NEAR MYTHS: ["THE YELLOW CLAW'S RETURN"] (STRANGE TALES #159-167. 1967-68)

At a time when all the other comics-publishers believed that their audience wouldn't support funnybooks with continued stories, Silver Age Marvel succeeded in capturing juvenile imaginations with a wealth of mini-epics-- the Master Planner storyline in SPIDER-MAN, the "Galactus Trilogy," and many others. Arguably, Jim Steranko's two long continuities in the NICK FURY AGENT OF SHIELD feature were just two more among this august company. Yet whereas the stories of the Lee-Kirby FURY had just been traditional comic-book shoot-em-ups, Steranko brought an approach that combined traditional thrills with experimental touches.

Of the two long stories Steranko did when he took over from Lee and Kirby (and occasional fill-in personnel), the first, "the Death Spore Saga," is still fairly routine, and I won't discuss that one here. But the second long continuity, to which I've given the semi-ironic title of "The Yellow Claw's Return," shows a greater audaciousness in its mining of adventure-tropes from earlier fiction. Indeed, in one of the main hero's few meditations on his past life, Fury recollects that he was raised in New York's Hell's Kitchen, right at the time when "the talkies" were coming in, and that he idolized such transitional heroes as Tom Mix and Joe Bonomo. Patently Steranko was trying to adhere to the established history of the character, who had to be in his early twenties by the time America entered WWII. But the artist's mention of serial-heroes, even those unknown to patrons today, suggests that he wanted to stress a common heritage between these heroes of cinema and the Marvel superspy.

Steranko also had a vast knowledge of pulps and comics from the early 20th century, including the works of his artist-predecessor on FURY, Jack Kirby. Steranko and Kirby had worked together on FURY, with the younger artist provided "finishes" to Kirby roughs, and there was some degree of mutual admiration between the two. I don't know at what point Steranko came across the short-lived YELLOW CLAW title that "Atlas-Marvel" published in the mid-1950s. Yet as I've shown in this brief overview of that title, Kirby's three issues of that feature weren't exactly his best work, even if one only compares those issues to other Kirby-works of that decade. So why did Steranko choose to revive-- and I use that word advisedly-- a character whom few if any of his contemporary readers remembered?

First of all, anyone who reads Steranko's two-part HISTORY OF COMICS (1970/1972) would have noticed that the artist possessed a near-encylopedic knowledge of adventure-oriented pop culture dating back to the early 20th century. Because he was a fan-turned-pro in a more methodical manner than his predecessor Kirby, he probably remembered Kirby's YELLOW CLAW series better than Kirby did back in The Day. Not only does Steranko revive a version of the central villain, a patent Fu Manchu emulation, he also brings back the other support-characters from the series: the Claw's aide Voltzmann, his niece Suwan, and the evildoer's Asian-American opponent Jimmy Woo (with whom Suwan was in love, providing the only real trope-link to the prose works of Sax Rohmer). 

Still, there are clear departures. Steranko borrows some elements of the original costume-design for the villain (originated not by Kirby but by Joe Maneely), the character from the 1950s series looks like a reserved older man despite his reputation for uncanny long life. Steranko's Claw is lanky and powerful, clad in body-armor and a skullcap reminiscent of the Lev-Gleason CLAW, and whereas all Asians in the 1950s series had canary-yellow skin, the 1960s version is the only one so colored. Steranko's Yellow Claw has a bony face, heavy eyebrows that emphasize his epicanthic folds, and bony fingers with inch-long nails-- the latter visual trope taking us back to the whole "Asians with claws" trope I examined here. Further, unlike the fifties Atlas character, Steranko's villain has a nodding resemblance to the forties actor Richard Loo, seen above playing a mean Japanese officer in 1944's THE PURPLE HEART.

The only strong resemblance between Kirby's Yellow Claw and that of Steranko is that under Kirby, the 1950s Claw channeled a lot more wild super-science. But in the Lee-Kirby NICK FURY, both the good guys and the bad guys were constantly hurling dozens of super-science gadgets against one another, and Steranko, by taking over the custody of the feature, did the same. Did Nick Fury have a "sonic shatter cone" and a "magnetic repulsor watch?" Well, then, the Yellow Claw can have an "id-paralyzer," an "infinity sphere" with a "nucleo-phoretic drive," and an "ultimate annihilator,"-- well, OK, he does steal that one from the organization AIM-- but still! 

Now, Steranko's Claw is occasionally more recherche in his use of Asian tropes than the 1950s character was. The new version speaks in a flowery, pseudo-Oriental lingo, and when Fury briefly disguises himself to be Asian to hoax the villain, the hero thinks to himself that he got all his dialogue from "old Charlie Chan flicks." Yet one good effect of all the techno-overkill is that this Yellow Claw doesn't really have any roots in the world of any Real Asians, aside from his long nails and his dialogue. (Only once does Steranko make an egregious all-Asians-are-alike goof, by having the Chinese fiend address the hero as "Fury-san.") I theorize that to Steranko, Asian villains were simply a useful, familiar trope dispersed all through pop culture, with no particular political content.

As breakneck as Jack Kirby's pace could be in his action sequences, Steranko barely allows for any characters to take a breath in the eight installments of RETURN. The pace of the narrative is akin to that of the most raucous Republic serials, with frequent use of teleportation tech to send Fury and his opponents zooming from one locale to another. Fury has various aides-- many familiar faces introduced in RETURN for the first time, such as The Gaffer, Clay Quartermain, and Fury's gal-pal Countess Val-- and there are even some superhero crossovers, such as Captain America and two members of the Fantastic Four. But Fury's really the whole show, careening through hordes of heavily armed killers with his forty-year old hardbody and his handful of super-gadgets. 

I won't go into the many ways in which Steranko incorporated contemporary design-elements and artistic tropes into RETURN, but if one moment most captures Steranko's channeling of the swinging sixties mood, it's the conclusion to RETURN. After Fury's tumultuous battle with the Claw, it's revealed that this Claw was a robot, as were Suwan and Voltzmann (but not Jimmy Woo, who came back only to see a simulacrum of his love get killed). The entire battle between SHIELD and the Claw's forces was an enormous chess-game that the diabolical Doctor Doom played against a robot chess-master. This was the closest Marvel Comics could come to something like 1967's THE PRISONER, in which the viewer sees the whole game of genre-battles exposed as a "magic shadow-show." 

About five years later, the real Yellow Claw came out of retirement in a CAPTAIN AMERICA continuity, and Steve Englehart gave this version a lot more of that old Sax Rohmer exoticism, mere months before the same writer linked up the Marvel-rented property of Fu Manchu with the new character, Shang-Chi Master of Kung Fu. But though the real villain mouthed a few lines about getting even with whoever had played game with his image, I don't believe the "revised original Claw"-- who of course looked just like Steranko's robot-- even crossed paths with Doctor Doom. The revived character never really became a major player at Marvel Comics, and later got substantially revised so as to purge him of any fiendish Asian tropes. Naive though Steranko's mini-epic might be, it's still the high water-mark for this curious character.

THE BAD APPLE DEFENSE PT. 2

And now for something completely disconcerting-- a meditation on comic-book diversity that isn't based in ideological overthinking. Said meditation was written by Bryan Hill, a ROC (Reader of Color) who refers to DC Comics' Batman as his "personal totem," for reasons that I won't attempt to summarize here. Nevertheless, Hill, while making the upfront admission that "diversity is an uncomfortable conversation," asserts that the very ideal behind Batman runs counter to the lazy stereotyping of POC.

I never minded that Batman didn’t look like me; most old money billionaires didn’t. What began to bother me, over the years I continued reading Batman comics, was the only people who looked like me were the people Batman targeted. My face was never the grand villain with the Aristotelean tragedy. My face was never on the character that elicited both sympathy and fear. My face was on the thug. The people who looked like me sold drugs, mugged people, and they ended with an armored boot in the stomach and a hog-tie from a lamppost.

What's extraordinary about this essay is although this section sounds superficially like hundreds of other complaints about "lack of comic-book diversity," there is at least an attempt to understand that there may be reasons as to why the conversation about diversity might seem "threatening to the pure joy of reading stories." Most persons stumping for diversity cannot even recognize that there might be a conflict between the "entertaining" and the instructive.

In Part 1, I cited my own example of lazy racial caricatures, those of the many "good Indians" and "bad Indians" of American westerns, so I can hardly deny the possibility that most POC characterizations may be lazy as well-- though I read very little current DC. Based on the Batman stories that I do know-- which I consider reasonably thorough up through the 1990s-- I recall few black people at all, either grand villains or street-muggers.

Here's the closest thing the 1970s spawned to a grand Afro-American villain in the Bat-universe.

And here's a scene from DETECTIVE COMICS #421, which may come closer to capturing the undesirable characterizations Hill describes.

I'm not attempting to support or deny Hill's interpretation of what he's read, since a close study of modern Batman comics might indeed show a propensity toward lazy caricatures of POC. But in line with my current theme, I would guess that most if not all of DC writers would justify their use of negative characterizations with some version of the "bad apple defense." I consider this to be a bad defense when used applied to bad work.

Hill doesn't call for a moratorium on the appearance of low-life black crooks in comic books, or accuse writers who have used such characters as racists. He simply calls for more positive role models. And yet, Batman stories are about his encounters with crime, so he's just not going to encounter that many memorable citizens of color, except as victims. as recurring characters involved in Bruce Wayne's life, or-- as villains.

I don't have any solutions to Hill's concerns, but in line with my remarks on Fu Manchu earlier, I think the comic-book world would be improved by the creation of a "better breed" of POC villains. I would not say that racial caricature should play no role, but it should be intelligent caricature when used at all. For instance, I can imagine the political correctness crowd screaming bloody murder at this Luke Cage villain:

However, though I won't say the story is anything but a decent thrill-ride, the Black Mariah character rates as an intelligent use of a ruthless gang-leader, not least because the term "Black Mariah" is allegedly based on an actual black person from 19th-century America. 


That said, I would also like some race-neutral POC villains as well, my favorite being Jim Steranko's one-shot "Centurius" from NICK FURY #2.

In short, even if I might not agree with all of Hill's interpretations, his is a rare voice in asking for an open-ended conversation.

ADLER PATED

"The Superman fantasy stimulated a host of intellectuals to write interpretations analyzing in terms of Nietzschean and Freudian philosophy what any child could have told them. The truth was that Siegel and Schuster's imaginary world tended to be more Adlerian than Freudian... the drive wasn't for sex but for power, for the ability to dominate their environment through sheer brute strength."-- Jim Steranko, HISTORY OF COMICS.


I think highly of Alfred Adler despite my having some philosophical problems with his compensation theory, or at least with ways in which others have applied it. I confess I haven't read much Adler in the original-- only SUPERIORITY AND SOCIAL INSTINCT, a collection of some late essays. My reigning impression is that Adler may well have been a better psychoanalytic theorist than Freud or Jung, since his work seemed a lot more focused on treatment of patients than on promoting broad philosophical concepts. OTOH, the one book I read struck me as fairly dully written despite some strong ideas. It's amusing to wonder whether or not Freud and Jung may've become more popular with general audiences not because their ideas were better but simply because they were more entertainingly presented.


Now, there is a worthwhile nugget in the above Steranko quote, but to get to it, one has to dig through a small mountain of superficial thinking, which should demonstrate even to the staunchest Steranko fan that as a philosopher Steranko was a good artist. Even to someone like myself, not deeply acquainted with Adler, there's rich irony in seeing Steranko invoke Adlerian psychology as some sort of aegis against the foolish "even-a-child-knows-better" interpretations that invokes Nietzsche and Freud-- particularly when one knows Adler was strongly influenced by both Nietzsche and Freud. But why did Steranko feel moved to make such an untenable opposition?

One should remember that Steranko's two HOC books were written in the early 1970s. At that time the anti-comics hysteria of the 1940s and 1950s had long subsided, but the anti-comics polemics (Wertham's SEDUCTION, Legman's LOVE AND DEATH) could still be found in libraries, while the only noteworthy pro-comics books (Feiffer's GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES) were nostalgic in tone rather than full-fledged defenses of popular comics.


There can be little doubt that Steranko, like everyone else in the comics business back then, was aware of SEDUCTION, whether he'd read it or not. The Nietzschean remark strongly suggests that Steranko did read it, since one of Wertham's most telling anti-comics bromides asked the unmusical question, "How did Nietzsche" (i.e., naked power-fantasies) "get into the nursery?" Of course Wertham does not really interpret comics through a Nietzschean lens and I doubt anyone else ever did back then either; for Steranko it may have been enough that Wertham had equated Superman with Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Ironically, though Wertham was (unlike Gersom Legman) a genuine psychologist with a strong if not doctrinaire Freudian bent, it was Legman who actually comes off as the super-Freudian who sees sex in everything, particularly in the narrative element of violence in comic books. Still, Wertham does have his super-Freudian moments as well, and probably other "intellectuals" followed suit, so one need not presume that Steranko read the more obscure Legman, though the juxtaposition of "Nietzschean intellectuals" and "Freudian intellectuals" against Adler leads me to some interesting reflections about compensation theory.


Wiki's entry on compensation says:


"In psychology, compensation is a strategy whereby one covers up, consciously or unconsciously, weaknesses, frustrations, desires, feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area through the gratification or (drive towards) excellence in another area. Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. The compensation strategy, however does not truly address the source of this inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority."


Adler elucidated his compensation theory in 1907, six years after he became part of Freud's Vienna circle of psychology-minded colleagues. What precise influence Freud may've had on Adler's theories (or vice versa) I leave to the historians of such matters: likewise, the precise nature of Nietzsche's influence on both men. What interests me is how Adler's theory allows for both "positive" and "negative" versions of compensation, which is a distinction not seen much in critiques of pop culture, where the word "compensation" almost always comes up in a negative connotation. The most banal of these critiques interprets a consumer's liking for pop culture as the consumer's inability to deal with "reality" and his (negative) compensation through fantasy.

Given the affectionate attitude of Steranko's HISTORY toward popular comics, it's clear that this isn't the way he invokes Adler against the overintellectualizing adherents of Nietzsche and Freud, though Steranko's phrasing comes a little close to making the same sort of indictment of "negative compensation" made against Siegel and Schuster by their actual detractors. Gersom Legman, for example, would have made no bones about viewing Siegel and Schuster as pornographers who offered the dominations of "sheer brute strength" as a "negative compensation" in place of sexual excitement, while at the same time taking to task the society that made possible such perversities.

Thus Steranko is at least half-right: Adler can be used as a counteragent against the reductive tendencies of Freud, at least as transmitted through his fellow travelers (Freud himself having written very little on specific items of popular literature).

Ironically, though, Steranko gives Nietzsche a bum rap as being an inspiration for effete intellectualism, when in fact certain of Nietzsche's writings might suggest the very sort of "positive compensation" Steranko might've endorsed, had he understood how little Wertham's vilification of Nietzsche had to do with the philosopher's writings.

I would view the following Nietzsche-aphorism as implying the dynamics of positive compensation:

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."

And in future essays I'll talk more about why this notion of positive compensation ought to receive more consideration in the stunted world of comics criticism.