QUICKIE REVIEWS OF (FAIRLY) NEW STUFF

Probably because of my current fascination with crossovers, I've been seeking out whatever related items I could find in public libraries. None of my readings have been impressive enough for a full review, but I might as well set down a few impressions of 21st-century treatments of crossovers.

First, though, I'll note that prior to these investigations I reread all the WEST COAST AVENGERS issues written by Steve Englehart in the 1980s. I enjoyed these stories much more than the current offerings, for all that I don't have a ton of remarks on this mini-oeuvre. My main takeaway is that in the eighties, the ideal of Marvel continuity was still rigorous enough that a hardcore fan-writer like Englehart could bring together dozens of stories by himself and other raconteurs in order to forge the identity of the WCA super-group. Characters like Tigra, who had flourished neither in solo outings nor in the original, New York-based Avengers acquired much more substance as a result of Englehart's efforts. Not all his decisions were without flaw-- Moon Knight as Avenger was never a good fit-- but it's a solid series, regrettably torpedoed when fan-favorite John Byrne took over the title.

I can't pin down a particular diegetic event that made Marvel less unitary in its approach to continuity, though I imagine the two main factors in the twenty-first century were (a) the emphasis on "celebrity" arists and writers, who would often just do their take on a given character or series and not worry about being "in continuity," and (b) the fact that by the 2000s there was just too much continuity to keep track of. Thus in all of the books I explored, continuity is something of a "catch as catch can" game.

DOCTOR STRANGE DAMNATION-- One of the co-authors of this outing was Nick Spenser, who gained fame (or infamy) for the fake-out story in which Captain America was revealed to be a Hydra agent and thus a kissing cousin to Nazism. DAMNATION spins off a development in some other story, wherein all of Las Vegas is destroyed. The Master of the Mystic Arts arrives and brings the city and all its slain people back into existence (sort of a lesser version of the reveral of "the Thanos snap.") But before being destroyed the Nevada "sin city" went to hell, and now Mephisto controls the strings of the reborn metropolis. Strange then forms a team of mostly oddball choices to beat the devil. Biggest plus is that the concentration on the fate of one city proves more appealing than the usual universe-threat. Biggest minus is that none of Strange's allies play off one another in any interesting ways, so the crossover aspect is wasted.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Volumes 1-3-- These were all Brian Michael Bendis stories, and as such they're very freeform, with minimal plotting. There are a few good fight-scenes, particularly the one between Gamora and Angela. (I'd never heard that Marvel bought the character off Neil Gaiman. Way to get rid of some dead weight, Gaiman.) But Bendis most reminds me of the dozens of TV writers who tried to write like Joss "BUFFY" Whedon. Those writers missed that each of Whedon's characters had individual voices, and so just gave everyone funny-sardonic lines. Bendis is like these writers, except he's never funny.

FEARLESS DEFENDERS-- Don't think I ever read Cullen Bunn before, though I'd heard his name. This six-issue tale, titled DOOM MAIDENS, teams up one actual Defender, The Valkyie, with a motley crew of unattached Marvel femmes: Misty Knight, the New Mutant once called Mirage, and "Warrior Woman," which is a new name for the Amazon Hippolyta. Oh, and there's a lesbian scientist who tries to get it on with Valkyrie, so that helped Bunn get a GLAAD nomination, but she's pretty forgettable. The "doom maidens" of the story are a bunch of dead Valkyries brought back to life to menace the world, but Bunn can't get the vibe of Norse mythology to save his life. After being routed by the undead warriors, these dim Defenders debate bringing in other superheroes, even some male ones. But for fuzzy reasons, the Bad Valkyries can only be repelled by female heroes, which allows Bunn to work in eleven other heroines. Though this sounds like a potential Great Moment in Comics Pulchritude, the fights in FEARLESS are poorly choreographed and all the heroines sound like one another.

DEADMAN-- This was one of Neal Adams's swan songs, as he returned to the DC character that brought him to fans' attention, This godawful series might prove that a lot of old-school artists lost their discipline in the 21st century, except that I think Adams' early successes were largely contingent on his collaborators. DEADMAN makes all the other offerings look coherent by comparison, as the Ghoulish Guardian once more tries to figure who really, really killed him way back in the sixties. At least Bendis made some efforts, however limited, to distinguish his characters from one another, but here you've got characters as different as Deadman, the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger all speaking in one voice: The Last Angry Spook. In the sixties Adams' heavy melodrama was a breath of fresh air compared to the overemphasis on exposition, Now it's a stone drag, man.

SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN-- Another revisionist retelling of Superman's origins, emphasizing his identity as Clark Kent of Kansas. I don't know writer Max Landry, but he has better control of melodrama than anyone else being reviewed here. His Kryptonian hero does seem to get drunk on Earth-booze pretty damn easily, though. ALIEN contains yet another contentious first meeting between Batman and the hero who's not yet Superman, and I don't care for Superman getting the idea of his costume from the Gotham Guardian. Nice fight with Lobo at the end. Not likely to become a dominant paradigm for Superman's early years.

HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD-- I'd seen reference to this "SHIELD Monster Squad" in some SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so I had to check this out. Apparently most of the monster-themed characters had appeared in other Marvel titles, though I was only familiar with Man-Thing, Orrgo (one of those giant Kirby Kreatures from the early sixties), the short-lived Manphibian (whom I actually don't remember, though I think I have his first appearance), and SHIELD agents Jasper Sitwell and Dum Dum Dugan. Or rather, simulacra of the two agents, since Sitwell is a nearly brain-dead zombie and Dugan is an artificial version of the deceased original "Howler." The oldies and the relative "newbies" don't play off one another's powers very well, and some, like Man-Thing, just don't belong in the "spy game." However, artist Brent Schoonover provides some appealing action and emotional scenes, and writer Frank Barbiere does the best job of any writer here at giving each character a particular voice. I don't think these "Creature Commandos" went on to further adventures in the comics, but at least their one series was diverting.

NEAR MYTHS: THE CELESTIAL MADONNA SAGA (1974-75)

Wikipedia features articles that are mere "stubs," but this essay is a "sub-stud," since I don't intend to lay out even the basics of the Celestial Madonna saga that occupied a couple of years in the AVENGERS title.

This was a popular sequence in the early 1970s, and I liked it as much as anyone back then. These days, however, I find that it lacks even the basic mythic underthought that I found in Roy Thomas's Kree-Skrull War. Indeed, Englehart's multi-issue continuity should be seen as a creative response to Thomas's project, which also concerned the operations of the alien Kree upon Marvel's version of Planet Earth. However, what was a minor failing in Thomas's narrative becomes a major liability in Englehart's story.

For both authors, THE AVENGERS was a book where they could seek to impress fans with meticulously interwoven plot-threads. The title's original scripter, Stan Lee, showed little indication to take advantage of the feature's potential for soap-operatic complication, but Thomas arguably gave the feature its narrative identity. Englehart's AVENGERS scripts are even more dense with plot-complications than those of Thomas. This is SOP today, but in the early 1970s comics were still a mass medium, expected to make most of their money selling to kids who might or might not read every issue. Englehart's story proceeds as if he's rock-solid certain that his readers care nothing for "done-in-one" stories; at most, he would throw in a story with a menace overcome in one issue. Yet the emphasis was clearly placed on the ongoing continuity, not any single conflict.

The "Celestial Madonna" of the title is the half-Asian heroine Mantis, who was (appropriately) sort of a camp-follower to the superhero group, not initially joining the team but simply tagging along when her beau, the former villain Swordsman, applied for membership. Swordsman was clearly just Englehart's way of getting Mantis into the group, for in due time Mantis's attentions strayed from him to the android Vision. Further, the group's adventures began to emphasize some of the mysteries surrounding Mantis's origins, while her former boyfriend was unceremoniously slain (at least, temporarily).

Thomas's Kree-Skrull War built up plot-elements from Lee/Kirby's FANTASTIC FOUR, regarding the way the alien Kree experimented with archaic humans, turning some of them into Inhumans. These experiments by the warlike Kree had the long-range purpose of using the descendants of the Inhumans as a martial resource. Englehart, however, evinces a fascination with Eastern concepts of mysticism and unity, and so he posited that a group of peacenik, kung-fu fightin' Kree were exiled from the bosom of their people. These Kree, "the Priests of Pama," migrated to Earth and decided to conduct their own experiments. Without going into lengthy detail, Mantis was the result of their attempt to create a "perfect human being," whose exalted status was signified by the "Madonna" term.

Most of the "Celestial Madonna" saga consists of adequate but unexceptional superhero action, as the Avengers charge about fighting Kang and other menaces, giving Englehart leeway to concentrate on the development of his creation Mantis. I can't say that I consider Mantis all that impressive a myth-figure; once one knows her origins, she loses most of her dubious charm. She's perhaps the first of the author's more self-absorbed character-types, but Englehart doesn't compensate for her obnoxious qualities with any deeper psychological complexity. She's also something of a one-note joke: having been a prostitute in the past, she's "the whore" who becomes "the madonna."

Thus, given how episodic and convoluted the saga is, it lacks the unifying theme of a good myth-comic, and must be rated as just an assemblage of many differing myth-motifs. Not least of these involves the Swordsman's body coming back to life, animated by the spirit of a tree, which Mantis then marries so that she can birth a super-baby.

Yes, it definitely read better in 1974.

THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 2

The terminology of "types" that I introduced in this preface can now be brought into line with the terminology of "forms" that I introduced in Part 1.

My main reason for bothering with all of these highly specific terms relates to my fascination with the idea of thresholds as they relate to both real and fictional experience. Earlier I've quoted Philip Wheelwright with respect to his assertions about "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." For me this means that there are certain crucial points, at least in fiction, where one phenomenality shades into another-- as with the naturalistic into the uncanny-- or where a subcombative level of violence can, with just a little extra *amplitude,* be transformed into the level of the combative. The same dynamic also applies to the shadings in between age-related clansgressions.

I gave one example of this subtle shading in this section of CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2:

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. 

Looking at this observation through the lens of the "chronophilia" article referenced in the preface, one might assume that even though there's not a large span of years separating "high school girl" from "college boy," the former aligns with what I've called the "E-type," the late adolescent usually aged from 15-19 years of age, while the latter often (though not always) aligns with the "M-type," the functional adult, even though the average collegian would not usually be all that much older than the high-schooler. Still, a sense of transgression, and of clansgression, pertains because there's the sense of mixing "clans" that ought to be separate.

For instance, in Rumiko Takahashi's long-running MAISON IKKOKU, the principal relationship is that of Godai, a college-age young man and a slightly older woman, Kyoko, whose age is cited as 22 on one wiki. However, one barrier to the relationship is the fact that Kyoko, who married her first husband when she herself was in high school, is a widow, and so the potential romance between her and the college student seems slightly out of balance, even if the age-discrepancy is not a great one. However, Takahashi erects other barriers as well.One of these is the above-pictured high-school student Ibuki, who sets her sights on the twenty-something Godai. Ibuki is never successful in her romantic campaign. But since Godai registers as an "M-type," any association with a "E-type" seems massively inappropriate, and Godai always gets in trouble with Kyoko whenever she suspects him of pursuing a high-schooler.

Yet age doesn't always confer the semblance of maturity. In the same LAWLINES essay I wrote this of the manga-series LOVE HINA:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house...

So even though the Keitaro character is in the same age-range as Takahashi's Godai, Keitaro is often treated as being an "E-type." so that there's no sense of age-based clansgression when he tries to make time with high-schooler Naru. However, I mentioned above that the "clan" in LOVE HINA included middle schoolers.

One is a wacky "foreign" girl. Kaolla, who likes to torment Keitaro both physically and quasi-sexually.

The other is a serious but shy Japanese girl, Shinobu, who's honestly attracted to the older male but becomes easily embarrassed in his presence.

Predictably, though Keitaro doesn't make any moves on either "H-type" girl, he's constantly placed in situations where it seems like he's guilty of this particular age-transgression.

In the Preface I also mentioned that age-based clansgressions might occur even when a particular character only "appeared to be" within a particular span of years. There are quite a few of these in Japanese entertainment, but for variety's sake, I'll give as example the American DC Comics character Arisia Rrab.

When first introduced, the character-- an alien Green Lantern, and a member of the same Corps as Hal Jordan, the titular DC hero-- looked very much an "H-type." She had a schoolgirl crush on M-Type Jordan, and that was all there was to that.

One online reference puts her age at 13 in this introduction, though in a later comic, Arisia argues that even though she looks like an immature Earth female, she's actually much older than her looks because of the longer span of time that her planet revolves around its sun. Jordan still rejected her as a potential lover, urging her to seek out boys "her own age." However, Arisia's inner torment caused her to subconsciously advance her own body in age, so that she became, in effect, an "M-Type" like Hal Jordan.  And at that point, Jordan acquiesced to her logic.

The story in GREEN LANTERN CORPS #206-- in which Arisia became "a woman" in more than one sense-- was entitled "In Deep," and writer Steve Englehart may have chosen this title knowing that he was going to get "in deep" with fan-reaction. He even anticipates the general reaction in the following dialogue:

It's hard to say whether or not the writer had any notion of breaking down this particular clansgressive stereotype, but the story had no such effect. Instead, the trope of "Green Lantern, Child Molester" has become an ongoing joke. Arisia did not last long as Hal Jordan's inamorata, and later continuity seemed to have papered over Englehart's scenario.

To bring the analysis back to the three forms--

The Primary Form would be best represented by Keitaro's romance with high-schooler Naru. Though she's part of the "sorority" in the hotel, and she actually knew Keitaro briefly when the two of them were pre-schoolers, she's the least 'sisterly" of the cast-members.

The Secondary Form is represented by the romance of Godai and Kyoko, whose transgressive association is filtered through, and somewhat inverted by, the interaction with Ibuki. One reason Ibuki becomes obsessed with Godai results from his having been a substitute-teacher at her high school. This institution happens to be the same one where Kyoko, in her high-school years, fell in love with the older man whom she married. Thus, even though Kyoko is older and more experienced than Godai, Godai's apparent flirtation with a high-school girl resonates as a reverse-recapitulation of Kyoko's history with an older man.

The Tertiary Form is represented by the "brief candle" of love between Hal Jordan and Arisia, who attempt to use sci-fi rationalizations to justify the clangression between an "M-Type" and a character who had at most been a "E-Type" before she wrought the Change of Womanhood upon herself.

ADDENDUM: I'll note that one reason Keitaro doesn't seem an "M-Type" despite his age is because he's failed his college entrance exams so often, thus consigning him to a sort of "immaturity limbo."

MYTHCOMICS: "FIVE BILLION YEARS" (GREEN LANTERN #200, 1986)

I noted in my mythcomics analysis of "The God Killer" that it was only a part of a greater saga, but that I didn't find the entire story to have the necessary symbolic density necessary for a mythcomic.

"Panther's Rage" is rambling and episodic, and though it's never boring, its myth-themes are not integrated enough to make me list the entire arc...

"Five Billion Years" is a similar case. It's the culmination of a long arc involving DC's space-opera superhero and many of his fellow Green Lanterns from assorted planets. If that wasn't complicated enough, the greater arc is tied into DC's multi-feature epic, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, and works in a lot of DC history seen in stories like THE SECRET ORIGIN OF THE GUARDIANS and THE SECRET LIFE OF STAR SAPPHIRE. (Below is a quick contemporaneous recap of Star Sapphire's origin.)

 In addition, this arc proved notable for building up the character of Guy Gardner, the Bad Boy of the Lantern Corps:

Most of these developments, however, relate purely to lateral meaning as I described it in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT. The symbolic density of myth comes into being through the mythopoeic potentiality, which aligns itself with a narrative's "underthought" and frequently, though not invariably, is granted greater profundity by its interaction with the "overthoughts" of the didactic potentiality. Lateral meaning describes what the characters experience physically and what readers should understand of its emotional meaning, and so the lateral elements of this story-- things that relate purely to Hal Jordan's romantic problems or his duels with old and new enemies-- are irrelevant to the matter of myth.

The underthought of "Five Billion Years" reveals yet another "secret origin" for the Guardians of the Universe. Although Green Lantern's mentors spend most of their career looking like sexless, hyper-intellectual dwarfs, "Five Billion" hearkens back to their origins as gendered entities-- which begs the intellectual question, "what happened to the other gender?" In short, the Zamarons-- who, since their introduction in John Broome's Star Sapphire origin, were always depicted as all-female-- are called upon to be the missing "other half" of the mortal race that gave rise to the Guardians.

The confrontation of the Guardians and the Zamarons has one extrinsic purpose, to link the events of the GREEN LANTERN comic to upcoming, post-Crisis events like the MILLENNIUM mini-series. However, Englehart is skillful enough to give this "big event" a strong intrinsic meaning, in that the reunion of the two sexes is touted as an evolutionary necessity. One Guardian says:

The race born on Malthus and and developed on Oa and Zamaron must be regenerated to create a new breed of immortal...

But before this can happen, the most prominent Guardian must duel the most prominent Zamaron to prove the former's fitness to mate with the latter. Since the duel takes place in terms of energy-blasts, the event shouldn't convey any anti-feminine sentiments except to those determined to find that sort of thing.

After the head Guardian proves, at least by implication, that he and his fellows still have the Stuff, they and the Zamarons fly off to some celestial plane, telling the Green Lanterns that they too must evolve, so as to be their own masters. Their own personal "devil" Sinestro attempts to tag along in the guise of a Guardian, but he's caught, and confesses, in very Earth-centric terms, that his intention was to become "a lurking serpent in your new and secret haven."

From what memories I have of MILLENNIUM and the somewhat related NEW GUARDIANS title, I don't think the Guardians succeeded in coming up with their "new breed." In any case the little blue men didn't stay away very long, but returned to the GREEN LANTERN within the next twenty issues, prior to its cancellation.

On a minor side-note, Englehart tries to extend his evolution-metaphor into one of Green Lantern's battles, as the hero bests the mentally endowed super-villain Hector Hammond, telling Hammond, "You've reached the far end of your evolution, while I'm still going." But it's at best a forced metaphor at that point. Whatever the long-term execution of the "Guardians have sex" concept, "Five Billion Years" does manage to impart a sense of space-opera grandeur to the proceedings.

MYTHCOMICS: COYOTE #1-16 (1983-86)

In AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY I gave pride of place to the first two issues of Steve Englehart’s Epic-published COYOTE series. At the time I wrote that, I hadn’t given the rest of the Coyote-tales a close reading: either the seven installments that appeared in ECLIPSE MONTHLY magazine or the remaining fifteen in the Epic series. I only remembered that after the first two solo-feature issues, in which Englehart’s script was beautifully realized by artist Steve Leialoha, both story and artwork fell off drastically in quality. Yet, given that I’ve said it’s possible to have a significant symbolic discourse even when other qualities are lacking, I decided to re-examine the full Coyote series.

I found no reason to change my opinion of the ECLIPSE MONTHLY stories, which I touched on briefly in a review for COMICS JOURNAL #85 (1983). This sequence introduced Coyote, a hero named for the Native American trickster-god. He possessed shape-shifting and dimension-crossing powers, the heritage of a meandering and confusing backstory. With almost no motivation, the hero began clashing with his principal adversaries: a secret organization called the Shadow Cabinet. These assorted spy-jinks led me to label the Eclipse series as “American Werewolf gets a shave and plays James Bond.”  I also noted that collaborator Marshall Rogers was guilty of “cardboard figures and meticulously cluttered panels.” At best the Eclipse stories rate as near myths.

The sixteen Epic issues, however, do manage to realize a “density of discourse” that raises them to the level of “good myths.” Englehart had established in the earlier stories that Coyote got his supernatural powers as the result of being raised in a society of eldritch beings: a were-coyote foster-father and a vampire foster-mother. But in the Epic series, Englehart deepened the protagonist’s connection to Native American lore and culture. Though Coyote’s “origin-story” is laid out without a lot of attention to motives or consistency, it does establish that Coyote, a mortal man, was actually chosen by the Native American coyote-god to help drive out the Europeans who conquered the lands of the red men. This revised origin didn’t come to much in terms of plot, but it allowed Englehart to intermingle two forms of narrative: the modern-day, superspy-like adventures of his hero, and vignettes about the original coyote-god’s adventures in the world that existed before the Caucasian invasion. I don’t know to what extent Englehart’s vignettes derived from real Native American folklore, although some of the details are certainly provided by the writer himself. The significance of the vignettes is that Englehart emulates much of the earthy humor that characterizes authentic Amerindian folktales. One outstanding vignette, possibly the height of the Englehart-Leialoha collaboration, deals with Coyote’s creation of the Milky Way by his impulsiveness.

And what of the main story concerning the hero? Well, in 1983 I wrote that he was one of several contemporary heroes who were more concerned with “maintaining personal freedom” rather than expousing total altruism (I was big on the theme of altruism vs. selfhood back in the 1980s.) Coyote, having much of the nature of his trickster-god, is full of youthful self-confidence, contempt for those of lesser attainments, and just plain horniness. Indeed, whereas James Bond of the Movies often got to bone at least two women per film—albeit separately—Coyote is a true “harem fantasy,” in which he hooks up with two sisters (one white, one phenotypically black) and later with a third hottie, a female Russian assassin. Issue #16 concludes not only with Coyote’s victory over the Shadow Cabinet, but also his success with getting at least two of the hotties to remain in his personal seraglio. I’m not sure if any modern American comics-creator would even be able to pitch, much less have published, such a politically incorrect male fantasy.

Further, Englehart does manage to tie together Coyote’s current enemies with the mythic past of the folklore-Coyote, for the Shadow Cabinet is largely run by magical beings called:”Crows.” Native American folklore has its share of crow-gods, but it’s not clear if these are gods, though in one of the past vignettes the Crows are seen as the persistent adversaries of the coyote-god. At the very least, the presence of the Crows keeps the Shadow Cabinet from being just another globe-spanning secret organization.

Ironically, in 1983, I wrote just the opposite, stating that I thought the Cabinet was meant to be more than “SPECTRE or Hydra;” that it was a metaphor for Englehart’s view of the “grasping-and-taking aspect of American business.” I no longer think Englehart applied this metaphor to the Cabinet itself: now I think it really was just another SPECTRE, albeit with overcomplicated origins (including aliens!) Yet throughout the sixteen Epic issues, Englehart adroitly contrasts the anal-retentive tendencies of Anglo culture with the more freewheeling spontaneity of Amerindian ways. He also works in interesting commentaries on the three “Religions of the Book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all of whom appear as minor players in the pagan conflict of Coyote and the Crows.

On a side-note, Marvel’s publication of the Coyote series also gave Englehart a venue inn which to publish his four-part collaboration with Steve Ditko, “The Djinn.” Only one installment of the series had seen previous publication, but Marvel published the whole series, much to the delectation of Ditko enthusiasts, since the series featured some of the artist’s best eighties work. Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn” story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the “everything plus the kitchen sink” school.

Issue sixteen concludes with the words, “James Bond is problematical, but—Coyote will return!” it takes a special kind of nerve to claim that your comic-book character has a better chance to return than that internationally famous superspy 007. But in this Englehart proved a better writer than a prophet, for Coyote hasn’t turned any new tricks in the comics since 1986.

MYTHCOMICS: 'SHANG-CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU" (SPECIAL MARVEL ED. #15, 1973)

Both of the previous examples in "Racial Other Mythcomics Month" reflected both positive and negative aspects to racial heritage. In "The God Killer" the hero, the Black Panther, incarnates the good aspects, while Killmonger and his henchman Sombre incarnate the bad aspects. In contrast, in the "Black Talon" story Strangler Burns, the black murderer whose legacy empowers the Caucasian villain, was shown to embody both negative and positive traits, though Burns himself must be deemed more of a plot-device than a substantial character. The "origin story" for the feature MASTER OF KUNG FU roughly follows the pattern of the Black Panther story, but makes the connection between protagonist and antagonist more intimate, as well as centering their heroic and villainous natures in terms of time.

The cover for "Shang-Chi" is a small masterpiece of design, not just in terms of kinetic effects but also in terms of conjuring with Asian representations from differing eras. Even though this was the hero's first appearance, most if not all comics-purchasers in 1973 would have quickly recognized the iconography of the young Asian kung-fu fighter. This racial icon had by 1973 been popularized in part through English-dubbed martial arts films made in Hong Kong and distributed to the U.S. According to this site and to Wikipedia, the film known in the U.S. as THE CHINESE CONNECTION, released to the States in November 1972, jump-started the brief American kung-fu craze, though the TV pilot for ABC's KUNG FU teleseries contributed as well, airing in February of that year. Both of Shang-Chi's co-creators, Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, have asserted in online interviews that the David Carradine TV show was their main source of inspiration, and this is reflected in the characterization of Shang-Chi as an earnest seeker of truth. Even the cover's design uses Chinese iconography to communicate this via the yin-yang symbol on the floor. Note that Shang-Chi's foot stands upon the white, "good" section and his bad sumo-opponent stands in the black, "evil" section-- although some colorist goofed and failed to darken the spot inside the "yang" section.

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Following a stunning action-scene by Starlin-- from back in the days when he could do stunning action-scenes-- Shang-Chi reveals his relationship to the "most infamous villain of all time:"

Having supplied a modicum of action for the impatient reader, Englehart and Starlin then produce in their hero's mind a flashback far longer than any seen on the KUNG FU series. Through dialogue between the son and his sire, it's established that from childhood Shang-Chi has been trained in the martial arts to become a "living weapon." Fu Manchu asserts that he labors ceaselessly for the betterment of the world, and that Shang-Chi's first mission on his father's behalf will be to go to London and assassinate an evildoer named Doctor Petrie. Shang-Chi goes where his father bids him, and though he vacillates when he stands by the bed of an ailing old man, he does slay Petrie with a single blow. However, the unwilling assassin is caught leaving by a gun-wielding old man in a wheelchair: Fu Manchu's long-time adversary Denis Nayland Smith. Shang-Chi disarms Smith, but the older man-- who will in later stories become a new father-figure to the martial artist-- reveals to Shang the truth about Fu Manchu's villainous nature-- in imagery, I should note, that reflects all of the prejudices of the era when both Fu and Nayland Smith were conceived. 

Today it might be almost impossible for audiences to credence this association of the Chinese villain and "spiders, rats, reptiles, and other loathsome vermin," much less extend their sympathies to a character, even an older one, who spoke of his Asian enemy as a "yellow devil."  Nevertheless, Englehart and Starlin are more careful than Fu Manchu's creator sometimes was, to keep the villain from being a representative of the Chinese people. 

The flashback ends with Shang-Chi's tortured realization of his father's duplicity, so he returns to Fu Manchu's stronghold for answers. He battles the gigantic sumo Tak, who was his father's tool in putting Nayland Smith in a wheelchair, and defeats him. He finds proof of Nayland Smith's accusations in his father's laboratory, where he is attacked by a huge gorilla. This battle lasts only two pages, but is less consequential for its action than for what the reader is told via captions about the gorilla: that Fu Manchu endowed the beast with a brain "capable of elementary reasoning," and then tormented the beast so that it would become savage enough to attack anyone trespassing on the laboratory. Though Shang-Chi is not privy to the information in the captions, he's horrified to see that his father's cruelty has resulted in "demons like this [creature]."

After the death of the guard-gorilla, Fu Manchu appears before his son, attempting to cajole his offspring back to the fold. However, Fu only reveals his own monomania by boasting of "an invisible, world-wide empire opposed to all governments." Shang-Chi, a peaceful pluralist at heart, renounces his father as a madman and swears to dedicate his life to preventing his evil schemes.

The series was so successful, albeit briefly, that the title in which the feature premiered, SPECIAL MARVEL EDITION, was quickly revised to MASTER OF KUNG FU, and remained under that title for the duration of its run. However, neither co-creator remained with their creation long: Starlin left with MOKF #17, and Englehart departed with #19. Curiously, neither man had planned to use Fu Manchu in their concept: this addition came about because Marvel had already licensed the "devil-doctor" but had been unable to find a way to make him salable.  Editor Roy Thomas reputedly injected Fu Manchu into the mix, but though his main motivation may have been economic-- that of justifying the license-- the combination proved more felicitous than might have been expected. Though Fu Manchu was not as popular in the second half of the 20th century as he'd been in the first half, his presence in the MOKF book forced creators to continually play the old, negative image of the Asian against the newer, positive one for as long as Marvel retained the license to Sax Rohmer's character.

To be sure, although writer Doug Moench and his many artist-collaborators produced some good mythcomics with Shang-Chi, none of them succeeded in portraying the Asian villain with as much dimension as did Englehart and Starlin. It's conceivable that their lack of enthusiasm was rooted in the dominant political view that Fu Manchu was only a racist artifact and nothing more-- or worse, that the prevalence of the many stereotypical Asian villains in pop culture signified that the most archetypal Asian villain should not be used by conscientious persons. It's a view with which I do not concur, as I will address in a future essay.

PROGRESS AND PROCESS, PART 2

In Steve Englehart's COMICS JOURNAL interview, the writer speculates that the tightening editorial controls of mid-1970s Marvel may have arisen as a reaction to the company having been acquired by a conglomerate. This is impossible to prove, as much as my own related speculation that Stan Lee might have backed off on the concept of "progress" in Marvel Comics in reaction to "negative feedback" over the death of the Gwen Stacy character. (Fwiw, Blake Bell's Steve Ditko biography, STRANGE AND STRANGER, also contains one or two anecdotes about Stan Lee trying a little too hard to please all the fans all the time.)

For a reader like myself, who read most of the company's output in the 1970s, there's no question that some sort of transition took place. From roughly 1970-75, Marvel Comics became far more experimental in terms of form and theme than had any other "mainstream" comics-company, with the usual exception of EC Comics. Some of this development was surely a direct consequence of the company expanding its line and therefore needing cheap young talents to fill the books. Not all of the young professionals who debuted in this time period were moved to experimentation, but for roughly five years Marvel Comics took on an aura of heterogenous creative expression. However, the Marvel "house style" had never completely vanished even during the most experimental period, and the late 1970s were by comparison a period of greater homogenization, even though Marvel's editors did still find outlets for developing new talents like Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Englehart's complaint, that the editors' desire for "the illusion of progress" interfered too much with the creative process, is one with which most fans can sympathize. Yet, even putting aside the alleged personal ambitions of those who tightened the reins, perhaps some pullback was inevitable.

In my essay on Umberto Eco's errors re: his comparison of myth-heroes and serial heroes, I said:

myth-heroes bear a strong resemblance to modern serial-heroes in that between the span of their births and deaths each hero has access to an infinitely-expanding "middle portion" of his life, in which he's always pretty much the same, with no commonplace causality to get in the way.

And later:

Eco talks further of how a reader must lose "the notion of temporal progression" when faced with a "massive bombardment of events which are no longer tied together by any strand of logic." Unintentionally he has defined the true status of archaic myth-narrative quite as much as that of the serial-hero. Indeed, in the wake of Marvel's soap-operatic twist on the superhero, it's possible to say that the myth-hero may at times possess less "temporal progression" than the serial hero.

There are narrative benefits to be had from preserving certain aspects of a status quo. Modern serial characters do not undergo a "massive bombardment of events" with no logical (i.e., "progressive") logic because the audience has been lulled into compliance with some Marxist commodity fetish. Such characters continually expand the "middle portions" of their lives because it's pleasing to audiences that the characters should be as the audience is not: functionally immortal and thus able to stand far more than the mere "thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to."

Elsewhere in the Eco essay I asserted that myth-heroes possessed what I considered "dominant" characteristics rather than the "immutable" ones Eco assigned to them. Dominant characteristics are important to any characters who appear in continuing stories; such characteristics define what expectations the audience should have for the character.

Ironically, many years later the sort of organic progress that Englehart and others advocated mutated into the phenomenon of the "event." Most of the time these events placed serial comics-characters through what I termed "earth-shattering changes at the last minute,", only to largely restore the status quo in the end. Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS series was perhaps most emblematic of this idea, although admittedly the "black Spider-Man costume" subplot spawned in SW did actually become an ongoing concern within the assorted Spider-books. But possibly the most peculiar "event" was one that initially seemed designed to oust the hero of the SPIDER-MAN title out of his own book: the infamous Spider-Clone saga of the 1990s.

In the "Earth-Shattering" essay, I mounted a measured defense of these type of events by noting that they depend on calling forth what Lee Drummond called "the elemental level of crisis," particularly though not exclusively for continuing characters. In terms of my own taste, I prefer the organic approach to progress to the more artificially-promoted "event" mode. At their best (if there any good ones!) event-stories are quick vacations from the status quo, like DC's Silver Age imaginary stories. But anything that can be done can be done badly, and often "event" stories, such as the 1990s Clone Saga, descend into fatuity by undermining the very concepts that make the series workable, as with the notion (later discarded) that the Peter Parker with whom the fans had identified for years was actually a clone of himself. Perhaps this notion would have borne some fruit in a satire, but as past of an ongoing adventure-series the idea was a bit of boneheaded incoherence.

Which may suggest that there's something to be said for homogenous creativity as well as the more experimental form. More on that later.

PROGRESS AND PROCESS PART 1

My historical Spidey-sense was activated recently by a CBR post in which the OP asked who originated the phrase "the illusion of change." This phrase, as the OP remembered it, described an alleged statement by Stan Lee in the mid-1970s, to the effect that he didn't want real change at Marvel Comics any more, but only "the illusion of change." The OP was able to find the phrase in a 1983 interview by Alan Moore, but Moore didn't claim to have either originated the phrase or to have heard Stan Lee utter it.

I can't say precisely who was the absolute first to use the phrase either, but I am aware of the first place I saw it attested to in print: COMICS JOURNAL #63 (1981), in an interview with Steve Englehart, although the actual phrase he uses is somewhat different.

Englehart, who first came to work for Marvel in 1971, described a change in Marvel's editorial priorities "around '74," which led, in 1976, to at least three talents leaving Marvel at that time: himself, Jim Starlin, and Paul Gulacy. When Kim Thompson inquires as to what editorial restrictions were being promulgated,
Englehart said:

Well, just "don't be so bizarre. try not to progress so fast." There's that famous meeting that happened before the quitting time when Stan said, "I don't want progress; I want the illusion of progress now. We don't want people dying and coming out of the strips, we don't want new girlfriends, we want to try to keep it the same."

This, if it is an accurate recollection by Englehart, is ironic on two counts.

One, because Stan Lee had made Marvel's reputation on visible signs of progress within the structured expectations of the adventure-genre. Sean Collins' ORAL HISTORY OF MARVEL COMICS records this remark by Chris Claremont:

DC’s theory was that you cycled through an audience every three years. Stan’s revolutionary concept was, Why not just keep moving ahead?

And then, it's also ironic because by all accounts Stan Lee had killed off a fair number of characters themselves, and in 1974 had reaped considerable attention for the death of Gwen Stacy the year before. One may speculate that some of the bad fan-press Lee received for the Gwen character's death may have had some small influence upon this editorial reorientation.

What's interesting is that though Englehart's 1981 statement is the earliest I ever heard of these backroom dramatics, he obviously didn't think he was the first to bruit it about since he calls the incident "famous."

Granted, he was talking to Gary Groth, Kim Thompson and Ralph Macchio, who all had considerable familiarity with fannish lore at the time.

But had fandom as a whole really heard about the "illusion of progress" story before Englehart described it in 1981?

Inquiring minds, etc.

Philosophical extrapolations to come in Part 2.