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.   

 

 

    

CURIOSITIES #36: ["KERRY'S LITTLE LECTURE"], KERRY DRAKE #10 (1948)

 

This one-page item appeared on the inside front cover of a comic book devoted to reprinting the Sunday pages of KERRY DRAKE, a patent DICK TRACY imitation. One interesting aspect is that though the lecture appears in a comic book, the complaining citizen is actually irate about violent crime stories in the newspapers, which for her set a bad example for the young. Prior to this, I hadn't seen much documentation of calls for comic-strip censorship, and indeed Wertham's SEDUCTION largely gives the newspaper comics a pass. According to Jay Maeder's history of the DICK TRACY strip, Chester Gould constantly dealt with complaints about violence for the entire history of TRACY. I imagine KERRY DRAKE might have caught some of the same criticism, though from what I've seen DRAKE was much tamer than TRACY. This proposition is strengthened by the fact that this lecture is signed by DRAKE's creator Alfred Andriola. Of course, some other artist might have ghosted the one-pager in his style. But if Andriola had been the victim of real citizen complaints, then there's no reason he would have refrained from using the interior of a reprint comic book as a "bully pulpit" to argue his case-- especially since he could not do so in the various newspapers that circulated his comic strip.

As an added amusement, the comic-strip continuity reprinted in issue #10 concerns illegal drugs, a topic which would be forbidden for comic books following the Comics Code. There never was an official Code for newspaper comics, but I imagine the existence of the Code might have had a chilling effect on, say, the depiction of various topics in the strips during the late fifties and the following decade.

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."

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR

... "ought to wear," that is, in terms of impressing adult readers and thus giving rise to the reception of the genre as a legitimate category of what I've called "adult pulp."

In one of my old JOURNAL essays I started off by noting that superheroes wearing costumes was the one element that made adult readers consider the genre as pulp-fiction of an irredeemably juvenile kind. And there's no question that a lot of adults say that the thing they find most off-putting about superheroes is their tendency to wear their underwear on the outside. (Incidentally, this excuse for a joke made the most sense back when Americans wore "long underwear" of one kind or another.)

However, I've come to think that the costume-complaint may not really be as substantial as I thought earlier. In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy). For every one of these that became moderately well known, there are presumably dozens that have been forgotten. The question is, did even Dick Tracy-- arguably one of the most famous "plainclothed crusaders"-- earn any deep and abiding respect because he pursued Flat Top and Pruneface while wearing regular clothes?

Say, for sake of argument, that the leotard-style costume never caught on in comic books. Early sketches of Superman suggest that Joe Shuster originally meant for the hero to wear street-clothes a la Doc Savage, and that the image of the costume that was added later, almost at random, in imitation of  such carnival performers as strongmen and acrobats. Given the appeal of a "modern-day Hercules," it's not impossible that a non-costumed Superman might have begotten an extended  family of mufti-clothed crimefighters, and that costumes might have appeared only occasionally, as they did in the period of the "hero pulps." Assuming that the level of talent and production of such comic books stayed the same, is there any reason to think that comic books full of supermen in plainclothes would have earned any more deep and abiding respect than the costumed versions?

Despite the fact that a lot of adults have scorned costumes as elements of childish make-believe, I think the genre of adventure itself is the real source of contempt. In an earlier essay I referenced Ursula LeGuin's animus toward prose genres like space opera and sword and sorcery, which certainly don't involve "costumes" as such. There are a few 19th-century prose novels in the adventure-genre that have become acknowledged classics-- IVANHOE, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But it took about a century for academic critics to embrace adventures with metaphenomenal content, such as DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In the last twenty years academics have become somewhat more latitudinarian about the adventure- genre, with or without elements of fantasy. But old attitudes die hard.

There are various "adult superhero" graphic novels out there, and it may be significant that a lot of them aspire to literary quality by using the tropes of irony and satire. I think a great "adult superhero" graphic novel in a purely adventurous mode is still a possibility, but it would have to have the complexity of a Melville novel to overcome the casual contempt so often directed against the genre.

STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 2

I introduced the term "stature" into my ongoing investigations of focal presences in SUBS AND COES PT. 1.  I doubt that I or anyone can provide a systematic description as to how stature works in narrative, and how it operates in some cases to bring about the coordination of some presences with one another, while in other cases it brings about the subordination of some presences to others. A simple, non-systematic description would simply consist of my re-stating my conviction that stature correlates with the "narrative emphasis" that the author(s) use to structure the narrative. However, being non-systematic is not one of my strengths.

One way to approach a literary process that is not defined by discourse-- where the property under discussion is a given once the narrative is complete-- is by process of elimination. In other words, what qualities do NOT define stature?

In SUBS AND COES PART 1, I indicated that in the BATMAN feature, Robin was coordinated with Batman, while in the DICK TRACY feature, Junior Tracy was subordinated to Dick Tracy. But this might not have been the most balanced comparison. After all, both the original Robin and various later iterations appear regularly in the Batman-mythos over many decades, whereas Junior largely disappears from TRACY once the artist ran out of things to do with him.

Therefore, a better side-by-side comparison would be one between Robin and Doctor Watson of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. I'll concentrate here on the canonical Holmes series of Conan Doyle, though I think it's inarguable that nearly every other later iteration of Sherlock Holmes brings in some version of Watson as well. By this standard, one might argue that the character of Watson is actually more thoroughly imbricated with the character of Holmes, whereas there have been many more Batman stories in which Batman has no partner at his side. So longevity within a serial narrative *might* be seen as a possible quality relevant to stature.

However, two characters in a serial narrative are not necessarily coordinated even if they appear together in every story. In order to be coordinated, each character in such an ensemble must have an independent, autonomous existence, just as, to reiterate my previous metaphor, two coordinate clauses in the same sentence must be able to stand alone.

In contrast, a subordinate clause cannot stand apart from the structure to which it's attached, which is, ideally speaking, a sentence that can stand alone without the clause. Going by these two definitions, longevity is irrelevant.

The question then arises: does dynamicity bear any relation to the stature of characters as being either coordinated or subordinated? When one sees that there have been one or two features devoted to Robin or one of his later epigoni, while to my knowledge Doctor Watson has no ongoing serials devoted to his exploits, one might think it had something to do with the fact that Watson, while courageous, doesn't usually bring much to the table in terms of his ability to trounce evildoers, while Robin's acrobatic abilities give him the ability to take on a variety of enemies without any help from his senior partner.

However, though megadynamicity insures that a given character doesn't need someone else to handle fights, it doesn't necessarily mean that said character and his partner are coordinated. The woods are full of superheroes who have tough sidekicks who are plainly subordinated to the stars of the features, with two prominent examples being "Doiby Dickles" from the Golden Age GREEN LANTERN and "Stretch Skinner" from the Golden Age WILDCAT.

Further, since most incarnations of the Sherlock Holmes concept are more about detection than fisticuffs, the fighting-ability of either Holmes or Watson has little significance in the Doyle stories. It's not impossible to imagine a take on the canonical Doyle stories in which Holmes and Watson are two detectives whose different strengths complement one another, along the lines, say, of the teleseries BONES. But to my knowledge Watson is always both intellectually and physically secondary to Holmes, with the exception of the spoof-tale seen above, WITHOUT A CLUE. There are even some serial concepts in which there's a starring detective who handles all the mental work while he has some legman do his heavy lifting, as per Nero Wolfe and his aide Archie Goodwin, or Ironside and his little coterie. But in these cases, the super-thinker is superordinate to his stooges.

Thus dynamicity, going by these disparate examples, would also seem inapplicable to the concept of stature. The only guide would seem to be that of pure functionality. Robin is coordinated to Batman because the reader expects a hero's sidekick to be able to operate on his own from time to time. In contrast, Watson's main function in the Holmes mythos is to be "the cat who looks at a king," and nothing more. His main status is to be a "subordinate clause" that adds important information to the main sentence-- if only that of making Holmes's feats of detection emotionally relatable-- but he's not important in and of himself.

More to come.

TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM I sussed out the centricities of various "mad scientists" and their creations. In Stevenson's DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Jekyll's alter ego Hyde has the greatest centricity, and is therefore the story's focal presence. In Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, the beast-men creations of the scientist are less central to the story than Moreau himself, and so he takes the position of the focal presence. However, in Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, both the creator and his creation share the spotlight.

From these books, it should be clear that the title of a feature doesn't indicate the focal presence, and as I've noticed elsewhere, this is equally true in other media. As others before me have noted, the Universal Frankenstein series is principally about the monster, while the Hammer series concentrates on the scientist.

This principle applies across the board to many comics-features. BATMAN started as a concept with just one focal presence. But the addition of Robin, BATMAN became known as an ensemble of two focal presences for the next twenty-odd years. After Robin went away to college, the serial feature frequently alternated between Batman on his own, and Batman rejoined with a new Robin, though some of the Robin-rebirths didn't go so well.

I would tend to say that whenever a comics-feature presented a team-mate as an "equal partner," then that partner, however nugatory he might be as a character, became an equal focal presence in the feature. Yet this sense of equality had to flow more from the creators' attitude toward the character than from the character's representation in the stories. As a contrary example, the comic strip introduced "Junior" to the DICK TRACY in 1932, and the youth got more than a fair number of storylines devoted to him. But he was not treated as an equal partner, and so he remained one of the main character's support-cast.

In the terminology I've introduced here, then, Robin has a transitive effect in terms of his centricity, so that he's centric to the action even in stories where he has no significant role. Junior, though, has an intransitive effect in terms of centricity. Whole story-arcs can be centered on him, but he's never really the focus, but rather a reason for central character Tracy to take action. Tracy is always the "common thread" of the stories, even if he doesn't appear that much in a given arc, much the same way that Will Eisner's Spirit is that feature's common thread even in stand-alone stories where the masked detective barely appears.

Titles of movies and movie-serials are similarly deceptive. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR picks up story-lines that are established in other movies, particularly AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, and Captain America shares the stage with about eleven other costumed characters. Yet the other Avengers and hangers-on are in the same position as Junior in the DICK TRACY strip: intransitive. The main thrust of the story focuses on two aspects of Captain America's personal cosmos: the fate of his old friend Bucky Barnes, and the need to keep himself and his fellow superheroes free of government oversight (which attitude is to a slight extent justified by the events of INFINITY WAR). The other heroes of CIVIL WAR are more in the nature of "guest stars" than supporting characters-- even the Falcon, who had the status of an equal partner during a brief period of the CAPTAIN AMERICA comic book, but did not achieve that status in the movie series.

But though the title of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR correctly foregrounds the fact that it's a Captain America film in a series of Captain America movies, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is not focused only upon the Avengers in the diegesis. The title in this case only functions to provide a semblance of continuity with the 2012 AVENGERS film, but in structure the story is just as much a sequel to the first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY film. INFINITY WAR's structure is directly patterned upon one of Jim Starlin's many superhero smorgasbords, which in turn owes its lineage to early multi-character mashups like Marvel's SECRET WARS. To be sure, not every character in such mashups is necessarily a focal presence. For instance, Shadowcat's quasi-pet Lockheed the Dragon, who was never a focal presence in the X-MEN titles, did not become one just because he also took part in SECRET WARS. He would still be intransitive in terms of centricity, just like Junior Tracy-- but almost every other hero in the story would be a focal presence, whether that hero played a large or small part in the story. (CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS also tosses in many hero-cameos that simply don't register high in terms of centricity.)

But INFINITY WAR doesn't have those niggling problems, and so all the featured heroes of the Avengers and the Guardians groups are focal, as is the one solo act, Doctor Strange, making a total of nineteen focal presences in all. The only characters who aren't part of the ensemble are those who weren't ever focal in other films: "helper-types" like Nick Fury, Wong, et al.

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.

NUM-INOUS COMICS PT. 2

This essay is a very belated response to a "part 1" published in February 2015. The gist of that essay was a response to a correspondent who wondered whether I might devote some time to showing how the NUM theory applied to comic books. I responded, in part:

it's a lot easier for any medium dealing with "drawn" characters-- and that includes comic strips and animated cartoons-- to invoke the marvelous, that level of phenomenality that allows for absolute freedom. Media that communicate via living actors will of necessity always be more limited, though the process of CGI-- which could be said to "draw" images real enough to mingle with live actors-- has leveled that playing field somewhat.

All that said, though, it occurred to me recently that it could be interesting to assign my categories to the "mythcomics" I've thus far surveyed, just as I've been doing regularly with all the movies reviewed at NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS! So, one afternoon, I devoted a few hours to making such entries.

It should surprise no one that of the ninety mythcomics thus far surveyed, the vast majority were indeed "marvelous," while there were only seven "naturalistic" comics and nine "uncanny" comics.
Even this determination requires a little explanation, though.

For instance, when speaking of the DICK TRACY comic strip as a whole, I would tend to assign it to the "uncanny" phenomenality, even though the series had its share of naturalistic adventures (like [JUNIOR TRACY FINDS A DAD] and marvelous exploits (the 1960s period when Tracy went to the moon, encountered Moon Maid, etc.) Still, following the logic of the "active share" theory, Dick Tracy falls into the uncanny domain because the detective's encounters with weird, non-marvelous villains-- Prunfeface, FlatTop, B.B. Eyes-- is the centric aspect of his mythos.

Similarly, as a whole the adventures of Batman fall into the domain of the marvelous, partly because of all the high-tech crooks like Mister Freeze and the SF-freaks like Killer Croc, partly because of the Bat's own penchant for technological wonders. But in two of the Bat-adventures surveyed here, no such marvels are extant, and so both "Laugh, Town, Laugh" and "Beware of Poison Ivy" fall into into the uncanny domain when considered apart from the series as a whole.

Whether this categorization proves useful in future, only time will tell.