NEAR-MYTHS: "THE DAY OF THE SWORD" (KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3, 1975)

As I noted at the end of my analysis of Red Sonja's first appearance in the CONAN comic, the heroine enjoyed about five stories, either solo or in tandem with Conan, that never explained her strange declaration that no man would ever enjoy her body unless he first conquered her "on the field of battle." Various comics readers found this less than salubrious, since it suggested that the heroine was daring the male sex as a whole to attempt raping her. This is not quite the tenor of the origin story, though one can see why that reading might occur to some readers.

"Day of the Sword" is plotted by Thomas but scripted by Doug Moench, while Howard Chaykin provided the art. And to be sure, rape is foregrounded in the story's first pages. While riding through a forest, Sonja comes across three highwaymen torturing a helpless man whom they've just robbed. The robbers threaten to despoil Sonja of her maidenhead, so the warrior woman kills all three. Then she turns to their trussed-up victim-- only to find that she knows him.

This cues a lengthy flashback, showing that five years ago she was a humble farm-girl in Hyrkania, living with her parents and brothers. The text stresses that she envied the boys for being given swordplay lessons by their father, but that being a girl she couldn't even lift a broadsword.

Then the father's past as a mercenary invades the quiet farm-life, as his old comrades track him down. Apparently the unnamed leader bears some unexplained grudge, for after Sonja's father declines to join the raiders on their next job, the commander gives the order to kill all of Sonja's family. As for Sonja, the commander satisfies his lust with her, and then burns down her house, expecting her to die as well.

Sonja escapes the house, at which point an unnamed deity appears to her. In contrast to some later retellings, the deity is not specified to be either a god or a goddess, but rather "shaped of neither man nor woman, yet embracing all the strength and beauty of both." The deity then makes a confusing declaration: that Sonja, by the act of saving her own life from the fire, has tapped into her hidden strength. The deity doesn't say that he/she is bestowing any special powers on the young woman, in contrast to the 1985 movie. In fact, the deity indulges in some confusing double-talk, suggesting that Sonja can, if she has the will, embrace the destiny of "a wanderer, the equal of any man or woman you meet"-- but only if Sonja vows to the deity that she will never allow herself to be "loved by another man, unless he has defeated you in fair battle-- something no man is like to do after this day!"

The origin, then, changes the implications of "The Song of Red Sonja" prose story. Therein, the heroine asserts that "no man" shall get busy with her unless he defeats her, not "another man." The original line implies that Sonja is an Atalanta who won't yield her favors to anyone but a superior male, and that she's implicitly a virgin. "Day" states outright that Sonja has had her virginity stolen by an unworthy man whose only advantage was biological strength. She can't change what has already happened to her, but she can become a new paradigm, that of a woman with unparalleled strength. After the deity disappears, Sonja gets the chance to test her new power, when a straggling mercenary happens across her, and she swiftly kills him.

But is it her strength, or something the deity gave her? Thomas and Moench play it both ways, having Sonja wonder at the ease with which she wields the sword and kills the raider: "A savage thrust-- learned by watching her father-- by long practice under darkness? Or was it, perhaps, a skill granted to her by a vision?" She even has a "Joe Chill" moment, swearing to find her rapist again someday. 

Then the flashback ends, and Sonja briefly exults that she's caught up with her rapist at last. But then she realizes that the man can't understand her, for the robbers' torture has unhinged his mind. (That was some really effective torture; one wouldn't expect someone to lose their mind from pain except from days and days of torment.) Sonja laughs at the cosmic comedy of it all, and then departs, leaving the still bound man to be slain by approaching wolves. I take the closing line about how the rapist's face is no longer "hideous" to her simply connotes that he no longer holds any capacity to haunt her dreams.

It's a strange story, particularly since the mysterious deity gives no reason for demanding that singular vow. (By contrast, the 1985 movie suggests that maybe Sonja comes up with the vow on her own, not through any supernatural inspiration.) But on balance I think Thomas, Moench and maybe even Chaykin meant it to be empowering. The seventies were the first time American culture as a whole seemed to accept the necessity for women to learn martial skills to protect themselves, and Sonja finding her own strength, with or without a deity's help, seems in tune with these sentiments. Other iterations on the origin may improve upon the sketchiness of "Day," but for my money, it's unlikely that anyone has done better, or will do better, than Frank Thorne. Following his much-celebrated tenure on the RED SONJA feature, he came up with a rewriting of the Thomas-Moench tale, in the superlative debut story of GHITA OF ALIZARR.

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.   

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.