ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

MYTHCOMICS: "LIGHT MAKES MIGHT"/"SEEING THE LIGHT" (IRON MAN #153/211, 1981/1986)

Though on average my mythcomics essays are once every two weeks, I decided to get ahead of Thanksgiving week. This essay analyzes two stories done about five years apart by different creators, linked only by the use of the same villain in two IRON MAN stories, a type of discourse-linkage I explored in my essay on three interlinked AIRBOY stories.

Prior to this date, I'd only found one example of a mythically concrescent IRON MAN story, the Stan Lee-Don Heck tale "Suspected of Murder." The mythic discourse behind that story was basically psychological, but it always seemed strange to me that the feature wasn't stronger on the sort of resonant fake science that made for good mythcomics in, say, FANTASTIC FOUR. I sampled a number of Iron Man stories from different periods, and though technology is often mentioned in many narratives, most authors just seem to pull any old sort of fake-science out of the hat, without trying to relate it to real-science. This relation isn't absolutely necessary, but it generally helps.

I would've liked to have found a mythic Mandarin story, since he stands as one of Iron Man's better villains, politically incorrect though he is. Instead, I found the Living Laser.

Though the character debuted as a solo villain in an AVENGERS tale, he was often utilized as a "cannon fodder" type, often teamed up with other low-ranking malcontents. However, in both of these stories, respective writers David Micheline and Howard Mackie at least attempt to pattern the villain's powers after what real lasers can do.

Though "Light Makes Might" picks up from the ongoing plot of the previous issue, that issue only introduced the hero's main foe in the last few pages. A "B-plot" was established, in that Iron Man rescues Tony Stark's then-current girlfriend Bethany and her estranged (and drug-addicted) husband Alex from an evil organization, and that B-plot concludes in #153, as well as ending the three-year collaboration of David Micheline and Bob Layton during that period. But the focus of "Light Makes Might" is the creators' attempt to beef up the mojo of the Living Laser. Not only does he put the captured hero in a pretty clever death-trap-- one whose solution is just as clever-- he also shows off new powers: to create laser holograms, to blind enemies with light-flares, and to turn functionally invisible.

At the conclusion of "Might," the Laser's powers go berserk, and the hero, to keep him from triggering the weapons in the sanctuary (poised to strike at the U.S.), hurls the Laser into the sky, where he explodes into a display of colored lights. The sacrifice doesn't make Iron Man happy with himself, but the story doesn't dwell on the hero's emotions in this regard. Bethany, after her rescue, chooses to stay with her husband and to leave Tony, which act contributes to Tony's later return to alcoholism.

At the time issue #211 appeared, the IRON MAN feature saw a number of short-term creative talents before Micheline and Layton returned for another run. Assistant editor Howard Mackie and artist Alex Saviuk collaborated on "Seeing the Light," which established that the Living Laser was still alive. Neither individual worked on the feature again, but Mackie followed the lead of Micheline's story quite well, getting a certain amount of decent melodrama out of the Laser returning as an insubstantial phantom-- though this did not nullify his laser-powers, nor his desire to be avenged on Iron Man.

Considering that he'd never written the feature before, Mackie also did a better than average job of catching the character-interactions of regulars Tony Stark and James Rhodes. Even the Living Laser, who is in all likelihood is no one's favorite villain, is at least two-dimensional. Mackie's versions of the characters are all somewhat tentative about their ability to function-- Tony at one point tells James "we both know what it's like not to be able to help ourselves"-- and this may've been intended to gloss this issue's B-plot, in which Bethany comes back long enough to watch her husband Alex die of an overdose. This death had the effect of freeing up Bethany Cabe for a possible return as Tony Stark's girlfriend, though after her role in #211 she disappeared from the feature for some time, indicating that her creators Micheline and Layton had no interest in such a comeback.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE ORIGIN OF THE MANDARIN" (TALES OF SUSPENSE #62. 1965)

In my previous essay I mentioned that of all the early Iron Man foes, only the Mandarin attained "epic status." This status was entirely built upon the type of racial-- not necessarily racist-- myth-motifs that editor/writer Stan Lee and artist Don Heck brought together for the character's early Silver Age appearances. None of the early Mandarin stories are mythcomics, as they tend to be structured as fast-paced thrill-rides, usually forcing the armored avenger to plumb the depths of his Oriental opponent's gadget-filled hideouts.

The principal myth-motif Lee borrowed stems from the late books in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series. When the series began in 1912, the author modeled his Asian villain on the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion, and Fu's desire was to restore China to its former power, while implicitly keeping its culture and social stratifications unchanged. Over time, it became clear that Chinese Communism had destroyed "Old China" more thoroughly than any colonial invaders ever could have, and thus in the late Rohmer books, Fu Manchu was just as often in conflict with the Chinese Communists as with Nayland Smith.

This racial /political myth of a conflict between Old and New China appeared next in Atlas Comics' 4-issue YELLOW CLAW series. Neither Lee nor Heck was creatively involved with the unsuccessful series. However, since Lee did edit the title, it's probable that he remembered how the titular villain frequently embarrassed the Chinese Communists, showing New China to be thoroughly inferior to his scientific wizardry. The Mandarin's first appearance in TALES OF SUSPENSE #50 reflects the same pleasure at seeing modern Communists terrified by the spectre of aristocratic China.

The villain's first appearance doesn't have much else to offer, except that, as the above scene shows, Iron Man's initial encounter with the Mandarin comes about not because the masked menace has done anything, well, menacing, but because the U.S. government is nervous about what he MIGHT do. For superhero comics of the period, which usually asserted that only the bad guy struck first, this was a very atypical "pre-emptive strike."

The story from SUSPENSE #62 is actually the second of two parts, the first part ending when the Mandarin captures his armor-clad enemy, and the only part of the story that shows a strong mythic consciousness is the Mandarin's origin, which he narrates to his helpless foe.

I mentioned before that the Mandarin, like earlier models, incarnated "aristocratic China," and nowhere is that more apparent than in "Origin." The villain doesn't disclose his original given name, but claims that his father was descended from Genghis Khan. In addition, the Asian villain also states that his mother was "a high born Englishwoman." Both parents perish on the day of the Mandarin's birth, and he claims that the displeasure of the Chinese gods caused his father to perish beneath a fallen idol, while his mother then passed of a "broken heart." The infant is then raised by his sole living relative, his father's sister-- but she wants her brother's fortune for herself. She considers leaving the child in the care of poor parents, so that the aunt can have the inheritance and the future Mandarin will be raised "as a peasant." Yet, the moment she thinks of doing this, a chandelier almost hits her-- and so she decides to raise her nephew with an eye to making him hate all humankind, the way she does. Admittedly, Lee's script suggests a characterization of the Chinese people as overly superstitious-- and yet, the overall effect of the story is to agree; that the Mandarin has been marked as having a special destiny.

Most of the family fortune goes to schooling the young nobleman in "the sciences of the world, the arts of warfare, and the subtle crafts of villainy." But the proto-Mandarin and his aunt neglect to pay their taxes to the new regime, and so they're turned out into the street. The aunt immediately pops off, and the nobleman wanders from place to place, refusing to toil for his food like a low-born citizen. To his good fortune, before he can starve, he trespasses on the fearsome "Valley of the Spirits," showing a lordly, fearless attitude toward the spirits.

What he meets isn't precisely a spirit, though it does have the semblance of a dragon, long the symbol of Chinese imperial power.

He learns that the "dragon" is actually the remains of a dead alien, and he taps the long-dead creature's machines to master a level of super-science beyond the level of humankind. Thus he rises to his position as having sovereignty over his own little kingdom in China. The origin-story ends, and so does the overall story's claim to mythic status.

Neither Lee nor Heck ascribe any symbolic import to the villain's most recognizable feature: the ten rings from which he projects an array of super-forces. Additionally, the Mandarin's hands are not as "claw-like" as one sees in most "Yellow Peril" comics. In this essay I advanced a hypothesis as to why Asian claw-fingers became so prevalent in American imagery of these villains.

I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this icon.

By the mid-60's, I believe editor Lee was trying where he could to eliminate imagery that seemed overtly racist. For instance, though one online reference claims that the Mandarin was drawn with "buck teeth," the Mandarin suffers from an overbite in only two panels of his first appearance, and never again. Yet the visual idea of the rings does call attention to the fingers-- even though they're neither claw-like nor long-nailed-- so that the rings' presence may owe something to an earlier and no longer acceptable image.

MYTHCOMICS: "SUSPECTED OF MURDER" (TALES OF SUSPENSE #60, 1964)

The Iron Man of the film-world helped spawn the cinematic Superhero Revolution. But when I look back upon Marvel's Iron Man of the Silver Age, I get the sense of a character who just missed being a flop, like Doctor Droom and the many incarnations of Henry Pym.

There had been a few armored Golden Age heroes, but Iron Man boasted a superior concept from the outset: a noble scientist-hero who had invented his armor to save his own life, and then began using it to save other lives and fight crime. In addition, whereas Reed Richards' version of 'science" in FANTASTIC FOUR only rarely suggested the hard labor of engineering, in IRON MAN Tony Stark, despite being a genius, really worked at his profession. I'm not saying that the feature didn't utilize phony technology for the sake of entertainment-- anyone remember the hero's short-lived "reflecting mists?"-- but even fake science can take on mythopoeic status. 

The psychological angle was strong, too, strongly resembling the pattern of Doctor Strange's 1963 origin, in that Tony Stark starts off as "the man who has everything," and has to cope with being a wounded warrior-- though his form of coping would surely reinforce Alfred Adler's notion of "positive compensation." The origin-story itself isn't all that interesting, offering little more than polemics in its opposition of nasty Communists and saintly pro-democracy forces. These political views, not objectionable from a mythopoeic standpoint, never became anything more than knee-jerk postures. Similarly, for the hero's first six adventures, he's largely indistinguishable from any number of Golden Age heroes, in marked contrast to the soap-operatic elements that appear in SPIDER-MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR from the get-go.

The seventh tale, appearing  in TALES OF SUSPENSE #45 (1963) finally got around to giving the feature a couple of supporting characters, secretary Pepper Potts and chauffeur Happy Hogan. By introducing,Pepper and Happy, the feature's editor and writers succeeded in endowing the fabulously rich, fabulously handsome billionaire Stark with a "common touch." The tycoon patently has no friends aside from his two co-workers, and there's no indication that any of his many dates with jet-setting beauties ever came close to being an actual romance.

Despite this improvement, there was the sense that editor Stan Lee-- who also wrote most of the early scripts-- was flailing for a direction for the Golden Avenger (who started out as grey for one issue). In addition, Iron Man didn't boast one of the most stellar rogues' galleries in those days. Although the Mandarin would take on epic status and would remain a world-beater for many years, characters like Jack Frost, the Scarecrow and Mister Doll were somewhat less than stirring. Of the Communist villains, two were slightly better than average: the Crimson Dynamo, who turned on his evil masters and died in defense of democracy, and the Black Widow, originally a road-show Mata Hari who proved popular only after both another reform and a substantial retooling.

The first time Lee seems aware of the dramatic potential of his damaged character appears in TALES OF SUSPENSE #56, which starts out with Iron Man flying into a belated rage at the fact that he can "never lead a normal life."

However, though the story presents a memorable moment of a hero being thoroughly self-centered, Lee chose not to pursue this line of thought as he and Ditko had been doing in the SPIDER-MAN title. Stark gets religion and everything goes back to normal.

The next issue introduces a foeman who might be considered a very loose mirror-image of Stark: the archer Hawkeye. A lot of Iron Man villains were "negative compensation" types who envied Stark's millions and sought to destroy his company or reputation. Hawkeye, a carnival archer whose name is not initially revealed, gets in a snit when Iron Man takes attention away from his act. His solution is to become a superhero himself.

Typical Marvel complications ensue: the newly minted crusader becomes suspected of criminal activity right out of the box. Then, by the wildest of coincidences, he's recruited by the Black Widow, who just happens to be looking for a super-pawn to use against Iron Man. Though the Widow had vamped Stark a few times-- though with no indication that she really cared about him, or vice versa-- Hawkeye fell hard for her charms, and in due time, she reciprocated, once Lee decided to put her on the reformation road. Thus, despite being a loyal American, Hawkeye became a "Commie dupe."

I mention both characters here because they are Iron Man's physical adversaries in issue #60's "Suspected for Murder."  Yet the story's main emphasis is upon Stark's feeling of being trapped in his armor-- which is to say his own compensation-creaton-- a mood aptly reflected by the splash page, which shows Stark imprisoned in a bottle by his alter ego.

This tale was the closest Lee got to exploring in detail Stark's ambivalence toward his double identity. To be sure, it wasn't as impressive as the better Spider-Man stories on the same theme. But since throughout Tony Stark's history the hero had been forced to wear one piece of his armor at all times-- his heart-stimulating chest-plate-- Lee evidently decided that the best way to put the hero through the mill was to make it impossible for him to remove the armor as a whole. He suffers a major heart attack in issue #59, and then finds that he can't take off the armor without risking a fatal incident. In keeping with real incapacitated human beings, Stark is chained to the device that keeps him allive. He even has an existential moment, saying that, "I'm a prisoner of Iron Man-- of my own creation!"

He's also a prisoner of the set-up he's created, in which Iron Man is seen as Stark's hired hand. Tony Stark must disappear to protect his double identity, but when he does so, Pepper and Happy immediately become suspicious of the flunky who seems to know more than he's telling about the boss's disappearance. Pepper and Happy also find the hero in compromising circumstances, and the police interrogate him, though without a corpus delicti, Iron Man can only be "suspected of murder," not formally charged. His Avenger-buddies seem to turn a cold shoulder, since he can't explain things to them either. And even after Hawkeye attacks Stark's factory and after Iron Man drives him off, one of the security guards comes at the hero with Stark's own "anti-armor gun," another case of employee-loyalty that almost kills the employer.

Unfortunately, this installment is the only one that gets the utmost myth-potential out of this double-identity peril. In the ensuing issues Stark does figure a way to get out of his armor without killing himself, not to mention resolving another plot-line in which everyone thinks Stark is dead. I suspect that Lee just didn't feel the impetus to pursue as many tangents as he did in other features, and I can't dismiss the possibility that the feature might've benefited from a different artist than Don Heck. In the Silver Age, Iron Man, despite great potential in many areas, never managed to "upgrade" itself beyond the level of decent formula.

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 1

Though I've discussed Bataille's concept of transgression frequently on this blog, Dudley Young's idea of "lawlines" affords me with an apt metaphor for both the physical and the cultural matrices that are being transgressed-- a word that means "stepped over."

In LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION, I considered only the physical effects of the kinetic elements of sex and violence, because I wanted to illustrate how the two elements were distinct but could shade into one another. Thus I wrote:

If even "right" sexual relations are a transgression, as Bataille clearly *does* argue in his 1957 book EROTISM, then what is being transgressed against? Clearly, although there have many marriages in which one or both of the spouses were coerced into marital bliss, many were not so coerced and so did not transgress against either the will of the spouses or the will of the community.
I may be taking Bataille into something more like the territory of object relations with my own answer, but it seems evident to me that the only constant transgression is that of one body interacting with at least one other body so as to violate the integrity of both...

So it's in the physical sense that "right" sexual relations can be transgressive. But generally speaking, "wrong" sexual relations tend to be transgressive in terms of cultural matrices.

Consider, as a starting-point, one of the most transgressive sexual acts in the history of culture, the one that Big Sigmund Freud made the centerpiece of his theory of interpersonal relations.

Now, it's often a source of amusement for some people to say, "Hah, Freud named his complex after Oedipus, and Oedipus didn't even know he was sleeping with his own mother!" But that ignores the deeper reason that the Oedipus myth attracted Freud. What Freud must have liked about the Oedipus myth was that the hero, upon receiving the cryptic prophecy, was properly disgusted at the idea of marrying his own mother-- whom he believed to be his adoptive mom Merope-- and so he took measures to avoid doing so.  Yet the prophecy is fulfilled precisely because Oedipus took that precipitate action-- an action which is are especially ironic in Sophocles' version, since the hero recounts that some of the nobles in his adopted city of Corinth had questioned his background. Freud often represented his complex as being just as insuperable as a Delphic oracle; no matter how one might try to avoid marrying one's mother, one would always do so, at least in a metaphorical sense.

For moderns, Oedipus' transgression may be more cultural than physical. Yes, Jocasta is his true mother, but neither of them knows that, either during their sexual relations or when they bear children. Greek religion, being focused on the physical, viewed the sex between unknowing parents as a source of pollution, though Sophocles emphasizes the killing of Laius above all else. Yet had Oedipus had sex with Merope, who was the adoptive mother who raised him, in one sense this would have a much more "physical" transgression, since Oedipus had grown up believing that he'd come from Merope's womb.  However, had he possessed from childhood full knowledge of Merope's identity and had done the deed with her when he became old enough to do so, that would have been a purely cultural transgression.

So OEDIPUS REX is a transgression against both physical, personal boundaries and against cultural boundaries. Do we see the same types of transgressiveness in my other example from THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT?

I argued in the above essay that in the backstory of the Fantastic Four, one can find a "taboo-and-transgression" pattern akin to that of Oedipus, even though this particular FF story has nothing to do with the incest-taboo.  Obviously I could have chosen other examples of the trope "two male friends fighting over the same woman," ranging from Shakespeare's TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA to late-night movie fare like WHAT PRICE GLORY? The conflict in FANTASTIC FOUR is particularly interesting, though, because Lee and Kirby step around it as if it were a literal taboo.  In the above scene Ben Grimm only agrees to fly Reed's plane to counter Sue's disparaging view of him, and the only other clue that Ben fancies Sue appears a few pages later, when he starts a fight with Reed later, claiming that Sue "loves the wrong man." There are no other references to unrequited love in the rest of the issue, and the conflict is only referenced indirectly from then on-- most significantly with the introduction of the character Alicia, clearly a "consolation prize" for Ben Grimm in that she looks a lot like Sue but cannot see the Thing's ugliness.

This reluctance on the part of the creators is especially strange in that in other contemporaneous features, the "two guys fighting over the same woman" trope is played for all it's worth: Tony Stark vs. Happy Hogan, Peter Parker vs. Ned Leeds (though the two of them are never really friends), and Thor vs. Balder (though once again, the latter's brief passion for Sif is forgotten when Balder takes up with another "consolation prize" figure, albeit one very unlike his original love-object.) It's possible than one or both of them felt queasy about introducing too much heavy drama in the feature-- for though they seem to have taken pains to keep it from looking like a standard superhero comic of the period, they must have known that their only probable audience was that of preteen boys. Since no one up to that point had incorporated "heavy drama" in a superhero-like feature, Lee and Kirby probably decided that bringing up Ben's unrequited love would be too disruptive to group unity on a regular basis. It was easier to have him or Johnny simply storm off about this or that perceived slight, so that the family-like dynamics could be perpetuated. Later, in fact, Ben and Johnny become comparable to quarreling children whose squabbles Sue and Reed must break up, making Sue into a symbolic mother-figure to both of them.

Now, this example of transgression is not physical in the least: Sue is certainly not related to Ben, nor have they even had a sibling-like relationship. If anything, Reed fits that profile better, since he's eventually given a backstory that suggests a sibling-like closeness, in that Reed and Sue are said to have been neighbors. So the transgression must be cultural. But what lawlines are being transgressed?

Of course there's no cultural consensus that an Old Suitor is automatically to be preferred to a New one, or vice versa. It's not difficult to call to mind multiple examples of Hollywood movies in which it's right and proper that a New Suitor should displace an Old Suitor, as well as examples that support the verdict of Lee and Kirby's setup: that Reed and Sue alone are "right" for each other.  So in this case the "lawlines" are entirely contingent on the internal logic of the series: the lawlines exist because the authors say that they exist, at least within the cosmos of FANTASTIC FOUR. In contrast, in the cosmos of IRON MAN, the contention of Tony Stark and Happy Hogan lasts only so long as the authors can get some mileage out of it. Finally the authors end up giving the girl to the supporting character, at least partly because there was no future in matching up Tony with his secretary-- in marked contrast to the current movies.

In a future essay in this series, I'll enlarge on some of the other ways in which implied lawlines can be just as arbitrary, if not more, than the real laws that govern society.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 1

My title for this essay-series is meant not as a statement of unalloyed fact, but an indicator of a tendency that I feel to be grounded in the fundamentals of narrative communication. In this, I think it's a little more philosophically sound than a famous, and equally attention-seeking, assertion by Dave Sim; i.e., "No one wants to be a woman."

In one of my earliest blog-essays here I wrote:

For most genre-fiction-- particularly those media which, unlike prose, hinge on depicting the appearance of the characters-- the standardization of sexual attractiveness is a useful narrative tool. In romances, for instance, it's almost de rigeur to depict both hero and heroine as meeting a bland standard for attractiveness. This is not because the narrative is trying to convince anyone that homely people don't mate in real life, but because it's advantageous to the narrative's smooth progression to depict only good-looking people becoming romantically entwined. As long as the hero and heroine meet a basic standard of attractiveness, an audience-member is less likely to be thrown out of his/her participation in the story to think, "How can Character A possibly be attracted to Character B?"

Though my essay touches on some of the disadvantages of this standardization, other critiques by such low-wattage luminaries as Julian Darius and Kelly Thompson show little or no awareness of how this standardization-- or objectification, as some prefer to call it without exception-- serves a consistent narrative purpose. This purpose remains constant regardless of the intensity utilized in a given work, be it one of GLAMOR, TITILLATION or PORNIFICATION.

By way of demonstrating this consistency, I cite an excerpt from this post by fan-blogger Barry Pearl.  In this essay Pearl quotes from an interview with Silver Age IRON MAN artist Don Heck:

“I used to think of Pepper Potts as Schluzie from Bob Cummings’ “Love That Bob” (TV Show). She was always interested in the boss and never could go out with him, and she’s thinking of all these dumb broads Stark is going out with. Happy Hogan was just a pug type, like Joe Palooka.” “Stan called and said he wanted Pepper to be prettier,”Heck laments. “That wasn’t my idea. As far as I was concerned, that killed it. If she’s homely and she winds up going out, then it’s a big deal. If she’s prettier, who cares? “Then, Stan said, ‘Make Happy handsomer.’ I liked him with his banged-up ears and crooked nose. He was fun to do at that point. When suddenly everybody had to be pretty, then I didn’t like him.”

Here we have what many fan-writers would automatically assume to be an appeal to the male reader's groinal region.  Don Heck wanted to depict support-character Pepper Potts as a slightly homely young girl, modeled on, but not quite as homely as, the actress who played the part of "Schultzie" on TV's "Love That Bob."  Under editor Stan Lee's direction, Pepper soon became as "model-gorgeous" as any of the jet-setting babes with whom Tony Stark cavorted.  I believe that writer Archie Goodwin finally tossed in a note about how Pepper had transformed herself, but clearly Heck was justified in feeling that his conception had been put aside.

However, note that Lee also wanted Heck to make the pug-ugly character of Happy Hogan handsomer.  Why would an editor require that if he's just trying to appeal to horny young boys?

The truth may lie in the fact that Lee was less concerned with giving Heck the latitude for more naturalistic-looking characters-- with which I do think Heck did a fine job-- and more concerned with developing the characters in the soap-operatic style that he Lee had started developing for the Marvel superhero titles. 

Soap opera, of course, is all about romantic torment.  Rarely on real soap operas does one see a homely girl catch a handsome guy, or a homely guy nab a real looker.  Why?  Because, even though such things do happen in real life, they seem unlikely to the audience, which expects that "beautiful people always win," particularly with respect to the prize of "other beautiful people."  It's a pecking-order that most if not all human cultures internalize, and even when one sees exceptions, many rationalize the deviation by saying something like, "X married Y for Y's money."

Stan Lee's scripts for IRON MAN show Tony Stark going out with various models and rich bitches, but as far as romance goes, only Pepper Potts resonates as a real romantic interest.  I surmise, though, that Lee thought his readers would find it incredible had the playboy started dating his homely secretary.  Hence "homely" must change to "hottie."

At the same time, Lee surely wanted to promote the "triangle" aspect of the Tony-Pepper-Happy relationship.  In the original Heck version, most readers could imagine Happy and Pepper together, but not Pepper with Tony, nor Happy providing any competition for Tony if the playboy decided to date his homely secretary.  Therefore I surmise that Happy gets a makeover so that he will appear as a credible romantic rival.

Such were the demands of beauty in the innocent Silver Age.  In Part 2, I'll examine some modern permutations.

MANDARIN DUCKED

Though I haven't seen IRON MAN 3 yet, I recently responded to an online comment on the general theme of "why did the adaptors bother to use the name of the Mandarin if they weren't going to keep anything else about the character?"  As usual, though I'm aware of some of the immediate contingent circumstances (e.g., Chinese investors and audiences), my response takes a more generalizing approach.

_________________________

Though I can't claim to have any direct knowledge of Hollywood thinking, I'm going to say that this is not a phenomenon not confined to comic-book adaptations. I think a lot of Hollywood adaptors have or come to have an adversarial relationship with the material adapted. In both the films KISS ME DEADLY and MODESTY BLAISE, the adaptors use assorted bits from the novels adapted, but play with those bits to suit their desires, often to pursue themes opposed to the original authors. That's why Frank Miller's SPIRIT doesn't resemble Eisner's SPIRIT. Miller didn't want to make a respectful Eisner movie; he wanted to make a Frank Miller movie.

Why even keep those bits if they're going to change them entirely? I think the adaptors are under some pressure to have SOMETHING that resembles the property the company buys. I have no idea who in the chain of command said, "Let's use the Mandarin in IM3," but once it was sent down, the adaptors were stuck with it. In this case the exigencies of political correctness probably informed the changes in the character, rather than personal preference as it seems to have been with DEADLY and BLAISE. But the principle is the same.

OUR ARMIES AT WAR, WITH MONSTERS

Part 1 and Part 2 of DYNAMICITY DUOS I discussed some of the ways in which individual characters, or small groups of characters, might pass from a lower level of dynamicity to a higher one.  With respect to such characters as Ellen Ripley of the ALIEN franchise, I demonstrated how such a character could begin at the "middle" level of dynamicity and then, in the course of the narrative, pull herself up by the proverbial bootstraps to the "high" level.  Even so, in the film ALIENS Ripley remained remained on the low end of that level, that of the "exemplary" as opposed to the "exceptional" level of her alien opponent. Later, ALIEN: RESURRECTION would transform the heroine into something more than human.

I also want to touch on the question of military might, which is often seen employed by large rather than small groups of characters, a might often pitted against the focal presences of giant monster-films.  I also touched on this principle with respect to small character-groups in TWICE THE MIGHT PT. 2, noting:

...whereas the sense of escalation to a final confrontation is absent from ANGRY RED PLANET, FORBIDDEN PLANET builds this sense by virtue of the baffled astronauts as they attempt to learn the nature of their invincible enemy.

To be sure, when the Id Monster is defeated, it isn't because of the clash between the weapons of Earth-science and the power of the Krell machines. The Monster is defeated by undermining the source of its power in Morbius, who is in essence the Monster's Achilles heel.

Nevertheless, without the clash of energies that establishes how potent the Id Monster is, there would be no narrative perception of the need to seek such a vulnerable point.

Prior to FORBIDDEN PLANET, another 1950s SF-spectacle followed essentially the same pattern.  In Ishiro Honda's 1954 GODZILLA, the audience witnesses the incomparable power of the focal monster.  Though the armies of this film are contemporary ones, as opposed to the far-future forces considered in TWICE THE MIGHT 2, the level of force unleashed by the Japanese military is functionally covalent with the forces unleashed by the heroes of FORBIDDEN PLANET.  The monster is at least affected by the intensity of these forces, though on the whole Godzilla is able to overcome everything humanity throws at him, including a huge electrified fence.

However, one genius-scientist, the war-weary Doctor Serizawa, is able to redeem mankind by unleashing a technological weapon which even Godzilla cannot resist: the deadly "oxygen destroyer," which reduces the giant creature to a skeleton-- though the resilient reptile manages to come back for further rampages in the many sequels.  Serizawa's invention is a tangible expression of the force that mankind as a whole can bring to bear.  So the 1954 GODZILLA qualifies as a combative film, since it both centers upon the results of the combat (the narrative value) as well as evoking the sense of sublime power (the significant value).

Consider in contrast, however, the 1953 adaptation of H.G, Wells' novel THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.  There's no question that the film evokes the grandeur of clashing powers as the American military strives in vain to bombard the near-invulnerable vessels of the Martian invaders.

However, though this would be another example of a work in which the X-level of dynamicity was expressed by both contestants in the significant sense-- exemplary for the military, exceptional for the Martians-- it would not be combative in the narrative sense.  In the film as in the Wells novel, what saves the human race is not some last-minute strategy or new weapon, but a lucky break having nothing to do with Earth's defenders.  In the book, Wells stresses only irony in the fact that the Martians perish from Earth-bacteria, while the 1953 film reverses this ideological interpretation, regarding the bacteria's presence as an expression of divine providence.  But regardless of which interpretation is favored, in neither case can Earth's defenders take any credit for the Martian defeat.

A very different rewriting of this Wells-conclusion appears in the last part of the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOLUME 2.  The starring characters are all involved in the battle against the Martians' second invasion, though neither Nemo's submarine nor Hyde's supernormal strength are able to do more than to give pause to the aliens.  What defeats the Martians in this second encounter is a mutant strain of bacteria developed by the army and dispenses by the League's government contact Campion Bond.  As in the examples of FORBIDDEN PLANET and GODZILLA, this germ-warfare is yet another last-minute "new weapon" which should be racked up to the account of Earth's defenders, even though Moore typically has his characters express horror at its utilization.  Two of the League-members, Quatermain and Murray, are even implicated in this dubious triumpth in that the two of them unknowingly convey the germ-weapon to their commander.
Admittedly the British army in this story is not as central an opponent to the monsters as the armies seen in the 1954 GODZILLA and the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS; the members of the League are the central opponents.  Nevertheless, the combative mode is not dispelled simply because the particular triumph comes about because of the actions of supporting characters.  As long as those supporting characters are strongly allied to the central protagonists, they can be viewed as an extension of the central protagonists' unified will.

One sees this "triumph of the supporting ally" in many venues, so I'll confine myself to one from Marvel's IRON MAN #5, where Iron Man's battle against the computer-villain "Cerebrus" (no relation to the Dave Sim character) is concluded by one such support-character.

SUPPORT CASTOFFS

Given that I've stated of Ron Marz's decision to kill off his character Alex--

"I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline"

--but also stated that I didn't think his story was very good-- it behooves me to mention a couple of times when support-cast members were killed to reasonably good effect.

I've mentioned that I didn't like Gwen Stacy's death in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121. That's not because I thought the character was indispensable to my enjoyment of the magazine, but because I felt that that the writers during that period-- not just Gerry Conway, but also Stan Lee in his last 10-20 Spidey-scripts-- made her death predictable by virtue of failing to expand on her character beyond the usual cliches. I think now that it made sense to kill her from an editorial standpoint, but still dislike Conway's hamhanded execution.

In contrast, Stan Lee himself "put a hit out" on one of the characters introduced in the early years of John Romita's tenure: Captain George Stacy, father of Gwen. Like Gwen, George dies in a senseless accident, but Lee gave him a heroic death. When a rooftop-fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus causes heavy bricks to plummet to the street below, Stacy perishes in shoving a small child out of the way of the debris.

Now, to some extent this is more palatable than Gwen Stacy's death because it is a heroic death. However, what I like best about the event is not just that the death was heroic, or even unexpected (certainly more so than daughter Gwen's), but that it became a new source of narrative avenues, allowing for a good amount of "my-sweetheart-hates-my-superher0-alterego" melodrama.

Another example-- perhaps more appropriate to the theme of senseless deaths-- would be Iron Man's 1960s girlfriend Janice Cord. Janice, introduced in IRON MAN #2, remained a regular support-cast member for the next 10 issues, only to meet an untimely end in IRON MAN #22, when she was caught in a crossfire between Iron Man and his enemy Titanium Man. Janice Cord hadn't been in that feature as long as Gwen Stacy had appeared in SPIDER-MAN, and thus it's quite possible that she, like Ron Marz's Alex, was intended from the start to be a sacrificial lamb. Scripter Archie Goodwin does allow her a Last Moment as she dies in Iron Man's arms, almost recognizing him as Tony Stark before she succumbs. Still, she was a pretty conventional character, having little identity apart from being Tony Stark's girlfriend, and so in a sense one might state that she most "came alive" in the intersubjective sense when she suffered the fate of a disposable support-cast member.