GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.-- MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals...-- SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2.

In an earlier essay today, I mentioned that as a kid reading newspaper comics in the 1960s I took notice as to how violent Chic Young's BLONDIE strip was. I also observed a concomitant level of mayhem in original comic-book stories of the time-- with almost all of the brutality aimed at Dagwood, the Goat of the World. Over fifty years later, I've continued to touch on the strip's unusual psychology on blog-pieces here, despite being fully aware that BLONDIE is far from one of the great comic strips. But I haven't had occasion to mention that I might have got a little help from the "devil" in my title, Gershon Legman.

In or near 1965, a family member, knowing that I liked the strip PEANUTS, gave me an issue of Time Magazine because it contained an uncredited article about Charles Schulz and his creation. Oddly enough, though nothing the author wrote about Schulz was all that illuminating, he decided to contrast the good-heartedness of PEANUTS with the darker manifestations of early comic strips, and with that in mind the writer quoted a passage from Legman's 1949 LOVE AND DEATH. From 1949 until his death in 1999, I don't believe Legman ever again turned his attention to comic books or strips, but the unbilled writer was evidently a fan of those 1949 observations.

Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."-- THE COMICS: GOOD GRIEF.

I won't dwell long on arguments that Legman himself tossed out in a willy-nilly fashion, but I want to establish that when he made these remarks, Legman was not stating that early comics like BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS were what the Time author called "offering a distorted, often brutalized form of life." Since Legman was in those days at least a nominal Freudian, he would have found it inevitable that the adults reading the comic strips-- and Legman does explicitly state that the comic strips are aimed only at adults-- should project "fantasy attacks" on "real frustrations," the latter being the "hell of other people." Legman only goes into all this detail about Young's BLONDIE and Dirks' KIDS, which supposedly conclude by returning the adult reader to the status quo for one reason. Legman wants to contrast such "status quo" entertainments with the overweening sadistic content of children's comic books, which as far as he's concerned do NOT return the reader to the status quo of relative realism but allow the kids to indulge in "the Oedipean dream of strength."

Legman's argument is littered with dopey ad hominem arguments and logical inconsistencies, and his contrast of comic strips and comic books is nonsense. (Despite his having excoriated teen humor books in the same essay, he somehow managed not to notice how often such stories also returned their protagonists to the same "status quo" experienced by the Katzenjammer Kids.) 

I like to imagine that even the ten-year-old me would have perceived how nonsensical his argument about BLONDIE was, because in the actual Young strip Blondie was never subservient to Dagwood. After he got beat up by his boss or his neighbor, or even (very rarely) by Blondie herself, she would tend his wounds, but one could rationalize that this was necessary because Dagwood was the breadwinner. She was almost always the boss in the relationship, with only occasional exceptions where Dagwood got his way by yelling and stomping his feet. So Legman clearly did not read BLONDIE very closely. And yet, he did home in on the fact that Dagwood was "degraded daily," and I never forgot that he had shown me one hidden cultural aspect of what most readers dismissed as forgettable trash.   

Parenthetically, in the same article where he favors BLONDIE's relative realism over the unrestricted fantasy of the superheroes, Legman nevertheless conflates the two, stating, "[Wonder Woman] is straight Wunschprojektion for the envious female-- Blondie with a bullwhip..." In the next paragraph Legman claims that the Amazon "lynches her spate of criminals" (even though Wonder Woman's villains were rarely even slain, as was the case with many other comic book features) and that she "humiliates and big-sisters all the other males in the strip" (which overlooks the fact that the heroine was not indulging in humiliation for its own sake, but attempting to convert recalcitrant men to her doctrine of feminine "loving-kindness.") If anything, Blondie has far more claim to being in the mode of Sade than Wonder Woman and her lasso ever has had.

But still, I give Legman his due for having a good instinct-- once in a while.

MYTHCOMICS:["HOW LONG O LORD?"] (1970?)

For this week's mythcomic I've chosen a particular variation on one of Charles Schulz's most famous jokes; Lucy goading Charlie Brown into trying to kick a football, only to yank it away so that he collapses into a painful humiliation.

Here's a routine, non-mythic version of the joke:

Of the many humiliations Schulz put his star character through, this one was one of the most often repeated. I'm reasonably sure that it resonated with both Schulz and his readers because it placed Charlie Brown in the position of willfully choosing to be sucked into Lucy's cruel trickery. But all of the "football gags" I've seen are pretty simple and straightforward, and thus not the stuff of myth--

Except this one.

To spell things out, I'm not saying that a given PEANUTS cartoon is automatically mythic simply because lay preacher Schulz worked in a Biblical quote or reference. The strip I've entitled "How Long O Lord" maintains an intense (if brief) mythic discourse in striking an unlikely parallel between the mundane interactions of two modern-day suburban children and the mythic interaction of an Israelite prophet and the God of his fathers. The comparison becomes incongruous, and thus humorous, precisely because the readers of the strip know that Schulz is not serious about it.

Yet, even if neither Schulz nor his readers believed that Lucy and Charlie Brown were enacting any sort of *imitatio dei,* Schulz is at the very least commenting upon the ongoing but intentionally static relationship between Lucy and Charlie Brown, between the "con girl" and her fall guy.

It will be noted that in the preceding passages of the Book of Isaiah, God has charged the prophet with a duty to preach to the rebellious people of Israel. Lucy's interpretation, that the prophet is expressing a "protest" against "the finality of the Lord's judgment," is not the only possible reading, but it may well be the dominant one in modern times. Many other "Lucy and the football" jokes stress Lucy coming up with some new ploy by which to gull her hapless victim. Here, though, Charlie Brown himself gives her a clue as to how to con him once more. By comparing the girl-bully's deceptions to a deity's perverse determination, he's initially conferring self-importance on himself, giving his suffering the stature of a prophet's ordeals. Lucy simply plays along with Charlie Brown's self-inflation, talking scripture as if she were agreeing with her target's desire to "beat the odds." But in the end she fulfills the role of a pitiless God-- maybe more in the line of a deity worshiped by Sisyphus than one venerated by Isaiah-- and pulls the football once again. This time, she adds eternal insult to injury by proclaiming that he's going to be the victim of crafty bullies like herself "all your life."

On a side-note, one of the other "Lucy and football" jokes of later years includes a brief post-defeat conversation between Charlie Brown and his sister Sally. Sally can't understand why Charlie Brown allows Lucy to gull him repeatedly, and asks if he's in love with Lucy. Charlie Brown's odd response is, "I should hope not." To the best of my knowledge, Schulz never suggests any sort of "crush"-level affection between Lucy and Charlie Brown, even though both characters are entirely capable of crushing on other kids their age. But Lucy clearly enjoys not only deceiving and insulting Charlie Brown. He's also the character she most often browbeats with her self-glorifying displays of illogical whimsy, and whereas her brother Linus occasionally finds ways to undercut Lucy's gigantic ego, Charlie Brown rarely, if ever, does so. But this reserve doesn't stem from any feelings of love.  Rather, it's the relationship between completion and incompletion. Lucy may be a demanding termagant, but she almost always knows what she wants, and that gives her a degree of power, even when her desires are never fulfilled (cf. Schoeder). Charlie Brown can never demand anything of anyone, and on some level he envies Lucy's peerless confidence. And this is the deep appeal of his futile attempts to kick the football: Lucy will always have one up on him, but he'll always keep trying to catch up with her, albeit without ever comprehending how she managed to supersede him so easily.

MYTHCOMICS: [LINUS THE RAIN KING], PEANUTS (1960)

In an earlier post, I stated that at some point I wanted to retroactively bring one of my earliest blog-essays, LINUS THE RAIN KING, into the mythcomics list. However, I only wanted to do so if I could round the material out a bit-- which is now possible thanks to the posting of two our of the three strips on Pinterest. Otherwise, I've added nothing new.

________________

STRIP ONE: Linus and Charlie Brown stand in an open field while rain starts coming down: CB is wearing a baseball hat and; glove. CB walks away, complaining that the rain interrupts every time you want to do something. Alone, Linus recites the well-known "Rain rain go away" chant. The rain stops. Shocked, Linus runs home and tells Lucy, "Hide me" in the last panel.

STRIP TWO: It's raining again as Linus leads Lucy outside to show her what he can do. He chants the words again, and even Lucy is startled by the rain coming to a halt. Linus gets hysterical: "Do you think I'm a demon? Do you think they'll stone me? I DON'T WANNA BE STONED!" Lucy calms him down and asserts that they have to wait for it to rain one more time, to be sure that the rain-stopping isn't just coincidence. (Apparently she's a believer in "the third time's the charm!") The strip ends with another gag.

STRIP THREE: While they wait, Linus continues to worry about being thought a demon, and Lucy assures him that science will find some use for him. Charlie Brown wanders up, giving Lucy the chance to explain to him (and any readers coming in late) what's going on. The rain starts. Lucy urges Linus to "say the words," and then yells at him, flustering him. Linus utters a mangled-up version of "Rain rain go away," and the strip ends with the three kids being drenched in a torrent of rain, as Lucy calls Linus a "blockhead."

Now, a Christian critic might make this little tale into a meditation on false gods or hidden talents or other themes. I don't think it's that allegorical. However, I also don't think Schulz' well-documented knowledge of Christian themes is entirely irrelevant, either. There's no doubt that Schulz's overriding purpose is to make his readers laugh, even as a superhero artist's purpose is to give thrills and chills. But humor and mythicity are not mutually exclusive, and here the humor proceeds from the notion of a mundane little boy finding himself in a very mythic situation, sans any guidance apart from Lucy's dubious help.

Most probably Schulz rooted the idea in a commonplace fantasy-- how many kids and adults alike have wanted the power to bid halt to an inconvenient rainfall? But it doesn't remain a commonplace fantasy in Schulz's world, which is what lends it the quality of mythicity. Linus' anguish about being thought a demon, while comic, is nonetheless a logical extrapolation of his mythic situation.

The seasoned PEANUTS reader knows that the situation is funny because Linus is not a demon and Schulz is not going to let him be stoned. However, that reader also knows that were this sort of miracle to occur in his world, stoning is not an unlikely outcome for anyone who seemed to arrogate to himself the powers of dat ol' storm-god Yahweh. Somehow, to get back to the status quo, Schulz must undo one mythic situation with another. This he does by having Linus mangle his magic words, essentially "un-saying" them. Since the reader has accepted the author's ability to confer this unexplained power on Linus, he accepts just as readily the author indirectly stating (through Lucy) that once Linus has blown the "third time" test, that was his last chance to prove the power real: thus the whole arbitrary rain-stopping power goes away and everything's back to normal.

Although-- no, don't even get me started on the blanket.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, PT. 1

I've been contemplating the place of comic strips with respect to the "1001 comics myths" project.

I've always thought that comic books have proven themselves a more fertile ground for the  mythopoeic potentiality than comic strips.  I further believe that comic books' greater capacity for myth has nothing to do with the profligacy of superheroes within the American medium; it's a capacity rooted in the comic-book medium's ability to make a more nuanced use of words than the comic-strip medium can. If one could disinclude all of the superhero or superhero-like features from both media, I believe that one would still find that comic books are superior at producing the discourses of myth, which elsewhere I've related to Philip Wheelwright's concept of "poeto-language."

That doesn't mean that I don't find worthwhile "poeto-language" discourses in comic strips. In my essay AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, I mentioned the following strips: Chic Young's BLONDIE, Harold Gould's DICK TRACY, Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND, Gary Larson's FAR SIDE, Herriman's KRAZY KAT, and Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES.

However, it may be a mark of the difficulty with critiquing such serial comic strips that I didn't write myth-analyses of any of these, though in the first year of this blog I did devote some attention to a particular PEANUTS conitnuity, which I entitled LINUS THE RAIN KING.  I've latterly decided that this too belongs within the corpus of the 1001 comics-myths, and I'll probably retrofit the original essay slightly for this series at a later date.

Of course PEANUTS may have benefited from the fact that its author Charles Schulz was a lay preacher, so he had a working knowledge of the "poeto-language" of the Bible.

Nevertheless, as a Jungian pluralist I don't believe that one has to have special education to tap into the potentiality of the mythopoeic.

I considered the possiblity that the rather truncated form of the comic strip might tend to force it into a verbal straightjacket, so that it became the dominant practice to use words only in a denotative manner, rarely tapping their connotative associations.  This is certainly a possibility, although Schulz's example shows that one can find ways to use the medium's limitations to produce mythic effects.

Of the six comic strips I mentioned above, the most mundane is Young's BLONDIE, which was certainly not a haven for metaphysical musings. Nevertheless, though I've never devoted any space to the Chic Young strip, in my "Mythic Monday" project I gave a mention to one short tale, "Shaved and Clipped," from a 1962 issue of Harvey Comics' licensed BLONDIE comic-book title. The tale is only two pages long, yet it is more plurisignative than most BLONDIE comic-book stories, to say nothing of many of the comic strips. From this I conclude that the actual length of the narrative doesn't always mitigate against symbolic complexity.

I'm currently considering the proposition that mythopoeic scenarios, much like those of the other potentialities, need to be formulated to allow for *complication*-- though this need not be entirely identical with the Aristotelian term given that translation, as seen in this essay.

I should weigh in on these weighty matters further, in at least one more essay.

WHEN FUNNY ANIMALS ATTACK

Technically the words "funny animal" could be used for real-life critters who perform amusing stunts, like the contenders in Dave Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks." But it's generally used as it is in this Wiki-page: to signify creatures who are anthropomorphic in some way.

One variety is the fully humanized animal, who regularly walks on two legs, may wear clothes like a human, and who frequently interacts with cartoon versions of human beings.

Another type behaves in some ways like an amimal, and usually walks (or flies, or swims) as its real-world counterpart does. However, at any time such types can "take a break" and do identifiably human things.

They may do nothing more than think coherent thoughts, like the titular star of Disney's 1964 film THE THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA.

They may imitate only a few human actions, like standing on two legs. as Garfield often does. A
related but more outrageous type like Snoopy doesn't regularly wear clothes but can don them whenever he wants to take on another identity.

Some continue to go on all fours but can talk like-- and even to-- human beings, a la Scooby-Doo.

It's clear that in a purely technical sense, all of these types fall into the phenomenal category I call "the marvelous."  And yet it's clear from my studies of other compendia of metaphenomenal films that often this species of marvelous phenomenon is given a "pass." To my knowledge no such compendium has ever included 1972's SNOOPY, COME HOME, in spite of its walking, coherent-thinking "funny animal."  Similarly, in the essay ON FAIRY STORIES, Tolkien's great examination of the nature of fantasy, he excluded animal fables like those of Aesop from his realm of faerie.

I can well understand Tolkien's reticence. Features in which the characters look like humanized animals but essentially act like human beings generally fail to transmit what Tolkien called the "arresting strangeness" of fantasy. Mickey Mouse animated cartoons may at least have the mouse doing impossible things, but the Floyd Gottfredson comic strip was more like a rural comedy-adventure that just happened to star humanized mice, horses, etc. The erotic anthropomorphic comic book OMAHA CAT DANCER only rarely referenced the animal natures of the characters, whose adventures usually fell into the realm of soap-operatic melodrama.

It's as if funny animals have a certain "invisibility" in certain contexts: they're so obviously stand-ins for human beings that one doesn't think of them as "marvels" at all. I'm tempted to regard some of them, like the casts of OMAHA and  the MICKEY MOUSE comic strip as belonging to the naturalistic version of my narrative trope "delirious dreams and fallacious fantasies." However, to qualify as a "fallacious fantasy," the fantasy would have to be a phenomenon that was simply a departure from the work's diegetic "reality" that the audience was not expected to take seriously. An example of this would be the animated "Pink Panther" from the live-action PINK PANTHER films, who may comments upon, but is not involved in, the "reality" of those movie narratives.

In conclusion, I can only note that although many funny-animal works technically belong to the category of the marvelous, they often evoke so little of the affects of wonder and strangeness that they almost constitute an "attack" on their own domain.