SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

ADDENDUM 4/12/2026-- I chanced across this abstract, suggesting that the critical acceptance of "romance" began to shift back to acceptance, after the form's long absence during the Age of Reason, slightly before the 1764 publication of OTRANTO. 

In 1762, when Richard Hurd (1720–1808) published a small work of historical-literary criticism, this was for him not the start of a long career in literary endeavor or scholarship. While not seeking a career in literary scholarship, Hurd’s two volumes of commentary were hugely successful, going through six editions in just a few years. Thomas Warton (1728–1790) revised his influential Observations on the Fearie Queene of Spenser (1754) after reading Hurd’s third Dialogue, on the Age of Queen Elizabeth. This chapter examines Hurd’s Elizabethan past, in which the monarchy, in the person of Elizabeth, and the nobility were in a balance of political power, while chivalry and romance formed the cultural and literary norms.

 

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I'm a big fan of one of Leslie Fiedler's quotes from his 1982 book WHAT WAS LITERATURE?: "Mythopoeic excellence is independent of formal excellence." I've never invoked the quote in any of my various analyses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either singly or in collaboration. Yet the quote came to mind while I was mulling over some recent friendly arguments between fellow comics-bloggers Kid of CRIVENS and Rip Jagger of RIP JAGGER'S DOJO, if only because both of them made some allusions to "myth."

Now the thing called "myth" is a many-splintered thing, and no one entirely agrees on how to define it. My overall concept of myth is probably not the same as that of Kid, Rip, or Leslie Fiedler. However, one possible common element may be the idea that mythic elements in fiction are those we commonly call "larger than life," and possibly all of us would agree that these two titans of comic-book storytelling predominantly told stories that were "larger than life." (I include Fiedler because he did make a couple of positive remarks on the Fourth World, though I believe he credited the opus to Stan Lee.)

I'll get to quotes by Kid and Rip soon, but first I want to clarify that I'm not entirely sure what specific targets Fiedler was reacting against when he coined his quote. In the book he generalizes a lot about the literary elitism of his time, without naming specific opponents. The way his quote is worded, one assumes that there were critics who believed that "formal excellence" in literary works was everything. If a writer like Virginia Woolf (my example, not Fiedler's) could turn out highly finessed prose that one could admire for its own sake, it would seem that Woolf's lack of any "larger than life" story did not matter to such critics. Fiedler represented himself as someone who could appreciate what he called "myth" in popular as well as elite culture; could appreciate a bestseller-type like Margaret Mitchell as much as he appreciated a literary light like William Faulkner, if not in the exact same way.

OK, so here are the relevant quotes from Kid and Rip from this comments-section of this Dojo post. First Rip mentions two of the more "mythic tales" of Jack Kirby's Fourth World  cosmology, and Kid responds:

I think it likely that many of the themes that people saw in Kirby's work, weren't actually there (or were exaggerated) and had probably never even occurred to him. The Fourth World is laid against a superficial backdrop of 'myth', purely for the purpose of telling stories about good guys versus bad guys.

And Rip responds:

I disagree with you adamantly that Kirby's tapping of mythic themes was by chance. He was intentionally evoking those themes. The "Anti-Life Equation" is a core idea that permeates the stories and is all about the individual freedoms we aspire to.

Now at this point one may be thinking, "okay, all three quoted persons said something about myth, but where does all the fuss about 'formal excellence' come in? Neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee was any sort of 'literary light' with a reputation for fine wordsmithing." Quite true. But Kid makes clear that he didn't find Jack Kirby's solo works, Fourth World and otherwise, to be as "readable" as the collaborative works between Kirby and Stan Lee, and this has been a frequent complaint from many other fans over the years in assessing the virtues of the Lee-Kirby collaborations as against the "Solo Kirby" stories, including but not limited to the Fourth World.

It's true that the sort of critics Fiedler was responding to would have deemed both comics-makers to be melodramatic trash. However, I believe that Fiedler was arguing that certain authors did tap into a special type of creativity, one that didn't require a well-turned literary phrase at all. But "readability" was another aspect of story-crafting, and it's as good a word as any for what fans liked in the Lee-Kirby collaborations that they didn't find in the Solo Kirby stories.

Since I'm not trying to make any new enemies, the only reason I quote Kid and Rip is to ground my own responses to their estimations, not to attribute to either blogger something he did not say. And my response is as follows. I agree with Rip that there's a lot of intentional myth-making in the Fourth World, though not so much in the rest of Kirby's solo oeuvre. But I also think Kid is correct that many contemporary comics-readers found the Fourth World hard to follow, and I believe that the hardcore comics-fans didn't invest themselves in Kirby's myths because by 1970 many of them had come to expect a certain level of "formal excellence" even in funnybooks. 

What does "formal excllence" look like on the low level of comic-book melodrama? I see one crucial element that Lee brought to the collaborations that Kirby was not able to master despite his best efforts-- and I'm going to capitalize this element to indicate its importance--

THE APPEARANCE OF CONSISTENT TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS (defined as characters who seem to have two or more dominant characteristics that give the impression of consistency)

Now, I say "appearance" because of course there were dozens of Marvel characters, either by Stan and Jack or by other creators entirely, who were only one-dimensional (defined by just one trait) or no-dimensional (defined by the function the character performs in the story). Both Lee and Kirby grew up with comics in which one-dimensional and no-dimensional characters practically defined the medium, and the main exceptions were in the works of particular raconteurs like Will Eisner and Carl Barks. Lee and Kirby separately experimented a little bit with two-dimensional characters, mostly in one-shot anthology stories, where they didn't have to worry about a serial status quo. 

I might argue that both authors had made minor inroads toward two-dimensional characterizations, Kirby in the comic strip SKY MASTERS, and Lee in his collaboration with Joe Maneely on the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT. But they weren't moved by any lofty literary aims in either case. By the late 1950s the comics-business was in chaos, and no one was sure what would sell. DC, long the home to the reigning super-dude, had started pushing superheroes in the last years of the decade. But even these were at best one-dimensional. Barry Allen was a dogged police scientist, Hal Jordan was a slightly more venturesome test pilot. 

Then Lee and Kirby, who had both been doing a lot of stand-alone SF/horror stories for the Company That Would Be Marvel, came together for FANTASTIC FOUR. In those anthology stories both men had sometimes emulated the two-dimensional characters in 1950s SF-films, and they brought a similar dynamic to this new group of superheroes. The feature's success was a blend of Kirby's great talent for character design and Lee's sensitivity to the different "voices" each character might possess. I would never credit all the "myth-elements" to Kirby alone, or all the "characterization-elements" to Lee alone. But each of them had their primary strengths, and together they were able to present a variety of larger-than-life fantasy-situations that seemed more "relatable" because the characters had an apparent consistency of voice and attitude.

I may build on some of these considerations elsewhere, since Fiedler's use of the word "formal" reminds me of my distinction here between "formal and informal postulates." But none of those hypothetical essays are likely to involve the eternal "Stan and Jack" question.

QUICK ADDENDUM: Here's an example of what I would deem a two-dimensional character by Stan Lee, which story he completed with John Romita long before Kirby returned to Martin Goodman's company.

REMEMBRANCE OF JOURNALS PAST

 Reader YBY wrote in the comments-section of this post: 

I always figured the people who worked [at the Journal] were true believers in the whole "comics should be grown-up and complex" view.

 As it happens, some ruminations on my experiences with the Journal fit in with another topic, so here goes.

On the general subject of making comics grown-up, the Journal didn’t start out with that high-toned ambition when the magazine began in 1976. In terms of content, the early Journal celebrated and criticized the same topics that engaged the greater part of comics fandom: genre-work from the major publishers and old fandom-favorites like EC Comics and the Carl Barks ducks. The Journal wasn’t the first fanzine to have couched its criticisms in a more intellectual tone, but Gary Groth succeeded in finding an assortment of writers who shared his waspish view of the medium-- including me-- which may have only been possible because mainstream fans had become more venturesome in their tastes in the early 1970s. At some point, the news section of the magazine became more adversarial toward the big companies (and some smaller ones), and that adversarial nature made the Journal notorious for its focus on controversial issues. Nevertheless, despite some of Groth’s later pronouncements, the Journal was still a fanzine. For what I remember as a full year, the magazine’s subscription page featured a still from the then-current STAR WARS hit, in which the movie’s characters were made to say something like, “That’s no fanzine—it’s too big to be a fanzine!” Some of the most memorable genre-celebrating essays of early issues included Cat Yronwode championing the mythic aspects of the WONDER WOMAN feature, and Ed Via devoting a long essay to the subtleties of Miller’s DAREDEVIL.

In this essay I provided a snapshot of the shift away from genre-celebration in the 1980s, the same period when Gary and Co. decided to emphasize “art” in the Journal while letting Amazing Heroes deal with all the genre-work. Still, while I was still contributing, I persevered in attempting to analyze the makeup of genre in my reviews whenever possible, rather than dismissing genre as the domain of mere hacks. I give credit to Gary Groth for giving Journal space to my very favorable review of Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS circa 1987, even though various personal remarks made it clear that he Groth abhorred the work. But by the early 1990s, the bloom was off the rose: genre was the enemy, and most of the writers were only too happy to jabber about commodification and similar Marxist fantasies in order to increase the magazine’s alleged intellectual heft.

In various essays I've argued that, in addition to the Marxist cant, many Journal writers subscribed to the Pedagogical Paradigm, claiming that superheroes could only appeal to children and that therefore modern fans were just as a bunch of big man-babies. No doubt the converted choir found this nonsense gratifying to their egos, but none of them had any better concept of what Art was than had the writers of the Frankfurt School, from whom many Journalistas sedulously copied. And yet, the dislike of genre may run even deeper than that.

In Malcolm Heath’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, Heath describes the philosopher’s definition of the term “tekhne,” meaning a special level of excellence that a superior member of any profession—artist, philosopher, politician—reaches when he masters his craft. Yet, as if to contradict this emphasis on intellectual assiduity, at the opening of the Metaphysics Aristotle says (according to Heath) that “unreflective experience may produce the same result as ‘tekhne.’ In general, the ability to do something well does not depend on understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well.”

Because Art has so many multifarious dimensions to it, I’ve often disputed judgments by various critics whom I found overly dependent on judging Art by some purely intellectual metric. Such critics, while comfortable with a Harvey Kurtzman, had no vocabulary for dealing with the genius of a Jack Kirby, except to call him a “primitive” or something like that. I sought to use the mythic arguments of critics like Frye and Fiedler to argue for a wider perspective, and at one point I even asked Gary Groth if he’d want to print a regular series on “myths in comics.” He did me another favor by refusing the proposal. While I don’t recant anything that I wrote back in those days, back then I hadn’t yet defined what factors were shared by both religious and literary myths—a commonality I would now abbreviate to “poeticized knowledge.” Without a sound definition, my survey of the topic would not have been adequate, and any “myth-essays” I might have written back then would have suffered.

I will note in conclusion that when critics—in the Journal or anywhere—celebrate works for adhering to some intellectual concerns, they’re just doing what they were taught in school. Anything I learned about HUCKLEBERRY FINN in elementary or secondary school was almost certainly framed in purely intellectual terms, as in, “Twain does XYZ in order to signal his deep revulsion toward slavery.” That’s the sort of simple idea on which that high-school kids can base meaningless essays, in order to show that they at least paid some attention in class. Anything deeper, such as Fiedler’s claim that Huck and Jim represent a homosocial union that divorces both males from the troublesome world of family life, has to come later, when an individual has learned how to deal with abstractions of all kinds, not just with those that serve some narrow “pro-social values.” In fact, if the Pedagogical Paradigm applies to anyone, it would be to all those who avoid the deep waters of myth and symbol in order to content themselves in the kiddie-pool of rationality—

The big man-babies.

AN URSULINE ELITIST

Years ago, during one of my many forum-arguments, I made some comments about the elitist mentality, and an opponent demurred at the use of the term, claiming that the word I ought to have used was “snob.” I countered by saying the word “snob” was too imprecise. After all, though snobbery is more often associated with elitism than with its conceptual opposite “populism,” I’ve encountered my share of “populist snobs,” by which I mean persons who are validated only by their association with works that have proven themselves popular in the marketplace.

“Elite” stems from a Latin word meaning “choice,” the usual connotations being that to be of “the elite” is either that one is “chosen,” or that one has such developed good taste that he/she can make better choices about what is good than can the average consumer.

Many of the essays in Ursula LeGuin's LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT are full of fulminations against hackwork in many genres, though she seems to have taken particular pleasure in assailing the then-popular sword-ands-sorcery genre. Yet, unlike many elitists of her time, she also takes aim at authors whom she considers “earnest snobs,” which would seem to indicate that LeGuin did not consider herself guilty of snobbery.

Who were these “earnest snobs?” LeGuin never specifies, either in the essay where the phrase occurs, the aforementioned “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” or in any other part of LOTN. In "Archetypes," LeGuin responds to the question of whether science fiction can be a “modern mythology,” and her response is framed in terms that are, if not snobbish, are certainly elitist. After defining all the tropes in science fiction that she doesn’t like as “Submyths,” she resolutely excludes all of them from even deserving to be called science fiction:

The artist who deliberately submits his work to [the Submyths] has forfeited the right to call his work science fiction; he’s just a popcultist cashing in.

In other words, to submit to the Submyths is the modern equivalent of prostrating oneself to the modern devil known as Commercial Hackery. Thus, by a rather accomplished sleight-of-hand, LeGuin affirms the idea of calling science fiction “modern mythology,” but only if it fits her elitist vision of the way true art works. 

However, at the time LeGuin wrote this essay, there were stirrings of pluralism even within intellectual circles, in which some artists and critics asserted that even popular art contained “myths” worth studying. LeGuin rejected this viewpoint by claiming that such persons were not aware of the true breadth and depth of mythic meaning: “they mistake symbol (living meaning} for allegory (dead equivalence). So they use mythology in an arrogant fashion, rationalizing it, condescending to it.”

To be sure, it’s hard to keep track of what “they” LeGuin refers to, since in the previous paragraph she starts talking about would-be writers learning the wrong lessons from uninspired academics. Her basic point is certainly undeniable: writers and critics who over-rationalize myth do exist. However, LeGuin weakens her case by conveniently not naming any of these offenders against true myth, and so these unnamed academics are treated the same as the nameless hacks: infidels who whore after the wrong gods.

The closest she comes to naming an offender of sorts, at least in the “Archetypes” essay, comes toward the end, when she proposes  this odd equnivalence:

There are never very many artists around. No doubt we’ll continue most of the time to get rewarmed leftovers from Babylon and Northrop Frye served up by earnest snobs, and hordes of brawny Gerbilmen ground out by hacks.

The sudden and unjustified mention of Frye in this context raises some interesting flags. It’s true that Frye’s fame had endured for the past twenty years, since he published 1955’s ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. But though he had a degree of influence in academia, I find it very hard to believe that any “earnest snobs” sought to find rationalizations of mythology in the ANATOMY, or in any other Frye work. Frye was at heart a pluralist, able to appreciate many different genres (certainly more than LeGuin), and he even gives SF an approving nod once or twice in the ANATOMY. It’s true that LeGuin doesn’t call Frye an “earnest snob,” but her loose association implies that there’s something in his work that would appeal to rationalizers. Or—is it just that Frye doesn’t insist on the type of high-toned myth that LeGuin prefers?

This hypothesis finds confirmation in one other LOTN essay, “Escape Routes.”  Prior to the essay proper, LeGuin identifies the piece as “an amalgamation and summation of several talks” that she gave to “teachers of SF.” In keeping with its name, “Routes” goes in more than one direction, lacking the focus of LeGuin’s more organized essays. But only one passage concerns me here: her slam, again unjustified, at another critic known for defending popular culture.

…outside the [SF] ghetto, there are critics who like to stand above SF, looking down upon it, and therefore want it to be junky, popcult, contemptible… and it’s one of the many games Leslie Fiedler plays.

As with Frye, there’s no telling what critical crime LeGuin thinks Fiedler committed, nor any attempt to clarify what he said or why it affronted the author. As I’ve read most of Fiedler’s writings, I would say that any “contempt” she thought she perceived existed in LeGuin’s own imagination. Fiedler was as much a pluralist as Frye, even though the two critics followed extremely divergent methodologies, and Fiedler devoted far more attention than did Frye to defending popular culture. That said, I don’t see in Fielder any of the “ha, ha, this is so bad it’s good” attitude that one can find, for instance, in Jules Feiffer. Fiedler is usually careful to map out the intellectual qualities that distinguish canonical “art” from pop art—but apparently, that wasn’t enough for LeGuin.

In the “Archetypes” essay, LeGuin accuses the rationalizers of myth as “arrogant.” The real truth of the matter, though, may be that LeGuin didn’t like Fiedler or Frye because, by offering even mild apologias for popular fiction, they didn’t validate her screeds against what she deemed as “bad art.” Thus she comes across as being not as a wise soul who wanted the best in art and literature, but as an arrogant elitist snob able to appreciate myths only if they shared her own high-toned themes.

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE DEATH OF IRIS"] THE FLASH #270-283, 1979-80)

This mythcomics essay didn't start as a blogpost, but as an essay for Robert Young's COMICS INTERPRETER magazine.  The issue for which the essay was intended wasn't published to my knowledge, and since the last recorded issue came out in 2004, I probably wrote it around that time. The magazine's demise anticipates the overall death of the print-magazine comics-fanzine, culminating in the end of the print COMICS JOURNAL somewhere around the  beginning of this decade.

Since it's an essay, it's longer and gets more into my personal aesthetics. I had occasionally thought about re-reading the FLASH issues analyzed in order to see if they still met my mythopoeic standards, and finally, I did so. I cleaned up a few cumbersome sentences, and I follow up the essay with a couple of extra comments, but substantially this post is the same as the essay submitted in 2004.
________________

In WHAT WAS LITERATURE?, critic Leslie Fiedler observed that the “mythopoeic power” of works, whether of high or low literature, was “independent of formal excellence.” If I had a hammer capable of pounding this insight into the skulls of comics-readers everywhere, I would use that hammer—on about 50% of the readers.   The other 50% could go on being elitists, populists, or nothing in particular, which would still leave me opponents with whom to debate. But the converted 50%, thanks to their newfound appreciation of Fiedler’s insight, would be granted greater understanding of the the amazing variety of myth-symbols present in all levels of literature, not to mention better posture and 75% fewer cavities than the other group.  But as I have no such hammer, I had to write this essay instead.

Fiedler does not explicitly define in the book what he means by “formal excellence." As far as this essay is concerned, it connotes the totality of literary qualities that have traditionally impressed the cultural elite against which Fiedler was reacting. It would thus take in elements like distinctive style, originality, mature content, and the one that concerns me most here, what I call “thematic complexity.”   I stress this over what’s usually called just “theme” because almost any coherent narrative has some sort of theme, no matter how simple—the triumph of true love, the defeat of the forces of evil. But simple themes do not generally impress the elite. I have nothing against the appreciation of thematic complexity in literature, but I think that often readers of an elitist bent overlook another kind of complexity in their search for deep themes about the meaning of life—what I will call “symbolic complexity.”  This complexity may be what gives some of these simple works about love and death the power to survive over generations, even when the works may have crafted as “throwaway entertainment,” and certainly lack much “formal excellence.”

At this point I should probably warn any elitists reading that they should probably just stop right here, as most of them have hardened their hearts (and heads) against the notion that myths and symbols have any value apart from how they are used in a narrative to enhance the theme.  Many of them have expended considerable intellectual resources to sound the clarion call for “comics as respectable art,” which often (though not exclusively) means comics with complex themes.   Because theme is predominant in the minds of elitists, they often have no ability to see how symbols can work apart from theme even as they work together, not unlike harmony and melody in music.   In any case I have a little tired of answering the charge of being simply a “superhero apologist” (as one Milo George was good enough to tag me on a message board), as well as being bored with the usual predictions of what will happen if the barbarians of pop culture should ever be allowed past the gates of respectability in any way: the downfall of civilization, rioting in the streets, and no new issues of EIGHTBALL.

In one way, though, fans of trashy genre-literature (whether they are myth-critics or not) have one thing in common with the elitists: both groups are faced with an often-staggering mass of garbage through they must dig to find gemstones. Most elitists solve this problem by ignoring everything that seems thematically conventional, unless it is given the gloss of superior technique. Fans, for their part, will keep on trucking through the muck and mire in search of whatever kind of gems they prefer, but most of them are guided by their individual tastes.  The unique situation of the Hunter of Modern Myths, though, is that he may find himself discerning interesting gems—mythologems, to be precise-- in works he doesn’t particularly like (as I will be doing here).   However, assuming that even a cynical elitist will take that critic’s word on the matter of his own tastes, one might consider this relative detachment a rebuttal of a classic elitist canard: that the myth-critic is merely attempting to use archetypal discourse to justify his nostalgic affection for things he read in childhood.   Indeed, the sequence I’ll be critiquing from the adventures of “the Fastest Man Alive” is actually devoted to tearing down much of what I have liked, in a nostalgic sense, about the character of the Flash.

But then, at times destruction can be as interesting as creation, as is testified by Camille Paglia’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous opposition of Apollo and Dionysus in art:

“Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid… Dionysus was identified with fluids; blood, sap, milk, wine.  The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one form from another.  All artifacts are Apollonian.”—Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 30.

The most common characterization of the superhero by the elitist is an Apollonian one.  The superhero is, we are told, the staunch defender of order at all times, which in itself proves him a potential fascist.  And even many of those who style themselves fans of the superhero genre would prefer to see their character unsullied with Dionysian darkness.  As I began this essay, issue #2 of DC’s crossover-miniseries, IDENTITY CRISIS, came out, occasioning considerable ire from many fans for its flirtation with such darkness.   This darkness took the form of the rape and murder of Sue Dibny, a character of some thirty years’ vintage (and who originally appeared in the FLASH comic).   The fans that did not like this development did not think such excessive violence belonged in a superhero comic, which was meant to be a fun, “all ages” form of entertainment.

Though I disagree with this conclusion, I sympathize on one symbolic level.   Most characters of genre-literature, particularly those in continuing series, are “Apollonian artifacts,” conventions given human form that do not even try to be three-dimensional human beings. One does not have to be Leslie Fiedler to suggest that it must be something akin to a mythopoeic power that keeps certain genre-characters fresh over generations.   Further, the superhero may be the most artificial of cultural artifacts, for he resembles nothing “real,” in the way that the fictional cowboy is patterned on his historical forbears.  There’s some logic behind the idea that the superhero’s adventures should be as strictly ritualistic as a Noh drama: nothing but endless tales of good conquering evil, in the form of a bizarre superhero constantly thwarting equally-absurd supervillains—which formula does, in truth, describe the early adventures of the Flash. 

When DC Comics introduced the character in 1956, he represented the first major attempt to revive the genre of the superhero, which had seen its greatest popularity during WWII and had been largely unpopular for almost ten years following the end of the war. Perhaps because of the period in which he began, the Flash then developed into the most Apollonian of superheroes.   Whereas even Superman had the catastrophe of planetary destruction lurking in his past, the Flash barely possessed any background at his start, and certainly not a tragic one.   He began as police scientist Barry Allen, first seen sitting around his laboratory reading a comic book of the original FLASH (the first, WWII-era version of a speedster-hero, also from DC Comics), and wondering what it would be like to have super-speed.  With that, mirable dictu, a lightning bolt crashed through his window, splashed various chemicals upon Barry, and endowed him with the desired power of super-speed.   From there he went on to encounter a colorful “rogue’s gallery” of villains, most of whom chose some natural phenomenon on which to base their powers or weapons—the Mirror Master, Captain Boomerang, the Top-- and who would go around stealing things mostly so that the Flash would come out and fight them.   

As developed under the aegis of editor Julie Schwartz, artist Carmine Infantino, and writers like John Broome and Gardner Fox, this Flash was distinguished by all sorts of Apollonian charms—a breezy humor, ingenious psuedoscientifc rationales for all the absurdities, and almost no emotional conflicts.  (I might except a tale in which the Flash’s “evil double,” a speedster called Professor Zoom, tries to steal Barry Allen’s fiancée Iris West: the Flash actually gets refreshingly angry at this act of bride-stealing.)

And yet, the Dionysian was in the early superheroes as well: in the violence of most of their origins (like the aforementioned death of Krypton), and often in the fear-invoking appearances many of them assumed in their crimefighting identities: the Batman, the Hangman, the Spectre. When the Flash appeared in 1956, the industry had been largely purged of overt sex and violence by its acceptance of the Comics Code Authority as a means to assure parents’ groups that comics with the Code seal were safe for Little Timmy.  Without knowing whether IDENTITY CRISIS will prove to be anything possessed of any sort of complexity, I can say that the Dionysian will always invade even the most conservative-seeming genres, and that both the elitist scoffers and the nostalgic fans are both wrong: one for not recognizing those dark undercurrents, and the other for not appreciating what complexities they can engender.   

And so at long last I come to that version of THE FLASH that was in many ways the antithesis of the “classic FLASH” of Schwartz and his creative team.  I recall being rather less then enthralled in 1979 when this new version took shape. New editor, Ross Andru took over the FLASH feature, promising on the cover of #270 that “starting with this issue—Flash’s life begins to change, and it will never be the same again!”  Andru’s editorial tenure lasted only thirteen issues, from #270-283. Cary Bates, who had been the principal writer on the title for some years, executed all of the Andru-edited issues, though the tone of the Andru tenure was so different from what Bates had been doing under editor Julius Schwartz, so I hypothesize that Bates was working from an editor’s plan.  The artists probably had next to no influence on these issues, given that during this period the penciling-chores changed hands five times. 

From an aesthetic angle, I’m ambiguous about the aforementioned changes, but in retrospect I see that there is method in the madness that editor Andru and writer Bates inflicted on the Flash’s life: a method that consists of disrupting the Apollonian pattern of the hero’s adventures with elements of chaos—drug running, police corruption, madness, suspicions of infidelity, and ultimately, the death of the Flash’s longtime spouse, Iris West-Allen.  For writer Bates this was fairly new territory, as he’d written the Flash’s adventures in “classic mode” for many years previous. Andru, for his  part, was essentially continuing in the more Dionysian mode of one of his earlier seventies’ assignments: as penciller for Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN series, during which, perhaps not coincidentally, that hero’s longtime girlfriend also bit the dust. Other motifs from the SPIDER-MAN series seem to make the leap as well: Barry Allen becomes more of a “Hard Luck Harry,” with his boss busting his chops and his wife nagging him about missing dinner to fight crime.  But symbolically, the most interesting thing is Barry Allen becomes implicated in an experiment that creates a Frankenstein-like monstrosity that almost incarnates the chaos overtaking his life—as well as his wife.

Indeed, the literary myth of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN bears strong resemblance to certain aspects of the Andru years, particularly in respect to the symbol of the doppelganger, the “evil twin” that does the things his good twin will not.   In contrast to many of the cinematic adaptations of FRANKENSTEIN, Shelley’s monster hews close to the doppelganger pattern, obsessively killing off all the persons, friends and family, whom Frankenstein values, including his new bride.  The Andru-Bates continuity also manages to duplicate many of the same motifs, though one cannot be sure how conscious the creators were of such parallels.

I wrote before that Barry Allen was “implicated” in the creation of a monster, but his contribution is more indirect than Frankenstein’s.  In the first issue, Barry is invited to a demonstration of a new “aversion therapy” process designed to reform criminals; a process which its inventor, Dr. Nephron, based on a criminology thesis Barry Allen wrote in college.   Possibly Bates introduced this twist only to give Nephron a reason to invite Barry to see the process demonstrated, but the effect is to render Barry complicit for having “postulated the possibility of organic causes for criminal behavior.”   Barry has considerable reservations about Nephron’s use of aversion therapy, and eventually uses his authority to have the project shut down—temporarily, as it later develops.

And as if all this is not enough to come down on the poor fellow, at the same time his wife’s giving him grief, a much younger girl, name of Melanie, comes into his life; a girl who idolizes him for being a powerful superhero.   No, it’s not a presentiment of “American Beauty,” given that Flash never actually seeks her out. At the outset she seems to be stalking him, using her mind-control powers to facilitate her search for her idol.   Yet it could be argued that within the greater pattern of the story she is Flash’s fantasy-projection, since she's younger than his wife and much more appreciative of his superhero career.   Indeed, she becomes something of a siren-like figure in the early issues, twice using her powers to summon him to her.   The first time she does so, in #272, she causes him to crash into a wall, much the way the sirens wrecked sailors on their reefs, and then stands over his unconscious body, saying, “I made you come to me, Flash.   I desired it—and it was so!   This proves I can make you do anything I want.”   This scene is the cliffhanger at the end of #272, but in #273 she doesn’t end up either making Flash do anything-- or doing anything to him-- and simply leaves the hero to wake up perplexed by the whole experience.  

However, by the end of #273 Flash has a more deadly opponent. Despite Barry Allen’s censure, Nephron continues his experiment on convict Clive Yorkin. The process turns Yorkin into a drooling, super-strong madman who imprisons Nephron in the same “therapy” device, reducing Nephron to a “vegetable.”   

Yorkin then escapes and somehow makes his way to Barry Allen’s house, motivated by a belief that Barry was one of his tormentors.   The madman spies on Iris, potentially setting up a scenario like the one where Frankenstein’s creation kills the scientist’s bride—but nothing happens at that point.  In #275 Iris, suspicious of her husband’s absences, uses a homing device to track him down—coincidentally, on the second occasion when Melanie decides to summon the Flash to a motel room.   Since Flash has no power to resist the teenaged psychic, the stage seems set for Iris to walk in a nonconsensual tryst—but the ditzy young teenager herself short-circuits that potential, for when she mentally forces the Flash to unmask, she’s disappointed by his “ordinary” looks (“I guess I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but whatever it was—you haven’t got it!”)    She leaves just as Iris arrives, and though Iris doesn’t catch her husband en flagrante, she still leaps to the usual conclusion.   Despite this, Barry manages to convince his wife of the truth, partly because he’s visibly distraught at having been called “ordinary.”  Thus the character that appeared poised to break up Barry’s marriage ends up bringing about a reconciliation between hero and wife, and even a brief discussion about having children.

That same evening, it seems the Frankenstein theme comes back into play.  Barry and Iris attend a costume party (with Barry in his own costume, and Iris dressed as Batgirl). The mad Yorkin follows them to the scene.   Barry is separated from Iris by circumstances too complicated to detail here, but by the issue’s end, Barry hears Iris being attacked. He bursts into a room and sees Yorkin standing over her dead body, in what seems a direct emulation of the famous bride-slaying scene from FRANKENSTEIN—though in a world of Dionysian chaos, all is not as it seems.

In #276 Yorkin escapes, and Flash goes a bit mad himself for a time, trying to convince his fellow Justice Leaguers to help him bring Iris back to life, and fighting with them when they profess helplessness.  By #277 he recovers enough to attend Iris’ funeral and to decide he should quit the superhero game.   Issue #277’s cover how divided against himself he is, in that the cover shows Flash rushing at a seeming duplicate of himself.   As it happens, it’s merely a trick of Flash’s old foe Mirror Master, who causes the hero to collide with a mirror-created image of himself before the hero manages to vanquish the villain.   But it’s interesting nonetheless for showing another take on the doppelganger theme, as are the words Barry uses when he goes before an audience to confess his “double life,” prefatory to resigning.   The crowd, fired by rumors of the Flash’s quitting, fails to understand what he’s talking about and drowns him out yelling, “We want the Flash!”   At that point Melanie reappears, having thought better of her dismissal of Barry’s “ordinary” nature, and persuades him to keep his superhero identity.  By doing so, she effectively puts to rest any “temptress” image she might have originally projected, and becomes not only an ally to Flash, but something of a “faithful daughter” to take the place of the one he never had.

Of course, with the apparent murderer of Flash’s wife on the loose, there wasn’t much likelihood of Flash really quitting, and he and his new “daughter” continue looking for the elusive madman.  Things come to a head in issue #280, in which Melanie manages to track down Yorkin to a condemned town, abandoned because the “whole place had become one giant sink-hole!”  (One might call the town a physical reflection of Yorkin himself, whose thoughts, Melanie finds, “reek of death and decay.”)   She also learns she cannot use her mind-powers on him, which stands as something of a reversal of her dominant position over Flash earlier: where earlier she controlled him, and could perhaps have “raped” him had she so chosen, here Melanie first perceives Yorkin as “that cold vile sensation!   I feel as if my mind’s been GROPED!”    She isn’t even able to summon Flash to her side, though conveniently the hero finds Melanie and Yorkin through following an unrelated lead.  Melanie then becomes a temporary enemy to the speedster, for her psychic powers boost Yorkin’s evil thoughts and repel Flash with “waves of fear.”  A seesaw battle then causes the three combatants to fall into one of the sink-holes.  Then, at a point when the madman has almost bested Flash, Melanie projects into his mind the image of Iris, which fortifies the hero and allows him to escape the sink-hole with her, leaving Yorkin to be deluged by falling mud (“his fall the final insult to the groaning earth beneath”).

So is the villain well and truly sent to his proper hell?  Well, as I hinted above—yes and no, for at the conclusion of this issue (the last in which either Yorkin or Melanie appears), new evidence comes to light, affirming that though Yorkin was a madman and murderer, he was not the killer of the Flash’s wife.   Once again the ground is pulled out from under Flash’s fleet feet, as he runs from pillar to post trying to find the real killer. And when he does find him, the final and most important doppelganger motif crops up, for it’s revealed that Iris’ true killer was an earlier rival for Iris’ affections, the aforementioned Professor Zoom.   

Zoom, unlike other villains, was dependent on the Flash for his identity, being that he was a denizen of the future who despised the historical records of Flash’s heroism and so used his super-science to become a speed-powered criminal version of Flash.  He even adopted a costume exactly like the hero’s, except for a reversal of its primary colors-- hence his secondary cognomen, “the Reverse-Flash.”  Only in one way is he exactly like the Flash, for he confesses that “I truly loved Iris Allen with a passion… the same passion that compelled me to snuff out her life” when she rejected his advances.   (As an odd doppelganger touch by Bates, Zoom even mentions that he disliked the hair style Iris had adopted at the time of her death, a style with which Barry Allen himself was less than taken.)  

Once again Flash manages to defeat Zoom, and despite his temptation to take full vengeance, spares the villain’s life, purposing to take him back to the future in Zoom’s time-machine, for legal execution.   But Zoom booby-traps the machine to take them “to an era where no human being can possibly exist—before the very creation of the universe itself” and mocks Flash, saying, “You and I are going to die together!”   Flash leaps from the time machine to take his chances in the time-stream, while his “other self” yells, “You can’t leave me to face the end alone--”   The circumstances at the end of Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN are not precisely the same, but there is some resemblance, in that creator and creature pursue one another through an arctic waste, terminated only when the creator dies and leaves the creature alone to face eternity.   Unlike Frankenstein, the Flash (indirectly responsible for both the creation of Zoom as well as the maddened Clive Yorkin)  is seen to survive in his next issue, but by that time the editorial reins passed to Len Wein, so that Ross Andru’s last issue ends, perhaps fittingly, with both the hero and his double apparently lost “beyond the brink of time itself!”

As has so often been the case in comic books, the insidious Professor Zoom also did not meet his final fate in eternity, but returned for more encounters with the hero: indeed, he outlived the Flash, who perished in the DC crossover-event CRISIS.  I doubt any later writer would have cared to bring back either Clive Yorkin or Melanie, though, since many fans considered this something of a low point for the series (which largely went back to “classic mode” until the title was finally cancelled).  For although Zoom killed Iris, both Melanie the “beauty” and Yorkin the “beast” were the principal Dionysian elements introduced by Andru, and can be seen as having symbolically presided over the death of Iris and all other changes in Flash’s life.   Indeed, the cover of their last appearances, #280, latches onto the story-element of Melanie having been accidentally turned against Flash, but exaggerates it for maximum effect, showing the beauty being cradled in the arms of the beast while nonchalantly telling Flash to “buzz off,” as if Melanie and Yorkin are allies under the skin.  So perhaps it’s fitting that the two of them disappear at the same time, just a few issues before Andru left the book.

Now, in focusing on the symbolic complexities of this story, it’s true that I’ve left out a fair amount of narrative material that wasn’t all that complex: the aforementioned subplots regarding drug smuggling and police corruption, for instance.   And I can practically hear some smartass Journalista saying, “You also left out the detail that the story SUCKED.”   My reply, of course, would be that I said early on I only esteemed certain elements of the story, not the story as a whole: in terms of its conscious thematics it’s rather mediocre, and visually hindered by a hodgepodge of conflicting art-styles.    I can’t even claim that it’s as entertaining on the level of simple genre-fare as is a better-conceived saga like the “Kree-Skrull War” from the Thomas/Adams AVENGERS—and yet, though I find the latter more entertaining, I don’t discern that extra level of symbolism in the AVENGERS tale.   The Andru/Bates FLASH also has the added attraction that it demonstrates how easily the elements of the Dionysian could invade even the most Apollonian of heroes, a full six years before the so-called “grim and gritty” movement in comics supposedly began with Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Moore’s WATCHMEN, and a much longer time prior to IDENTITY CRISIS.

There are certainly better works out there, some possessed of both thematic and symbolic complexity, and surely given the old “what comics would you take to a desert island” test, any of these would make the cut before this FLASH tale.   But since none of us is voluntarily going to that desert isle any time soon, we are left with sorting out questions of merit in all its manifestations, and with trying to constantly hammer our interpretations into others’ skulls.   And whether this hammering serves to let in some light into darkness, or just increases the degree to which the skulls are already cracked, also remains to be “sorted out” by posterity.     ______________________________________   

Two minor additions:

One odd detail about Clive Yorkin's transformation is that it comes about because he's dyslexic, which supposedly causes his brain to interpret the negative input from Nephron's aversion process as pleasurable. Writer Bates doesn't even try to make this bit of "comic book science" seem logical-- much less giving a reason as to why Yorkin gets super-powers from the process. Yet the explanation proves modestly interesting in that it means the reason Yorkin can shrug off the aversion therapy is that he reverses "pain" into "pleasure," a symbolic reversal that slightly resembles that of Milton's Satan saying, "Evil be thou my good."

And though I made copious comparisons of Clive Yorkin to Mary Shelley's monster, I see I neglected to toss in a possible influence from James Whale's two FRANKENSTEIN films, both of which starred-- Colin Clive.     

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ADVENTURES OF PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST" (1965-66)

Somewhere in Leslie Fiedler's voluminous writings, he asserts-- and I obviously must paraphrase-- that even though Western literature is replete with dozens of images of women suffering cruel fates at the hands of men, this does not necessarily make the women into mere victims. On the contrary, in some cases-- such as the classic English novel CLARISSA, written by one of the founders of modern prose literature-- woman's ability to survive the perils that ought to break her spirit provides proof of her *perdurability.*

"Perdurability," though not exactly a commonplace word, would almost do as well for me as "persistence," one of the two literary goal-affects I first categorized amidst these Hobbesian-Bataillean meditations. Persistence is certainly not a quality confined to females, but I'd argue that from one point of view it's possible to assert a logical-- though not to say "necessary"-- correlation between "femaleness" and "persistence," as well as a concomitant correlation between "maleness" and the other goal-affect, "glory."

I don't imagine that Michael O'Donoghue, the writer who created Phoebe Zeit-Geist, was thinking in quite these terms. My reading of PHOEBE is that it was meant as an extreme satire of all the "women in peril" stories that had permeated popular culture for decades. O'Donoghue might not have known Richardson's Clarissa from a hole in the ground (so to speak), but he almost certainly knew of the long tradition of melodramas that placed women in peril, perhaps epitomized by the 1914 film-serial THE PERILS OF PAULINE. Some of these melodramas put the woman in peril so that she could rescue herself; sometimes she is set up to be rescued by a more dynamic male character. Since O'Donoghue consistently places his heroine in situations where she cannot rescue herself, clearly he expected the audience to default to the latter formula-- for throughout the episodic storyline, Phoebe is almost never rescued in "the nick of time," or if she is, it is only to subject her to some even more terrible danger and/or humiliation.

This isn't to say that O'Donoghue was totally unaware of the more capable heroines of fiction. Indeed, according to an essay on THE COMICS JOURNAL site, the editors of the literary magazine EVERGREEN REVIEW asked O'Donoghue to do something along the lines of Barbarella, the saucy siren of French comics. Barbarella had debuted in 1962 and, according to Wikipedia, had three of her adventures translated for EVERGREEN in the same year that PHOEBE began. Barbarella wasn't exactly a tower of strength in the comics I've read, but she was sometimes capable of extricating herself from trouble, and so, assuming that O'Donoghue even looked at the translations, I'd assume that he decisively rejected that approach. If anything, O'Donoghue's approach with PHOEBE has strong affiliations with the ouevre of Sade, who liked nothing better than images of degraded women, though on occasion he does torture his fictional men as well.

So is PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST a Sadean work? Well, sort of. Once Phoebe loses her clothes in the opening chapter, her lithe feminine charms remain on constant display throughout the narrative; not even at the conclusion, with its ironic "victory," is she allowed to put on any clothes. So O'Donoghue, whether or not he personally enjoyed his heroine's humiliation, played to the "sexploitational" tastes of some potential readers. Of course, the fact that PHOEBE appeared in a literary magazine meant that it wasn't overtly directed at pure porn-lovers-- not even to the extent that the original BARBARELLA was-- and in theory, one could interpret the trope of continuous exposure as hypothetically ironic. And although Phoebe is subjected to loads and loads of sadistic punishment-- including being killed outright-- O'Donoghue treats these torments in a much more cartoonish fashion than Sade. Sade would certainly never conjure up an Eskimo magical ceremony to restore one of his deceased victims, and if he had one of those victims beat to a pulp by a huge lesbian (O'Donoghue's cunningly named "Blob Princess"), Sade would have savored every wound. But when Phoebe endures this fate, she somehow suffers pain without having any wounds to mar her flesh, at least as rendered by Frank Springer's luscious, Caniff-style artwork.

I called the work episodic, and therefore there's no point in summarizing the faux-plot. What makes the work mythic, however, is the over-the-top inventiveness with which O'Donoghue tortures his bizarrely named heroine. He also takes a number of shots at other contemporary forms of pop culture. At one point the author teases the reader into thinking that Phoebe may be rescued by a super-competent Bond-like agent, only to have him killed out of hand before he even begins the case.

Strangely, though the satirist's intention may have been to lampoon popular fiction-formulas-- like having Phoebe facing the prospect of rape by a Komodo lizard-- there's a sense in which he reveals his own dependence on those formulas. O'Donoghue sets things up so that the reader never sees what happens to his imperiled heroine, thus making fun of the reader's desire to see the narrative played out. And yet, not fulfilling the narrative expectations is just as much a storytelling trope as fulfilling them. I would say that when O'Donoghue simply shows Phoebe surviving the ordeal without explanation, he's simply tapped into tropes like those of the animated cartoon, where the characters can survive insane violence for no reason but because the author says that they can. By conjuring up so many stock villains to menace Phoebe-- Nazis, poncey gays, lesbians, foot fetishists-- O'Donoghue gives them new life in this ironic form, rather than undermining their influence by creating new and more viable menaces. In any case, Phoebe may not really be a *femme formidable,* but she is at least a *femme perdurable.*

MYTHCOMICS: AMAZING FANTASY #15/ SPIDER-MAN #1-2 (1962-63)

(Note: I wrote the original version of this essay years ago, and have updated it for this series.)   

The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud are no longer central to the practive of modern psychological treatment. Yet in literary criticism, it’s nearly impossible to speak of the psychosexual concepts underlying fictional characters wthout addressing Freud, if only to refute him.   The early Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN is an ambivalent example in this case, conforming to Freudian patterns in some respects but not in others.

The centerpiece of Freudian theory is the concept that the son’s dawning sexual desires become centered on the mother and inculcate in him a murderous jealousy of the father. Freud named this concatenation of love and resentment after Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX, not because the play depicts such a relationship but because (Freud believed) Oedipus unknowingly performed the actions that such a jealous son would like to perform: killing his father and marrying his mother.   Freud also claimed that this wish-fulfillment pattern could be displaced in devious ways, such as the son’s displacing his animosity onto some third party.  Freud asserts that this occurs in HAMLET, where Hamlet’s uncle kills Hamlet’s father and sleeps with Hamlet’s mother, thus incurring Hamlet’s anger because these are supposedly things Hamlet wants to do. 

In broad outline the early adventures of SPIDER-MAN conform to the displacement angle of Freud's theory, particularly in the classic origin tale in AMAZING FANTASY.  High school student Peter Parker is valued by his teachers and by his elderly surrogate parents, Aunt May and Uncle Ben for being a “clean-cut, hard-working honor student.” 

But the accomplishments of a "professional wallflower" count for nothing in the eyes of Parker's fellow students, particularly the female ones.  Parker is embittered by his ill-treatment-- not unlike protagonists of many standalone horror-stories on which creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko collaborated prior to SPIDER-MAN. He dramatically swears that “someday they’ll be sorry!—sorry that they laughed at me!”  In horror-stories, embittered protagonists usually sought to take revenge by appealing to supernatural forces.  If the horror-protagonist devoted himself entirely to an unjust revenge, the narrative often levied upon him some terribly ironic punishment.  If the protagonist came to his senses at the eleventh hour, he might be pulled back from the abyss with a new-found sense of guilt and responsibility. 

Parker never makes any literal pact with the devil for supernatural powers. But from the point in the origin-story where he desires to make his peers “sorry,” the narrative evolves as if he had done so.  His preoccupation with science leads him to a radiation exhibition, and, as most comics-fans know, an irradiated spider bites Parker and infuses the teen with spider-powers. Though he's initially bewildered as to what to do with these powers, he gets the idea of testing them against an opponent in the wrestling-ring. This is the story's first meaningful mention of Parker's desire for money, as opposed to sexual favors. His success in the bout brings Parker into contact with a promoter, and so Parker adopts the identity of Spider-Man not to pursue a destiny of selfless heroism, but to enrich himself and his surrogate parents. He declines to act the part of a good citizen by helping a policeman catch an unarmed robber, explaining to the frustrated cop that, "From now on, I just look out for Number One-- that means me!" A few panels later at his dwelling-place, one of Parker's thought-balloons makes clear that he will protect his aunt and uncle as well: "I'll see to it they're always happy, but the rest of the world can go hang for all I care."

But fate will demand its ironic pound of flesh. Because Parker ignores his societal obligations in the pursuit of filthy lucre, his Uncle Ben dies at the hand of the same burglar whom Parker allowed to escape days earlier.  While the protagonist of an episodic horror-tale would simply be humbled by the experience of being hauled back from the hellmouth, Parker must assume a never-ending responsibility as payback for having “murdered” his uncle through neglect. For Parker, the costume of the superhero often becomes a hair-shirt, though not surprisingly, subsequent stories manage to find many ways for Spider-Man to have fun being a superhero, to say nothing of occasionally being able to humiliate old enemies.  From then on both the triumphs and tribulations of being a superhero become so merged that one cannot say if Parker's fate is punishment or reward.

A doctrinaire Freudian reading of the origin-story might end up accusing Parker of having murdered his uncle through an "act of omission" in order to be closer to his surrogate mother, Aunt May.  And this might be a reasonable suspicion if Parker’s aunt were given any aura of sexuality.  Instead, Aunt May is always an icon of aged, sexless virtue.  Rather than being a source of sexual temptation, she becomes the objective correlative of Parker’s implacable new sense of responsibility. Further, though she's in a position of relative authority over him, she functions in the series more like a child whose health and peace of mind Parker worries over.  So a doctrinaire Freudian reading does not apply, particularly since Parker's sexual needs are still turned outward, toward women more or less his own age. One might make something of the fact that the character's first major girlfriend is a little older than he is: Betty Brant is a working woman, roughly of college-age, when she starts dating the high-schooler. Few stories treat the Betty character as significantly older than Parker, though. So despite the occasional reference to her age-- in one story, her rival Liz Allan makes Betty feel "a hundred years old" simply by addressing Betty as "Miss Brant"-- she doesn't work as a mother-substitute any better than does Aunt May.

However, Uncle Ben does continue to throw his shadow over Spider-Man's destiny, in a manner analogous to both Laius in the Sophocles play and Hamlet's father in Shakespeare. But Hamlet, according to Freud, is plagued not only with desire for the forbidden mother but also with a new "older male rival," in the form of his uncle Claudius. SPIDER-MAN #1 not only features the hero's debut in his own title, but also appearance of a "bad father" in the hero's life.  There’s no causal relationship between the death of Uncle Ben and the “birth” of newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, but from issue #1 on, Jameson becomes a second shadow in the hero's life. Whereas the spectre of Uncle Ben continues to chastise Parker for his sin of omission, Jameson comes at the hero from the other direction: publicly castigating the figure of Spider-Man, deeming the hero a vigilante who "takes the law into his own hands" and accusing him of being a bad role model for children. (It's not hard to imagine that aspects of the comics-critic Frederic Wertham found their way into the figure of Jameson the irresponsible pundit.)  Further, it's clear from Jameson"s first appearance in issue #1's lead story that the publisher's real grievance is that the real heroism of his own son, astronaut John Jameson, may be overshadowed by the superhero’s deeds. 

Usually supporting characters in superhero comics-features were one-dimensional in their opposition or their advocacy of the hero's goals, but Jameson was something of a breakthrough: a character who "knew himself but slenderly." By the end of this story Spider-Man saves the life of John Jameson during his space-capsule's malfunction. Despite this, the publisher regards the hero as a menace, accusing him of causing the malfunction. Because Lee and Ditko did not choose to keep the character of John Jameson as a regular-- though the astronaut did return much later, after Ditko's departure from the feature-- Jonah Jameson's motivation was soon re-interpreted as the jealousy of an older, essentially selfish man for the courage and fearlessness of a young hero.

So if there is an Oedipal conflict in the early SPIDER-MAN of Lee and Ditko, it might be glossed less by Freud than by Leslie Fiedler’s remarks about the father/son conflict of DON JUAN: that “[Don Juan’s] legend projects the naked encounter of father and son (the women mere occasions), of the alienated individual and the society he defies.” By these terms SPIDER-MAN might be an even more “naked” encounter, insofar as there are no women at all standing between Parker and Jameson. It's true that since Betty Brant works as a secretary at Jameson’s newspaper, she could have taken on the connotations of a "daughter-figure" to a "heavy father," which would conform not only to DON JUAN but also to ARCHIE comics. But no such relationship develops: Jameson does not care whether or not Parker dates his secretary. 

The Parker-Jameson relationship is defined by the conflicts of money and fame.  Jameson has some degree of public prominence because of his wealth, and uses his position to suppress the superhero’s growing popularity with the public.  But Spider-Man’s selfless actions in themselves don't put any money in Parker's bank account. Though Parker frets over money all through SPIDER-MAN #1, only in the first tale of SPIDER-MAN #2 does he find a way of making heroics pay, without neglecting the mantle of responsibility. He elects to start using his powers to go around town taking photographs that no ordinary journalist could get-- in particular, photos of a new super-criminal, the Vulture. In fact, nowhere in "Duel to the Death with the Vulture" does Parker assert that he plans to round up the super-crook for the benefit of the law. When some classmate tosses Parker a copy of a magazine Jameson publishes, this gives the hero the idea of photographing the Vulture-- and when the flying villain next appears, all Spider-Man does is to follow him, snapping pictures. The Vulture tries to kill his pesky shadow, fails, and on their next encounter Spidey beats him and delivers the Vulture to the cops-- although not before the hero gets more pictures to sell to the new "parental authority" in his life.

From then on, this becomes the new status quo: to make money Parker must continue selling photos to an older man who hates Parker's alter ego, while Jameson, who hates Spider-Man, must continue feeding the fame of "the menace" or face losing the interest of the paper-buying public. (One later tale even asserts that the paper's newsstand sales go down whenever Jameson writes another of his many anti-Spider-Man editorials.) For the young hero, there's no final duel with the older authority. The alienated individual simply goes on jousting against the older man and the conservative society he represents-- on and on, world without end.