation of the plot also sounds like par-for-the-course with DC story-lines:

"An evil alien, imprisoned as an energy-form inside a meteor for his crimes, enters Earth's atmosphere and suborns one of Earth's heroes to carry out new crimes. The alien even makes one Earth-hero fight another one until they join forces and overcome the evildoer." True, in "Origin" the two heroes come from different versions of the Earth, but the parallel applies nonetheless. The cover seen above is also extremely familiar, as even by 1965 DC Comics had published innumerable covers in which a featured hero found himself about to be marginalized or replaced by a rival. However, the quality of the mythopoeic is much like the saying about the Devil: "it's in the details."

The first four pages of the story proper deal with Alan Scott, the Green Lantern of Earth-Two, coming into contact with the meteor. The object's radiation temporarily nullifies the weakness of Scott's power-ring-- a vulnerability to wood. Immediately thereafter, rather than testing the meteor's properties, Scott decides to go to Earth-One and see what the Hal Jordan Green Lantern thinks about it, in case the meteor might be able to banish the weakness of Jordan's Guardian-given ring. 

As soon as the two Lanterns meet, Jordan reminds Scott (in a totally nice way) that Scott could have verbally asked his ring to analyze the meteor, since the ring can do almost anything, including communicating info like a miniature computer. The ring then informs the crusaders that within the meteor was the imprisoned villain Krona, who hails from a time from the race of Oa, the race that later involved into the Guardians-- thus allowing author Broome a quick way to communicate said history. 

"Ten billion years" ago, the Oans were a race of blue-skinned super-scientists, who were immortal and did not need food or rest. They lived an untroubled, pre-lapsarian existence, not yet evolved into a coterie of aged blue dwarves (they even have women and childbirth at this point, which would lead to a complicated set of retcons in later GREEN LANTERN stories). But one among them, Krona, aspires to "probe the beginning of all things," despite a legend that claims that the universe will end if the Guardians learn their origins. 

As the excerpt shows, Krona does get a peek at the cosmic beginnings, and sees what one must presume to be the Hand of God Himself, shaping the cosmos. However, this peek isn't enough to wipe out the whole universe; it unleashes "cosmic lightnings" that zap Krona but don't kill him. The non-immortals of the cosmos pay the real price, for "evil was loosed on the universe," which presumably had existed in some sort of Edenic state up to that point. Because the Oans feel guilty over Krona's actions, they imprison in the aforesaid meteor and hurl him into outer space-- after which they decide to organize the Green Lanterns in order to quell the evil in the universe. 

Scott's ring also informs him that the only reason that it gained immunity to wood was because Krona wanted Scott to have a reason to cross into the Earth-One universe, because only in that universe can Krona continue his forbidden researches once more. Once the ring finishes its story, one of Jordan's Guardian-mentors shows up on Earth-One, informing the two heroes that Krona's activities will soon cause an outbreak of disasters, even before he finds out the Big Secret. The Lanterns spend a few pages fighting natural cataclysms, and are then summoned to the base the Guardians have made on Earth-- where the Guardians suddenly justify the cover and announce Alan Scott to be Hal Jordan's replacement.

The solution of the cover-conundrum is weak at best: for some reason Krona decided to steal a march on the heroes before they came after him, by possessing the body of Scott and mentally manipulating the Guardians. This questionable strategy leads to a battle of the Lanterns, which Krona easily wins. Krona then transports the paralyzed Guardians to his hidden lair, boasting that he will make them watch their own "secret origins" on a viewscreen, and then use "a duplicate of Alan Scott's power ring" to flee to Earth-Two with his forbidden knowledge, while the Earth-One universe is annihilated. However, the two Green Lanterns team up and defeat Krona, who is once more consigned to the outer depths of space.

As noted earlier, the base plot is nothing special; what's impressive is the way Broome had merged several myth-motifs into one cohesive story. 

At the time of the story's publication, Broome surely knew that most of his readers would stem from a Judeo-Christian tradition, so that he also knew that he would not rock any boats by suggesting that the Hand of God had shaped the universe. To my knowledge there are no canonical stories in that tradition in which God punishes mortals for looking upon him or his works, though a few stories, particularly that of Noah, loosely suggest such transgressive tropes. In the other myth-tradition best known to American audiences-- the interwoven threads of Greek and Roman mythology-- mortals are also never in a position to look upon the creation of the universe. However, since the Greco-Roman gods are anthropomorphic, mortals are able to invade the gods' privacy in other ways; not least being the tale in which the mortal Actaeon intrudes upon Artemis while the goddess is bathing.

However, the one relevant myth shared by both traditions is the origin of evil, and in both cases, a female did the dirty deed. I've already referenced mankind's fall from Edenic peace, which was laid upon Eve, but the Greek myth of Pandora is morphologically closer to the Green Lantern story, in that evil is actually released as a miasma that infects the cosmos, if not as specific demons. And yet, the first metaphor Broome uses to typify the polluted universe resonates with one of the prime narratives that befalls Adam and Eve; that of "brother killing brother" (page 8). 

No less mythologically intriguing is the name Broome confers upon his villain. Krona is almost certainly derived from the Greek god Cronus, whom the Romans later conflated with their deity Saturn. 

In Greek myth, Cronus can be compared in some particulars with God-the-Creator. Cronus doesn't spawn the cosmos, but he makes the ordered cosmos possible through the slaying of his father Uranus, who refuses to let Cronus and the other Titans come forth from their mother Gaea (at least in one version of the myth). After Uranus is deposed, Cronus and his sister Rhea rule the world of the Titans and maintain a Golden Age for a while-- another pre-lapsarian period, which appears in Broome's story as the "ten billion years ago" era of the Oan people, who apparently start out as immortals and live in a universe free of evil. Broome even furthers the comparison to the Greek Titans by saying on page 7 that "[The Oans] strode [their] planet like giants," though there's no suggestion that any of them are literal colossi.

The end of Cronus' Golden Age comes when he hears a prophecy that one of his offspring will overcome him, at which point he more or less emulates his father-- this time, not confining his offspring to their womb but devouring them as soon as they come out. Thanks to some trickery by Cronus' wife Rhea, Cronus' destined usurper, his son Zeus, survives, kills Cronus, and frees his siblings from Cronus' stomach.

So Cronus' transgression against the orderly cosmos is that he, like his father, tries to cut off the next generation. In one sense, this seems a very "male" thing to do, on a par with alpha-male gorillas who take over a tribe and slay any children born by alphas other than him. Certainly it seems to be opposite to the sins of Eve and Pandora, which both boil down to feminine over-curiosity. And yet, though Broome's Krona has no interest in spawning children, or even ruling anything, he does seek to destroy the entire cosmos in a manner analogous to Cronus' suppression of the newborn gods-- and he does it for the same sin evinced by Eve and Pandora: that of curiosity. Yet in many ways Krona is also in the tradition of the curious male-- not so much bumbling swains like Actaeon, but more along the lines of Victor Frankenstein, whose name has become synonymous with that of a science that trespasses on the precincts of God.

I should note also that Zeus does not slay Cronus right away as Cronus implicitly slays Uranus: once the other gods are freed from Cronus' gullet, Zeus leads them against the Titans. This results in the cataclysmic war of the Titanomachy, from which the gods emerge as the new rulers while the Titans are consigned to Tartarus-- once again, imprisoned within a womblike Earth. The cataclysmic battle between "the favored gods" and "the gods no longer in favor" is arguably translated into an ongoing battle of "good" and "evil" in popular fiction, not least the "Lensmen" novels of E.E. Smith, alleged to have been a strong influence on the Hal Jordan corner of the DC cosmos. It's almost surprising that Broome, who had created Qward, a "universe of evil" in GREEN LANTERN #2, did not reference that universe in "Origins." And yet it's not truly surprising, given that comic-book creators avoided overly complicated scenarios, since they were writing so as to catch the vagrant attention of kid-readers. Later writers would inflate the opposition of the Oans and the Qwardians to the point that the two groups became the structural kindred of E.E. Smith's warring alien races. But to his credit, Broome, unlike many later comics-writers, had some intrinsic understanding of the myths he evoked. A lot of comics-writers have conjured up disasters for their heroes to fight, but few, aside from Broome and maybe Stan Lee, have been able to give them mythic resonance:

"Wracked by invisible waves of evil, spreading from Krona's presence on Earth-One, the planet itself goes berserk, seeking in fury and hatred to destroy the humanity that has spawned on its surface."

And this line of thought takes us back to tales of world-wide cataclysm, whether spawned by God or by Zeus-- but that's probably enough myth for now.

MYTHCOMICS: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS

In a recent post I gave some thought to reviving the "1001 Myths" feature I instituted back in 2011. For anyone who's interested, here's the original rationale. I don't plan to follow the same schedule I followed at the time, nor will I necessarily use the format I used before. Whether I do or not will depend on how well I think the format elucidates the meaning. The topic here, the 1985-6 limited series CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, requires a little more flexible handling.  This being one example--

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I don't have as much of a problem with commercial art as do the more ideologically minded critics. In tune with my loosely Jungian beliefs, I consider that the commercial artist's sheer need to come up with something that might sell can *sometimes* play the midwife to a breakthrough in creativity. There's no guarantee that the creative lightning will strike more than once, of course. The same commercial artists who gave birth to Superman also gave birth to a lot of unexceptional features, like "Slam Bradley" and "Doctor Occult."

That said, I generally prefer that commercial artists maintain the illusion of storytelling for its own sake while they entertain me: that is, not injecting anything that strongly reminds me of the commercial status of the work, such as advertisements for the publisher's other publications. In the early Silver Age Marvel Comics managed to perfect the device of "the crossover," so that the company could advertise other works without seeming too blatant about their commercial motivations in, say, having Spider-Man meet Daredevil. That brings me to one of my biggest problems in reading CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS (henceforth COIE for short)-- for often the appearances of the hundred-plus heroes who answer the "call to crisis" are often so perfunctory, so nugatory, that I can't think of them as anything but advertisements for the history of DC Comics.

I don't know how COIE would read to someone completely unacquainted with that history. The limited series was clearly meant to be an insider's thing: one could not appreciate it unless one were "universe-versed." And the most important message COIE had to convey was that DC Comics was undergoing a massive universal sea-change.

Whereas Marvel Comics had in essence 'started fresh" with the publication of 1961's FANTASTIC FOUR, DC Comics's history involved a tremendous number of franchises, some of which were originally intended to stand as part of a loose "continuity," while others were not. When DC began reviving the basic ideas behind some of its once popular Golden Age heroes-- particularly the Flash in 1956 and Green Lantern in 1959-- they initially intended to "start fresh," without making references to other aspects of continuity. However, both the FLASH and GREEN LANTERN features were more heavily invested in science-fiction concepts than their forbears had been-- and this led to both features' greater use of the concept of "parallel worlds."

GREEN LANTERN was first to evoke a parallel universe in its second,October 1960 issue, as the hero encountered denizens from the anti-matter universe of Qward. The original story did not make any special references to past history, but over time, Qward's central world would be re-fashioned as the anti-matter counterpart to Oa, the planet of the Guardians, who mentored the law-keeping forces of the Green Lanterns.

Roughly one year later, FLASH #123 (which shared the same writer and editor as GREEN LANTERN #2) featured a different parallel-world concept. Though the first FLASH story was written as if the Golden-Age version was just a comic-book character, #123 established that the Golden Age Flash occupied his own world, "Earth-2," which existed in a dimension parallel to that of the Silver Age Flash, who termed his own world "Earth-1."

In time DC found the "alternate Earth" paradigm to be a convenient way to account for other franchises that the company acquired, notably those of Fawcett Comics and Quality Comics. There was never a clear distinction between the "alternate Earth" concept and the "matter/anti-matter" concept, but COIE depends greatly on this distinction, more or less taking the position that all of the "alternate Earths" belong to a universe of "positive matter," while only Qward belongs in the universe of "negative matter."

Unfortunately for DC, twenty years after the birth of the Fantastic Four, Marvel Comics had become the leader of the comic-book market. And since Marvel's universe was more or less unitary, COIE was conceived to boil down all of DC's unruly universes into one conceptual cosmos. They did so by orchestrating a massive conflict between two immortal being: the Monitor, the representative of the "positive matter" universe, who could call on all the heroes of all the Earths for aid, and the Anti-Monitor, the representative of the "negative matter" universe, who wishes to destroy everything but ends up doing the will of the extra-diegetic series-creators, killing off only what they want killed.

The job of becoming "hit men" to the old DC multiverse went to writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Perez. As commerical artists, part of their job involved persuading comics-buyers to invest in the new cosmos without feeling that the new one had displaced all the beloved aspects of the old one. Thus COIE follows a loose plot that allows for maximum appearances of almost every then-current DC character, as well as guest-shots from characters who were no longer published, such as the cave-boy Anthro, who only enjoyed seven appearances in his 1970s series. Very few characters were strictly necessary to the plot, which somewhat resembles those of old movie serials. Villain launches Plan X, heroes prevent Plan X, villain appears defeated but then launches Plan Y, and so on. With such a structure, no single character was vital to the story. Even the series' much-ballyhooed "celebrity deaths" of the Barry Allen Flash and the Kara Zor-El Supergirl could have been written out had that proved necessary, with no damage to the overall structure of the plot.

So in my re-reading of the series, its commercial motives are even more clear than they were in 1985: loose plot, innumerable guest-stars, and an extra-diegetic reason behind the cosmos-shifting changes. But even if all of these audience-stroking devices make COIE less than pleasurable to read, do they exclude the series from the realm of the creative "breakthrough?"

They do not, though the symbolic complexity of COIE is certainly compromised by all the commercial stuff. In this essay I pronounced a particular CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story as "inconsummate" because, although it had some interesting mythic content, the story was rather half-assed, so that "the gears of the symbol-making machine" appear to be "a little out of whack." But I must admit that COIE, unlike a lot of the apocalypse-tales that emulated it, has a sense of the pathos involved in trading old worlds for new.

By "pathos" I'm not referring to Wolfman's tortured prose or Perez's frequent head-shots of characters' faces distorted in horror. I'm referring to the creators' references to figures of Judeo-Christian mythology, as seen through a lens superheroic, as evinced by the following:

(1) PARIAH. This is the first character who speaks diegetically within the COIE storyline. He is the only survivor of the first positive-matter earth to be destroyed by the series' villain, the Anti-Monitor of the negative-matter universe. He believes himself to be responsible, due to certain scientific investigations, for having unleashed the Anti-Monitor upon the positive matter dimensions. Late in the series, Pariah is exonerated of this crime. Nevertheless, as a consequence of his special destiny he keeps flitting from parallel world to parallel world, presaging the destruction of each world he visits, so that he becomes something of a conflation of the Biblical Jonah with the extra-Biblical legend of the Wandering Jew.

(2) THE HARBINGER.  This character is an orphaned Earth-woman raised as an adoptive daughter by the Monitor. Long before the COIE series officially began, the two of them were seen endlessly researching the affairs of DC Comics heroes, and COIE was the pay-off to that continuing mystery. However, only in COIE was it revealed that Harbinger's destiny was to become enthralled by the Anti-Monitor so that she would kill the Monitor. This destiny, however, turns out to be more or less stage-managed by the Monitor, much as Judas' betrayal of Christ is destined to accomplish the Crucifixion. Obviously, the Monitor's goals are far more secular in nature-- he wants his death to liberate certain energies to use against his enemy, sounding more like Obi-Wan Kenobi than Jesus. But this consideration doesn't nullify the potential symbolism of the Judas-archetype.

(3) ALEXANDER LUTHOR JR. Like Pariah, this character is a survivor of one of the worlds destroyed by the Anti-Monitor. He is the child of Lois Lane and a good version of Lex Luthor, but he survives via a method copied from DC's favorite Messiah, Superman. The child-- who grows to maturity in short order, like many folkloric "wonder-children"-- combines "positive matter" and "negative matter" in his body without their imploding. This "alpha and omega" constitution is, like the Monitor's sacrifice, principally a chess-move that can be used at a certain point to counter the villain's efficacy. Nevertheless, though he is the son of one Earth's Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, he vanishes from continuity by going into another (spiritual?) world, along with the original Superman and Lois Lane from the Golden Age. It might have been a good commentary on the "father, son, and holy ghost" trope if the creators hadn't decided to have a stray alternate-world version of Superboy go along for the ride.

These three characters all play roles that bear a striking resemblance to characters associated with the Christian Passion. This observation does not speak to what either of COIE's creators thought about religion. COIE is a secular comics-story and all the Judeo-Christian allusions are secular as well, just as were (Jewish) Marv Wolfman's uses of Christian mythology in the TOMB OF DRACULA series. But the fact that Wolfman and Perez invoked such complex associations at all speaks to the likelihood that they were attempting to endow their commercial endeavor with the significance of a great mythic tale, rather than just tossing together a crock-pot full of super-dudes and letting the chips fall where they might. COIE is at best a jumbled mosaic, and I frequently don't feel that the whole was more than a sum of its parts, any more than DC's "new unified world" turned out to be.

But at least some of the parts proved interesting, which is more than most DC epics can say.