MYTHCOMICS: “MOURNING PREY” (AMAZING ADVENTURES #39, 1976)

When mainstream comic books began a somewhat more adult-oriented phase during the Early Bronze Age—which was also the time when I began thinking more coherently about comics characters as myths—I might have judged most of the better works “mythic” simply because they dealt successfully with larger-than-life topics. This POV didn’t prevent from perceiving that a lot of stories that played around with such topics were just pretentious twaddle. But when I did encounter a well-executed series with genuine mythic concerns, I probably saw the whole series as mythic. These days, however, my analyses depend on closer reading. Thus, some stories in a given series may seem primarily dramatic or didactic in their appeal, and only one or two are truly mythopoeic.

Marvel’s KILLRAVEN series, a post-apocalyptic take on H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, started out as largely generic and unremarkable. The series took on its greater complexity (mythic and otherwise) once writer Don McGregor began collaborating with penciller P. Craig Russell, and many of the stories they executed are enjoyable on the purely dramatic level, such as issue 32’s “Only the Computer Shows Me Any Respect.” One of their strongest mythopoeic tales, however, was also the one that concluded the series. Years after the termination of the KILLRAVEN series, McGregor and Russell re-united one last time on a Marvel Graphic Novel featuring one more adventure of the heroic title character and his roving band of Martian-fighters. This reunion was interesting but flawed in many respects, suggesting the Wolfean aphorism “You can’t go home again.”

The letters-column of AMAZING ADVENTURES #39 notes that the featured story was not intended to be a conclusion to the peripatetic series, since the news of cancellation came down after the story’s completion. Indeed, “Mourning Prey” even devotes one panel to foregrounding a story for the next issue, which tale would of course never be told. But the unnamed person answering the letters opined that “Prey” did provide a “haunting” conclusion to the series, and with this sentiment I readily concur.

“Prey” is rife with allusions to various ambivalent states of mind. On the extrinsic level, this parallels many of the ways that post-apocalyptic stories enact their charms upon their readers. The readers realize that within the story, the characters suffer greatly from having their formerly peaceful world severely restructured. But remodeling the world gives the author the chance to shape things to mirror his own preferences, and from that flows the basic appeal of the subgenre. On page 16 Killraven says, ‘Earth will never be the same as it was before the Martian invasion.” Readers identity with the hero’s travails, but at the same time they know that their pleasure stems from that chaotic upheaval.

Like most of the McGregor-Russell collaborations, “Prey” starts out with Killraven and his band of Martian-fighting “Freemen” wandering through some strange environment for some ill-defined purpose—in this case, the Okefenokee Swamp in January 2020. January usually connotes the demise of the old year’s troubles and the promise of a new year’s bounties. Russell’s art certainly conveys the sumptuosity of a swamp far more baroque than any in ordinary reality, but McGregor’s prose contradicts this impression, as Killraven is made to think that “the morning future seems empty and dead.” Throughout the story McGregor finds three or four other ways to work “morning” into the tale, though none of the characters—Killraven, M’Shulla, Old Skull, Carmilla Frost and their local guides Huey and Louie-- ever draws the parallels that McGregor wants the readers to draw between this word and the homophone “mourning.” Carmilla is the first character to voice the latter word when she bestows the name of “Mourning Prey” upon the creature that attacks the Freemen during their trek. Here too McGregor combines ambivalent content — “mourning” because of the creature’s “melancholy quality” and “prey” because she seems intent on making the Freemen her victims. Omitted from Carmilla’s exegesis is the likelihood that the name really stems from a play on the words “morning prayer,” a religious observance which usually connotes hope, not unlike the month of January. No one in the story uses the word “pray,” though toward story’s end we do get mention of a “communion.”

The story not only opens in media res, it skips back three times from real-time to yesterday-time before finally remaining in real-time for the duration. I’ll forswear all the diegetic hopscotching and stick to a linear telling. While Killraven, his friends and the guides are tromping through the swamp, they find their way blocked by a series of webby cocoons hanging from the thick trees. Not willing to go around, Killraven blasts the cocoons with his pistol. Out rain dog-sized caterpillars that attack the travelers. While in the process of fending off the creepy-crawlies, the hero spots a golden-hued, unspeaking woman flying overhead with butterfly-wings, glaring at them. Later that night the rebels make camp, and Carmilla meditates on the butterfly-woman’s genesis, without ever explicitly claiming that she’s the result of Martian genetic manipulation. Moments after Carmilla puts a name to the “sentient identity” of the strange female, Mourning Prey attacks the group, commanding a horde of golden butterflies able to spit formic acid. Killraven himself seems to suffer a telepathic assault from the woman, who seizes him and lifts him into the sky. Killraven levels his pistol at her head, but for some reason does not fire. Then, before she’s flown high enough to injure the hero, Mourning Prey drops Killraven into the swamp-waters. While both he, M’Shulla and one of the guides are knocked out of action, somehow Mourning Prey spirits away Carmilla, Old Skull, and the other guide. Killraven and M’Shulla tromp around the swamp looking for their friends and having flashbacks to the yesterday-action.

Then the sound of Old Skull’s flute leads them to a blissful arbor, where Mourning Prey and her butterflies are entertaining the missing trio. Old Skull claims that through telepathic contact the butterfly-woman has realized that the travelers didn’t mean her any harm (a conclusion not entirely believable: surely Killraven guessed that giant cocoons had some sort of living beings in them?) But in any case Mourning Prey forgives the injuries done her, and by coincidence just happens to be ready to send forth her butterfly-progeny to seek out their individual fates, whatever they may be. Russell sells this shaky conclusion with intense images of “an embrace by sight, a communion of hands,” and Killraven watches raptly as the butterfly-mother’s brood—who may or may not develop as she did—fly off into the sunlight.

The poetic trope of the ugly caterpillar metamorphosing into the lovely butterfly sees sustained usage here, almost as much as all the references to the “sunsets and dawns” mentioned in McGregor’s closing paragraph. Indeed, Mourning Prey’s chimerical change of heart may mirror the dual nature of reality as it’s experienced both by fictional characters and real readers: the dark experiences of loss and death, counterbalanced by hopes for renewed life and rebirth. This ambivalence appears even in a possible but unconfirmable inspiration for the butterfly-woman’s cognomen: the “mourning cloak” butterfly. The living creature was so named by various Germanic/Nordic peoples in reference to a myth-image of a widow who, though garbed in the dark colors of mourning, allows just a little bit of color to show in her attire, the better to express her hopes for a renewal and recovery of future life.

MYTHCOMICS: "AND THERE WILL BE WORLDS ANEW" (DOCTOR STRANGE ANNUAL #1, 1976)

Since its inception, Marvel’s DOCTOR STRANGE has been such a triumph of visual design that a fair number of quality artists—Colan, Rogers, Starlin, and a host of others—sought to play baroque games of form and shape in the Sanctum That Ditko Drew. That said, though Ditko’s visual rendition of the doctor’s very strange worlds remains unsurpassed, the feature’s scripting was usually not quite as distinguished. Thus, though I’ve argued for the mythic depth of many tales from both of STRANGE’s co-creators Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, I’ve found little complexity in the Lee-Ditko stoiies of the “master of the mystic arts.” It’s been suggested that one of the two creators took some inspiration from the sixties bestsellers of alleged Tibetan monk T. Lobsang Rampa, insofar as those books introduced Western readers to complex concepts (however borrowed) of Tibetan sorcery. But if Rampa was the proximate source for DOCTOR STRANGE, neither Ditko nor Lee pursued any other aspects of esoteric tradition, Eastern or Western. While I would not have wanted to see the creativity of the feature straight-jacketed by adherence to occult doctrine—a failing of Steve Englehart’s version of the character— some metaphysical motifs might have kept the feature from having been so dominated by two principal plots: either Doc Strange goes to some alien dimension to fight tyrannical rulers there, or he defends Earth from being invaded by such extradimensional forces.

“And There Will be Worlds Anew” was ostensibly the sole creation of artist P. Craig Russell (more on that matter later), and there’s no more esoteric tradition in either his art or script than in most other adventures of Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme. However, Russell does pattern his stand-alone story on a metaphysical motif common to Western art: the close association of Beauty and Death. Many Russell works make no bones about his narrative inspirations, often adapted from or patterned after famous (and public-domain) operas like PELLEAS AND MELISANDE and Wagner’s RING continuity. In re-reading ‘Worlds,” I didn’t pin down any specific narratives on which Russell might have modeled his tale, though I did think of Poe’s little-known story “The Island of the Fay,” in which the main character fantasizes seeing the same scene from two viewpoints: a beautiful faerie-bower and a desolate wasteland.

For the first eight pages, “Worlds” isn’t much different from the average Doctor Strange story. Brooding in his domicile after a quarrel with his lover Clea, the magician receives tidings that she’s been kidnapped by an unknown entity. The hero seeks out “the Temple of Man,” which is apparently mainly a big old occult library. Strange’s characterization carries more currents of self-doubt than is usual, but it’s not significantly different from the Strange of more formulaic stories. And after the magician’s quest takes him to a never-visited dimension called Phaseworld, his first action is to engage in battle with the dimension’s ruler Lectra, much as the doctor would in many previous adventures. Lectra only wins the conflict by a standard villain-trope: she shows the hero an image of his beloved in captivity, and he’s forced to surrender to preserve Clea’s life.

However, with the standard Marvel pyrotechnics out of the way, Russell then devotes the remainder of “Worlds” to portraying the beauties of Phaseworld. The two mages set out for Lectra’s home city, Allandra, transported across “the currents of space” (and a relatively mundane-looking ocean) in a mystical ship. On the way a sea serpent attacks, and Strange wounds the creature before Lectra can explain that the beast is meant to guide them through stormy seas. Lectra thus gets to strut her stuff by forcing the storms to cease, conjuring up the Biblical motif. Once the seas are calm, the complex golden city of Allandra rises from the depths.

Russell makes Allandra a true faery-dwelling, all spires and minarets, with no indication that it was ever meant to be lived in. Up to this point Strange has seen no sentient beings except Lectra and a ship-crew of undead sailors. But the city has even fewer signs of life, causing Strange to think, “It is magnificence itself, a city of floating form and sculpture. And yet, beneath the fascination, I sense death.”

Once the two sorcerers arrive at the palace, Lectra outlines her plan to make Strange her consort. She doesn’t have the usual motive of wanting to spawn offspring, though, for her purpose is to meld her sorcerous powers with those of the hero in order to preserve Allandra from doom. She attributes the decay of her world to her sister Phaydra, who then makes an appearance, and the latter remains silent in contrast to Lectra’s volubility. 

However, the silent woman keeps company with a type of bird almost iconic in ballet and opera: a lovely white swan. The swan, name of Tempus, is able to speak for Phaydra, accusing Lectra of beginning their world’s doom by usurping the throne for “vainglorious lusts.” The two sisters battle magically. Strange interrupts the fight, wanting nothing but his missing beloved. The swan metamorphoses into an angel-winged man, and reveals that Clea was never Lectra’s prisoner. The revelation causes Lectra to hurl a spell at Tempus, but when he deflects, her magic destroys a “soul mirror,” leading to the deaths of both sisters and the world of Allandra. Strange alone escapes and returns to his own world.

The conjoined but opposing natures of the sisters is the dominant theme here, though only once does Russell gloss those natures, having the hunky swan-stud state that Lectra “possesses the evil of the mind” while Phaydra “holds the truth and good of the heart.” I’d like to say that this interpretation is supported by the Classical Greek names Russell invokes, but his characters don’t parallel in any meaningful way the stories told, respectively, of Classical Electra and Classical Phaedra. My best guess is that in the story of Electra, she represents Thanatos, since she’s willing to sacrifice Orestes so that their mutual father is avenged, while Phaedra is Eros, given that her passion for her stepson would’ve harmed no one had it not been forestalled by the priggishness of Hippolytus. But again—just a guess.

The original story appears with both scripting and co-plotting credits for Marv Wolfman, but in a COMICS JOURNAL interview Russell denied that Wolfman had done anything but provide dialogue. Many years later Russell persuaded Marvel to re-publish the story with his revisions to the art and the script, and as I have not read this version I cannot comment. Still, Russell’s art nouveau approach to the master magician was at least an improvement on the character’s generally-neglected metaphysical potential.

MYTHCOMICS: "CLOUD OF WITNESS" (SON OF SATAN #4-7, 1976)

NOTE: I'm using "Cloud of Witness," the title of the first story in this four-issue arc, to denote the whole arc. I'm not sure why writer John Warner chose this title. Curiously enough, "Cloud of Witness" is the title of a 1891 compilation of devotional prayers, but this would seem to have nothing to do with the content of the arc. If anything, "Cloud" seems to be moving away from the Judeo-Christian basis of the "Son of Satan" mythos.

The brief run of the "Son of Satan" feature in two Marvel magazines, MARVEL SPOTLIGHT and THE SON OF SATAN, followed the pattern of Satanic films that became more popular following the success of 1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY. Daimon Hellstrom, the son of the Devil and a mortal woman, is first seen as an adult who has renounced his paternal heritage but undergoes periodic werewolf-like transformations from a super-powered devil's spawn to a Catholic priest. The priest angle was quickly dropped, and when writer Steve Gerber took over the series, Hellstrom became sort of a combination superhero/exorcist. Gerber also brought in some non-Christian elements into the mix, but during the MARVEL SPOTLIGHT run the whole never exceeded the sum of its parts.

John Warner became the writer for the series when SON OF SATAN became a solo title. The first three issues delve heavily into the opposition of Hellstrom and his father, but this sequence ends with Satan foreswearing any more involvement with his son's life. Warner almost certainly took this tack in order to ground the feature within the Western tradition of ceremonial magic. The arc from issues #4-7, however, were Warner's last hurrah on the series, and the title was cancelled following the publication of an inventory story, reviewed here.

In this essay, I observed that certain stories, such as the Golden Age HAWKMAN origin, might be fairly simple with respect to their dialectic overthoughts, but complex with respect to their symbolic underthoughts. "Cloud of Witness" follows the same pattern. Starting with issue #3, Warner and his assorted artists (mostly Craig Russell and Sonny Trinidad) set up a new direction for Hellstrom, including a new job (occult instructor at Georgetown University) and a new support-cast. The first new addition to the Hellstrom cast is a fellow teacher (and inevitably romantic interest), Saripha Thames. She's later revealed to be a practicing witch who doesn't believe in Hellstrom's father, thus refuting the common conflation of witches and Satanists in American pop culture. To some extent Hellstrom finds himself alienated from this hotbed of occultism, since in his earlier exploits he rarely interacted with large groups, as he does when he's obliged to teach a course to a roomful of students. Thus Warner uses the standard revising of a serial character's setup to delve somewhat into the character's lack of socialization.

But since he's also a superhero as well as an occultist, he has to meet a new villain. although his introduction to this foe comes through a hieratic dream. Once he arrives at his university apartment, the hero falls asleep and finds himself beholding a procession of Egyptian votaries. There's also a "cloud" of incense-vapor that the dreaming Hellstrom likens to "ambrosia," the food of the Greek gods, and inhaling this shifts him to another dreamscape. He meets the image of his mother, who claims that she's about to enter a convent. Hellstrom is never less than aware than he's in a dream, not least because in life his late mother only talked about becoming a nun.

However, the Christian piety is immediately undercut when this "bride of God" greets and embraces her "demon lover" Satan, and Hellstrom is repulsed by his mother's acceptance of this unholy union.

As the dream-parents fade, Hellstrom encounters the puppet-master of the dream: an androgynous, satyr-horned being named Proffet, who claims to be an oracle. Despite the satan-son's attempt to escape the dream, Proffet keeps propelling the hero into more dreamscapes, not least being a confrontation with the two parts of his own soul, the destructive "darksoul" and a normal-seeming Hellstrom who's able to wield a cross to subdue the evil "dark half." Finally the dream ends and Hellstrom wakes up in his apartment, but his next conflict is signaled by a mysterious explosion from the apartment neighboring his own.

Though Hellstrom never met the other apartment's occupant, it's plain that the latter was involved in occultism, because the explosion throws his corpse against a wall in the posture of the Tarot "Hanged Man." Hellstrom reads the "symbolic allegory" of this supernatural manifestation, interpreting the body's posture as that of "a pyramid surmounted by a cross-- or an ankh." Warner does not mention that this opposition of images duplicates that of the dream-fight between the two Hellstroms, where a symbol of life (an Egyptian ankh) transcends an image of death (a pyramid, which is, of course, a glorified tomb, and thus reflective of all the death-imagery in the dream).

To be sure, Warner's beginning is more mythic than his resolution. The villain who caused the occult student's death is a megalomaniac who's taken the supervillain name "Mindstar," and he was attempting to capture the student, for very involved reasons, to turn him over to his divine perceptor, the Egyptian god Anubis. Because Mindstar screws up his mission, he attempts to confuse the issue by convincing the god that the Son of Satan is Anubis's quarry. This proves a rather weak plotline, largely setting up Hellstrom's superheroic battles with Mindstar. Still, at least Anubis conforms to the representation of both death and destruction, the negative elements with which Hellstrom regularly contends. Indeed, Saripha, though not yet romantically involved with Hellstrom, invokes the pagan powers of life to help Hellstrom against the Egyptian god of death.

Had the series continued for a time, Warner probably would have come up with some inventive takes on Marvel characters with an esoteric edge. As things stand, the short run of the SON OF SATAN comic merely hints at some tantalizing possibilities.

MYTHCOMICS: "RAMADAN" (SANDMAN #50, 1993)

A few months back, an acquaintance asserted the extinction of the literary tradition of "Orientaliam." In its original use, this term usually concerned non-Oriental artists, principally Europeans and Americans, who attempted to reproduce the tropes associated with Oriental cultures.

(Parenthetical aside: it's currently incorrect to use the term "Oriental," with "Asian" being preferred, though both words connote "Eastern-ness." I'll use "Oriental" just because that was how this quasi-genre was traditionally denoted, ranging from William Beckford's VATHEK to the pulp magazine ORIENTAL STORIES.)

My associate was largely correct about the extinction of literary Orientalism. However, one of the few exceptions to this rule appeared as recently as 1993: in the stand-alone story "Ramadan" in SANDMAN #50.

According to Craig Russell's statements online, Gaiman wrote the script with Russell in mind, and the choice was borne out in full. Visually, "Ramadan" is a powerful evocation of many of the visual tropes common to medieval Arabic culture-- minarets, semi-clad harem-maidens, genies and ifrits, weird beasts like a Pegasus and a phoenix, and lots of calligraphy-inspired lettering (the last courtesy of Todd Klein). As for Gaiman's story, it might be characterized as a love-letter to the Thousand and One Nights, whose stories are frequently referenced-- although the content of the "letter" might be seen as a farewell missive.

Only once in the story does Neil Gaiman define for his readers the Muslim custom of Ramadan, though there are throughout the narrative references to the fasting-rituals associated with the holy day. Fasting is a form of renunciation, of giving up the pleasures of the body-- food, sex, etc.-- to commemorate the day. But main character Haroun Al-Raschid, ruler of the medieval city of Bagdad, finds himself obliged to give up his entire city.

There are many types of stories in the Nights-- comical, tragic, ribald, adventurous-- but Gaiman chooses to embody his Bagdad with the world-weariness best represented by "The City of Brass."
Gaiman spends six pages establishing that Bagdad is a place of incomparable marvels, but that all of its joys and wonders fail to give surcease of sorrow to its ruler.

Gaiman flawlessly emulates one of the many repetitive structures of Arabian-Nights narratives: that of having a hero pass through a series of imposing chambers in order to obtain some prize or treasure. Using a key of gold, Haroun, whose disquiet remains obscure, traverses chambers full of forgotten prisoners and fabulous treasures, swords that hang from the ceilings and flames that never die, and two of the eggs of the Phoenix. (One of the eggs, we are told, hatches the Phoenix's scion while only Allah knows what is born from the second one.) The prize that Haroun gains is a device he uses to summon Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, into his company-- and though Morpheus does come, he's not pleased to be called "as one might summon a steward."

Gaiman keeps the reader curious about the ruler's motives as long as possible, when the reader finally learns that he fears that Bagdad, City of Wonders, is destined to go the way of all flesh, and all cities, to be consumed by time and death. Haroun proposes to sell his city to the Sandman if Morpheus can assure him that its wonders will never die. Intrigued by the mortal's selfless offer, Morpheus agrees, and the City of Wonders joins the Sandman in his world of eternal dreams. Haroun for his part continues to live out his life in a now ordinary Bagdad, and like his people he no longer remembers his previous existence. All will live out commonplace lives in a commonplace world, and this extends to the Bagdad of the present, where a young boy has just heard the whole story of Haroun's sacrifice from an old teller of tales. However, though the story is infused with the spirit of Arabian-Nights pessimism, Gaiman allows a ray of hope, telling us how the boy, despite his hunger and poverty, because "behind his eyes are towers and jewels and djinns, carpets and rings and wild afreets, kings and princes and cities of brass."

"Ramadan" shares with other SANDMAN stories the theme of using dreams to anneal the miseries of real life. However, it's also one of the few stories I've covered that has nearly no overt conflict. There is no real conflict between Morpheus and the ruler of Bagdad; rather, the conflict is within Haroun,.who seeks to protect his fabulous city rather than simply enjoying its wonders until he himself passes from the world. His ability to act against the expectations of the readers bears some resemblance to the conflict in Ray Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," which I analyzed here. Most amusingly for a pastiche of the Arabian Nights, Gaiman frequently has supporting characters start to unwind some long Oriental tale, but neither Haroun nor Morpheus will stay to hear, given that both are more intimately involved in the greater story of the wondrous city's preservation.

MYTHCOMICS: "CRACKS" (SHOWCASE 94 #7, 1996)

I didn't follow much of the KNIGHTFALL continuity in the 1990s Batman titles. I knew at least generalities: that, after the original Batman had his back broken by the villain Bane, a substitute for the Caped Crusader had to be found. One Jean-Paul Valley took over the mantle, albeit wearing a high-tech suit-- possibly an editorial comment on the then-popular vogue for Image-style heroes-- and passing himself off as the authentic crimefighter.

I've usually found Peter David's writing, however entertaining, to be antithetical to the notion of symbolic discourse. However, David succeeds in this "imitation Batman" story due to two other overriding factors: that the art is supplied by Craig Russell and Michael Gilbert (both credited for both penciling and inking chores), and that here David is able to work with the rich mythology of the Bat-universe.

As the Jae Lee cover makes clear, this is a story devoted to Batman's frequent foe, the Penguin. In contrast to the Golden Age version reviewed here, the nineties version of the criminal no longer involve him committing clever, bird-based robberies. "Cracks" is structured like a crime story, focused on the Penguin-- whose criminal status is concealed under the veneer of respectable
activity-- being interrogated by Commissioner Gordon at police headquarters. At the time the story opens, "Armored Batman" has been operating for some time, though many persons-- including both Gordon and Penguin-- suspect that Valley is not the real deal.

The wordless first page establishes that the Bat-signal-- artfully reflected in the Penguin's monocle-- is shining in the sky, and the dialogue on the next relays that the signal has gone unanswered for half an hour. Gordon needs Batman because Penguin has boasted of having kidnapped the Commissioner's wife, and that she's doomed to perish in a giant egg about to fill with poison gas. What does Penguin want, to reveal her location?

Of course, Penguin isn't going to reveal his desire right away. He masks it by blathering about the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, and states that both he and Gordon are dinosaurs because they came from a time that valued "style and finesse." (Implicitly another shot at the banality of Image Comics, which David was wont to criticize more than a few times in that decade.) Then the villain challenges the cop to figure out what he Penguin wants in exchange for the information.

Eventually, after much cat-and-mouse dialogue, Penguin does reveal what he wants-- to affirm his suspicion that New Batman is a "decoy"-- but Gordon takes it further. Forced to play psychologist, the cop baits the villain by asserting that he suffers from "the most massive inferiority complex in all of Gotham," and that the real reason he wants so badly to know about Batman's fate is because he wants "to be treated by Batman as if he's important." There was nothing startlingly new in this observation. Penguin's first appearance played upon the scorn he received for his birdlike appearance, and later iterations, especially one by Denny O'Neil, made his complex explicit. But David does add, in counterpoint to the evocative art, a leitmotif in which Penguin constantly throws bird-metaphors in the Commissioner's face, and then finishes by claiming, "We both worship winged creatures, but I can still function without mine. Can you?"

Gordon's final strategy is one which Batman himself has been known to employ: dragging an unrepentant villain to a rooftop, and asking him if he wants to learn how to fly.

However, to the cop's good fortune, Valley-Batman then appears on the same rooftop, revealing the reason for his absence: that he'd already ferreted out the location of the Commissioner's wife, and didn't want to waste time answering the signal. And though the reader knows it's not the real Batman, the hero makes clear that, as far as crooks like Penguin are concerned, he'll always "be there" to stop them. Then the final page once more echoes the image of the Bat-signal reflected in Penguin's monocle-- only this time as an symbol of the "cracks" in his pose of superiority: his existential fate, insofar as a comic-book villain can have one, to suffer eternal defeat at the hands of a hero.

HIDE AND BUSIEK

Yes, I think the pun still works even if you pronounce the name "Byoo-sik." So there.

Before getting into Kurt Busiek's response to my comments on this now closed BEAT thread, I'll make a general statement: I don't think that any of the complaints from McDonald or anyone else have ever been concerned with the most basic level of "sexualization," which in this essay I termed "glamor." I think the fuss is now, and has always been, about the two more extreme forms of sexualization: "titillation" and "pornification."  The NSFW photos McDonald prints on the BEAT thread fall into the third category. It's debatable as to whether the "boob windows, brokeback [position]s, boob socks and more" fall into the secondary or tertiary category.

My post is directed at McDonald's complaint of a lack of equity in terms of sexualization of males and females. I wondered how one might be accomplish the hypothetical state of total equity, since equity is what most of these critics claim that they want. I wrote:

For sake of argument, let’s say a comics company wanted to have an absolutely level playing-field, but still wanted to be able to depict its characters in a sexual manner. What would be the solution? I for one think it would be both immoral and futile to ask straight cartoonists to attempt to sexualize male characters. With rare exceptions, they simply wouldn’t have the mindset.
Could the company create a level field simply by employing 50% straight artists and 50% gay artists? But then, the gay artists chosen would have to be something along the line of P. Craig Russell, who can draw women competently but IMO generally doesn’t sexualize them as he does his male characters.

Kurt Busiek replied:

>> I for one think it would be both immoral and futile to ask straight cartoonists to attempt to sexualize male characters.>>
Straight cartoonists are all male, after all.
And it’s immoral and futile to ask Olivier Coipel to draw sexy men, but moral and effective to ask Amanda Conner to draw sexy women.
I think, perhaps, that cartoonists, both male and female, straight and gay, should be able to draw what the story needs. If the story needs a sexy guy, it shouldn’t be immoral (immoral?!) to ask for that to be drawn in a story. A sexy woman, same deal. But the idea that straight men simply can’t draw sexy men, and that it’s actually _immoral_ to ask them to do so, is a pretty weird concept.
But then, perhaps to some eyes, sexy women are just and normal and the default setting, while sexy men are weird and unpleasant and squicky. To the point that morality demands that men not have to draw such things.
This is called gender bias, though, and it’s not really a compelling argument.
kdb

First, I'll address Busiek's only valid point. A touch, a touch, I do confess it, but yes, not all "straight cartoonists" are male.  However, if one is dealing with straight female cartoonists, then there would be no issue of compulsion with respect to those hetero female cartoonists.  It would be entirely natural for them to sexualize males, even as it would be entirely natural for a gay male artist-- as per my example of P. Craig Russell-- to sexualize males.

What I find "immoral and futile," since Busiek patently misses the point, is this implied element of compulsion for the sake of equity.  Heidi McDonald may or may not really want to see more depictions of male sexual abjection; her actual sentiments are of secondary importance here. But the phrasing of her rhetorical point implies that if you have pornifed female characters in comic books, you ought to have pornified male characters-- and not just, as she says, men "with a good physique in a dynamic pose."

Now, in my scenario of a 50-50 split, I made allowance for 'rare exceptions" to the tendency wherein hetero males are generally stronger at depicting sexy women, while homosexual males would be generally stronger at depicting sexy men. (A similar distribution would of course pertain for female artists as well.) Busiek, puffed up by his desire to score a point rooted in facile sarcasm, names off Olivier Coipel and Amanda Connor as types who do not fit my schema-- happily ignoring that I have already allowed for exceptions to the rule.  He says:

I think, perhaps, that cartoonists, both male and female, straight and gay, should be able to draw what the story needs.

This is also facile thinking because the entire point of extreme forms of sexualization is that they are not "needed" in an absolute sense, unless one is producing literal pornography. With the advent of the Comics Code, comics-publishers often reprinted pre-Code works with substantial redrawing, to avoid being accused of pandering to the youth of America.  In some cases, even artists who controlled their own works sometimes ameliorated the sexier aspects. In one JOURNAL interview, underground artist Jack Jackson stated that in some editions of WHITE COMANCHE he covered up some female breasts because he wanted the story to be more available to younger readers.

Busiek propounds a bland code of the professional artist, who can supposedly draw sexy men and sexy women with equal facility. There are artists like that, as I have admitted. There are also artists like P. Craig Russell, who is not overly strong with female sexuality, and artists like John Romita Sr, who's not overly strong with male sexuality.

I for one want to see artists do what they're good at, not what someone claims that they must do to satisfy a politically correct agenda.

Busiek's final point about "gender bias" is of course predicated on a straw man that is duly torched by my advocacy of gay artists to draw whatever they want to draw.


BTW, since Heidi makes mention of J. Scott Campbell's possible limitations in the arena of sexualizing males with respect to a particular Spider-Man cover, I thought I might as well print this except from a Campbell fan-page to illustrate that maybe with Spider-Man, he wasn't really giving it his best shot.