ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

MYTHCOMICS: "SANTA'S LITTLE HELLION" (JINGLE BELLE #1-2, 1999)

I didn't find but one concrescent Christmas-myth this year. (Grant Morrison, the last two issues of your KLAUS project let me down.) For several years, I had been familiar with the comical character of Jingle Belle, impish daughter of Santa Claus, but I hadn't read her earliest appearances from Oni Press. The two-part story I feature here, whose second part sported the title I'm using for both, was only the second time Paul Dini's character had appeared in a story, though an artist named Lynne Naylor is credited on Wikipedia for having made early concept drawings. Stephen DeStefano penciled the first story as well as this second outing.

One interesting aspect of this tale is that it draws upon a motif I've identified once or twice before: the trope of Santa Claus being "the master of the frozen North."  In the backstory to the main heroine's birth, a frost-creature, the Blizzard Wizard, controls the North Pole and uses his icy foot-soldiers (made of rancid ice-cream) to enslave the Northern elves. When the elves' queen Mirabelle seeks to free her people, the evil Wizard threatens to imprison her.

Enter Kris Kringle, which here is another name Dini uses for Santa, and one I'll use here just for variety's sake. Kris has mastered many of the animals of the arctic or has at least made common cause with them against the Wizard's tyranny, and with their help he invades the frosty fiend's sanctuary and defeats him. The liberated elves swear fealty to Kris by vowing to help him make toys for children, while Queen Mirabelle marries the hulking old fellow.

A century or so later, the only offspring of Kris and Mirabelle has reached her teenaged years, and she's a daddy's girl in reverse, alternately seeking to impress him and to put him down. In the story's first part, Jingle (whose technical full name would be Jingle Kringle) makes a combat-toy to impress her sire, but she fills it with live ammunition-- suggesting at very least a lack of ability to think critically. Then, knowing that Kris is supposed to make an appearance at a department store, she reroutes him to a Hanukah celebration and tries to fill in for him-- though again, in a half-hearted, distracted-teenager manner. However, before she reaches her goal, the Blizzard Wizard makes his move. He creates an ice-storm to sidetrack Jingle, feeding her a line that the bad weather proves that Santa's weather-subduing snow-globe must be malfunctioning. The villain rather easily talks Jingle into bringing him the globe, and while she's on her little jaunt, he uses the device to initiate his re-conquest of the North Pole.

Dini doesn't mean for the reader to think that Jingle is dumb, even though she does dumb things. Rather, a flashback at the start of issue #2 establishes that as a small child (presumably only a few decades old) she has considerable ambivalence about sharing her father with thousands of other children, so she always remains similarly ambivalent about Kris Kringle's mission in life-- meaning that she screws things up because she secretly wants her father to devote all of his attention to her. Conversely, when Kris and Mirabelle discuss their wild child, they conclude that they were too indulgent with her when she was young, so that now, when they attempt to instill discipline in Jingle, she merely resents it and keeps yearning for the happy days when she alone was the center of her parents' world.

And that ends the psychological myth, which I imagine Dini will never alter because it's the source of his comical conflict. But after her father and mother are captured by the Wizard, Jingle gets the chance to emulate her father's feat of defeating the tyrant. This means enlisting the arctic animals as Kris did, although, since Jingle is not as powerful, she ends using more scatterbrained methods...               

 Like dueling with the mammoth king of the narwhals, and winning the duel only because she comes up with the improbable strategy of plugging up the creature's blowhole...

And sending an incompetent assistant to enlist the polar bears, only to gripe when the elf comes back with a bevy of lemmings-- which manage to save the day anyway (not unlike Jingle herself).

The Wizard is defeated, but not surprisingly, she's still in the doghouse for her carelessness. So her "imitatio Santa" fails, but it's questionable as to whether she really wanted to make herself over into her father's image. Indeed, in all the subsequent JINGLE BELLE stories I've read, she just keeps rebelling against Kris's authority in one way or another-- which seems to be the perfect way to keep drawing his attention away from all those other kids. I don't think Dini had any desire to "solve" Jingle's psychological problems, since she's not meant to mature any more than Dennis the Menace. But "Hellion" is one of the few times Dini brought her psychological quirks into line with a metaphysical myth about Santa of the North Pole.    

Since Santa Claus is a legendary figure who possesses charisma rather than stature, the attempt to "spin off" Jingle from his "cosmos" only constitutes a charisma-crossover. However, when a later story featured the bratty elf-girl meeting with the characters of BLUE MONDAY, that tale stands as a stature-crossover. 

MYTHCOMICS: KLAUS AND THE CRISIS IN XMASVILLE (2017)

With CRISIS IN XMASVILLE-- a title designed to evoke fan-memories of Grant Morrison's associations with various DC "crises"-- the author, in tandem with artist Dan Mora, begins fleshing out the details of the "Klaus-verse" he began in the 2015 original.

A prologue sets things up with the depiction of an unfortunate family that accidentally drives into Xmasville, a town where it's always Christmas. Their misfortune grows greater when they're all taken prisoner by these Growly Old Elves, who also display a penchant for goosestepping. 

Before Klaus begins his investigation of this townful of Bad Santas, the reader meets the hero's enemies, the Partridge Family-- or, more specifically, two partridges without a pear tree: young Milhous Q. Partridge and his unnamed grandpa. The latter villain encountered Klaus in combat a generation ago, when he and his father engaged in a "trademark dispute" between Klaus's interests and the company "Pola-Cola," which sought to gain "complete ownership of Christmas as a concept." That gambit failed, but now Grandpa is directing Milhous to help him in a new game: "supplying children for space weapons."

These lesser foes' new ally is an unnamed "evil counterpart" of Klaus himself. While the Partridges want to control the imagery of Christmas to sell products, the Monster, as Klaus calls him, kidnaps Earth-kids (like the ones seen in the prologue) in order to drain off the imaginations and transfer them to his alien customers. He appears to kill Klaus's wolf-friend Lilli and hurls Klaus to his death.

Fortunately, both Klaus and Lilli receive succor from folklore-legend Grandfather Frost and his grand-daughter Snowmaiden. The heroes go toe to toe with the monstrous reflection while both the Monster's alien allies and the Partridges escape to fight another day. The Monster turns into a wolf-man who's vanquished by Snowmaiden's silver spear.

The real challenge, though, is that Klaus and Snowmaiden are forced to enter the Monster's domain, and this underworld is a kissing cousin to that of "the Underverse" from Morrison's earlier effort BEING BIZARRO. But Klaus can get himself, Snowmaiden and the captive kids free because he's the giver of gifts-- the greater of which is a rekindled imagination. In a wrapup coda, we see one of the kids grown to young womanhood, visited by Immortal Klaus in the same year, 2017, as this graphic novel is published. Whether Morrison returned to the insidious corporate schemes of the Pola-Cola Partridges may be fuel for a future Yuletide fire-- and I'm hoping Morrison and Mora continue to come up with new myth-takes on their Warrior Santa.

NEAR MYTHS; KLAUS AND THE WITCH OF WINTER (2016)

The second KLAUS story, following the first less than a year later, thrusts the former 16th-century gift giver to the 21st century, where he seeks to free two abducted children from the evil Snow Qu-- er, the Witch of Winter.

It's a serviceable Xmas adventure, with an interesting take on another famed craftsman, the Gepetto of (public domain) PINOCCHIO.

The story's most mythic moment concerns Klaus reforming the Winter Witch into an avatar of Spring. I bet that other Santa wished he could do that in a Xmas tale I imagine Morrison never encountered: the 1942 SANTA CLAUS IN TROUBLE.

MYTHCOMICS: KLAUS (2015-16)

We all know that Santa Claus isn't real. We get to a point as children where we know he's not real. But then we grow up, and get to a point where we think, well, Santa Claus is real. We've known about him all our lives. Every year, we hear about this character. What is that character? What is that power we all understand? Every generation has their own version of it, but it's real. Santa Claus doesn't have to be physically real, because he's emotionally real.

 I'm fascinated by that idea. Even as a teenager, I remember sitting up and thinking, "I know Santa's not real, but it's Christmas eve, and I'm hearing bells in my head. Why am I hearing bells? I know Santa Claus isn't real." And then the understanding: Of course Santa Claus is real. He's a real idea. Like Superman, like Batman, he's an idea so powerful that we can't destroy him by rationality. That's magic.-- Grant Morrison, COMICS ALLIANCE interview.

I don't know Grant Morrison's exact criteria for considering Santa Claus to be a "real idea," since one can endlessly debate how much "reality" one can find in human emotions. Nevertheless, I think I can identify one connotation Morrison does not imply with his piquant phrase.

There's a long tradition of euhmerism in popular science fiction and fantasy, where some relatively ordinary person gets confounded with a god or legendary figure, which is supposed to "explain" the origin of the mythic entity. In the seven-part "origin story,"Morrison never actually says that his Nordic strongman is actually the only "Santa Klaus" in existence, so he's not invested in the euhemerism fallacy. Further, online references assert that later KLAUS stories introduce other versions of the Santa archetype that co-exist with the starring character. I tend to think that this extrapolation was Morrison's Christmas-themed version of "The Batmen of All Nations" concept that appeared throughout his BATMAN tenure. 

Klaus's origin unfolds in media res, starting with the titular character arriving, for the first time in many years, at the walled medieval city of Grimsvig, during the winter festival of Yuletime. (One online reference claims that the story takes place in the 16th century, but Morrison sedulously avoids references to the specific history, just as he avoids tying his hero to overt Christian themes.) He appears to be an ordinary trapper, coming to town to sell the skins of the beasts he caught. Klaus soon finds that the ruling powers of Grimsvig have turned to evil ways (though when one sees his backstory, the reader may wonder why he didn't expect something of this sort.) Not only do the city-guards confiscate his wares without recompense, they strike a child for playing with a stone, for the city-ruler Baron Magnus has forbidden toys. 

Klaus's outrage doesn't win him any friends. The guards, not content just to beat him down and toss him back onto the wilderness, decide that they're going to hunt the wild man, whom at least one guard deems to be some sort of werewolf. And possibly that one guard had an acute sense of smell, for when the hunters overtake their quarry, they're routed by Klaus's wolf friend Lilli. Klaus and Lilli take refuge at an isolated cabin. Klaus plays his flute to take his mind of the unfortunate children of Grimsvig, and he experiences a weird psychedelic trip, possibly brought on by his accidentally summoning a group of strange spirits. Under the influence of the spirits, Klaus carves a sackful of toys for the Grimsvig kids, without even being aware of so doing.

The first issue also introduces the sinister Baron Magnus, his wife Dagmar, and their child Jonas, though the only one given much character is the boy, who wants all the children in town to be deprived because nothing satisfies him. But while Jonas pouts and Dagmar suffers for knowing what a Scrooge she's married, Klaus returns to Grimsvig, penetrates its defenses and begins leaving toys for the local kids. After Baron Magnus takes some of the toys to his castle, Dagmar sees one and recognizes in it the craftsmanship of her former lover Klaus. In due time one learns that Klaus had been a city-guard in earlier years, but Magnus framed him for killing Dagmar's father, after which Klaus was abandoned to die in the snows while Dagmar married Magnus on the rebound.

Issue #3 expands on Magnus's cruelty, showing that he treats the adult men of the town no better than their children, relentlessly working them to death in the coal mines. Magnus's real purpose for the mining is to provide sacrifices to a subterranean demon. This entity is never named, but some references claim that he's a revised version of The Krampus, but one who wants to devour children rather than just punishing them. (The Krampus and Klaus represent opposite attitudes toward children, one believing that no children are innocent, while the other asserts that they all are.) There's one brief scene of a congregation at a Christian church, though the priest just pontificates about "salvation" and shows no will to oppose Magnus's cruel treatment of the people. During this time Klaus continues to make unsanctioned visits to Grimsvig, playing merry pranks, such as packing snow around a loutish guard named Olav so that he looks like a snowman. (Possibly a FROZEN in-joke?) Issue #4 fills in the backstory and somewhat reconciles Klaus and Dagmar, but Baron Magnus has a plan to trap "Santa" with a letter from his not-entirely-willing son Jonas.

Klaus tries to encourage the miners to rebel, but his kryptonite is children. He escapes Magnus's trap, but not without wounds. After one child betrays him, another succors him, taking him out of town to Klaus's hidden refuge. But this provides the "Santa" with only temporary respite, for Magnus and his men overtake Klaus once again. Like many a comics-villain, Magnus leaves the hero in dire straits rather than simply killing him, and so of course the hero escapes this peril as well. Magnus lures the children of Grimsvig for a feast, but only to fatten them up for the consumption of the Krampus. Thus the stage is set for a major battle between the good spirit of Yuletime and his diametrical opposite.

Though Magnus is damned for his efforts to control the spirits of his subjects, among other crimes, Jonas is allowed to reform despite his father's influence, reinforcing a theme of redemption that is, as I noted earlier, not specifically Christian. Though the majority of Dan Mora's panels emphasize the barbarism of medieval Scandinavia, he excels whenever Morrison's script calls on the artist to depict the wild, abstract shapes of the spirit domain, particularly in the above-cited psychedelic "trip." I may end up saving some of the later KLAUS outings as "presents" for myself in future Xmas posts.

NEAR-MYTHS: “SANTA IN WONDERLAND,” SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES #2 (1943)

 

This Santa-tale, which might have been crafted by the same creator(s) of “Santa Claus in Trouble,” isn’t nearly as strong in the mythic sense. But since I’ve been writing a lot about crossovers lately, I can’t resist the temptation to hold forth on the novel idea of having the folkloric figure of Santa interact with the literary creations of Lewis Carroll.

The reader may suspect that the old “all a dream” resolution is in the offing when Santa, about to go to bed before making his Xmas Eve ride, encounters young Alice, who wants him to bring Christmas to Wonderland. Good-hearted Santa can’t resist her appeal, and she leads him to the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. Since the author has a lot of Wonderland-tropes to condense into a very short tale, Alice gets the old fellow to try a few bites of a “magic mushroom” (minus its resident Caterpillar). The two of them spend a couple of pages changing size, until Santa finally gets into Wonderland (“At least this is easier than going down a chimney”). 

He soothes the weeping Mock Turtle with a toy of its own species, but the White Rabbit gives Santa attitude, so that the frustrated old elf calls him “mad as a March Hare” (more condensation). Later Santa duplicates Alice’s feat of growing too big for the house of the Duchess, and visits the Mad Tea Party, consisting of the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, and the Mad Hatter.

Santa tries to introduce the joys of Christmas tree-trimming to the partiers, but the Hatter screws things up with another size-change that takes them into “Mother Goose Land,” apparently for no reason except that the author remembered that the next Wonderland character Santa meets, Humpty Dumpty, did not originate with Lewis Carroll. “Mother Goose Land” or not, the Red Queen’s court is playing croquet in this territory, and she gets mad when Humpty spoils the game by falling upon her wickets. In the story’s best exchange, the Queen orders her card-soldiers to cut off Humpty’s head, and one guard responds, “He’s nothing but head!” The soldiers turn on Santa—Alice having absented herself from the last two pages—but he blows all the cards away just as book-Alice does, wakes up, and immediately rushes off to begin his world-wide ride.

It’s a pleasant confection of a story, whose main point seems to be exasperate Santa’s genial personality by exposing him to the terminal naughtiness of the Wonderland crew, none of whom express the least desire to learn about any aspect of Christmas, not even gift-gettting-and-giving.

MYTHCOMICS: “SANTA CLAUS IN TROUBLE” (SANTA CLAUS FUNNIES #1, 1942)

 

I had picked out my last mythcomic for the year of 2021 when something occurred to me: of all the 300 comics-stories I’ve analyzed, I don’t think any of them directly build upon either of the principal myths of this season, be it the birth of the Messiah or the folklore surrounding Santa Claus. I believe the closest I’ve come is the SON OF SATAN story “Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," though it’s only of incidental importance that the narrative takes place on Christmas Day. I didn’t expect that the comics medium would have turned out anything on the level of Dickens’ CHRISTMAS CAROL, or even A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (whose storyline was not derived from any PEANUTS continuity, though a few “quotes” from the strip are worked into the tale). Still, I thought that during the long history of comics, someone somewhere must have played with the complex symbolism of the Yule holiday.

Not surprisingly, the figure of Santa appears in commercial comics a lot more often than the Christian savior. But to be a myth in my reckoning, the story must have some epistemological content, and can’t just grind out all the expected Santa-tropes. As it happens, the story I selected touches on one of the less well-traveled of these tropes: “Santa as the Master of the Frozen North.” This was used to some good effect at the opening of the 1985 SANTA CLAUS, though it was pretty much the only good moment in the flick.

“Santa Claus in Trouble” doesn’t have an author attributed, but thanks to the story being posted on Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine, a reader identified the artist as George Kerr. I will assume for the convenience of my essay that Kerr was the sole author.

Though Kerr never claims that his Santa Claus actually rules the fantasy-land of the North Pole, there’s the suggestion of one-upmanship in the first panel of “Trouble,” in that Santa’s eventual antagonist, “Belinda the Ice Queen,” lives “just a little north of the North Pole,” as if to say that she’s a little “north-ier” than the jolly toymaker. The Ice Queen, who may be loosely based on the folk-figure of Jack Frost, is in charge of crafting all the “snow and ice” that contribute to a “white Christmas,” and her “faithful snow men” mass-produce all of these frosty phenomena—including “26-inch icicles”—in a manner that clearly bites the style of Santa’s workshop.

Santa stops by Queen Belinda’s castle to inquire about the Xmas weather, only to find that the enterprising snow men have begun making “ice toys.” This clearly bugs Santa, who wants Belinda to stay in her own lane. He’s less than diplomatic in claiming that “I thought making toys was my job.” Belinda defends her snow men’s creations against the toys made by “those silly little gnomes of yours,” but Santa astutely points out that if humans touched, or even breathed upon, these icy objects, they’d simply melt. Belinda turns Santa out of her castle, but Santa’s such a jolly old elf that he doesn’t even suspect that she’s going to counterattack.

While Santa goes to bed that Christmas Eve—making a side comment about the complications of delivering toys during “war time"-- Belinda’s snow men abscond with Santa’s sleigh and reindeer. Santa can’t track the thieves in the heavy snow, but he has a winsome weapon in his arsenal: magic snowshoes that allow him to bound above the snow-clouds in order to find his missing possessions. He still doesn’t suspect Belinda of the deed, and when he accidentally steps through a cloud and lands outside the ice queen’s castle, he naively enters her domain, seeking aid.

Belinda and her snow men broadcast their guilt so strongly that even good-hearted Santa figures out what’s going on—though it helps when he hears the jingling bells of his sleigh in the next room. Santa doesn’t exactly become violent, since that wouldn’t have fit with his saintly demeanor, though in taking off in his flying sleigh, he does demolish Belinda’s castle, remarking, “That will teach you to try to keep toys from boys and girls on Christmas Day.” Since we never see Belinda again, the young reader is left to assume that she is duly chastised and from then on will stick to doling out ice and snow. Thus, even if Santa isn’t the undisputed Master of the North Pole, you don’t mess with the jolly elf when it comes to making toys.