VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE REVOLT OF THE GIRL LEGIONNAIRES" (ADVENTURE COMICS #326, 1964)

 I decided I would dedicate this day to the recently passed Jim Shooter by writing about Jerry Siegel. Well, to be more precise, I've wanted for some time to sit down and cross-compare the respective takes each author took toward the trope of "the war between men and women," as expressed through a series both raconteurs worked on: The Legion of Super-Heroes. One might argue that Siege's shortcomings in this case shine a brighter light on Shooter's bushel-- or something like that.

  

The first page of "Revolt" shows some of the Girl Legionnaires shows them occupied with mundane activities, but the second ramps up the action, revealing that the six female Legionnaires have sent six male members of the group off on a phony errand. They then discuss their plans to lay traps for the remaining males in order to destroy them all and claim the club only for Girl Power.  

First, Light Lass mousetraps Element Lad. "Thrilling," right, EL?

Then Triplicate Girl splits herself in three, makes up to three separate males, and forces them all to admit that size does count.

Saturn Girl makes only a token effort at seduction, but then tricks Superboy into a rescue mission that gets him trapped.

Supergirl, who could easily twist any form Chameleon Boy might take into knots, feels it necessary to use some arcane formula to block his shape-changing power.

  And finally, Phantom Girl goes back to the Delilah-mode, liplocking Star Boy before she makes him imprison himself with his own powers.

-

There's not much myth-material in all of these simplistic "betraying women" scenarios, but there is a little bit in the Big Explanation. Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz (paging Rush Limbaugh) brainwashed all of the girls into hating men, because for many years the Female Femnazians had become obsessed with war-games, to the extent that they exiled their pacifistic males. Jerry "hurry-up-the-damn-exposition" Siegel conflates the Femnazians' desire for warfare with their ritual of shooting rockets at the moon-- which, in Earth cultures, most often represents feminine intuition and periodicity. Apparently shortly after the tyrannical women exile their men, they also decide to spread their desires for female supremacy to the Legion, if not to Earth generally, and use magical jewels to infect the Girl Legionnaires with man-hatred. But the other male Legionnaires, whom Saturn Girl sent on a false errand happen to pass by Femnaz, and two of the members keep the planet's moon from colliding with the planet. The heroes also reunite the chastened, no-longer-overaggressive females with their (presumably still pacifistic) males, while the Girl Legionnaires release all of the Boy Legionnaires from their traps, and good times are had by all.

The repetition of the Samson-and-Delilah seduction-trope is pretty repetitions, as if Siegel were indirectly suggesting that the girls had to resort to duplicity in most cases because girls just couldn't conquer boys (with the exception of Light Lass, who really does overcome Element Lad in a power-over-power struggle). However, there's more complexity when Siegel reworks elements of the Superman-origin for this little jaunt. Instead of a planet exploding, it's the moon of Femnaz, though the planet is saved by two Superboy-like heroes. Instead of a noble mother and father dying together as their child survives, there's a whole group of Amazons who kick out their wimpy males for being too tolerant, though the two groups are brought together, and an exile ends rather than an adoption of one survivor by a younger culture. But Siegel's conflation of two conflicting myths-- that of the martial Amazons and that of the seductive Deliah-- work agsinst one another here. In my next essay, I'll show that Shooter's pursuit of this theme was at least more unitary.               

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NEAR-MYTHS: STAR-SPANGLED ROGUES' GALLERIES

In THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER, I made some generalized comments on the debt that Jerry Siegel's STAR-SPANGLED KID feature had to the Batman-AND-Robin team that was launched in April 1940 (with the usual allowances for inaccuracy of cover-dates). Jerry Siegel didn't rush to come up with his risible reversal of a kid hero with an adult sidekick, since STAR SPANGLED COMICS #1 debuted as a regular DC feature almost a year and a half after Robin's debut. (To be sure, the Kid and Stripesy first showed up the previous month in ACTION COMICS #40, where the raconteurs clearly hoped that Superman's fans would rush to check out the New Dynamic Duo in their own magazine.) DC editors may have thought, "Hey, Batman was conceived when Bob Kane (supposedly by himself) tried to do his version of Superman. So why wouldn't it work for the creator of Superman-- teamed with humor-artist Hal Sherman-- to riff on Batman?" At any rate, the very name of STAR-SPANGLED COMICS was clearly contrived to spotlight the name of the cover-featured hero, and for the first half dozen issues Siegel and Sherman's heroes got three adventures apiece. There were other features in SSC, but none were all that prepossessing, with only the Mort Weisinger-Hal Sharp Tarantula maintaining any place in DC history.                                                     

  Now, as the title may suggest, my main interest in these early stories is to demonstrate some early examples of the "pattern criminal," which formula I think developed largely in comic books. This conception contrasted with such pulp-favorites as the "one-gimmick villain" and "the all-purpose villain" types, which I argued were the dominant templates for the prose pulps. Thus the only two relevant features of SSC are those of Tarantula and of the Kid and Stripesy. The first adventure doesn't trouble to retell the pair's origin from their debut in ACTION COMICS, but the last one in issue #1 introduces their most persistent enemy, Doctor Weerd. After the villain's regular ID is humiliated by a rather snotty Sylvester Pemberton, the villain reveals that he has his own "Mister Hyde" potion, that changes him into a shaggy-locked, barrel-chested hulk. Unlike Siegel's Superman, whose repeat villains appeared off and on, Weerd appears in every single issue until #7, and he's clearly an all-purpose type like Luthor, whipping up diverse weapons like giant robots, a vortex machine and a mirage-maker. Did Siegel hope Weerd would be the Kid's "Joker?" It seems a fair conjecture. Issue #1 also features the first outing for Tarantula, in a forgettable exploit that doesn't give the spider-man much of an origin either.                                                               

   Issue #2 introduces the comic's first "one-gimmick villain," but in the TARANTUALA feature. Such was the Crime Candle, whose big thing was doping people with candles that exuded toxic gases.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                        Issue #3 holds nothing relevant, but in #4-- dated January 1942, and thus a month or two after Bill Finger unveiled The Penguin in a December 1941 issue of DETECTIVE COMICS-- Siegel and Sherman introduced the Needle. Now, the Needle's weapon of choice was a gun that shot needles, so he didn't "branch out" as the Penguin did, using different gimmicked umbrellas and (a little later) trained birds. But though neither Needle nor Penguin gets an origin as such, both seem to have "patterned" their respective weapons after their respective physical appearances. That said, the Penguin seems like a developed character from the first, and the Needle is a just a flat bad guy.                                                                                                         

   Siegel and Sherman distinguish themselves a bit more in SSC #5 with new villain Moonglow. A wimpy type of professor, he discovers that he can enhance both his intellect and his penchant for evil by prolonged exposure to moonlight. The small touch of characterization, though, doesn't lead to anything comparable to, say, Two-Face, or even Green Lantern's foe The Gambler. More relevant to my "pattern criminal" project, though, is the TARANTULA tale in the same issue. "Warlord of Crime," whose script GCD credits to Manly Wade Wellman, introduces a crimelord named Siva. This villain uses a whopping TWO gimmicks patterned on the mythos of the Hindu god: (1) he's served by a henchman named Ganesha, who wears an elephant-costume like that of Mythic Shiva's divine son, and (2) Siva burns rebellious followers with fire the way the Hindu god annhilated his opponents with fiery powers. However, for whatever reason Siva never appeared again, and remained at large at the end of his only story.                                                             

With issue #6, the Kid gets scaled back to two adventures (one featuring the omnipresent Doctor Weerd, again) -- and then, just one tale in issue #7, in which Simon and Kirby's NEWSBOY LEGION bumps the Kid off the covers. Robotman and TNT join Tarantula as backup features who (I believe) never get cover-featured in SSC. The solo Kid adventure does feature the comic's first villain-teamup in "The Picture That Killed," as The Needle and Doc Weerd challenge the not so dynamic duo. In #8, Manly Wade Wellman apparently caught the teamup bug from Siegel and Sherman, since he assembled three of Tarantula's very forgettable villains into "The Trio of Terror." Siegel and Sherman trumped Wellman by bringing together their three most noteworthy nasties-- Needle, Weerd and Moonglow-- in "Crime by the Chapter." None of those villains, together or separately, were as good as the best Finger foes, though at least the Sherman antagonists were more visually memorable than those of Hal Sharp (except the aforementioned Siva). And that's where I'll leave this short study, for by issue #9 it was clear that the Kid/Stripesy duo had failed to impress the kid-readers as their model had, and whatever "pattern criminals" may have appeared were then overshadowed by many more momentous features in the early forties. Despite various post-Silver Age revivals of the original characters, the two seemed to distinguish themselves most when Geoff Johns reinvented the core idea for his STARGIRL concept, which in turn begat the last good superhero TV show for the CW network. But clearly there was a good reason that no one ever bothered to bring back (to my knowledge) any of the Kid's villains, or those of any other foemen in SSC.                       

THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be the first exemplar of a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. 

Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

NEAR-MYTHS: "JIMMY'S INTER-DIMENSIONAL ROMANCE" (JIMMY OLSEN #73, 1963)

 In many ways "Romance" is just another of the many OLSEN stories in which Jimmy, after getting turned down by his fickle girlfriend Lucy Lane, gravitates toward another woman-- usually someone who ends up being a bad match for one reason or another. But this tale is a little more intriguing because of the way the writer-- whom I will assert to be Jerry Siegel though there's no absolute proof of this-- played with a couple of well-known mythic tales.

At the opening "Romance" makes a quick reference to Jimmy having proposed to Lucy on some previous occasion. Nothing daunted, not only does he buy an engagement ring for his next attempt, the young reporter rents a studio and plans to win Lucy over by immortalizing her in stone. There's a tossoff explanation as to how he picked up this rather demanding skill, but as he's working on the statue, a strange force takes over Jimmy's hands, so that he sculpts the image of a totally different woman. After an offended Lucy flounces off, the statue comes to life, claiming that she is Rona, inhabitant of the seventh dimension. She further claims that the stone from which Jimmy released her was a sort of an interdimensional vehicle.

Rona informs Jimmy that the two of them are now betrothed. But before the unusually dim youth even thinks to protest an engagement with a woman he doesn't know, Rona offers him the chance to compensate for his perceived lack of masculinity. She gives him a drug designed to make Jimmy as big and muscular as his idol Superman, and within about a day, it works. Lucy is terribly jealous, not just because she's losing Jimmy, but Jimmy-as-a-hunk. For his part, Jimmy's no better, rubbing salt in Lucy's wounds by asking the former girlfriend to pick out the new one's trousseau-- and he seems to be marrying Rona, whom he still barely knows, just to show off his ability to bag a hot chick.

The story then rushes to its foregone conclusion. The happy couple agree to be married before a "judge" (who wears a Catholic collar) and with only "best man" Superman in attendance. Again Rona gets Jimmy to drink some unknown potion, and again he obliges. Then cops from Rona's dimension show up, reveal that she's a female Bluebeard who kills her mates. (With possibly unintentional comedy, the cops prove what she is by showing that she has a blue tongue.) But Superman whips up a poison cure and talks the judge into keeping quiet. Jimmy reverts to his normal size but now enjoys being able to keep Lucy under his thumb-- at least until the next story reasserts the status quo.

The only thing that makes me think Jerry Siegel wrote this one is the risible term the writer gives to Rona's rocky prison: "the Stone Zone," an overt riff on The Phantom Zone. And as in some of Siegel's other stories, there's a very loose mythopoeic parallel here. This time the parallel is between how the tale begins with life arising from dead rock-- and ends with the villain's attempt to turn the rock's sculptor into lifeless matter.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #30: ACHILLES HEALING

 While kryptonite was still waiting in the wings to be introduced, Jerry Siegel occasionally showed his hero being adversely affected by various vulnerabilities, like an ancient Mayan weapon that channeled sunlight, in SUPERMAN #30.

One issue later, the hero voluntarily undergoes a ray-bombardment experiment and loses his memory, eventually turning into his new secret identity, Mary Worth.

CURSED FROM THE EARTH

 In the comments for my essay on THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST, AT-AT Pilot posted the following:

What is the mythical significance of the fire-fall crystals and Kryptonite? Why is it that the remaining fragments of his doomed planet hurt Superman? Is it supposed to be interpreted as a painful reminder of a past that he wishes he could forget? But of course, Superman has been written to be appreciative of his Kryptonian roots, with the Fortress of Solitude serving as a museum for his mementos. (The one time I can recall Superman distancing himself from his Kryptonian self was the last issue of the Byrne series, where--if I recall accurately--Superman asserts that he is now earth's son, not Krypton's.)

Kryptonite may have the most involved backstory of any element in the Superman mythos. 

One of the most egregious mistakes about kryptonite is that it was introduced because Superman was so mighty that he had no weaknesses. That may be true of Superman as he had developed in 1949, when kryptonite officially entered the comics-canon in SUPERMAN #61 (1949). However, the Superman who had been produced for DC by the studio of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster did not need a specific weakness. Throughout the eight-or-so years that the studio elaborated the nature of the Man of Steel, the hero was occasionally seen being stymied by energy-rays or mental powers. (The moderately famous "Powerstone" story even shows him being briefly mesmerized by the hypnosis of guardian serpents.) I don't know at what point the hero became so godlike that he could fly into the heart of Earth's sun without taking harm, though I'm reasonably sure that it took place after DC kicked Siegel and Schuster to the curb in the late 1940s. But the point is that Siegel himself never thought of his pre-eminent creation as being invulnerable in the way later DC editors defined the term.

And yet, in 1940 Siegel birthed the basic idea of kryptonite in a story rejected by DC's editors and then squirreled away in a vault for the next fifty-plus years. "The K-Metal from Krypton" only came to the light of day because in 1994 Mark Waid, working on staff for DC, encountered the story in the files and made known its contents to comics-fandom. It's been further theorized that though DC never published the story (except for a very brief excerpt in a 1960s annual), Whitney Ellsworth made all Superman material available to the writers of the 1940-51 SUPERMAN radio serial, and that one of those writers used Siegel's K-metal story as a template for the 1943 episode "The Meteor from Krypton," in which the name "kryptonite" was first used for the radioactive mineral that could bring death to Krypton's only surviving son.

Since the Siegel story was not completed at the time of its composition-- though the aforementioned site provided a modern interpretation-- we can't know exactly why Siegel introduced the K-metal. But as I mentioned above, Siegel's Superman did not need a specific weakness, because he was already vulnerable to a handful of esoteric menaces. The most likely reasons are that (a) Siegel wanted to inject a new level of drama into Superman's adventures, in part by revealing his identity of Clark Kent to Lois Lane, and (b) to get that drama, the hero would find his mighty powers endangered by metal from his homeworld. Siegel could have conjured up any kind of power-draining entity or material, but I'm sure that on some level he appreciated the irony of Superman being weakened by a fragment of his own world. Indeed, on page 15 of the modern interpretation, Clark Kent muses that originally he derived "great strength and powers from the planet," which might be the only time Siegel had ever advanced that particular explanation of Superman's powers.

I'm not aware of any examples from folklore or myth in which a hero's strength is either increased or depleted by contact with native soil. The only example in which native soil increases a character's mojo would seem Bram Stoker's 1897 DRACULA. To the best of my knowledge, Stoker made up the idea of the vampire needing to rest in his native Earth out of whole cloth. But there can be no question that Stoker gave the idea special significance, for I just happened to cover the matter in depth in my 2008 AA essay A MOVABLE FEASTER. I wrote in part:

Early in the novel, Dracula tells Jonathan Harker:

"Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders."

Naturally, at that point in the novel, the vampire does not dwell on how this "blood-enriched" earth is going to make it possible for him to pick up stakes (so to speak) and invade merry old England. But much later in the novel, Van Helsing goes into greater detail about Dracula's literal need for earth that has been sanctified (as well as ensanguinated) by the past:

"There have been from the loins of this very one [Dracula] great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest."

So in Stoker's mythos the sacred earth of Dracula's Transylvania is replete with both "the blood of the heroic dead" and "memories of great men and good women." Blood, then, is not just plasma and platelets in Stoker's cosmos, but rather the objective correlate of life itself, a sort of vitality that doesn't vanish with the deaths of individual humans but which seeps into the earth and sustains the life of a vampire quite as much as feeding off the blood of the living. This "sacred earth" explanation may explain how Dracula and his vampire brides managed to survive without exsanguinating every last mortal left in the region, especially given that Stoker's Transylvania often seems like a barren Hades-on-Earth, lacking the vitality that Dracula praises in past generations of his land. Stoker, in formulating this notion of the vampire needing to take his native soil with him when he departed for other climes, was thus overcoming the folkloric notion that a vampire had to return to his grave. Thanks to Stoker, Dracula could take his grave with him as he travelled.

To be sure, Stoker never has any scenes which directly prove Van Helsing's assertion about Dracula's dependence on Transylvanian soil-- that is, scenes like having Dracula try without success to sleep in English soil. But apparently whatever "blood-memories" in Dracula's native soil nourish the vampire, that vitality can be trumped by a greater vitality, as Van Helsing uses holy wafers, presumably blessed by the Catholic Church, to make some of Dracula's earth-filled coffins useless to him. (Side-note: the "holy water" device popular in many later vampire-tales appears nowhere in the original novel.) Still, the original folklore-limitation does crop again with respect to Dracula's only vampiric convert in England, for apparently Lucy Westenra can't just go anywhere she likes, but is obliged to return to her mausoleum at daybreak. Stoker does not emphasize her dependence on being close to English soil, but one must presume that she has some such dependence on returning to her original grave.

 I think it's pretty likely that by 1940 Jerry Siegel had read DRACULA, though I don't know that he ever committed to posterity any comment on Stoker's greatest work. A long time ago I read a vampire story Siegel did for his 1930s series DOCTOR OCCULT, but I don't recall any special Stoker quotes therein. But writers are packrats, and I think it very likely that he picked up the symbolism of "beneficial earth" from Stoker and later transformed it into "inimical earth" for his superhero.

Oh, and though it has nothing to do with the derivation of kryptonite, the title of this essay I rook from the King James Bible, wherein God tells the murderous Cain that he's "cursed from the earth"-- meaning not that the earth is literally poisonous to Cain; just that the earth won't give him sustenance. Readers of this blog should know that a day without a myth-quote is like a day without sunshine.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SEARCH FOR GOD" (THE SPECTRE #57-62, 1997-98)

The DC character The Spectre, despite being one of the more interesting characters originated by Jerry Siegel after his breakthrough conception of Superman, has never been particularly successful in any of his incarnations. This may be because the character extended the superhero's devotion to justice-- with its concomitant eschewing of domestic commitments-- into the realm of a perpetually vengeful spirit. Other Golden Age heroes occasionally took the lives of their enemies in the heat of battle, but the Spectre never had that excuse, being almost omnipotent and given to smiting evildoers with extreme prejudice. The fact that Spectre had died by criminal violence, and that he was given such powers by some entity in the Judeo-Christian heaven, may have made both him and his mission unrelatable for the average reader. It remains a minor mystery as to why this basically unsuccessful character was revived by DC in the mid-1960s, without any of the focus on divine vengeance. A 1970s series by Michael Fleischer and Jim Aparo took the opposing tack, but this still did not succeed, though the grotesque EC-style executions of crooks made the stories popular with the fan contingent.

I have not read the entire sixty-two issues of the character's nineties revival by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, but I perused enough individual issues to get the general sense of the creators' take on the franchise. I debated whether or not to read all of the online stories before devoting a post to the concluding six-part arc. I decided not to do so, since in theory the arc should be able to stand as a mythcomic whatever else the authors did in the course of the series.

Ostrander was probably dominantly responsible for seeking ways to "justify the ways of the Spectre to fans." He formulated the notion that Spectre was the incarnation of "the Wrath of God," or specifically that of the Judeo-Christian God Spectre's alter ego Jim Corrigan had grown up with. However, unlike Siegel and Fleischer Ostrander also sought to place the avenging apparition in situations where a clear-cut choice between good and evil was not available. One such conundrum crops up at the end of issue #56 sparks a conflict between the persona of the Spectre and that of his "vessel" Jim Corrigan. Spectre seeks out adjudication with the powers of Heaven, only to find the Pearly Gates wide open and all of Heaven's inhabitants, including the reigning deity, gone.

Spectre plays detective, trying to find God in all of his "usual haunts." The unquiet spirit Deadman provides the first inkling that God's presence may be a matter of perspective, since Deadman believes that his own deity Rama Kushna is the actual being in charge of things. Spectre then seeks out the mythological domains of two pagan belief-systems, and gets no answer. He gets a better clue, though, from Jack Kirby-- or, more specifically, from an ambiguous deific force, "the Source," invented by Kirby for his NEW GODS series.

The Source only gives the Spectre a vague oracle, which leads the Ghostly Guardian into ambivalent contacts with a race of aliens who deem their "hive-mind" to be their deity, and with the spirit of the Earth-Goddess, who complains a lot about mortals murdering the biosphere. But Gaea directs Spectre to seek the answer in the history of Jim Corrigan. 

The Spectre learns assorted new aspects of Jim Corrigan's early existence, all of which culminate in both Spectre and Corrigan experiencing a "Job moment."

In answer to this demand for justice from God, the hero and his alter ego get a very different answer than did the postulant from the Book of Job. A being claiming to be God manifests, looking for all the world like a moronic version of the Greco-Roman Cronos/Saturn, claiming that he simply ate everyone in Heaven. After Corrigan defies God, the demented deity sends him on another voyage of discovery. Corrigan sees yet more sinfulness in his lineage, such as a grandfather who participated in a murderous rage upon Cherokee Indians (not exempted from their own sinfulness, since Ostrander specifies that these were slave-holding Indians). 

This second katabasis actually allows Corrigan an "aha" realization about the nature of evil, which allows him to banish the vision of the imbecile God and to return to the side of his sometimes confessor Father Craemer. Craemer supplies Corrigan with the gloss to the Search for God: "What you have done is confront your image of God and found your old beliefs are not enough." However, because the magazine was on DC's chopping block-- which Ostrander and Mandrake certainly knew when beginning this arc-- there's no time for Corrigan to embrace any new visions of deity. The detective decides it's finally time to "give up the ghost"-- that is, separating himself from the Spectre in order that Corrigan can go to his eternal rest-- assuming, of course, that the perception of Heaven's non-existence was just a bump in the road of the Ghostly Guardian and his alter ego.

It's bracing to behold the DC version of the God of Abraham depicted as something like Twain's "malevolent thug." Of course Ostrander and Mandrake must supply a mitigation of this vision, because they're playing with DC's toys, and therefore must leave the doors open for whatever the next author wants to do with God, Heaven, the Spectre or Jim Corrigan. For all I know, Corrigan may have been revived one or more times by now. So "The Search for God" must be an exploration not of any final vision of deity but of all the contingent factors that may go into forming that vision. Nevertheless, this "Search" is a pretty good metaphysical primer on religious relativism and moral ambivalence-- certainly not the sort of thing the Golden Age character was intended to explore.

SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3

My application of the “killing stroke” trope to the combative mode may serve me in formulating an answer to one long and nagging theoretical problem: that of combative characters who are not overtly challenged by most of their opponents.

In THE SAD STORY OF SUPERHERO SADISM I mentioned that during the Golden Age characters like Superman and the Spectre (both, as all sagacious fans know, linked by the authorship of Jerry Siegel) only occasionally encountered opponents who could fight them in terms of “give-and-take” combat. Even other powerhouses of the period were given convenient vulnerabilities so that they could be placed into peril—said vulnerabilities ranging from a special weakness, like Green Lantern’s inability to influence wood, or something more generic, wherein a super-strong character like Wonder Woman could be downed by a blow to the back of her skull. At the time, my main rationale for still deeming Golden Age Superman and Spectre as combative heroes was that, even though their individual gangland-foes were no challenge, Crime as a Whole was a constant menace not to the heroes but to law-abiding innocents.

Now, as per my Cyclopean example, the “killing stroke” usually represents a weaker character’s attempt to marshal both skill and strength to overcome a more powerful enemy, usually in some appropriate way (a one-eyed monster is made to lose his only means of seeing his prey). But it’s occurred to me that if one reverses the valences of power in the killing-stroke paradigm, what one has is akin to “the curse of the gods.” Greek mythology in particular is replete with numerous stories of gods who strike impious mortals with curses that fit those mortals’ impieties. Lycurgus the reaper is made to reap his own kindred, Pentheus the foe of Dionysus ends up meeting being ripped apart by Dionysian maidens, and so on.

Again, while both of Siegel’s co-creations would have many fully combative adventures during and after the Silver Age, it’s important to point out that their combative status in the Golden Age doesn’t depend on the trope of the “back-and-forth” fight. Instead, Superman and the Spectre depend on a trope I choose to term “the reverse killing stroke.” In contrast to a relatively weak character who slays a more powerful entity via strategy, the practitioner of the “reverse killing stroke” is, like a Greek god, far more powerful than any of the mortals he blights. But, for the extrinsic sake of the story, this godlike hero can’t just destroy his criminal targets any old way. The superhero-god must use his power strategically, for the sake of imposing a divine irony upon the victim.

The second part of Superman’s debut story, retitled “the Coming ofSuperman,” shows the hero acting the part of a trickster-god. Once Superman ferrets out the identity of a nasty munitions-maker, obviously the Kryptonian could destroy or imprison the villain in any number of ways. But in order to make a good story, Superman badgers the fellow into joining the U.S, armed forces—at which point he’s forced to face the real-life conditions of the wars he’s fostered. To be sure, the hero allows this villain the chance to reform, but in other contemporaneous stories, the Man of Steel uses his power judiciously, in order to make the enemies of law and order destroy themselves.

The Spectre presents a more bald-faced evocation of the “wrath of God” motif, which may be one reason the character wasn’t especially popular in the Golden Age (nor have any subsequent treatments scored that well, with or without the emphasis on said wrath). Siegel didn’t seem to exploit the idea of the “reverse killing stroke” quite as artfully as he did in Superman, but there’s a little use of irony in the origin-story. After Jim Corrigan is slain by gangster Gat Benson and his two cronies, the heroic cop rises from the dead, empowered by the power of Heaven to war on crime. Not yet donning his crimefighting togs, Corrigan overtakes his murderers, and the first one to meet Corrigan’s gaze instantly dies. Not much irony there. Yet the second death is more accomplished. When the second thug fails to kill Corrigan with bullets, he unwisely tries to grapple with the dead policeman. He pays for this “impiety,” since touching Corrigan causes the thug’s flesh to dissolve, making him into a living skeleton for a few macabre seconds, before Corrigan decisively slays him. Curiously, the gang-leader Benson is spared, as Corrigan merely allows him to fall unconscious and to be arrested. In subsequent stories, some of the Spectre’s killing strokes had an ironic appeal, and others were nothing special. Arguably the Bronze Age series by Fleischer and Aparo exploited the gruesome potential of the concept to greater effect, in that the Ghostly Guardian consistently devised dooms for dastardly villains that would have fit the EC horror-anthologies.

So, can one call any aspect of these godlike punishments “self-mastery?” Certainly such “reverse killing strokes” don’t engage one’s sympathies in the same way as the normative killing-stroke. Nevertheless, Superman and the Spectre must be judicious in order to destroy evildoers in an ironically meaningful way, and this ties in with my general concept that self-mastery entails a form of self-limitation. Thus the killing strokes used by these heroes to deter criminals can be deemed a special form of strategy-combat, and thus qualify for the combative mode even without a lot of back-and-forth battles.

MYTHCOMICS: [THE 'LONG ORIGIN OF SUPERMAN], SUPERMAN #1 (1939)

Batman's first origin, short though it is, still qualifies as a bonafide mythcomic. However, not so much Superman's.

I didn't reference the short one-page origin from ACTION COMICS #1 in my analysis of the two-part story that introduced the Man of Steel to comics-audiences, largely because it wasn't part of the story proper. Now, as I explore the subject of "how short can a myth be," I have to ask whether the single-page origin by itself constitutes a myth. And my answer is that it could do so-- but it doesn't.

The main Superman story in ACTION was not even the complete story that Siegel and Shuster had assembled in their pitch to the comic-strip syndicates. Even the full story, later fully printed in SUPERMAN #1, doesn't explain anything about the character's provenance or powers. It seems likely that the editors of ACTION #1 felt the need of at least a quickie explanation, and thus readers were given a one-page summary of "who he is and how he came to be" on the inside front cover.

But despite establishing some major myth-motifs. the one-pager never brings them together into a cohesive myth-scenario, so that it is at best a "near myth." In contrast, the two-page origin from 1939 expands on the fragments of 1938, and does assemble a genuine, albeit short, myth-continuity.

The first page is largely "the beginning:"

While the last page provides both the "middle"-- the general sense of Clark Kent growing to manhood, the death of his parents-- and the "end," in which Kent decides to become a costumed hero.

By the time the two-page origin appeared in the SUPERMAN #1 (dated Summer 1939), the comic strip, launched in January 1939, had fleshed out much of the backstory, conveying the first visual depictions of the hero's real father and mother. I may explore the comic-strip origin in more detail at some time, but for now, suffice to say that Superman does have at least one very short mythcomic in his repertoire. 

MYTHCOMICS: "LOIS LANE'S SUPER-DAUGHTER" (LOIS LANE #20, 1960)

This story was actually the second in a series of two imaginary "what if Lois married Superman" stories, which ran back to back in issues 19 and 20 of the LOIS LANE magazine. I presume from this that editor Mort Weisinger accepted an initial pitch for both stories, instead of choosing-- as he sometimes did-- to wait awhile to gauge audience interest. There may have been a sequel or two that followed, but these two were produced so as to be read back-to-back.

The first story from #19, "Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent," however, is not as symbolically resonant as the second one from #20, though both stories were written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger. "Mr. and Mrs" is not much more than a "beware what you wish for" homily. Superman marries Lois Lane, thus supposedly fulfilling the dream she's cherished since she first met him (at least in Weisinger's universe), finds out her dream isn't all it's cracked up to be, for in public she's simply the wife of the hero's alter ego Clark Kent. The fact that he's Superman is of course kept secret from the populace, so that no one-- especially Lois' longtime rival Lana Lang-- knows that the superhero is off the romantic market. It's a pleasant enough story, but "Lois Lane's Super-Daughter" strikes a deeper chord.

About three years after this story appeared on newstands, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE was published. Building on material the author had gathered during the late 1950s, Friedan sought to make clear that modern American women had become desperately, symtomatically unahppy due to the imposition of a "mystique" upon their lives; one that kept them from fulfilling themselves as rounded human beings. MYSTIQUE was a major influence upon Second-Wave feninism from that time on. But Jerry Siegel's "Super-Daughter" presciently taps into some of the same discontents, though obviously it does so within a juvenile context, and within the context of a continuing superhero melodrama.

A few fans of Silver Age Superman have wondered why, after Superman's cousin Supergirl appeared on Earth in 1958, he didn't "man up" and adopt her in his identity of Clark Kent. I don't think the question was formally addressed in the actual continuity, and I'm sure that the proximate reason the character did not do so was that his editor and writers didn't want him playing Adoptive Daddy in every story. But there was still a kernel of logic in Clark's reticence, for during this time-period social services personnel generally took a dim view of single men or women adopting children of any age. Given this state of affairs, having the teenaged Kryptonian placed in an orphanage to seek adoption by a bonafide married couple-- which eventually does transpire-- doesn't strain my credulity.

What's interesting from the story's beginning is that the moment Clark and Lois are married, Clark springs it upon her that he'd like them to adopt this teenaged cousin that he's never mentioned before.

Lois looks a little bit poleaxed by this revelation, but she's married "for better or worse," and when the adoption agency complains that she might not be able to handle a new child and a job, Lois does what anyone in the period would deem The Right Thing.

Keep in mind that this Lois is not the fire-eater from the Golden Age. Though it would be absurd to assert that the Lois character was thoroughly consistent, since her moods could fluctuate according to the needs of a given story, it is at least part of Weisinger's conception of Lois that she has an irreducible domestic side to her personality. Mort Weisinger may well have been the sort of man whom Betty Friedan criticized for wanting women to become wholly domestic once they became wives. Nevertheless, for the time, the demands of the adoption agency seems not unusual, and the strength of Siegel's story is that one does see certain disadvantages to the world of domestic bliss.

True, there's almost no trace of mother-daughter bonding in the story, except for minor scenes like this one:

But it probably would have been a little beyond Siegel's skill-set to be THAT attuned to the ways of modern women, and besides, the main thrust of the story is all about Lois's discomfort with this perky intruder who's been thrust into her domestic world before the former lady reporter has even had a chance to get used to her new husband. The problem is only aggravated by the fact that both Lois' husband and her de facto daughter belong to a world of super-powered endeavors to which Lois cannot aspire. Here's one of the tandem "super-feats" to which Supergirl alludes on the cover of #20:

Worse by far, though, is that Supergirl's powers make Lois's function in the household irrelevant.

There's an exquisite irony in this setup that I wonder if Betty Friedan could have appreciated, even without the fantasy-content. Lois sacrifices the "exciting life" she enjoyed as a girl reporter, but her reward is to be marginalized within the household that is supposedly her domain. Yet through it all, Lois masks her pain, a veritable Stella Dallas of the comic books, an icon of maternal martrydom. Yet, where Olive Prouty's character accepts her marginalization, Siegel's Lois manages to manifest her hidden hostility in one of the most roundabout ways ever conceived, even in a Mort Weisinger comic book.

Yes, that's right: not only does Lois "just happen" to whale on the backside of a robot who looks just like Supergirl in her secret ID, a snoopy women from the adoption agency literally invades Lois's private home just in time to catch Lois in the act of unleashing her fury at the (first) unwanted intruder. I particularly enjoy how tearful Lois is in the story's final panel, perhaps revealing just a touch of the schadenfreude she may be experiencing from Supergirl's "unhappy ending." Will Lois ever make things up to Superman? Well, maybe or maybe not, but either way, she won't have a fifth wheel getting in the way.

I should note that though a fair number of stories from this time-period contain hints at some sexual stirrings between the two super-cousins-- particularly "Superman's Super-Courtship"-- "Super-Daughter" actually works just as well without any such elements of sexual transgression as it would with it. I could see the story entering new terrain if it were ALSO about a nubile young adoptive daughter nudging out an older wife from the affections of the adoptive father. But mythically speaking, the story works quite as well as a melodramatic-- as well as comical-- look at the marital disadvantages of a former working woman in the era of the Comic-Book Silver Age.