OUTSTANDING EPIC FANTASY COMICS

 I've been thinking about the appeal of epic fantasy-- which usually includes the subgenre of sword and sorcery, and includes at least mystical marvels even if some version of science fiction may also be present-- and then wondering about the best examples of this super-genre in comic books and comic strips (not that there are a lot in the latter medium). 

My main criterion is an epic sweep showing either a made-up world or some version of Earth's archaic past, but magic does need to be present to make it fantasy, so "sword and planet" stories like the John Carter series are out, unless magic is evoked alongside science. Mike Grell's WARLORD, which is an "inner Earth" SF-world in which magicians and demons run around, would qualify if I thought any of its arcs were outstanding in some way. For my purposes I'm also thinking only of long comics runs or arcs; no one-off short stories set in fantasy-worlds. I tend to rule out serials in which characters are too jokey or too homey, which would probably let out CEREBUS in addition to its being a domain where magic is only occasionally important to the story. Ditto ASTERIX. If someone had done original-to-comics versions of Peter Pan or the Oz books I might tend to exclude those too. I'd like to have included ELFQUEST but I'm pretty sure all of its miracles fall under the rubric of science fiction, even with all the archaisms.

So far I've come up with:

PRINCE VALIANT-- I've only read a smattering of these reprints, but I would say Hal Foster may be the only guy in newspaper comics to master the form, though I've read that the only usages of magic occur early in the strip's history

THE WIZARD KING-- technically only the first part of Wally Wood's opus is really good; he was pretty ill when he rushed out a quickie second part

CONAN-- maybe the first fifty Marvel issues. Barry Smith was the best exemplar of Conan art though John Buscema did a lot of impressive work up to that point.

KULL-- more scattershot in its first Marvel incarnation, but the second one, titled KULL THE DESTROYER at times, included some imaginative Doug Moench scenarios

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED-- a Conan ripoff, but with more emphasis on magical fantasy, with some cool Keith GIffen artwork

BEOWULF-- DC only did six issues of this character, who was a little jokey at times but still had some epic sequences

RED SONJA-- most if not all of Frank Thorne's work with the character

GHITA OF ALIZARR-- Thorne again, and the first of two albums is very good while the second is still pretty good

INU-YASHA-- medieval Japanese fantasy with an epic sweep

VIKING PRINCE-- gorgeous Kubert art in the feature's more fantastic incarnation

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION

 In the response-thread for EYES OF THESERPENT, reader AT-AT Pilot brought up the topic of mythic content with respect to comics using cheesecake art. After making my response there, I decided to build on it with respect to the overall topic of art with a “sexploitation” angle and its possible relation to myth-content.

To define the second term first, “myth-content” arises in fiction when its authors produce what I term “epistemological patterns” in their work. These patterns are drawn from real-world observations about the way things work in different aspects of reality: patterns of the physical and metaphysical properties of the cosmos, or patterns of human beings in both their individual and social matrices. These patterns, when transmuted into literature, should not be valued in the same fashion that scientific data is valued: as reproductions of how those factors function in reality. Rather, the patterns serve to deepen the symbolic universe of each myth-narrative, thus allowing readers to reflect upon all the different factors that make up experience, when seen through the free play of imaginative fantasy.

The first term, “sexploitation,” also requires some analysis. The term seems to have sprung into being as a tag for works that sold themselves to the public by focusing upon spectacular versions of sexual depiction and/or activity. This view assumes a sort of baseline for normative sexual depiction, which might extend even to those works that seek to avoid sex as much as possible, like Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND. Starting from this supposition, one must assume ever-increasing levels of sexual depiction, and for convenience I tallied three such levels in this essay. More on the levels of spectacular depiction later.

While a number of critics have sneered at sexual depiction as taking audiences’ minds away from “better things,” sex and myth are certainly not in conflict in my system—not least because sex is an important aspect of archaic religious mythologies. Since I’ve continually favored the analysis of literary works through the heuristic tool of Joseph Campbell’s four functions, I thought it would prove stimulating to look at four sexploitation works I’ve already reviewed, each from the viewpoint of a particular function.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION arises most often in literary myths involving sexuality, probably because each individual’s sexual nature is as a bedrock of that individual’s personality. In my review of Wally Wood’s PIPSQUEAK PAPERS, I noted that he encoded his fairly misogynistic feelings about women into a short series of riffs taking place in a burlesque (in more than one sense) fantasy-verse. Perhaps the most revealing projection in PIPSQUEAK is the way he undermines the sex-fantasies of main character Pip toward his perpetually nude mate, the nymph Nudina. Pip starts the story as an undersized sprite whose dinky wang can’t possibly satisfy Nudina. He acquires a “second body” that allows him to enjoy the naughty nymph, but soon finds that it’s a drag to always be defending her from rapacious villains. At the end his reward for remaining true to Nudina is that he loses his alternate body and falls into slavery alongside her, in a situation where he can no longer satisfy her and must also put up with the child he sired by her. Whatever psycho-demons Wood sought to lay to rest via this satire, he nevertheless gave them much more complexity than he did in a romp like SALLY FORTH.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION looms forth wherever a given work seeks to show how human society is affected by the disparate natures of men and women. Thus, Russ Meyer’s FASTERPUSSYCAT KILL KILL, which starts out by welcoming the audience to “violence,” shows male and female social roles breaking down by the new breed of the Sixties Women. Three go-go dancers, less criminals than lovers of life in the fast lane, become involved in murder, mostly because of their bad-tempered, karate-chopping leader Varla. Instead of butting heads with the patriarchal order in the form of lawmen, the trio of hot babes—who have abducted a young, naïve woman who witnessed the murder-- comes into conflict with a trio of men living in a remote desert-cabin. Both the three men and the three women have various dark secrets, but none of the characters have “psychologies” as such. The Old Man, father to a normal young man and to a mentally impaired hulk, represents not so much abstract patriarchy as a male sexual desire to prey on women. Varla, hoping to rob the old hermit, pits both her feminine wiles and her penchant for violence against this male prerogative, but her victory proves pyrrhic. She sacrifices both of her female followers to her greed and almost destroys all three men, only to be ignominiously defeated by the girl hostage.

THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION perks up with some loony effects in the 1961 film INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. Though the viewpoint characters are Penn and Philbrick, a pair of goofy army privates, the real stars are the titular stellar villains, the risibly named “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” CREATURES was almost certainly conceived by writer Bruno VeSota as a baggy-pants reaction to a spate of “space Amazon” films seen during American cinema’s sci-fi boom of the 1950s. As one sees in most space-babe films, Puna and Tanga are designed to provide cheesecake-fantasies for the two homely schmucks. Both alien babes are tall and stacked, and though they’ve supposedly been hidden on Earth for ten years, both have coiffed hairdos and walk around in high heels while wearing outfits that look like swimsuits with flared collars attached. They came to Earth to scout the planet for possible conquest by their people, and they’ve just managed to get their damaged ship ready to return to “the black voids of space” when the army-ants come knocking. Yet the big girls are not only spies, but also scientists, and they maintain a small standing army of “vegetable men” as guards (a conceit probably swiped from 1951’s THE THING). Unlike most space Amazons, the two women are both physically and mentally superior to the male leads, and they display impressive mastery of sciences far beyond the Earthmen. Still, the alien ladies are defeated by their biology. Tanga tells Puna that the sympathy she feels toward the puny Earthlings is the stimulation of her “maternal nature.” Nevertheless, after ten years of raising little vege-men in incubators, Puna is hard up enough that even Philbrick’s dubious charms can persuade her to “sleep with the enemy.” Tanga also falls for Penn without putting up that much resistance. Science gives you weapons and technology, but sex, even with shrimpy guys, keeps you warm at night.

THE METAPHYSICAL FUNCTION culminates with in Frank Thorne’s first graphic novel featuring GHITA OFALIZARR. Ghita, a cheerful prostitute who seems willing to have sex with nearly anyone, has her receptive feminine nature (as a metaphysician might see it) invaded by a masculine propensity for violence. Necromantic transference is at the root of it, in that Ghita gets raped by an undead king, one significantly named for a Philistine fertility-god. From then on, Ghita is a reluctant badass, able to slaughter opponents with a sword rather than inviting them to her bed. Late in the story it’s revealed that her transformation was somehow stage-managed by one of her world’s gods: Tammuz, a female deity using the name of a male Sumerian myth-figure. In this raucous ode to conjoined sex and violence, Thorne suggests that both male and female natures proceed from mirroring forces in heaven, which means that Ghita is pretty much stuck between the rock of masculinity and the soft place of femininity for the remainder of her career.

Returning quickly to the topic of the levels, I would judge that the first three of these sexploitation examples fall into the category I term “titillation.” Only GHITA falls into the most overtly spectacular category, “pornification,” insofar as Thorne is evoking the fantasy of endless, cost-free sex and violence, paralleling, though not indebted to, the dominant associations of sexual pornography.

I chose works that fit these more extreme categories since they’re the sort of thing most readers envision when they think “sexploitation.” But to be sure, sexploitation also appears in what I termed the least spectacular category, “glamor.” Examples of glamor-sexploitation might have included such works as the 1966 BATMAN—which repeatedly appealed to older male viewers with sumptuous female eye-candy—and also Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, which I also attribute to the glamor category despite the series’ frequent use of female nudity. I may devote a future essay to discussing the aesthetic that separates the three levels, but for now, that’s all folks.

NEAR MYTHS: LANN (1984)

Frank Thorne's space-opera spygirl LANN enjoyed just one serialized adventure in the pages of HEAVY METAL during 1984. While LANN is primarily another sexy-adventure comic like the GHITA series, Thorne changes things up a bit by placing this heroine's adventures in your basic routine space-opera setting, and by giving the new girl a look distinctly different from both Ghita and Ghita's more famous predecessor Red Sonja.

The plot for LANN is fairly simple. Lann, who works for an intergalactic agency called "C.I.," is charged with finding the two grown daughters of a skeevy crime-lord. This gives Lann the chance to show off her capacious charms while seeking information in all manner of bawdy space-bars and bordellos. Ghita traveled with two helpers-- an older man and an obedient troll-- and Thorne alters the latter to a mute droid named Glitch, while keeping the same basic template of "dirty old man" in the person of Lann's mechanic Shard.

Rigorous character definition isn't exactly on the menu for these sort of quasi-Rabelaisian hijicks, but Lann is more than just a boobalicious blowup-doll. From the first page of the story, Thorne makes clear that Lann is some years older than her twenty-something bod. He apparently doesn't want to rain on any reader's parades by revealing just how old she was before she received a "recycled' body. Still, the dialogue between Lann and Shard on page 2 suggests that Shard has already seen Lann's previous body, and that said body was perhaps closer to his own age, since now he claims that "you've made me into an instant dirty old man." Thorne doesn't make the age-discrepancy central to the story, but it becomes a leitmotif throughout, with Lann herself opining, "It's vanity that chose youth over morality." When Lannn has a random hookup with a middle-aged reprobate, he remarks, "This is the first time I've felt easy with a dame young enough to be my kid." She merely hints that they may be closer in age than he thinks. The intrepid sex-agent also hooks up with a genuinely younger conquest, but this doesn't turn out well for him or for her.

Simple though Lann's sole outing may be, Thorne's work is distinguished by his ability to suggest the interactions of sex and violence as comprising a single vision of total excessiveness for its own sake. I wonder sometimes if any comics-artists in this politically correct era has even attempted to follow in Frank Thorne's impressive footsteps. I would tend to think that his only rivals might be Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, but even their sexy work is often hamstrung by their catchpenny politics.

NEAR MYTHS: THE THOUSAND WIZARDS OF URD (1981-82)

THE THOUSAND WIZARDS OF URD, Frank Thorne's follow-up to GHITA OF ALIZARR, shared its origins: appearing first as installments in Warren's 1984 magazine before being collected in an album-like volume. URD is, like GHITA, a very bawdy take on Red Sonja, the character whose fan-popularity boosted Thorne to comparative celebrity. But whereas I found GHITA interesting enough to invoke Bataille to describe its interactions of violence and sexuality, URD is just very well-drawn sword-and-sorcery.

I won't dilate on the plot, since there isn't much of one. GHITA had an episodic plotline as well, but the episodes were strengthened by an overarcing goal: Ghita's mission to re-take the city of Alizarr. The story featured a lot of "sword" but not nearly as much "sorcery." URD reads like Thorne decided to shift the balance this time, with a lot more magical phantasmagoria, closer to the content of the Thorne-Clair Noto collaborations on RED SONJA. However, perhaps because artist-writer Thorne is so focused on depicting his S&S world as a place of infinite bawdiness, there's not a lot of room for enchantment. (And I never figured out the reference to "thousand wizards," since' there's just one. He can project himself into various phantom duplicates, but he certainly doesn't come up with a thousand such proxies.)

It's some months after Ghita and her boon friends Thenef and Dahib have kicked the trolls out of Alizarr and assumed the reins of power. Having been used to the wastrel life, they decide to cut out on their boring royal duties for a while and check out a traveling acting-troupe, for which Ghita and Thenef performed. But their vacation comes at a bad time, for Rahmuz, the wizard of Urd, conspires to get rid of Alizarr's current rulers and take over. The three friends do indeed overtake the acting-troupe, which leads to Ghita hooking up with a handsome actor and thus making her sometime lover Thenef jealous. But more serious problems arise, as Rahmuz's threats flow thick and fast, ranging from a tribe of nasty dwarves to an Asian assassin. Eventually Rahmuz captures Ghita, and tries to sacrifice her in an otherworldly dimension referred to as "the Ebony Sea."  The foul-mouthed heroine wins out, of course, and is reunited with her friends. There's a small suggestion that things might grow more serious between Ghita and her almost-old-enough-to-be-daddy mentor, but Thorne naturally prefers to end things on a bawdy note. To the best of my knowledge, that's where the sage of Ghita ended-- possibly because Thorne said everything he had to say with the character.

Thorne's writing is heavy and sometimes repetitive, but the tone is at least consistent, and there are flashes of strong wit throughout. The biggest problem with URD-- which looks forward to the near-shapelessness of 1989's RIBIT-- is that Thorne loses control of the story. In the GHITA graphic novel, the heroine meets a strange unicorn, "the Ghibelline," which apparently wants to mate with her. I interpreted this as Thorne having a laugh at the medieval "unicorn-and-virgin" trope, However, the unicorn appears again in URD-- and it turns out that it contains the spirit of Khan-Dagon, the man who raped Ghita and somehow imprinted male attitudes upon her. This by itself would be an okay turn of events, but then, by the end of the story, Ghita once again encounters Khan-Dagon-- and this time he's one of Rahmuz's undead soldiers in the Ebony Sea. It's as if Thorne became obsessed with reiterating this part of Ghita's mythos, rather than moving on to fresh ground-- obsessed to the extent that he didn't really plot out why the dead ruler turned up in either of these peculiar places.

THOUSAND WIZARDS OF URD offers lots of hard nudity and loose language, as only Thorne could render them, but it's unfortunately also the place where the stronger threads of the Ghita-myth start to unravel.

MYTHCOMICS: GHITA OF ALIZARR (1979)

The most famous sword-and-sorcery heroine was launched in the pages of Marvel Comics' CONAN THE BARBARIAN in 1973, but for the next three years no one at the company managed to find a proper venue to exploit her popularity with fans. She received an origin in 1975, one whose approach to the subject matter of rape has long been a bane to feminists, and later that year she finally received a berth in the second volume of MARVEL FEATURE, followed by her own comic. During this period artist Frank Thorne became inextricably associated with the character, not only drawing her adventures but also appearing at conventions in "wizard's garb" alongside models in Sonja-costume.

Thorne's tenure with Marvel's "she-devil with a sword" ended in 1978. Roughly a year later, the artist began a new swordswoman series, GHITA OF ALIZARR,  in the pages of Warren's 1984 black-and-white magazine, producing enough material that in the 1980s Catalan published two albums of the character's adventures. The first collected adventure is the only one I'll address here.

Ghita exists in the same sort of feudal fantasy-world as that of Red Sonja; one where the author has built his universe out of an assortment of archaic cognomens and/or nonsense-words. Ghita's name, as the artist cheerfully admits in his afterword to the first volume, is taken from the Hindu religious tome "The Bhagavad-Gita," the name of her city Alizarr appears to be a random nonsense-word, and the city's principal deity is named Tammuz, but has no resemblance to the Mesopotamian god. An additional Mesopotamian name, Nergal, appears as well, but again Thorne's version of this myth-figure is in no way beholden to the archaic myth.

Though Alizarr, the city of Tammuz, is currently beseiged by savage, Nergal-worshiping trolls, Ghita-- a dead-ringer for Sonja, aside from being blonde-- has no interest in participating in the war. She's been a whore for many years, and is currently the favorite of Alizarr's king, Khalia, though she seems to sleep with whoever she pleases. At the start of the adventure, she's just finished doing the two-backed beast with her old friend Thenef, who's drawn to look like Frank Thorne's wizard-persona. Thenef, sixteen years the senior to Ghita, has been something of a mentor to the young woman, which has apparently led to his becoming the court magician, even though Thenef is a fake with barely any real grasp of magic. Ghita's only comment on the impending invasion is to wonder if the leather-skinned trolls might prove tolerable lovers.

Then Ghita and Thenef are ordered to attend the bedside of King Khalia, severely wounded in a battle with the trolls. Khalia anticipates that he will soon die of his wounds, but he's come up with a solution to the troll problem. Khalia orders his favorite, his court wizard and some courtiers to descend into the royal mausoleum, where Thenef is expected to use the mystic "Eye of Tammuz" to revive Alizarr's long-dead warrior-king, the mummified Khan-Dagon. (In Philistine mythology, Dagon was sometimes given fertility-associations.) Thenef has no clue as to how to revive a dead man, and so he stands in danger of being revealed as a fraud. To save Thenef's life, Ghita takes hold of the Eye of Tammuz and crams into the gut of the dead mummy.

The gem works. Khan-Dagon returns to life, all signs of physical corruption erased. However, as soon as he sees Ghita, the former king has no ear for Khalia's purpose. The revenant kills Khalia, whose courtiers flee. Khan-Dagon throws Ghita down and proceeds to rape her. Only Thenef remains, but though he's not courageous enough to fight the rapist, he passes Ghita a dagger. She stabs Khan-Dagon back to death, possibly by dislodging the magical jewel in his gut, which Ghita keeps thereafter.

It's not clear from the narrative whether or not Ghita's been raped before, though one assumes that her profession forced her to deal with intemperate male attentions. She is, not as ultraliberal critics would wish, traumatized by the experience, but she is changed, for it appears that some of Khan-Dagon's personality has been transferred into Ghita's soul. As she and Thenef seek to flee not only the mausoleum but the beseiged city, Ghita takes along Khan-Dagon's sword and tries to wear his armor as well. The duo encounter Dahib, a half-troll conceived from the union of a human and a troll, and he uses his trollish talents to alter the armor so that Ghita can wear it (though, as with Red Sonja, not a lot of the swordswoman's charms get concealed). Then Ghita undergoes her heroic baptism of fire, when the trio encounter a small party of trolls. Ghita slaughters them all with Khan-Dagon's sword, and she escapes the city in the company of the false wizard and the devoted half-troll (who thinks the former whore to be the incarnation of the goddess Tammuz).

The remainder of Ghita's first adventure then focuses on her masculine desire to force the trolls out of Alizarr, rather than simply fleeing to the nearest possible refuge. This isn't to say that the former concubine accepts her unwanted transformation. Shortly after killing the trolls, Ghita muses, "Khan-Dagon. You are within me, and I loathe your presence." If an ultraliberal encountered this line out of context, he might assume that it was an automatic condemnation of "toxic masculinity." But in time it becomes clear that Thorne doesn't view Ghita as a victim. In his afterword he ventures that he would like to think of Ghita as being kin with the works of Rabelais. Be that as it may, Thorne's softcore sword-and-sorcery also has much in common with George Bataille's concept of the interpenetration of sex and violence./ On page 64 of the 1983 Catalan edition, there's a scene in which Ghita and Thenef have riotous intercourse after taking refuge with Dahib's tribe of fellow half-trolls. The caption, which seems to combine the POVs of both Thenef and Thorne, reads in part:

The seedy delirium of bordello life would mold Ghita. The implicit violence of whorish sex would breed explicit violence in the sword of Khan-Dagon. 

But despite the implied equivalence of To be sure, Ghita does not forget her old nature easily. At first she lays plans to re-take Alizarr with the help of the half-trolls and a giant monster right out of a Japanese "tentacle porn" comic.

But later she has her own monologue, renouncing Khan-Dagon's "mad schemes"-- even though he doesn't seem to be literally possessing her-- and swears that she will again become a true woman. A strange child appears to Ghita, as if to reflect back on an earlier statement that Ghita is infertile, but the child turns out to be none other than the goddess Tammuz, claiming that she somehow stage-managed Ghita's destiny. Ghita and her forces succeed in driving the trolls and killing their leader, but afterward she returns Khan-Dagon's sword to the sepulcher, in order to forswear the dead man's influence upon her feminine nature. However, since this story ends

with Ghita swearing to rule Alizarr with Dahib and Thenef-- and since there was at least one more adventure in her future-- it seems axiomatic that Ghita probably picked up that sword again.

Thorne's surging lines are true to the Rabelaisian spirit he invokes, but I must note that he doesn't delve as deeply into fantasy-imagery as he did in the RED SONJA title, one of which I analyzed here. As if to acknowledge the absence of wild fantasy, an incident in GHITA shows a forest-unicorn seeking out the swordswoman in the belief that she's a virgin fitting of his attention. It's probably not complete coincidence that RED SONJA #1 dilates on the same theme, portraying a more fulfilling-- and less explicit-- union between a girl and her horse.

NULL-MYTHS: RIBIT 1-4 (1989)

In GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT.3, I summed up the "null-myth" thusly:

Nowadays, I would not associate my idea of the "null-myth" with this base denotative functionality: over time it's come to mean a work that had "super-functional" potential coded into the narrative but which became denatured by authorial confusion or misjudgment. 

In most of the examples I've analyzed so far, most of the time the "authorial confusion" stems from the author using mythopeoic symbols in a desultory manner, as if they were mere functionalities, or allowed the symbols to be reined in by didactic considerations. However, there's also the possibility that the author may allow himself to be overwhelmed by his own symbolic prolificity. Like the monarch who complained that Mozart had "two many notes," an author can produce "too many symbols" for his narrative to support. Case in point: Frank Thorne's four-issue Comico title, RIBIT.

RIBIT is almost impossible to summarize. It takes place in some vague future in which there abound references to 20th-century culture, but there's no physical resemblance to any 20th-century settings. Thorne's world is a phantasmagoria out of Bosch, in which both magic and science are hopelessly intermingled. In essence, it's a one-shot feature that allowed Thorne to draw any damn thing he felt like drawing, whether it worked within the context of a narrative or not.

For most of the story, the title character looks like a three-foot-tall version of Thorne's most famous comics-character, Red Sonja. Ribit starts out as the lizard-like familiar of a sorceress named Sahtee, and though Ribit is not human, she nurtures a devotion for Thog, a big ox of a human who works for Sahtee, Sahtee, like a lot of fantasy-sorcerers, has rivals, and she tries to create a formidable warrior-woman as a servant. The creation goes awry with Sahtee's magic combines with little Ribit, who then turns into slightly bigger Ribit. Ribit has no real loyalty to Sahtee, though, being totally devoted to Thog. Nevertheless, events transpire to get Ribit, Thog and Sahtee-- who gets transformed into a furry little homunculus-- involved in a lot of crazy fantasy-world shenanigans. 

I note with amusement that in the Grand Comics Database entry for this series, the contributor didn't list any character except Ribit-- which may indicate that he simply threw up his hands at Frank Thorne's tendency to whip out a new character every few pages. The result is definitely an "embarrassment of riches," in the sense that the art always looks impressive and imaginative, but there's not much context to any of it, except that one can be sure that whatever Thorne drew amused the heck out of him. 

(Incidentally, from the angle of the combative mode, Ribit occasionally demonstrates some fighting-talent, but the stories are so shapeless that Thorne clearly had no intention in creating a warrior-woman to rival Red Sonja. Indeed, by series' end Ribit goes back to being a lizard-- which makes one wonder what kind of lizard Thorne ever heard, that made the sort of sound associated with frogs?)

In my review of PRINCESS KNIGHT, I said that the "problematic structure" of certain works by Tezuka might 'stem from the same "problem" one finds in the works of Jack Kirby: both artists were just so damn creative they sometimes overwhelmed their own narratives with "new stuff."' Yet I felt that PRINCESS KNIGHT still had some structure, enough that I termed it a "near myth." RIBIT reminds me of the later issues of the RED SONJA. Supposedly Thorne worked on these with two writers, the very wordy Roy Thomas and comics-newcomer Clair Noto, but these issues-- aside from issue #1, reviewed here-- look like Thorne just drew whatever struck him as fun to draw. This was a sad state of affairs, because Thorne's artwork was at its best depicting Sonja's world of fantasy-- but the stories wandered and made no sense.

To sum up, RIBIT is an example of "underthinking" rather than "overthinking." Or as I put it in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

...freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

MYTHCOMICS: "SCALP HUNTER" (TOMAHAWK #133, 1971)

Though Native Americans arguably got no better treatment from the white citizens of early America than did people from Africa and Asia, "Indians" excited the imagination of the European mind, both on the continent and in the U.S. Noble red men-- and sometimes equally noble red women-- appear in great profusion in most of the fiction we deem "westerns." Arguably one might rename the genre 'frontier stories," since many of the stories took place in the Eastern United States-- thus becoming "eastern westerns," as some wit styled them. One such example is DC Comics' original TOMAHAWK series, whose original adventures rarely strayed past Texas.

As this reproduction of the first Tomahawk story shows, Tomahawk's heroic path is thoroughly imbricated with that of the Red Man. Though he's already an adult when he receives tutelage from a kindly Indian tribe, he becomes an expert in woodcraft and even modifies his regular name, Tom Hawk, to one emblematic of Indian culture. In the first story he even has an Indian girlfriend-- Fenimore Cooper would never have approved!-- but I presume that she was never seen again.

However, the idea of white/red intermingling reappeared toward the end of the DC series. During the late 1960s the title was faltering under the aegis of talents like Ed Herron and Fred Ray, so there was an attempt in the last years of editor Murray Boltinoff's reign to give Tomahawk's frontier adventures a more realistic edge. TOMAHAWK #131, which began Joe Kubert's editorship, tried one last-ditch effort to revitalize the title, retitling the feature "Son of Tomahawk" (albeit only on the cover; the indicia-title stayed the same). In this reworking, a young Tomahawk met and married an Indian woman, settled down, and raised a family. Given that the original character's adventures always took place prior to the end of the Revolutionary War-- and given that Tomahawk and his wife were drawn to look like they were in their sixties in SON OF TOMAHAWK-- it would appear that it took a while for the couple to conceive, for "Hawk Son of Tomahawk" was portrayed as a tempestuous young man in his twenties. In any case, for the last ten issues of the title, the stories by Robert Kanigher and Frank Thorne depicted the lives of Hawk, his parents, and his little brother Small Eagle as they found themselves continually embroiled in violent conflict, often involving racial tensions (Hawk looked white while his brother looked Indian, but their community knew them both as "half-breeds.")

Most of the Kanigher-Thorne stories are good frontier adventure, but the story entitled "Scalp Hunter" is their most mythic evocation of the racial theme. Hawk finds himself targeted by a cyclopean enemy known only as "Bounty Hunter." (I suspect that the original intention was to call him "Scalp Hunter," since that's the name he's given on the cover; perhaps someone at DC wanted to soften the impact by changing the name inside the comic.) Hunter is a white man who carries around a "trophy pole" adorned with dozens of Indian scalps, but he's never been convicted for murder because he's claimed self-defense every time. The killer targets Hawk, calling him both "injun" and "half-breed," so the young man attempts to leave to protect his family. Hunter captures Hawk and tells him how he became obsessed with murdering every Indian he could find: an Indian raiding-party killed and scalped the man's family while he was away scouting for land on which they could all settle. The horror of his loss so unhinges the Hunter that after he buries his mutilated relatives, he swears at their gravesite to take enough Indian scalps to stretch from the graves to the top of nearby mountain "Snow Peak." For good measure, Hunter even explains the bear-claw necklace he wears; that he stole it from one of a medicine-man victim even as the Indian warned him that the amulet would bring Hunter bad luck.

Though Hunter has Hawk at his mercy, he decides not to shoot him outright-- "That'd be too easy! You're special!"-- but orders to strip off his shirt, gives Hawk a knife and a headstart, and begins to hunt him down. Hunter also strips down but remains armed with a pistol. Hawk, who's stated earlier that he has no Indian woodcraft, has to learn the hard way how to walk softly in the forest, but it doesn't help. Thus he strikes for high ground, scaling Snow Peak (which just happens to be in the area where Hunter took Hawk prisoner). Eventually Hunter triggers an avalanche to deluge the young hero. However, when the villain tries to claim the buried body-- boasting of the "good luck" his amulet has brought him-- Hawk stops playing possum. In the ensuing fight Hunter almost goes over a cliff but catches himself on the edge. Hawk reflects is tempted to let the killer die: "the weight of the scalps he took-- are draggin' him down!" The young hero reconsiders and tries to pull Hunter up, but Hunter refuses his charity and allows himself to fall: "If you wanna beat me, redskin-- you'll have to follow me plumb tuh hell!" Hawk watches the villain fall, laughing all the way. Then he returns home with a token of his adventure; the bear-claw necklace. When his father asks him if he found out "how much o' you is Indian, " Hawk replies, "as much as this claw is bear."

Between them, Hawk and Hunter form two responses to the mythic tension between white and red races. Hawk, of course, signifies the humanity that binds the races as being essentially identical. Hunter, despite his hatred of Indians, has taken up a life that most white people of the time would have deemed "savage," and thus not far from the life of real Indians. Not only has he taken up the practice of scalping, thus imitating the horror perpetrated by his family's killers, he even emulates an Indian-like ritual by hunting Hawk. Kanigher doesn't try to draw a deep portrait of Hunter's racism or his insanity. However, one may speculate that the only reason the character would consider Hawk "special" is because he Hawk is a product of two races, and so Hawk is a living testament that the separation Hunter cherishes can be abolished. Thus he prefers to die with the belief that if he takes his own life, Hawk has not managed to beat him, while to accept Hawk's charity would be to admit that a red man could best him.

I called Bounty Hunter "cyclopean" earlier, because I think Kanigher and Thorne have modeled him on the figure of the cannibalistic giant. though of course Hunter does not literally consume his victims. Even Hunter's insane scheme for vengeance-- to create a trail of scalps connecting his family gravesite to the top of a mountain-- bespeaks the ambition of a giant, rather than that of a merely mortal man.

In the flashback scene, the medicine-man predicts that Hunter will have bad luck if he steals the bear-claw necklace. The trope of the villain "hoist on his own petard" was one commonly used by Kanigher; about a year previous to this story, the author pitted the young Tomahawk against a fiend with a penchant for hangings, who is undone when his scarf gets entangled in a tree-branch, hanging him. However, the bear-claw necklace plays no role in Hunter's defeat. I'll speculate that because of the final parallel between "the claw that is all bear" and "the half-breed who is all Indian" suggests that Hawk himself is Hunter's "bad luck" personified; he masters the killer of red men in a rough parallel to the way men, particularly red men, can master animals. And while Hawk is a liminal figure connecting the worlds of red and white men, the character's final words indicate that the Indian way of existence, of blending with the environment to survive, may be more fundamental than the civilized mode of life-- which may be the very thing that has made Native Americans so popular in popular culture.

MYTHCOMICS #18: RED SONJA #1

PLOT-SUMMARY for "The Blood of the Unicorn" (script Thomas & Noto; art Thorne): As a mounted Red Sonja approaches a forested area her horse stumbles in a hole and breaks its leg, so that she's forced to stab the animal to death with her sword. On foot, she comes across a band of men attempting to capture a wild unicorn. The unicorn tries to bolt but collides with a tree and breaks off its horn, which falls into the hands of the band's leader, a sorcerer named Andar. Sonja fights off the hunters and mounts the unicorn, which carries her away. Together the warrior-maid and the unicorn wander the forest, enjoying one another's company in a "nigh-mystic tie" while the unicorn's horn slowly grows back. Meanwhile Andar, who has returned to the village he rules with his men, uses the broken horn to compound an immortality serum, which he drinks (though it's not clear whether he thinks it makes him immune to being killed or simply able to live forever as long as he's not fatally attacked). Despite having accomplished his goal, Andar does not want anyone else to share his immortality, and is irate to hear that Sonja still travels in the company of the horned beast. He and his men attack Sonja and the beast, and Andar almost manages to kill Sonja, only to be killed instead when the unicorn impales the sorcerer on its horn. The other men scatter, but soon Sonja realizes that she cannot stay in the unicorn's forest forever and the two of them part, so that she can follow her "warrior's destiny" while the beast remains "riderless and free."

MYTH-ANALYSIS: One of the easiest type of stories to write-- and thus a type that rarely rises above the monosignative-- is one in which an obsessive personality pursues some idée fixe. Admittedly this may lead to something as plurisignative as MOBY DICK. However, in the sword-and-sorcery genre to which RED SONJA belongs, the story-type usually takes a simple form. Some tyrant wants the sexual favors of a maiden; the hero protects the maiden and kills the tyrant; the hero often if not always gets the sexual favors denied the tyrant.

"Blood" is interesting in that it seems more about an obsession over a rather abstract form of *libido.* The backstory for Andar specifies that as a boy he saw a "white colt" and that he became "enflamed" with the desire to touch it, but the creature frustrated his attempt by fleeing. The backstory does not precisely say that Andar saw a real unicorn, but he evidently thought that he did, for he later researched the creature's history and thus learned the story that its horn would grant one eternal life. However, even though Andar doesn't want to have sex with the unicorn, he's just as jealous as any rejected lover, becoming angry at "the mere thought of the warrior-woman and the unicorn together." Similarly, he wants the creature dead so that no one else can partake of its bounty of eternal life; he even kills one of his aides when the man tries unsuccessfully to take a sip of the immortality serum.

Sonja's role parallels that of the hero who does enjoy the freely-given favors of the "maiden," though here too, what passes between her and the unicorn is a communion that transcends and yet encompasses sexuality. Clearly her sojourn with the creature draws on medieval stories in which virgin maidens alone can draw unicorns out of hiding. Yet the medieval myth is somewhat overturned by the fact that Sonja is not a virgin, though "Blood" makes no reference to her standard backstory. Red Sonja's first appears as a Marvel character-- one very loosely patterned after a Robert E. Howard warrior-woman-- in CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23(1973). Here she suggests something of the "iron virgin" in that she swears no man will sleep with her unless he conquers her in battle. However, roughly two years later, a story in the KULL black-and-white magazine discloses that as a young woman Sonja suffered rape by a bandit-chieftain, and that she was empowered by a goddess who required Sonja never to sleep with anyone save a conqueror.

It's interesting, then, that the unicorn might also be viewed as something of a "rape survivor" in the most metaphorical sense, in that Andar wants to plunder the unicorn of its horn as a bandit took away Sonja's virginity. The unicorn is often referred to as an "it" but there are two or three telling moments when the script specifies that the beast is male, which is why the relationship between the girl and the stallion does seem quasi-sexual. In the first panel in which Sonja beholds the unicorn's horn, the Thomas-Noto caption reads that "His [the unicorn's] eyes move, as though aware of Sonja's presence." And in keeping with dozens of girl-and-horse stories from BLACK BEAUTY to Silver Age SUPERGIRL, Sonja is most impressed with the unicorn when she rides him. "Tarim's blood; what power!" she exclaims.

One could easily read Andar's fate as that of the biter bit, or, more specifically, the rapist raped-- and to be sure, just before the unicorn stabs Andar to death, Andar is about to plunge into "the supple flesh" of Red Sonja. But while the horn-as-penis motif is probably there in some sense-- Andar's name certainly references the Greek "andro-", meaning "man"-- both script and art place more emphasis on the irony of Andar's fate. Because Andar is killed by the very thing that was supposed to confer on him immortality, one cannot know whether he actually had immortality and lost it, or whether the legend of the serum was false from the start. But the script does confer on the fallen villain a dubious "immortality:"

"For we mortals will chase and dream of life eternal till both stars and unicorns are scattered dust...and Andar's ghostly voice will whisper for all time to bid others follow him down the doomed path where he led."

As for Sonja, the setup of her continuing adventures dictated that her idyll with her equine friend had to end. Nevertheless, the parting is given its own mythic resonance, suggesting that even mortals who respect magical critters can't remain long in their company, precisely because they are mortal. All of which would certainly put a different philosophical spin on the cover-copy of RED SONJA #1, where the heroine, flanked by various beasties as well as Andar and the unicorn, shouts at the reader:

"To the death!"