COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

LEGACY REALIGNMENT

 While glancing through issues of Eclipse's 1980s AIRBOY comics-- all of which I reviewed in 2019-- I realized that I'd never seen anywhere a case of such "super-cosmic re-alignment." That is, in articles like this one, I've usually been addressing only minor re-alignments, where Character X is introduced in Cosmos Y but then gets transferred to Cosmos Z, or even becomes a "free agent," bouncing around into any cosmos where some raconteur wants to place him or her.

"Large pastiche" concepts are somewhat more ambitious. The original run of MASTER OF KUNG FU centered upon the new character of Shang-Chi, whose exploits drew upon the hero's acrimonious relationship with his father Fu Manchu, an established and familiar fictional icon. In the course of the series, the writers worked into their cosmic continuity about a half dozen other Sax Rohmer characters. But there was no idea of a total re-alignment of all Rohmer's "Fu-concepts" into the cosmos of Shang-Chi.

What Eclipse did with the "cosmos" of Hillman Comics was rather different. Though Hillman ceased publication in 1953, a handful of reprints had established a very loose continuity for a few of their features. In three stories I examined as a quasi-triptych, first one AIRBOY story introduced a new villain, Misery. Two issues later, the titular hero encountered a new opponent, Valkyrie. But though she started off fighting the Allies as a native of Germany, in the same story she was converted to the cause of good by Airboy's charms and is turned against the Axis. Then, three years later-- during which time Valkyrie had again appeared alongside Airboy as an ally a couple of times-- the two of them took up arms against the recrudescent Misery, in what might be considered an "informal crossover." After Misery's defeat, I don't believe he appeared again in the Golden Age, though Valkyrie did, even not all raconteurs were consistent with her character.

          

Another type of "informal crossover" appeared in AIR FIGHTERS #3 (1942), in the feature SKY WOLF. This titular hero and his squadron, in the midst of battling evil Nazis, had to take time out to destroy a weird muck-monster named The Heap. It seems unlikely that the creators of the story meant for the Heap to be anything but a one-off menace. However, it's been claimed that readers wrote to Hillman wanting to see more of the once-human monstrosity. This the Heap got his own backup feature, which only fit into AIR FIGHTERS because the creature had been a WWI German pilot before getting transformed into a swamp-thing. Further, though I don't believe Golden Age Airboy ever met the Heap, Airboy had at least one crossover with Sky Wolf. However, most Hillman featured characters-- the Black Angel, the Iron Ace, etc-- never encountered any other characters in the "Hillman Universe."

  

 Rather ambitiously, Eclipse sought to forge the idea of a fully shared universe, built around a legacy version of the original Airboy. The original hero, now some thirty years older in 1986 since his feature's demise in 1953, appears only in the first issue long enough to be killed by the forces of his old foe Misery. Davy Nelson III, the dead hero's grown son, takes over his father's mantle, and by so doing becomes the new Prime to whom Misery is a Sub. In addition, the original Valkyrie is restored to life without having aged, and she too becomes a regular Sub in the new AIRBOY series. Other characters from the Hillman-verse, whether they had their own features or not, get drawn into either the Airboy cosmos or that of his backup strip, the revived Sky Wolf. Such characters ranged from the aforementioned Heap and Iron Ace to a couple of new iterations of old icons, like a Black "Black Angel." Some new characters were created as well for the AIRBOY and SKY WOLF cosmoses, but the focus was clearly on having them host all the characters that Eclipse had acquired.

After a year or so, Eclipse also promoted Valkyrie to Prime status with two mini-serials and two solo outings of her combined with an all-female group of stalwarts, "The Airmaidens." The stories were always decent if unremarkable formula-work, even in the one-shot "maybe-a-dream-crossover" AIRBOY/MR MONSTER SPECIAL. But though I can name off a lot of large pastiches in which current authors pulled from the creations of many authors, the "Air Fighters Universe" at present does seem to be the only example of a "legacy realignment," totally attributing every possible crossover-icon from one cosmos to another.                

EMINENCE AND STATURE

Technically, "eminence" and "stature" are the same words with which I characterize the significant value of centricity in literature, but each one was reached by a different path, so I'll probably keep using both in their respective contexts.

Though I wrote four essays here in which "charisma" was the term I applied to superordinate icons and "stature" to all subordinate icons, I reversed this terminological use in the 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2. That formulation of both "stature" and "charisma," then, was tied to my effort to finding a broad terminology for all the icons in a given narrative.

"Eminence," though, was an attempt to find a structural metaphor that described how centricity looks when one focuses only upon a given centric icon, in comparison to everything else in the narrative. As my most recent essay on the topic specifies, "eminence" is more explicitly linked to what sort of "master-trope" dominates the author's propositional conceptions. Thus, for example, no individual character dominates either Pierre Boulle's PLANET OF THE APES novel or any of the film versions, for the icon of the environment is the star of the show. Wells' TIME MACHINE depicts a similar situation, though the nameless time-traveler visits two distinct time-periods. I tend to think both of them share eminence because they share a common purpose in Wells' proposition: to show the complete irrelevance of human ambitions and priorities in the face of a universal principle of entropy.   

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of qualitative durability.      

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 Before preceding to the discussion of the new category "eminence," which will connote "the organizational power of centric icons," I'll touch on another line of thought about centricity, though one that, unlike the resonance formulation, won't need to be discarded.

The 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL, PART 1 was my first attempt to apply Whitehead's concept of vectors to my Schopenhauer-influenced concept of authorial will, going back to 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER. The definition I cited for "vectors" is worth repeating.

A quantity that has magnitude and direction and that is commonly represented by a directional line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction.

"Magnitude and direction" are still applicable in my system, but it's worth reiterating that, in contrast to the discrete forces we know from physics, these are vectors of the author's intentionality-- often conscious intention, sometimes subconscious as well. The author gives his centric icon or icons the magnitude and direction that makes its/their vector superordinate to those qualities in other icons. But he does so because the proposition he most wants to advance can best be organized around one icon rather than any of the others.  

I use the phrase "the proposition he most wants to advance" in keeping with my previous observations that a given work may advance many propositions as easily as one. In short narratives, there's usually only room for one proposition. However, longer works can incorporate a wide variety of propositions. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, my main example was Melville's monolithic MOBY DICK, and I argued that the organizing proposition of the book-- what I called the "master thread," and later rechristened "the master trope"-- was that of the "myth of the Hunter and the Hunted." 

I'm not sure that, prior to this essay-series, I'd ever noticed that over the course of my investigations, I had attributed an organizing principle both to the abstract propositions put forth by a fictional narrative AND to the icons within that narrative, the icons which (as I mentioned here) make possible audience-identification. However, after discarding the unhelpful concept of resonance as a metaphor for the organizing principle, I found myself turning back to the thoughts expressed in the 2013 essay JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY.

Wherever Jung derived the term "sovereignty" from, he used in a manner apposite to my own: to suggest an organizing factor within the multiplicities of the human mind. His argument doesn't have any great relevance to literary criticism, but I did consider using his term for my principle of organization. However, the word "sovereign" suggests an uncompromising rulership, which is not quite in line with some of my literary concepts. Yet a trip to the synonym dictionary gave me "eminence," and that birthed my new term birthed my new term for all of a narrative's organizing factors, whether related to icons, propositions, or some combination thereof. It also didn't hurt the new term's appeal that Philip Wheelwright had used the term "eminent instances" in his book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. Wheelwright's use of the phrase, appropriately derived from Melville's BILLY BUDD, is not identical to my evocation of the word here, but the base meaning still seems roughly parallel.

Lastly-- and there must be an ending, for the time being-- I prefer "eminence" to "sovereignty" because the former seems more malleable. In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3, I asserted that when Lois Lane stars in her own series, a "phase shift" occurs in which she and Superman reverse their respective subordinate/superordinate positions. This alteration in their respective centricities is elucidated by my formulation that Lois, a charisma-figure within SUPERMAN stories, shifts into a position of eminence while Superman's eminence recedes. This takes place for the purpose of relating propositions not possible in the SUPERMAN features-- propositions about what it might mean to be "Superman's girlfriend," which are also the sort of stories might have held particular appeal for young female readers. I added that Lois will probably always be considered "charisma-dominant" because Superman is, culturally speaking, a much more "eminent instance." But she does still have a low degree of stature thanks to having been in a position of organizational eminence.          

ADDENDUM: I must admit that the word "eminence" doesn't automatically connote the idea of an organizational principle. But a person who is "eminent" is, like a sovereign, often the person whose authority serves to organizes others into action, and thus the word works for me to denote how authors organize the elements of their stories/propositions to have a desired effect. An interesting coincidence: the day after writing this, I encountered the word "eminence" in its little-used geographical sense-- that of "a natural elevation"-- in a re-read of Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH.      

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 3

 

I started thinking once more about the topic of "story-hosts" after re-reading Batman's visit to "The House of Mystery" in BRAVE AND BOLD #93, courtesy of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. In a previous installment of this essay-series, I had talked about how certain issues of that rotating team-up title, because those stories paired Batman, a superordinate icon, with such subordinate icons as The Joker, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, none of whom have ever progressed beyond the subordinate level (in contrast, say, to a rare character like The Catwoman, who made her superordinate mark in the 1990s and who has kept that stature thereafter). 

But at least all of the villains so featured were actual icons. In the story "Red Water, Crimson Death," the two "headliners" are Batman and Cain from DC's "House of Mystery" title-- but not only do they not interact with one another, the latter character has, as far as this story is concerned, no power to interact with Batman or anyone else. He might best be termed a "null-icon" here, as he is in most if not all of the horror-stories he hosted. Thus, in contrast to what I wrote in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6, in all such narratives Cain would be neither Prime nor Sub. I'm aware that he becomes a Sub in the SANDMAN comic, which parallels what I also wrote in the above essay about the EC story "Horror Beneath the Streets." In that tale the three EC horror-hosts come into "reality" to berate the comic-book makers-- but only to make the humans assign the hosts to their already established venues. Technically they are Primes and the comic-book authors are Subs-- though the categorization is made more difficult in that story-hosts are essentially identical with their authors. They serve the same purpose as omniscient narrators, but as "null-icons," they convey a sense of personality absent in such narrators.

So in my book, "Crimson" is essentially a Batman story, concerning his adventure when he tries to take a vacation from being Batman. He meets a young Irish boy, Sean, during an ocean voyage , and though Bruce Wayne has no idea that Sean is involved in a criminal case, he ends up accompanying the boy back to his small fishing-isle, and thus, getting some necessary exposition-- and an introduction to a supernatural manifestation.          

I won't recount the whole story here, but suffice to say that there's a human agency behind the so-called "red tides" and the never-specified deaths of Sean's parents. However, there's also a superhuman agency that manipulates the Gotham Guardian into intervening to capture the criminals and save Sean's life. And yet, though as scripted this is a Batman story, with no crossover elements, O'Neil and Adams structured the tale as the sort of thing that could have run in HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And suppose that it had been reworked to be just such a story, with Batman ejected and replaced by just some basic one-shot viewpoint character? Then the centricity would have shifted from that POV type to either King Hugh, the ghost that renders aid to the boy's protector-- or even to Sean, since O'Neil's backstory slightly suggests that the boy, still grieving for his lost parents, may have subconsciously summoned the spirit of his dead relative to enact vengeance.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 4

 In Part 3 of this essay-series, I asserted that the characters Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne were better defined through their collective statures, as members of the Avengers team, than through whatever individual stature they had accrued in their original stint as the bonded ensemble they comprised in the original "Ant-Man/Giant-Man and the Wasp" feature. This statement went in contradiction to the more general rule that when members of either inclusive or semi-inclusive ensembles had sustained their own features, as did other Avengers like Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, then their individual stature was of paramount importance.                                                                                 

 Now, inclusive teams need not always be as expansive as the Avengers, for there have also been inclusive teams where publishers united just two heroes under the same banner. The best-known is that of the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, but though this pairing became famous, the two heroes not only retained their individual stature from prior to the shared banner, they enjoyed individual serials afterward that added to their stature in both the quantitative and qualitative senses. But with some characters, it's hard to judge whether their individual or collective stature is greater in isolation or in tandem-- and such is the case with Power Man and Iron Fist.                                                                                                     

 As individual features, both Power Man and Iron Fist lasted somewhere between two and three years before both were threatened with cancellation. Aside from a few stories written by Don McGregor, almost all of the Power Man stories are at best just adequate formula, though still better than most of the tales in the oeuvre of the "Giant-Man/Wasp" feature.                                              

Iron Fist's solo career was roughly the same, though the character's title benefited from work by Chris Claremont and John Byrne during their salad days, including the debut of the villainous Saber-Tooth, who eventually became a major X-Men adversary. Presumably the two creators enjoyed Iron Fist enough to pitch the idea of merging his failing book with Power Man's failing book. However, Byrne was gone after the debut issue, and Claremont only stayed a few more issues. However, in issue #56 the title's assistant editor Mary Jo Duffy took over as writer and kept the title going for another three years. Though the title lasted until #125 (1986), my general impression is that the Duffy years made the team most viable and produced the most memorable stories-- although most of these, too, were also just adequate formula, like the stories in the individual titles. I cannot claim, as I did with my examples of Pym and Van Dyne, that the collective stature of Power Man or Iron Fist in their ensemble excelled whatever individual stature they had in their individual-focused features.                                           

   Further, after the original POWER MAN AND IRON FIST was cancelled in 1986, the two characters continued to appear in both solo-featured serials and in revivals of their ensemble. My scant impression is that most of these manifestations were of even less consequence than the most meretricious junk from the earlier runs. However, there is one aspect of the Luke Cage-Danny Rand ensemble that makes their collective status more significant than that of their individual adventures-- and that is the idea of taking these two exemplars of Marvel Comics responding to 1970s cultural trends-- blaxploitation for Cage, martial arts for Rand-- and creating an ensemble in which those cultural aspects played off one another in a salt-and-pepper combination. The "Netflix Marvel" serials built some of their concepts around that ensemble, and while I don't view those tv shows as supervening the comics themselves, they do at least verify that non-comics professionals found the ensemble-idea appealing for their narratives. I suppose I would have to say that the ideal of that combination, even if it has never quite been fully realized by any single story or group of stories, makes me feel that the ensemble of Cage-and-Rand gives both of them more stature collectively than they have ever possessed individually. Unless there are tons of great individual Power Man or Iron Fist stories of which I'm unaware, I would tend to say that they form a bonded ensemble, in contrast to the semi-bonded one seen in the short-lived GREEN LANTERN-GREEN ARROW feature.  

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

At first Kanigher kept the teen and adult Wonder Women separate, though issue #120 (1961), he found a way to cross over the respective icons by having each of them encounter the same peril, "the Mercurian Menace," but at different times in the Amazon's heroic career. Then in #122 he began to play with time, showing Princess Diana getting de-aged to her younger selves, including not just "Wonder Girl" but also "Wonder Tot."

Then in WW #124 Kanigher introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman and her teenaged self both existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though both icons continued to enjoy independent stories. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. Given that both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were designed to generate their own separate cosmoses, every story with both characters after WW #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, just as much Thor and Iron Man are in every co-starring appearance in THE AVENGERS, which is also a semi-bonded ensemble, but only for those characters whose own features reached a certain level of escalation (as opposed to the earlier example of Giant-Man and the Wasp, explained here).

FINE-TUNING DURABILITY AND DURATION

 ...not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative icons within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture. -- A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1.

Since typing the first part of this five-part essay series, I said very little about my use of the offhand term "durability." The other essays, however, generally imply that I judged the highness or lowness of icons' stature or charisma on the basis of quantitative escalation-- though I would only adapt that earlier term a few weeks later in December of 2021. For instance, in Part 2, I noted that the Golden Age character of Miss Victory had transferred her stature from a solo feature to that of the ensemble of the Bronze Age title FEMFORCE:

Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

In contrast, in Part 3 I noted that The Blue Diamond was an example of a character who didn't accrue much stature, having had only two starring appearances. Also, the character of Magik, prior to joining the New Mutants ensemble, didn't get much stature by virtue of appearing in one four-issue mini-series.

In Part 4, I noted that I might not assign High Charisma to a villain-interaction between Joker and Catwoman, who'd only just been created, but that I definitely would in the first crossover of Joker and Penguin, who by the time of their meeting in 1944 had already logged in several appearances as Bat-foes.

And in Part 5, I gave examples of two narratives-- WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC-- in which numerous Primes function as little more than background-characters to the featured Primes.

Now, all of the above examples depend on an idea of "duration," of how much narrative time a given icon has enjoyed as either a Prime or a Sub, either within a single narrative or in a series of linked narratives. This form of duration I henceforth subsume under the general concept of durability.   

Then, a week or two later, I wrote ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, in which I formulated a term for the type of escalation depending on an icon's duration: Quantitative Escalation. But I also specified that another type of escalation could also take place with respect to a narrative assuming the nature of a cultural touchstone, as per the example of Walter Scott's IVANHOE, which was a single work with no additional installments. About a year and a half later, I would show in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PART 3 that qualitative vectors could also influence serial narratives: specifically, as to whether the characters of "Giant Man and the Wasp" were qualitatively more important in their AVENGERS appearances than in their solo feature.

So, though I did not see the distinction in 2021, the "durability" I was describing took two distinct forms:

Narrative Durability relates to how much time an icon occupies within a story, or series of stories.

Significant Durability relates to how much time an icon accrues in literary history, thanks to whatever the icon does or doesn't do that some sizable audience imbues with significance.

A further elaboration is that in some narratives, though a crossover between stature-icons may be relatively short within a story, that crossover can accrues greater significance because of its impact upon the audience. The crossover between Ivanhoe and the pre-existing icon of Robin Hood lasts only a few chapters in Scott's narrative. Yet even if the icons' time together has little Narrative Durability, their crossover possesses Significant Durability because Scott managed to relate his newly created hero to the ideals of the Lord of Sherwood, in such a way that many readers found that part of the story significant. 

The same significance applies to works outside the sphere of canonical literature. In the 1918 book THE GOLDEN SCORPION, Sax Rohmer pits his established detective Gaston Max against a new villain, The Scorpion. Only on a few pages does Rohmer establish that the new villain belongs to Fu Manchu's Si-Fan, and on one of those pages a witness describes an encounter between The Scorpion and his master, though the latter is not explicitly named. Since the Scorpion never appears again, and thus lacks Narrative Durability, the novel cannot be termed a villain-crossover. However, the established figures of Gaston Max and Fu Manchu sustain the crossover-vibe between their universes, even though the two of them never meet. And Significant Durability applies solely because the SCORPION narrative was an important development in the history of the touchstone character of Fu Manchu. But there was no such Significant Durability for Gaston Max, given that he faded from prominence and never, like Fu, became a cultural touchstone.

 

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 4

 The second appearance of Yuriko Oyama also does not bring her into direct alignment with the X-MEN cosmos, though in contrast to her DAREDEVIL appearance, this time she at least meets Wolverine face-to-face. But her dramatic arc is secondary to Wolverine's interaction with the character of Heather Hudson.

Once again, I don't choose to reread every story involving Heather or her husband James since Chris Claremont and John Byrne introduced them in the pages of X-MEN in the early 1980s, or the characters of the Canadian supergroup Alpha Flight, who were in essence a project brought into being by James Hudson. Byrne both wrote and drew the first 29 issues of ALPHA FLIGHT when they got their own title, and during that period James, who took up superheroing under the name Vindicator, was killed off. Heather took over theoretical command of the supergroup after James's death, but the next writer on the title, Bill Mantlo, determined that she should become the new Vindicator in order to join her fellow heroes in the field. But because she had no combat training, she sought out the man whom she and James had essentially fostered in his identity as Wolverine: the mystery man Logan. (And I'm sure Mantlo chose this story-path for much the same reason Wolverine was included in DAREDEVIL #196: to stoke a title's sales with the appearance of a popular character.)

I assume, without checking, that Mantlo mainly followed the broad outlines of what Claremont and Byrne had established in the backstory about James and Heather taking in the feral-seeming Logan, but it's my loose impression that Mantlo probably expanded on some details. For instance, Mantlo specifies that James and Heather were on their honeymoon at the time they found Logan, and that James actually leaves his blushing bride alone with the feral man to seek out help. Mantlo's not usually a very mythic writer, but I rather liked him having Heather think that her "Cinderella" story got turned into "Beauty and the Beast." This may also be the first time Wolverine himself witnesses how he was transformed by the Weapon X project, though the uniqueness of that experience was later overwritten by the events of WOLVERINE: ORIGIN.

As for Lady Deathstrike, she's brought in just to give Wolverine and the New Vindicator someone to fight. To this end, Mantlo quickly undoes O'Neil's happy ending for Yuriko Oyama, claiming that her lover Kira, shamed by the slaying of Dark Wind, committed suicide. This essentially caused Yuriko to do a 180-degree turn, so that in effect she became a copy of the father she had resented all her life. She considered that because Wolverine's adamantium skeleton had been created by Dark Wind's research-- even though it was the scientists of the Weapon X project who transformed the hero-- her dead father had a proprietary interest in said skeleton. This lousy motivation is matched by a rather desultory fight between the heroes and the villain's forces, after which the story kind of drops the training idea.

Lady Deathstrike quickly becomes fully aligned with the X-MEN cosmos in UNCANNY X-MEN #205, dated May 1986, which happens to be the same date allotted to the second part of the Mantlo ALPHA FLIGHT story. Given the quickness of the villainess's transformation, the editors may have flown Mantlo's idea of Lady Deathstrike before regular writer Chris Claremont, after which he, or other parties, arranged to remold the character. Thus, with the help of regular X-foe Spiral, Yuriko becomes a killer cyborg who now emulates Wolverine with her own claw-appendages. From then on, I would say that Deathstrike remains in the X-MEN cosmos no matter where else she may have appeared.

And just to bring things back to the cinematic tales, Deathstrike first makes her movie debut in X2, where she's said to be the creation of scientist William Stryker, who also assumes the role of transforming Logan into Wolverine in place of the head of the Weapon X project, one Doctor Thorton. Regrettably, Deathstrike isn't given even as much character in the movie as Mantlo gives her in the ALPHA FLIGHT tale, even though X2 remains the best of the X-films. But all this establishes in my mind that Lady Deathstrike is not in an iconic bond with Stryker or anyone else in the comics, and thus the film's use of Deathstrike and Stryker together makes that movie a charisma-crossover, even disregarding the presence of the script's other villains, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

While I guess I could follow up my meditations on the phase shifts of Lois Lane with an essay on, say, Jimmy Olsen, I'll take a 180-degree turn here (however brief) into a similar dynamic I found in a pop-fiction take on a venerable myth from the Hebrew Old Testament.

I won't go into the plot of the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA, since I adequately summarized the movie in my review. What makes it relevant to the phase shift I described is that the original texts from the Old Testament, principally "Kings," Solomon is the Prime while the Queen of Sheba-- later given the proper name "Balkis" by Islamic commentary-- is a Sub. So is Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But in the 1952 movie, both of them are Primes, while Solomon becomes a Sub who barely impacts the narrative. But there is no crossover-vibe at all in the movie. Even though Balkis and Rehoboam have absolutely no interaction in the Old Testament, they are both aligned to the "Solomon cosmos." Thus, when the movie centers upon these two characters and relegates Solomon to Sub status, the phase shift involved follows the same pattern as Lois Lane assuming Prime status and demoting Superman.

In contrast, the 2004 film NOAH is a valid crossover of two disparate figures in the Old Testament. There are no associations there between Noah and Tubal-Cain in scripture, except in the generic sense that both are incredibly long-lived figures. For that reason, the movie supposes that Tubal-Cain slew Noah's father Lamech, despite the fact that scripture does not reference Lamech's death in any way. Since Tubal-Cain does not sustain his own narrative, I suppose I would deem him a Sub within the story of his progenitor Cain, so making him a Sub within a pop-fiction version of Noah's narrative is only a minor shift in his Sub-alignment. 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. -- INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2.

In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2, I described how a particular stature-bearing icon, Robin the Boy Wonder, completed a phrase shift away from being an icon within a superordinate ensemble to being (in the identity of Nightwing) a stand-alone superordinate icon. Here I want to deal with a phase shift related to a subordinate icon graduating to a qualified superordinate status-- qualified, because the icon remains stature-dependent upon the icon from which she was derived.

For most of her existence, Lois Lane was a part of Superman's subordinate ensemble. Starting in SUPERMAN #28 (1944), the girl reporter got a backup series in that title for about a year. Now, for the length of time that said series existed, Lois Lane was the superordinate icon, while Clark Kent/Superman, whenever he appeared, became a subordinate icon. But for Superman that was a very qualified status, since Lois's popularity was contingent upon that of Superman. 

Now, in the essay referenced in the quote above, I went on to describe how the "spin-off" Batgirl functioned as a subordinate icon within the Batman serials up until the point that she graduated to her own serial. However, BECAUSE Batgirl appeared to be fast-tracked to getting her own series within about five years of her debut, she was also a proto-crossover. Lois by contrast was a pure subordinate icon, and neither her 1944 serial nor the Silver Age one that lasted for about thirteen years-- SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE-- really did anything to lesson her standing as what I've labeled a "Charisma Dominant Sub." My same verdict holds even given the existence of a couple of television shows in which Lois and Superman were arguably equal Prime types, those being LOIS AND CLARK and SUPERMAN AND LOIS.   

Now, all the serials in which Lois is a stature-dependent Prime and Superman is her Sub do not count as crossovers, the way all of Batgirl's appearances in BATMAN serials do hold that status, simply because Batgirl became a "Stature Dominant Prime." By the same token, Superman does not have any crossover-status with Lois in her own serials, in the way that he does when he teams with Batman in the WORLD'S FINEST feature. The "phase shift" associated with a support-icon being spun off in a separate feature, but a feature that does NOT alter the overall status of the feature's star, is distinct from the one in which such an alteration of status does take place. For this, the example of Robin-turned-Nightwing is instructive, because once Nightwing is independent of Batman he's no longer automatically aligned with the Bat-universe. One example I cited was that because Batman meets Ra's Al Ghul after discontinuing his partnership with Dick Grayson, Ra's Al Ghul does not belong to the Grayson-verse. Thus, whenever Nightwing and Ra's Al Ghul cross paths in any story, that's a charisma-crossover, because Ra's is exclusively Solo Batman's foe. If Ra's has a later encounter with one of Batman's later Robins-- Jason Todd, Tim Drake-- then there's no crossover, because those Robins at that time are aligned with Batman. If one of those Robins phase-shifts his way into a new identity, as "Jason Todd Robin" did to become The Red Hood, then any encounter between Ra's and Red Hood would be a charisma-crossover.

Now, in the Silver Age LOIS LANE feature, unlike the short-lived Golden Age one, the Prime star sometimes met other icons who belonged to Superman's Sub-cosmos, such as Lex Luthor. Everything in Superman's cosmos is also in the dependent cosmos of the girl reporter, so Luthor and other Super-villains have no crossover value, as they would if they interacted with Batman under the WOR LD'S FINEST umbrella. 

Lana Lang presents a slight anomaly, because, by the rules I set up in Part 2 of this series, Lana belongs to the SUPERBOY cosmos, not to that of SUPERMAN, because the personas are different even though they belong to the same person at different ages. Further, at the time that Lana made adult appearances in LOIS LANE, she also continued to appear as her juvenile self in the SUPERBOY title. Lana Lang remains a "Charisma Dominant Sub" in the SUPERBOY feature, but Mature Lana Lang's status is not identical with that of Juvenile Lana Lang (who, incidentally, had only debuted two years previous). 

The former first appears in a 1952 story, "The Girls in Superman's Life," in SUPERMAN #78, but this story is just a one-off. Mature Lana does not show up again until the first Silver Age LOIS LANE comics, 1957's SHOWCASE #9. The two stories don't blend, because the SHOWCASE story ignores Lois having previously met Mature Lana in 1952. Mature Lana is a Sub to Superman in 1952 and a Sub to Lois in 1957, and she continues in that capacity whenever she appears in either feature from then on. She's arguably more strongly aligned to the LOIS feature than the SUPERMAN one despite having probably made more total appearances in the latter. This superior alignment to the LOIS feature s qualitative in nature, because Lana as a competitor to Lois for the hero's heart proved much more significant in that feature than any function(s) she served in assorted SUPERMAN stories. Since "phase-shifted Lana" makes two separate but not congruent debuts in both 1952 and 1957. I would regard that both debuts are crossovers, whether between Superman and Mature Lana in 1952 and between Lois and Mature Lana in 1957. 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I cited my definition for "phase shift:"

"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.

 Simply as a random choice I cited one of the phase shifts I had identified in a recent essay, but as I said at the essay's conclusion, I could have chosen many others.

My first *sustained* investigations into "crossover-ology" began with Part 1 of the series A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS. The examples in the essay concerned how icons with stature, such as Robin Hood and Fu Manchu shifted into icons of charisma when they were "demoted" into subordinate icons, which was the opposite type of shift discussed in PHASED PART 1. In this essay, I'll deal with a different type of phase shift.

GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN in June 2023 introduced the overall concept of iconic bonding. For my example of this literary process, I drew distinctions between the status of Batman and Robin during the thirty years that they were a bonded ensemble, and all the years afterward, when Robin ceased to be Batman's partner. According to some critical evaluations, DC ended the partnership for purely pecuniary reasons. Following the cancellation of the BATMAN teleseries in 1968, sales for BATMAN comics fell precipitously, and DC decided that the presence of Robin in the series reinforced the feature's association with the now unpopular concept of camp. For the first time Robin had solo adventures of his own that were not implicated with the Batman-and-Robin series, as well as entering into ensembles with both Batgirl and the 1970s incarnation of the Teen Titans. (The character had also been with the 1960s incarnation of that super-group, but that iconic bond had been qualitatively secondary to the better-known Batman-and-Robin ensemble.) 

All of the 1970s alterations to Robin's status should be viewed as a minor phase shift, akin to any other time a character in an ongoing partnership gets a "spin-off." However, a different flavor of phase shift transpires in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #44 (1984), which I previously reviewed here as part of the JUDAS CONTRACT continuity. For four years Robin had remained in the ensemble of the successful 1980s TITANS franchise, which had become his dominant source of ongoing stature.

 During that time DC also reversed its course on having a Robin in the BATMAN franchise, and since Dick Grayson already had a successful berth in TITANS, the company chose to bring forth a new Robin, Jason Todd, introduced about a year before in BATMAN #357. For whatever reasons, it took roughly a year for DC staff to decide that Dick Grayson would divest himself of the Robin identity for good, and take on a new superhero name, Nightwing.

This is a phase shift of a different nature than the spin-off status of Solo-Robin. Over time DC raconteurs had to evolve a new literary identity for Dick Grayson As Nightwing, even though textually he was the exact same person as Dick Grayson As Robin. This type of phase shift relates not to stature or charisma, but to what I will call the "narrative texture" of a character; of the set of expectations that the audience brings to a given text, separating one persona assumed by Character A from another persona assumed by Character A. By this same logic, I deem DC's Superboy to be a distinct persona from DC's Superman-- but that's a discussion for another time.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 3

 As I reviewed the original INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE, I decided that I had been too vague in giving my reasons for stating that a particular pair of icons had transitioned from being defined by "individual stature" to "collective stature."

In that essay, I stated:

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

I did not give any reasons for saying why I believed the Wasp and the former Ant-Man/Giant-Man had, by their appearances in the AVENGERS title,"excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series." I didn't make it a matter of the sheer number of the two icons' appearances in AVENGERS as opposed to their own feature, though one might construe as much. If so, that would relate to my established principle of Quantitative Escalation.

However, my intent as I recall it was that the appearances of the two icons was of greater qualitative consequence than their appearances in their own feature. This distinction relates, rather, to the principle of Qualitative Escalation, first mentioned in ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2.

There, too, my earlier statements require expansion. A quantitative assessments requires little explanation; it only signifies, "how many times did a serial icon appear in distinct narratives?" But I possibly should have expanded on my definition of "qualitative," though I've made clear, throughout many other posts, that I believe that "literary quality" always inheres in an author's mastery of one or more of the four potentialities. 

If the corpus of stories that starred Giant-Man and the Wasp had shown mastery of one of the potentialities, then I might consider that that corpus was a qualitative success, even if the series failed to catch on with readers and become successful. But on the whole, the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN serial was marked by generally inferior art and writing in comparison with the other Marvel serials of the period. 

In contrast, though there were some subpar AVENGERS stories following the re-entry of Goliath and the Wasp, the overall level of quality was much higher in all four of the potentialities (even there wasn't much more *didactic* appeal in AVENGERS than there had been in ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN). 

For instance, if I choose to focus upon "the creation of new villain-icons" as an indicator of a superhero serial's mythopoeic potentiality, then most of the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN villains barely stir one's memory, except for The Egghead and The Whirlwind.  (And they, like their enemies, generally got better stories when they made appearances in AVENGERS.) In contrast, the AVENGERS feature, even confined only to the first period in which Goliath and the Wasp were members, boasted characters like Ultron and the Grim Reaper, both of whom generated far more consequential narratives for the evolving Marvel mythology. And writer Roy Thomas was certainly at his most inventive in terms of extending parts of the mythology that he did not invent, as with the Kree-Skrull War.

Therefore, Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne benefit from their association with the better stories of AVENGERS, as opposed to those of their own feature, and "qualitatively" their Collective Stature supervenes their Individual Stature. And of course, this is also true given that these two icons made many more appearances in AVENGERS in the ensuing decades, and remain best known to comics-fans as members of that team, not as solo acts. Even stories that may be dramatically bad, like "Henry Pym, Wife Beater," have become inextricable to the cosmos now designated as "Earth-616" in a limited mythopoeic sense.

A DEMIHERO DISTINCTION

This post follows up on one made about a year and a half ago, wherein I made a point with which I no longer agree.

 Shortly after I re-defined "focal presences" as "icons" in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, I stated that in PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS that I didn't think "charisma-crossovers" occurred at all when, in a given open-ended series, subordinate icons belonging to one persona-type encountered subordinate icons belonging to another persona-type. Here was one of my examples:

...within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

One flaw in this statement, though, is that as an often-seen support character, Commissioner Gordon is as familiar a sight in the BATMAN comics as an object like the Batmobile. He belongs to what I've called "the subordinate ensemble," so naturally he does not "cross over" with subordinate icons who are only seen in a more irregular fashion. Gordon, like Alfred the Butler, might be seen as moons circling a planet called Batman-- or sometimes "Batman-and-Robin." Non-regular subordinates are more like celestial bodies that might not be big enough to be planets, but they too respond to the gravitic influence of the Bat-planet. But even if the Joker and the Penguin are seen as separate celestial bodies, when they come near one another they also issue a gravitic influence on one another-- and that intermingling of energies does qualify as a charisma-crossover.

Side-note: arguably some of these celestial bodies may increase their mass, enough to become "planets" in their own right, then they may start generating their own gravity-power on the Bat-planet as well as upon lesser celestial bodies. Catwoman, for instance, remained a "Charisma Dominant Sub" for the first fifty years of her existence, and her very rare forays into stature-territory did not change her, any more than the JOKER series made the Clown Prince into a "Stature Dominant Prime." But in 1993 Princess of Plunder acquired strong stature from a series that lasted roughly eight years, and continued to headline various projects over the past twenty-plus years. All that stature bulked her up into a "planet" with "Stature Dominant" mass, and she would be stature-dominant even when appearing as a guest-star in some other feature. End side-note.

Another inaccurate statement I made in CALLINGS was the following:

When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona.

In saying this, I was trying to suss out why demiheroes in a given series did not have "crossovers" with one another, just because, say, Flash Thompson crossed paths with J. Jonah Jameson (which I believe was a minor event that only happened one time in the Lee-Ditko years). But there was no necessity for this statement, since characters like Thompson and Jameson were already part of Spider-Man's subordinate ensemble.

Further, if it ever made sense to me to say that "monsters" and "villains" could not cross over their charisma-filled gravity-wells, that now seems entirely unnecessary. Monsters and villains are indeed very different personas, but as long as they are subordinate icons who are NOT part of the subordinate ensemble, then there's no reason that, say, if Batman crosses paths with both The Mad Hatter and Solomon Grundy, that's not a charisma-crossover. The reader recognizes both icons as "adversaries of Batman" and so their gravity-waves play off one another. Equally, in one Superman tale he encountered a "villain" of his own rogues' gallery, the Atomic Skull, and teamed up with a "monster" from the Dark Knight's domain, The Man-Bat. I would deem both Skull and Man-Bat Charisma Dominant Subs, since Man-Bat never enjoyed more than fleeting stature-roles. So the two charisma-icons definitely cross over, just as if they'd both been Superman-foes-- or even two foes belonging to some third hero's cosmos.

Now, is it possible for a "non-regular" demihero "foe" of a hero to cross over with a monster or villain? Possibly. A character from the Frank Miller series BATMAN YEAR ONE, Commissioner Loeb, only made rare appearances in the comics. But he did make recurring appearances in the first two seasons of GOTHAM. There Loeb was a menace to James Gordon but not one regular enough to belong to that show's subordinate ensemble. He would have to have had some "dynamic" relationship to a monster or villain for that to sustain any crossover-vibe, not to simply be in the same room with Riddler or that sort of thing. A brief scene from THE LONG HALLOWEEN, in which Harvey "Not Yet Two Face" Dent crosses paths with Solomon Grundy for a chapter or so could have been reworked as a stand-alone arc with such a crossover-vibe with a demihero-type. I already alluded to a "monster-demihero" crossover in CALLINGS, where Brother Power crossed paths with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters.

And that's probably enough noodling on that for now.