COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 3

 I began devoting lots of space to literary crossovers in 2021, but I don't think that concentration appreciably changed the narratological project with which this blog began. I'm sure I would have conceived something along the lines of my "Primes and Subs" distinction, but the crossover-factor allowed me a perspective one may not find in a lot of other lit-crit circles-- certainly not those I have dubbed "the ideological critics." Thus, in the first COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I asserted that the term interordination, more than Julia Kristeva's better-known "intertextuality," best described my definition of narrative:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

However, I've become aware of a shortcoming in my explication of interordination with respect to how it plays out in the two main forms of fiction: "serials" and "monads." Prior to 2022 I'd written a great deal about the nature of serials, but not much about that of monads until THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Now I'll try for a more synoptic view of both monads and serials with respect to interordination.

In DANCE I only defined monads as "stand-alone works," but this needs finessing. The purest example of a monadic fictional work is one in which every icon in the story, both Prime and Sub, is entirely fictional, whether one is dealing with a short work like London's "To Build a Fire" or a long work like Dickens' OLIVER TWIST. I make this specification only because along such "pure works" exist "impure monadic works" in which one or more icons, whether Primes or Subs, have some existence outside the stand-alone work. Such icons fall into three categories:

Historical figures, like Louis XI in Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.      

Legendary figures that may have no firm grounding in history (such as Joaquin Murrieta) or who have been transmuted, by fictional treatment, into figures more of legend than of history (such as King Arthur and Jack the Ripper).

Fictional figures not created by the author(s) of the monadic work, such as the appearance of a character implied to be James Bond in the TV-movie RETURN OF THE MAN FROM UNCLE.  

As I've established elsewhere, works in the latter two categories may be crossover-works, while works in the first category will not be, since purely historical figures lack a purely fictional nature. But all stand-alone works can only be valued in terms of what I call "qualitative escalation," which is the process by which critics and their culture distinguish important works from non-important works. I commented in EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad.

The same essay also specifies how serial works can be analyzed for their durability, or lack of same, in terms of either qualitative or quantitative escalation, but only when the serial actually produces two or more works. A work that is intended to spawn further serial stories, but does not do so-- say, a pilot-film for a never-realized teleseries-- defaults to monad-status.    

Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives.  

 

    

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of qualitative durability.      

FINE-TUNING DURABILITY AND DURATION

 ...not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative icons within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture. -- A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1.

Since typing the first part of this five-part essay series, I said very little about my use of the offhand term "durability." The other essays, however, generally imply that I judged the highness or lowness of icons' stature or charisma on the basis of quantitative escalation-- though I would only adapt that earlier term a few weeks later in December of 2021. For instance, in Part 2, I noted that the Golden Age character of Miss Victory had transferred her stature from a solo feature to that of the ensemble of the Bronze Age title FEMFORCE:

Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

In contrast, in Part 3 I noted that The Blue Diamond was an example of a character who didn't accrue much stature, having had only two starring appearances. Also, the character of Magik, prior to joining the New Mutants ensemble, didn't get much stature by virtue of appearing in one four-issue mini-series.

In Part 4, I noted that I might not assign High Charisma to a villain-interaction between Joker and Catwoman, who'd only just been created, but that I definitely would in the first crossover of Joker and Penguin, who by the time of their meeting in 1944 had already logged in several appearances as Bat-foes.

And in Part 5, I gave examples of two narratives-- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC-- in which numerous Primes function as little more than background-characters to the featured Primes.

Now, all of the above examples depend on an idea of "duration," of how much narrative time a given icon has enjoyed as either a Prime or a Sub, either within a single narrative or in a series of linked narratives. This form of duration I henceforth subsume under the general concept of durability.   

Then, a week or two later, I wrote ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, in which I formulated a term for the type of escalation depending on an icon's duration: Quantitative Escalation. But I also specified that another type of escalation could also take place with respect to a narrative assuming the nature of a cultural touchstone, as per the example of Walter Scott's IVANHOE, which was a single work with no additional installments. About a year and a half later, I would show in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PART 3 that qualitative vectors could also influence serial narratives: specifically, as to whether the characters of "Giant Man and the Wasp" were qualitatively more important in their AVENGERS appearances than in their solo feature.

So, though I did not see the distinction in 2021, the "durability" I was describing took two distinct forms:

Narrative Durability relates to how much time an icon occupies within a story, or series of stories.

Significant Durability relates to how much time an icon accrues in literary history, thanks to whatever the icon does or doesn't do that some sizable audience imbues with significance.

A further elaboration is that in some narratives, though a crossover between stature-icons may be relatively short within a story, that crossover can accrues greater significance because of its impact upon the audience. The crossover between Ivanhoe and the pre-existing icon of Robin Hood lasts only a few chapters in Scott's narrative. Yet even if the icons' time together has little Narrative Durability, their crossover possesses Significant Durability because Scott managed to relate his newly created hero to the ideals of the Lord of Sherwood, in such a way that many readers found that part of the story significant. 

The same significance applies to works outside the sphere of canonical literature. In the 1918 book THE GOLDEN SCORPION, Sax Rohmer pits his established detective Gaston Max against a new villain, The Scorpion. Only on a few pages does Rohmer establish that the new villain belongs to Fu Manchu's Si-Fan, and on one of those pages a witness describes an encounter between The Scorpion and his master, though the latter is not explicitly named. Since the Scorpion never appears again, and thus lacks Narrative Durability, the novel cannot be termed a villain-crossover. However, the established figures of Gaston Max and Fu Manchu sustain the crossover-vibe between their universes, even though the two of them never meet. And Significant Durability applies solely because the SCORPION narrative was an important development in the history of the touchstone character of Fu Manchu. But there was no such Significant Durability for Gaston Max, given that he faded from prominence and never, like Fu, became a cultural touchstone.

 

ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2

 My original formulations with respect to the principle I called "escalation" in this 2012 post had nothing to do with centricity or crossovers, but I've decided to adapt the principle with respect to the concepts of high and low forms of both stature and charisma.

Since beginning the crossover-series, I've mentioned that every narrative presence, whether a Prime or a Sub, can change the form of its stature or charisma when a given presence migrates to another narrative. In Part 1 I observed that Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu started out with a high level of stature in his own series, and I compared him loosely to Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture.

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

Now, the vast majority of literary characters don't become cultural touchstones. Walter Scott published a lot of other one-shot novels in addition to IVANHOE. But if for some reason he had chosen to make even a brief series out of some character-- say, Guy Mannering-- then arguably Guy Mannering would have a little more stature than an equally non-iconic Scott character still confined to just one adventure like, say, Quentin Durward. This sort of escalation I call Quantitative Escalation.

Similarly, no one aside from readers with very antiquarian tastes remembers Rohmer's serial detective Gaston Max. But in his day, he enjoyed four novels and a handful of radio-plays, so that puts him ahead of a one-shot figure like the starring villain of Rohmer's 1932 YUAN HEE SEE LAUGHS, who might be best described as a "fat Fu Manchu."

For that reason, in Part 2 of my crossover-series, I noted that I deemed the now obscure Golden Age heroine Miss Victory to have accrued a moderately high level of stature-- one related purely to how often she appeared-- so that when she was revived in the 1980s series FEMFORCE, her original stature "crossed over" with the new heroes created for the series, even if this "crossover" existed only in the initiating episode of the FEMFORCE series, since the character, re-dubbed "Ms. Victory," became thereafter absorbed into the Femforce mythos.

On the other hand, in Part 3 I mentioned that I didn't think Marvel's character Magik had accrued much stature in her one four-issue series, and so I assigned her a low level of stature in her initial crossover with the already established New Mutants team, and this too would be based on the principle of Quantitative Escalation.

The same dichotomy applies to characters who are dominantly Subs, whether they possess high or low levels of charisma. I also mentioned in Part 3 that of the three Batman villains who formed temporary team-ups with the crusader in the original BRAVE AND BOLD series, the Joker had enjoyed nine issues of a series, unlike the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul. Yet the meager stature that the Joker garnered from his series did nothing to erase his dominant image as a subordinate figure, and so I would tend to regard even the temporary escalations of these three Subs to Prime status to be equally negligible. 

By the 1970s, though, all three possessed comparable levels of high charisma resulting from multiple appearances as subordinate character in the Batman features (as well as occasional guest-shots in other features). Such figures, having negligible stature, don't fit the category of even the low-stature crossover. However, they may generate a high-charisma crossover when comparable figures cross paths with one another, as per my example of the Joker and the Penguin in Part 4.  

The same applies to a multi-villain crossover like THE LONG HALLOWEEN-- but only to those villains-- Joker, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow et al-- who have "made their bones." This same story introduces a new villain, Holiday, but since he never appeared before or after that story, he has negligible charisma and so is not part of the charisma-crossover per se. 

Lastly, a well-traveled Sub can generate a low-charisma crossover when he appears outside his normal bailiwick in some other character's mythos, such as we see when the Riddler crossed paths with the Elongated Man.

There are certainly other permutations to consider, but I'll leave things there for the time being.