THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST" (DC COMICS PRESENTS #82, 1985)

 

Though Superman and Adam Strange were created over twenty years apart, and only one of them was explicitly conceived to be a DC Comics hero, both share some inspiration from a hero created over twenty years before Superman: Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter, first appearing in 1912's A PRINCESS OF MARS. The indebtedness of Adam Strange is more obvious. Earthman John Carter was mysteriously spirited to the red planet Mars, where he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his cherished princess Dejah Thoris, whom he married in the third book. Adam Strange was yanked from Earth by a Zeta-Beam originating on the planet Rann in Alpha Centauri, and once he reached Rann, he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his girlfriend Alanna (who would become Strange's wife some time after the demise of the original series). Superman's debt, though, is more apparent than real. Though it seems well established that Jerry Siegel was familiar with the Burroughs hero, all he really emulated from John Carter was the idea of a super-strong hero amid lesser mortals. Siegel's original idea seemed to be that all denizens of Krypton had super-powers even on their own world. But once the Man of Steel fell under the aegis of other editors, the hero became much more Carter-like, powerless on his homeworld but empowered by the conditions of an alien planet.

Written by Cary Bates and both penciled and inked by Klaus Janson, "The Ghost of Krypton Past" (which happily does not force any other Dickensian tropes into the mix) opens with Adam and his wife enjoying a picnic on Rann. Alanna thinks Strange is trembling at her touch but it's really a Rann-quake, caused by the advent of a Kryptonian "ghost." The continuity of what happens next is muddled, but Strange apparently rescues her from the cataclysm, after which Alanna falls into a trance and starts speaking Kryptonese. This moves Strange to have his father-in-law Sardath summon Superman to Rann via the Zeta-Beam. 

As soon as the Man of Steel arrives, though, the happily married Alanna greets him like a trollop trying to pick up a sailor, remarking on the "physical and psychic magnificence" of the Kryptonian race. It's immediately evident that Alanna's being possessed by a spirit who's both vixenish and unsubtle-- she comes on to Superman right in front of her "husband"-- and on top of that, she speaks in tongues, or rather, the one tongue of Kryptonese. But even before Superman reveals the significance of the foreign phrase, the spirit changes Alanna into a monstrous form (with risible lobster-claws), wounds Strange, and escapes while Superman's helping his buddy.

Superman then provides a mini-history of the Kryptonian legend of Zazura, "a space-succubus, a female demon who subsisted by devouring the life-force of other human beings." It's not clear if Zazura is an alien creature or a metaphysical construct, though the former seems more likely, since we're also told that Zazura dwelled in space just beyond Krypton's atmosphere. This bit of retconning plays into a commonplace of the Krypton mythos: that for one reason or another, the super-advanced people of the planet eschewed space-travel, so that they were caught flatfooted when their world went boom. Thus Zazura, who for some time devoured any Kryptonian astronauts who came her way, bears indirect responsibility for the near-extinction of the race. Superman further theorizes that Rann has become infected by Zazura's presence since the Alpha Centauri star-system has passed through space once occupied by Krypton, and that the demoness plans to eradicate Rann to devour the energies of its inhabitants.

While Superman flies off to find the demon, Strange characteristically uses brain-power to deduce that Zazura isn't the only phenomenon that has appeared on Rann. Strange and his father-in-law learn that particles of crystal from Krypton's ancient "fire-falls" have entered Rann's atmosphere; crystals which weaken the creature the way kryptonite harms Kryptonians. When Strange finds his way to the locale from which Zazura is working her evil will, he finds that she's already subdued the Man of Steel. But the Champion of Rann shoots her with firefall-crystals, thus separating the spirit from the body of Alanna. This wound weakens the demon enough that Superman breaks free and administers the coup de grace: setting off Strange's second weapon-- a bomb full of firefall-crystals-- so that Zazura is destroyed and Rann is saved.

I said earlier that there's no precise proof that Zazura was in any way connected to Krypton's worship-systems; that she could as easily be an alien force interpreted as a "space succubus" (though negative incarnations of femininity were certainly a big part of the Judeo-Christian religion that influenced much of the Superman mythology). Being an alien rather than a magical demon doesn't keep Zazura from having metaphysical significance, though, and in any case the conclusion of "Ghost" reveals a different sort of mystical import. Rann, having passed into the space-sector of vanished Krypton, also came into contact with the spirits of that long dead race. Those spirits (whose plurality means that the title should have read "Ghosts") were aware of Zazura's malign plans. They, not Zazura, caused Alanna to speak her initial Kryptonese words, so that "their planet's last surviving son" would be called to Rann. As that world passes out of the Krypton sector, the final two pages show Superman enjoying a fleeting communion with his deceased ancestors.

"Ghost" is definitely far better than the usual run-of-the-mill stories seen in DC COMICS PRESENTS, and possibly artist Klaus Janson had some uncredited story input, in addition to his producing a stark yet evocative take on the wonderworlds of Rann and Krypton. Both Janson and Bates do credit to the classic Jerry Siegel-Wayne Boring story "Superman's Return to Krypton," wherein the Fire-Falls and other Kryptonian spectacles debuted. In addition, as shown above, a 1965 Supergirl story by Leo Dorfman deserves credit for first using the fire-falls as an exorcism-device, for when Supergirl becomes demon-possessed, only the surviving phenomenon of the falls can purge the evil in a Kryptonian's heart.

ADDENDUM: I initially didn't make much of Zazura's name, since it didn't seem to correlate with any established names from myth and legend. Of course I noticed that the demon's name begins with the last letter of the English language, while Alanna's begins with the first letter. This by itself could be an example of positive-negative mirroring, where "A" is "the beginning" and "Z" is "the end." But I then noticed that Bates (assuming he created the name) went a little further by (a) having the two names possess the same number of syllables, while (b) the first three letters of each name is a palindrome: ALA for Alanna, ZAZ for Zazura. A little more evidence of non-formulaic thinking in the story as a whole.

THE READING RHEUM: MORE MARTIAN BOOKS

 

A hardcore devotee of Edgar Rice Burroughs might know how thoroughly the author plotted his books ahead of publication. Thus it’s only my opinion when I state that A PRINCESS OF MARS, reviewed here, feels rather made-up-on-the-run, with Burroughs devoting most of his story to John Carter’s “wild Indian” battles with both “redskinned” humanoid Martians and the monstrous four-armed green Tharks. In the two subsequent books, though, Burroughs seems to be giving more thought to the makeup of Mars and the role that Carter would play in the planet’s destiny—to say nothing of his providing some perhaps unintentional meditations on his notion of a hero who supposedly never ages.

PRINCESS concludes on what must be deemed one of the best cliffhangers in literary history. After Carter wins and weds his beloved princess Dejah Thoris, duty forces him to attempt saving Mars by re-activating the atmosphere plants that keep the planet’s denizens alive. Before Carter even knows whether or not he’s been successful, his sojourn on Mars comes to an end and he finds himself back on Earth. Twenty years pass, both on Earth and on Mars, before the hero is once more able to return to Mars through a process loosely modeled on (but never explained as) the concept of astral-body travel.

Providentially Carter’s second sojourn takes him to the very heart of both Martian biology and Martian religion: the Valley Dor. Many Martians believe that when they perish, they will float down the River Iss (clearly indebted to the mythos of Egyptian Isis and her association with her river-borne husband Orisis) and enjoy eternal paradise in the Valley. Carter, as both a new culture-hero and a debunker of myths, learns the truth: whether alive or dead, Martians who go to the Valley end up having their blood drunk by bizarre plant-men, and their flesh eaten by giant white apes. And if that’s not enough, the Valley also plays host to a contingent of white-skinned Martians, called Therns, who also drink the blood of wayfarers—and they are in turn preyed upon by a race of black-skinned pirates. (Carter, a Virginia-born veteran of the Civil War, passes the comment that it’s unusual for a Southerner such as himself to think that the Black Martians are all surprisingly handsome.)

The reality of Dor is one of religions deception, best represented by an elderly Thern woman who pretends to be the Goddess Issus. (Burroughs probably borrowed this image of an evil old witch-woman from Haggard’s character Gagool in KING SOLOMON’S MINES.) However, not all of Dor’s mysteries are so easily dispelled. One of the Black Martians tells Carter a fabulous story of the origin of all Martian races. There was in distant times a Great Tree that manifested buds attached to its branches, some of which became the mindless plant-men later, while others developed into the forms of the apes, the Tharks, and of the Black Martians (who deem themselves “the First Born” among humanoid Martians). Carter never proves or disproves this impressive myth, since the Great Tree is long gone, but Burroughs invites the reader to take this particular story “on faith,” as it were.

While sojourning with the Therns and the Black Martians, Carter encounters many avatars of War, just as he did in the first book. But only in GODS and the sequel does he find his faithfulness to Dejah Thoris—who is kept offstage for most of the book—challenged by two avatars of Love. Red Martian Thuvia and White Martian Phaidor—both implicitly of a later generation than that of Dejah, and thus symbolically “daughter-figures”—both throw themselves at Carter. For his part, he remains comically confused by this development, since he has absolutely no lady-killing abilities, except those that stem from his ability to slaughter enemies. GODS ends with a cliffhanger which sots out the young women in terms of morality: Phaidor is the “bad daughter” who tries to slay Dejah Thoris, while Thuvia, “the good daughter” who renounces her affection for a married older man, tries to save Dejah from Phaidor.

The mythic events of the first half of GODS are rather undercut by its second half, wherein Carter goes back to chasing around Mars getting into bloody fights. WARLORD, the final book in the “Carter trilogy,” reverses this tendency. Two of his enemies, the Thern Matai Shang and the First-Born Thurid, manage to capture Thuvia, Phaidor, and Dejah Thoris, forcing Carter to chase the villains hither and yon. Yet all this derring-do, impromptu though it is, makes him so prominent that he ends becoming the planetary “warlord” to the entire planet, thus allowing him to organize the strife-filled nations of Mars in a manner that later generations would condemn as imperialistic. Toward the end of the book Carter meditates, “Today, by the might of my sword and the loyalty of the friends that my sword has made for me, black man and white, red man and green, rubbed shoulders in peace and good fellowship.”

I won’t sneer, as might some critics, at Burroughs’ conception of his hero as an ultimate fantasy of martial competence. However, at times this focus keeps Burroughs from letting his hero relate to others in any other terms save martial ones. In one case, this is inadvertently amusing. Partway through WARLORD, Carter, absent from Mars for twenty years, fights at the side of a handsome twenty-something warrior who manages never to state to Carter his name or lineage, so that eventually Burroughs can spring the Big Surprise: he’s Carthoris, whose name combines the names of his father John Carter and that of his mother Dejah Thoris. Apart from being a little thrown by this development, Carter never relates to Carthoris as father to son; the younger man is just another boon battle-companion. Clearly the author didn’t want to clutter his martial fantasy with lots of emotional baggage, which may be another reason that Carthoris is a deadly dull character. The youth’s only other function in WARLORD is to serve as a consolation prize for Thuvia; if she can’t have the already married “father,” she can at least enjoy a romance with the age-appropriate “son.”

To be sure, romance doesn’t go that easily for the couple in the fourth book. Just as the Lord of the Jungle stepped back from the spotlight to let his son Korak shine in THE SON OF TARZAN, John Carter is conspicuously absent from THUVIA, MAID OF MARS. Carthoris and Thuvia remain in love as they were at the end of WARLORD, but Thuvia’s father affiances her to an older ruler to maintain a treaty. The young lovers seem doomed by the forces of societal commitment, but to their good fortune, a gang of schemers abscond with Thuvia to unexplored parts of Mars. This gives Carthoris an excuse to chase after them, even if he’s pledged to defend her engagement to a man she doesn’t love.

The potential for young-love angst would have been enhanced had either Carthoris or Thuvia been particularly memorable, but both are dull characters, far less lively than their counterparts in the Tarzan saga, Korak and Meriem. Carthoris, who has inherited some of his father’s fantastic abilities, gets almost all of the physical action rescuing the lady fair. That said, Thuvia gets a little more to do than a lot of Burroughs-heroines, and so I judge THUVIA to be one of the few novels in which hero and heroine deserve to share co-billing, in contrast to the status of Jane Porter and Dejah Thoris, who are both adjuncts to their respective paramours. In addition, Thuvia may be the only Burroughs-heroine who has her own “superpower.” When she’s introduced in GODS OF MARS, Thuvia manifests an unexplained ability to control animals, which may have been the author expanding upon Tarzan’s rapport with jungle creatures. Thuvia uses her power against some of Carter’s enemies in her first appearance, but in the novel named for her, she only employs her skill to stop lion-like “banths” from attacking their prey, be it her own self or one of her adversaries.

The most amusing section of THUVIA places Carthoris in the isolated city of “Lothar” (a possible influence on the name of Superman’s enemy, perhaps?) Lothar only has two occupants, both of whom can call up “phantom bowmen” via their fantastic mental powers. One Lotharian calls himself a “realist” and the other styles himself an “etherealist,” which philosophical stances are meant to parody some of the philosophies extant during Burroughs’s era. Both men prove eager to put aside their high-minded thoughts for the chance to copulate with the Maid of Mars, and both are ultimately routed by the masculine superiority of Carthoris.

I don’t judge THUVIA to share the deeper mythic resonances of the first three Martian novels, and as memory serves, most of the rest of the Martian novels share the fourth book’s relative lack of ambition.

THE READING RHEUM: A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912)

 

In one crucial respect, the French writers of the degeneracy school differed from their American counterparts. Where Mather and his cohorts saw the Indian as insatiably lustful, a being of overbearing sexual power, these European writers saw him as sexually weak, cold-blooded, insensitive to pleasure or pain, passionless—perhaps even defective in his manhood.”—Richard Slotkin, REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE, p.203.

Numerous critics have remarked that in A PRINCESS OF MARS, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his “myth of Mars” out of myths of the American West. Prior to publication of PRINCESS (serialized under a different title), Burroughs had already penned three or four traditional westerns. John Carter, the protagonist of the first Martian novel, claims that he remembers no personal history, but nevertheless his main identity is that of a native of Civil-War Virginia and a former Confederate officer. Having become impoverished because his side lost—which is Burroughs’ only direct comment upon Carter’s Southern heritage—Carter goes West. He teams up with another former Rebel officer and seeks riches. However, savage Indians attack the two white adventurers. Carter’s partner is killed and Carter is cornered inside a cave by the hostiles. Believing himself doomed, he suffers a strange paralysis, after which a part of him separates from his mortal body, and he looks down upon what he deems his own “lifeless clay.” His “alternate self” then gazes up at the heavens and beholds the planet Mars, with which he identifies as a “fighting man.” In no time, Carter’s other identity manifests on Mars, where he seems to have as physical an existence as he did on Earth. He learns that Martian gravity gives him fantastic strength, and this leads in turn to Carter becoming the supreme warrior on the planet, as well as winning the hand of a red-skinned princess, Dejah Thoris.

In keeping with the theme of the Roman god of war, all denizens of Mars are warlike, but their warring nature springs from their world’s geological catastrophes, resulting in the planet’s slow loss of its atmosphere. Earlier Martian generations possessed a higher level of technology, which makes it possible for the natives to use super-science on occasion. Nevertheless, every race on Mars—red, white, black, or green—fights with pre-industrial weapons: swords, spears, bows and arrows. The people of Dejah Thoris, who are red-hued like the Indians of Earth, are somewhat more sophisticated than their fellow Martians, but in PRINCESS Burroughs is far less interested in them than in the bizarre green men, the Tharks and the Warhoons. These science-fictional ogres, Burroughs’ most memorable monsters, do not share the humanoid characteristics of most Martians, in that they have four arms and tusks in place of teeth. In addition, they incarnate the deepest idea of the ruthless savage, appearing to have no concept of pity or kindness. Carter will eventually learn that “nurture” rather than “nature” makes the Tharks pitiless, thanks to their habit of being raised by an impersonal village rather than by natural parents. That said, a couple of Thark characters prove themselves capable of being ennobled by Carter’s example. John Carter himself clearly loves the savage life—never once is he disheartened by killing an opponent, since all of his killings are justified—but he is a savage who has not forgotten the benefits of civilized life.

But the closest similitude between Carter and the Tharks is their reserve toward sexuality (hence the opening quote). In Burroughs’s cosmos, the unrelenting chaos of Martian life has made it difficult for the Martians to have more than perfunctory interest in spawning. There are occasional “degenerates”—though “throwbacks” might be a better term—among the Tharks, as with one of the book’s main villains, Thark chieftain Tal Hajus. Of this nasty villain, who later comes close to committing inter-species rape on Dejah Thoris, Burroughs writes:

[Tal Hajus] was, in contrast to most of his fellows, a slave to that brute passion which the waning demands for procreation upon this dying planet had almost stilled in the Martian breast.

Burroughs writes this in Chapter 12, and not until Chapter 27 does Tal Hajus attempt to assault the comely princess. Thus, long before the threat manifests, Burroughs has Carter meditating (on the same page of Chapter 12) that it may be necessary for Dejah Thoris to take her own life as did “those brave frontier women of my own land rather than fall into the hands of the Indian braves.” In Tal Hajus, then, Burroughs allows for the reader to imagine the savage as “insatiably lustful.”

But even though John Carter wanders through a world where he and everyone else walk around near-naked, he himself seems as “underfunded” as the majority of Tharks—and for the same reason, that of being almost wholly oriented on the arts of Mars, with little experience in the ways of Venus. In Chapter 14, Carter gives readers their only view of his own sexual experiences as he thinks about his burgeoning affection for the princess.

So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine.

In other words, in Burroughs’ cosmos, inter-species sex is okay when sanctioned by the goddess of love. Yet in contrast to the author’s same-year TARZAN OF THE APES, there’s not a lot of lust in the pages of PRINCESS, except from villains like Tal Hajus and the spite-filled Thark villainess Sarkoja. But then, the loyalty of Carter and most other Martians to the martial spirit mirrors the author’s dedication to spectacular violence. Even though Burroughs does not dwell on the resultant gore from blades piercing flesh, he provides so many guttings and slicings that it’s impossible for readers not to imagine the sights the author denies them. It would be interesting to compare the sheer quantity of violent acts in any Mars book to those in the contemporaneous novels of the period. I tend to think that Burroughs had no literary peers in the realm of spectacular violence until Robert E. Howard came along—but even I am not dedicated enough to the spirit of Mars to undertake such a comparative study.

NEAR MYTHS: "MAROONED ON MONGO," "TOURNAMENT OF DEATH" (1934-35)

In THE PLANET MONGO, Nostalgia Press's 1974 collection of the first two years of Alex Raymond's FLASH GORDON strip, the editors assigned titles to five sections of Raymond's work. I disagree with these assignments, for as I see it, these three years break down into three definable installments. I'm keeping their title, "The Witch Queen of Mongo," for the forthcoming essay, but the other two I've designated as "Marooned on Mongo," a title borrowed from the otherwise unmemorable 1996 TV-show, and "Tournament of Death," a title borrowed from one of the episodes of the 1936 serial. In all of the Raymond works I analyze here, I give Raymond sole credit for sake of brevity, though some if not all of the work was co-written by Don Moore.

_________

The comic strip adaptations of two prose creations-- Edgar Rice Burroughs' TARZAN and Philip Francis Nowlan's BUCK ROGERS-- launched what many have called "the Golden Age of Adventure Comic Strips." The two strips even debuted in American newspapers on the same day in 1929.  About five years later, King Features Syndicate invited artist Alex Raymond to create two ongoing strips, often if not always appearing together on Sunday pages, and both seemed to be biting the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs. JUNGLE JIM, though it concerned a white hunter rather than a ape-man, at least sought to compete with Tarzan's jungle thrills, though at no point was the former capable of eclipsing the latter. However, if it's true that King originally thought of doing an adaptation of Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, then there's not much question that Raymond'FLASH GORDON did indeed surpass the reputation of the Burroughs creation. (Additionally, King was possibly seeking to compete with the popularity of BUCK ROGERS, whom FLASH also excelled in popularity and repute.)

The sequence I've dubbed "Marooned on Mongo" is a long picatesque adventure that acquaints Raymond's readers with many of the colorful races of Mongo, and in this Raymond follows the lead of Burroughs's Mars books for the most part. Burroughs' Carter was an Earthman transported to a savage Mars inhabited by humanoids, one of whom, the "incomparable Dejah Thoris," eventually becomes Carter's wife. Mars's humanoids were largely characterized by skin-color-- red, white, black, and yellow-- though there were two quasi-humanoid races, the Tharks and the Warhoons, who were four-armed green monsters. In contrast, Raymond's Flash Gordon and his love-interest Dale Arden are both abducted to Mongo by crazed Doctor Zarkov when the scientist takes the two youths aboard his ship and tries to ram the hurtling planet Mongo to keep it from crashing into Earth. (The peril of colliding worlds is summarily dismissed and nothing more is said about the havoc Mongo's presence might be wreaking on Earth's solar system.) Mongo has a few humanoid races characterized by color alone, though the strips are inconsistent about depicting Ming, Aura and their congeners as "yellow," while Ming is the only one given a "Chinese Mandarin" image. However, Raymond was far more interested in creating humanoids with overt or implied animal natures: lion-men, hawk-men, and shark-men. Mongo is also, like Mars, rife with both primitive sword-battles and advanced technical gadgetry, underscored by sneaky court intrigues and romantic entanglements.

In contrast to John Carter's wooing of Dejah Thoris, the romance of Flash and Dale takes place somewhat on the fly, and is swiftly challenged by the ardor of Aura, daughter of Ming. In the "Marooned" sequence none of these four characters are very strongly characterized, and the attitudes of Ming and Aura toward the two Earthpeople reverse one another: Ming desires Dale and wishes to kill Flash; Aura desires Flash and wishes to kill Dale. In an early essay here, I discerned this as a "racial myth," but today I tend to think that this was just a surface imitation of the BUCK ROGERS strip, and that Raymond had little real interest in such matters. "Marooned" is largely a Cook's Tour of Mongo. There's nearly no social commentary on the various exotic tribes met by the humans, except insofar as many of them have grievances against Emperor Ming, who implicitly rules the planet with an iron hand.

"Tournament of Death," however, marks a transition in Raymond's work. Toward the end of "Marooned," King Vultan of the Hawkmen has been trying to make Dale his bride, and even comes to blows with Flash. However, when the floating city of the Hawks is imperiled, Doctor Zarkov saves the city with his scientific knowledge, and so Vultan befriends the three Earth-people. Ming and Aura then show up with their troops to seize the humans. So Vultan invokes "the ancient laws of Mongo," calling for a "tournament of death," in which Flash can compete to rise to the rank of rulership-- but only if Flash is the "last man standing" in the midst of dozens of ambitious warlords from all over the planet. It's with "Tournament" that Raymond abandons most of the storytelling tropes favored by Burroughs. Palace intrigue and romantic complications remained, but "Tournament" begins to portray Mongo with a sense of the pagantry emblematic of photorealistic book illustrations. In addition, Raymond advances Barin-- one of the rebel warlords seen in "Marooned"-- as a consolation prize for Aura. Though Aura makes one attempt to kill Dale during this sequence, she's overcome by Barin's charm and for the most part forgets her ardor for Flash, as well as deserting the cause of her father.

Though Aura's character diminishes in this sequence, Ming becomes a more majestic figure of evil here. He allows the tournament because he hopes to see Flash humbled before all Mongo. Instead, Flash wins in such a way that he allows his fiercest competitor Barin to live. But even though Ming is forced to assign kingdoms to both Flash and Barin, the wily emperor gives both of them wild, untamed domains, so that the two warriors will have to exert themselves mightily in order to attain their goals. It's at this point that Flash goes forth to conquer the lands under the sway of Queen Azura, "the Witch Queen of Mongo"-- which I'll consider in the next essay.

THE MANY FACES OF MIGHT

In DYNAMICITY DUOS PART 1 I considered whether or not mere gangsters could be deemed as "megadynamic" foes for Batman even though they lacked any of the outward marks of exceptional status, such as costumes, gimmicky weapons, a penchant for bizarre crimes, etc.  My answer was affirmative:

I suggest that although these ne'er-do-wells are not in the same league with Batman's truly exceptional foes, as per my example of the Penguin here, they still fall into the range of the megadynamic by virtue of their narrative operations. For one thing, though in both examples Batman defeats the mundane malefactors, he has to work somewhat harder in the second case, suggesting that the lawbreakers here are smarter and/or more formidable.

My phrase "narrative operations" fits with my earlier definition of "dynamicity" as a "narrative value" rather than a "significant value," as seen in DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.  In DUOS I formulated the notion that though "tough gangsters" who give Batman a run for his money might not be as "exceptional" as the Penguin, but they at least qualified to be rated as "lower-level" x-types, best considered "exemplary" rather than "exceptional" types. 

Later, I wondered if this "lowest division of the highest level" rationale might also solve the conundrum I proposed at the end of MEGA, MESO, MICRO PT. 2. To what extent, I asked at the end of the essay, should one consider a character like Dream Girl-- whose future-forecasting power is essentially strategic in nature-- to be exceptional?  One might say that she, too, belongs on that "lowest division" level.

And yet, even Dream Girl and the "Academy for Gangsters" (the mundane opponents cited in DUOS) are still x-types in terms of the "narrative operations" they serve, operations which might be summed up with the idea of "spectacle."  It's only through spectacle that one can truly view two forms of might contending, and thus created the sublime experience of Kantian dominance.  In contrast, in MEGA, MESO, MICRO PT. 2 I cited the teleseries VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA as a "subcombative adventure," even though the starring characters regularly overcome marvelous, megadynamic threats:

Because of the lack of spectacular violence, I see VOYAGE as a subcombative form of adventure. The heroes are perhaps a little better at combat than the average man-on-the-street, but not by much. 

In the same essay I described the VOYAGE heroes' violence as "functional," and this is probably the most desirable way of describing how the spectacular quality of violence can be neutralized, so that Kantian dominance is not conjured forth.  In THE NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE PT. 2  I furnished another comparative example like the one I made between STAR TREK and VOYAGE, this time comparing two giant-monster flicks, and showing why REPTILICUS' violence was spectacular, and therefore in the combative mode, while that of DEADLY MANTIS was merely functional, and therefore subcombative.

What's interesting to me here are the many manifestations in which a lower-ranking form of *dynamicity* can overcome a higher-ranking form.  Peter Coogan's SUPERHERO: THE SECRET ORIGIN OF A GENRE asks the question, "If Sergeant Bullock defeats and captures the Penguin, is Bullock a superhero?"  Coogan's response is couched in his own hermeneutic, but mine would be, "No, because Bullock has only functional, non-spectacular violence at his disposal."


I've previously analyzed a similar pattern in this essay with the microdynamic hero "Mighty Max," but here's another example of a "mesodynamic" type overcoming a "megadynamic" one:

I recently reread Edwin Arnold's 1905 novel LT. GULLIVAR JONES, retitled as GULLIVER OF MARS when re-published in a 1960s Ace paperback format.  There are several similarities between Arnold's GULLIVAR and Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 "John Carter" novel A PRINCESS OF MARS.  In both works, the hero is translated to Mars via improbable fantasy-devices.  In both, the hero encounters Martian people who dispose of their dead by sending them down a "River of the Dead," and both encounter weird plant-life.  Gullivar even encounters human-eating plant-creatures, though they're not as memorable as the plant-men John Carter meets in his next outing, GODS OF MARS.  Finally, in both novels vicious warlords abduct the hero's potential beloved, and the hero goes in pursuit.

But whereas John Carter and all of his descendants chase down their enemies with true bloodlust, Arnold's Gullivar is a reluctant hero at best.  In Arnold's hands, Gullivar sounds like what one would expect if Oscar Wilde tried to create a spacefaring superhero.  Gullivar is reasonably tough, somewhat like the VOYAGE heroes above: when a warlord's men come to take Princess Heru in tribute, Gullivar brawls a little with them before getting knocked out.  He then spends half the novel in pursuit, mostly observing the weird sights of Mars on the way.  He does have a prolonged encounter with the warlord Ar-Hap, and he does get to slug the evildoer once during a big fracas.  But the violence is merely a disorganized mess, after which Gullivar returns to Earth.  Here, even though the warlord has the potential to be a combative menace, the hero is too functionally depicted to provide much of a challenge. 

I'll probably return to this topic in a part 2, but since I'll probably never write about GULLIVER OF MARS again, I can't resist adding in this historic panel from the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN:

 

In other words, though Moore is careful not to use full names in order to avoid the wrath of ERB's lawyers, here we have "John Carter" meeting "Gullivar Jones:"

Or, put another way, "John" meeting "Jones:"

Or maybe even-- if you give Moore enough credit for punnery:

"J'onn"-- meeting "J'onzz."