NULL-MYTHS: BLOOD AND JUDGMENT (1986)

I should preface my remarks on Howard Chaykin’s four-issue SHADOW series by stating that I was never (unlike the celebrated Harlan Ellison) a strong fan of the character prior to Chaykin’s take on him. Growing up in the sixties, I heard fragmentary references to the hero and his mythology, most of which probably stemmed from the popular radio show rather than from the pulp magazine series wherein the crusader originated. There were no paperback reprints of The Shadow until 1975, and the only comic book that took a shot at reviving the Master of Darkness was an insipid superhero title from Mighty (Archie) Comics in the mid-sixties. The short-lived DC Comics adaptation in the early seventies was my first real exposure to any accurate version of the character, and though I found the series enjoyable, it was not one of the high points of the period. Sadly, most revivals of the Shadow in comics since then have failed to last into the high numbers of the pulp magazine’s decades-long run, and the hero was scarcely served any better in the media of TV and movies. These days, I’m reasonably well acquainted with the mythology of the character, especially through copious reprints of the original pulp tales. But even now, I’m not a big Shadow fan.

I didn’t like the four-issue BLOOD AND JUDGMENT any better in 1986 than I do now, but I must admit, it stands as one of the few times a comic-book adaptation of the Shadow made good money for its publishers. To be sure, a lot of extrinsic factors played a part. In comic books the relative freedom of titles aimed at the “mature readers” in comic-book specialty stores made it possible to stretch the boundaries of what one could do in “masked avenger” narratives, resulting in what I’ve chosen to call “adult pulp” in contrast to the juvenile variety seen in most though not all actual pulp magazines. A lot of eighties comics were just the same puerile stories with greater sex and ultraviolence—THE OMEGA MEN comes to mind—but there were valid makers of adult pulp as well, talents who shone in the eighties as they never could have in the seventies. Miller and Moore were the top of the heap, but Chaykin, something less than a “fan-favorite” in the seventies, became a Big Name Creator with First Comics’s 1983 publication of AMERICAN FLAGG. Whatever FLAGG was, it wasn’t just warmed-over clichés with more violence ladled on top, and at least three (if not more) critics for the hero-hating COMICS JOURNAL reviewed the title in its heyday. (I was not one of them; despite initially liking the series, I just didn’t have much to say about the feature back then.)

By the middle eighties DC had fully embraced the aesthetic of adult pulp, with the four-issue SHADOW series appearing in May 1986, roughly three months after the debut of Frank Miller’s wildly successful THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Miller explicitly stated that at the time he thought of RETURNS as a “brass band funeral” for the superhero genre, even if Miller’s reborn bat ended up becoming more of a meal ticket in the long run. But what did The Shadow mean to Howard Chaykin?

As seen in the first link above, Harlan Ellison manifestly despised Chaykin’s take on the character. I expressed some doubts as to how “mythic” the original pulp character was, but on the whole, if a creator wanted to reduce a famous hero to a travesty of his (or her) original self, I thought said creator ought to have a really good reason, beyond putting money in his bank account.

Having reread BLOOD AND JUDGMENT, I don’t think Howard Chaykin gave a ripe fart about the Shadow or his mythology. He does take various elements of the pulp stories—principally, the ideas that the Shadow acquired his mental skills in some far-Eastern domain, and that Lamont Cranston, the hero’s supposed alter ego, was merely one of his many disguises. Since BLOOD AND JUDGMENT takes place contemporaneously, Chaykin gives the Shadow a straightforward hero-origin. After crash-landing in a Tibetan super-science enclave named “Shambala,” pilot Kent Allard is enlisted to become a “paladin” for the Shambalans, who for vague reasons want to have their own urban avenger fighting crime in big cities. Chaykin puts no more into this origin than he must to make the story work; he’s manifestly uninterested in the Shadow’s career and barely gives a reason for his retirement to Shambala for some 35 years. Super-science does allow this version of the Master of Darkness to remain young while all of his former aides have become doddering old men and women. Apparently Shambala gave Allard a nose-job as well, since by 1986 he’s become the spitting image of Reuben Flagg.

What interests Chaykin is presenting a raucous, ribald vision of the modern world. It’s never a vision of great depth, but it certainly has a personal vibe to it. There’s copious violence—a mystery villain, Preston Mayrock, starts killing the Shadow’s former aides in order to lure the hero out of hiding—but the real emphasis is kinky sexuality. This makes an odd fit with The Shadow, who was one of the least sexual of the pulp-magazine heroes. Chaykin’s ageless Shadow has already fathered two offspring—both fully-grown Asian men. In addition, he is served by an agent named Lorelei with a super-sexy voice (her word balloons are all hearts) and after he seduces a woman who hates him, she ends up calling him “master.” Preston Mayrock is even more of a fount of perversion, being a wheelchair-bound old man who’s married a ripe twenty-something chippie. He allows his wife to screw his clone-replica “son” because Preston plans to have his brain transplanted into Preston Junior’s body.

It’s all very racy, but not much better developed than one of the “saucy stories” from the pulp-magazine era. The prose stories of the original Shadow were naïve and juvenile, but they weren’t incapable of depicting shades of feeling and characterization. The only time Chaykin’s era doesn’t seem like a self-satisfied parody of a hero is a single scene in which the villain sics guard-dogs on the Shadow, and the hero spares the “innocent ones” by mastering them with mesmerism. Without characters to engage the reader, most of Chaykin’s visuals prove busy and ultimately off-putting.

For me the only positive aspect of this mini-series is that because it sold well, DC kept this SHADOW series going for nineteen more issues, usually scripted by Andy Helfer and penciled by such luminaries as Bill Sienkiecwicz and Kyle Baker. Most of these stories are not much deeper than Chaykin’s, but Helfer embraced a more genial, Miller-like comedic approach in adapting the adventures of this classic crimefighter, so they’re more fun to re-read than Chaykin’s smarmy sensationalism. His outlook worked better with a series of his own creation, though, on a side-note, I reread a handful of the AMERICAN FLAGG installments and found them also lacking in mythicity.   

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

_____

I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 2

"As John Gardner said in his book ON MORAL FICTION, there is room in the world for trivial art, but it is only because high art exists and is recognized and is worshiped and honored that the world is safe for triviality."-- Harlan Ellison,"The Harlan Ellison Interview," TCJ #53 (1980).

As I've not read the Gardner book in many years, I can't say if Ellison has fairly summarized that author. I do seem to remember thinking that Gardner didn't offer much logical proof for his artistic judgments.

Judgment is a key factor here. Ellison is certainly not the person one would go to-- today or in 1980-- for a reflective analysis as to what makes one work good and another bad. What's interesting about this 1980 quote is that so little has changed after 30 years. To this day, would-be critics in any medium rail against trivial works as if they were direct threats to the survival of the "good stuff."  Few critics stop to ask whether or not the same audience that wants to lose itself in what Ellison chooses to call "shit" are likely to ever be attracted to what any elitist, be it Ellison or someone else, considers to be "high art."

One irony of Ellison's excoriation is that, in contrast to his interviewer Gary Groth, the author seems to cherish his memories of "trivial art." On one hand he sneers at mainstream comics for putting bad work out there just to fill pages and meet deadlines. Yet he speaks of his passion for the character of The Shadow, which was certainly framed by the same pulp-adventure aesthetic one sees in comic books. I doubt that I've read as many of the Shadow's adventures as Ellison, but what I have read strikes me as not only trivial art, but bad trivial art. The Shadow is IMO a classic character, but most of the actual pulp adventures strike me as dull mysteries that are just barely redeemed by the hero's supernal presence.

Later, following Howard Chaykin's less than reverential treatment of the Shadow for a 1986 DC Comics limited series, Ellison was irate with the artist for profaning the character. Suddenly, trivial art was important, because it was something Ellison liked. In a radio show for HOUR 25, Ellison commented, "At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths?'"

It may be that for Ellison, calling the Shadow a myth is no more than empty rhetoric. Certainly it would seem to contradict his statement above. If trivial art is only redeemed by the existence of high art, then how can any example of trivial art stand on its own enough to be a "myth?"

In my Jungian-Campbellian view, of course, the Shadow is a myth not simply because I like it; it's a myth because it incorporates dimensions of Campbell's four functions: the psychological, the sociological, the cosmological and the metaphysical.  The depth with which a pulp-character comments on these aspects of life may be much more limited than that of whatever Harlan Ellison deems high art-- which, going on the TCJ interview, would seem to include Michael Moorcock-- an inclusion that might have raised the eyebrows of John Gardner.  But the salient fact is that even "trivial art:" can sometimes incorporate serious content, just as some "high art" is capable of moments of extreme triviality. This would include petty roman à clef  attacks on one's real-life enemies, for example-- which just might appear in some of the works of-- Harlan Ellison.

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 1

A recent forum-post reminded me of the momentous 1980 Harlan Ellison interview in COMICS JOURNAL #53. I hadn't read it for a while, and my memory was that the first time Ellison slagged the work of artist Don Heck, he was doing so in the mistaken impression that Heck had done the art to the 1970s comic NOVA.

Instead, as I reread the interview, it turned out that the NOVA reference came second. In the course of the interview Ellison was ranging all over the place, holding forth on his personal gospel of artistic excellence vs. journeyman mediocrity. On page 76, Ellison has just finished exulting in his own escape from the hell of network TV: "...they get you to write this shit and they corrupt you and writers are turned into mere hacks. I won't do it any more but there are plenty who will..."

Slightly later he makes the caveat that in some cases the willing hacks don't even have talent to start with, which brings him to an excoriation of the total worthlessness of all mainstream comics then current. Ellison asks interviewer Gary Groth to name the "worst artist in the field," and Groth names Don Heck.  When Groth also mentions that a particular publisher once praised Heck, Groth assumes that the praise was for Heck's ability to turn the work in on time. For Ellison this is tantamount to compromising the integrity of the work for a paycheck. Somehow it never occurs to Ellison that this contradicts his earlier point: if Heck had no talent to begin with, then, one may reason, how can he compromise the work?  But then Ellison is off again, touting Neal Adams as a conscientious professional who respects the work over the demands of the industry. After opining that "five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams," THEN he remembers how much he disliked the art of NOVA. He wonders if Heck was the artist on that work; Groth agrees that it was terrible art (as do I, incidentally) but neither remembers that Sal Buscema committed the crime against great art.

Four JOURNAL issues later, the magazine's lettercol carried several responses to Ellison's tirade, one of which came from Steve Gerber. Gerber praised some of Heck's work, not coincidentally work on which Heck and Gerber had collaborated. Then Gerber asserted parenthetically that Heck had suffered some personal tragedy in his life. In his response Ellison did not retract his opinion on Heck's work, but he did admit that in some situations "one should watch one's mouth."

Strangely, I recall reading an interview with Heck-- who passed away in 1995-- in which he denied that he had experienced any personal tragedy that had interfered with the quality of his work. In fact, I recall that Heck claimed in said interview that the story had taken on "urban legend" status in his field, where dozens of fellow workers believed it but no one knew precisely what had supposedly happened to the artist. But since I cannot at present remember where I read this, readers are advised to take my recollections with a grain of salt.

Next up: examining the roots of an elitism from over thirty years ago.