KEEPING VS. SHARING PT 3

 In my previous recent essays, I've been examining the way two ethical systems, the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing, have interpenetrated human history in the past and continue to do so. principally through their modern manifestations as "conservatism" and "liberalism." However, I added a couple of subdivisions to the mix. Keeping and Sharing can both manifest into extreme forms, both of which can be subsumed under "radicalism." The less extreme forms of both are best described as "meliorism"

Routine political discourse often distinguishes between radical and meliorist forms of liberalism. In the meliorist form, the ethic recommended to those that hold power can be summed up as "You Should Share" such things as rights and privileges with those that do not have (or do not think they have) said capacities. In the world of American civil rights, it's almost de rigeur to name Martin Luther King Jr as an exponent of persuading powerholders to cede power to the marginalized. In the radicalist form, the prevailing argument says, "You Must Share" and the best-known advocate from the same Civil Rights era, Malcolm X, favored the stick rather than the carrot.

Conservatism, though, displays the same two subdivisions. Liberals are usually only able to recognize the extreme form, so that everyone from the KKK to the guy running the Christian cake-shop are viewed as equals in tyranny. Naturally there are specific agents who want to Keep Power under all circumstances and cede nothing.  However, meliorist conservatives display the ethic that "You Should Share," albeit only under the right conditions. Franklin D. Roosevelt earned the reputation of a Liberal for measures like empowering the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Yet, the act of interning Japanese-Americans was fundamentally a conservative act, even if one takes the most charitable view of FDR's action.

And so I come to my first fictional example, that of the opposition between meliorism and radicalism seen in SPIDER-MAN #68-70 (dated January, February and March 1969). Yet to examine this scenario, a little grounding is necessary, since the conflict revolves around one of Spider-Man's support-cast, Joe Robertson. Though introduced in ASM #51, not until issue #55 does Stan Lee set up the newsman's role as a regular character, where he's a voice of reason as against the mule-headedness of publisher J. Jonah Jameson. He's also the epitome of a Liberal meliorist view: Joe Robertson ascends to his position of authority purely on the basis of merit. 

Jumping forward a year and some months, Joe's son Randy Robertson is briefly seen in ASM #67, but only in #68 do we see Randy's purpose: to show Stan Lee's negative view of radicalism. Thus, almost as soon as Peter Parker encounters Randy on the campus they both attend, up comes the shadow of Randy's friend Josh-- who, since he never has a last name, might as well be called Josh X.

Though Lee was often criticized for the piddly nature of the "campus protest" involved here, he shows considerable acumen in showing how militant Josh X is. There's no "hey, how they hangin,'" just, "are you joining the cause?" Lee obviously means readers to find Josh abrasive here and later, even though Peter Parker nominally approves of his cause. The campus protest will tie into Spider-Man's adventure with his frequent foe The Kingpin, but the cause is less important here than showing how Randy, the offspring of a meliorist parent, is being influenced by a radical who demands that the campus authorities "Must Share," while said authorities are taking the radical conservative posture, presumably currying favor with alumni to garner donations (though Lee does not say this).

Josh X is even less appealing in his second scene in the story. Though Randy is the first to invite Parker to help the students fight the good fight, Josh not only acts like Parker owes him allegiance, he addresses a near-stranger as "Whitey" as if he doesn't owe Parker the slightest courtesy. Stan Lee doesn't have Parker react to the racial slur, but rather to Josh's statement that the young militant doesn't think he has to listen to, or account for, the response of the authorities to the protesters' demands. On the next page, an unnamed Black protester casts aspersions on Randy for being "the son of an Uncle Tom," and Josh, for whatever reason, defends Randy as a "soul brother." But it's not hard to imagine Josh flinging the same insult if Randy failed to follow Josh's lead.

The battle between the spider and the gang-lord continues into ASM #69 and #70, but Stan Lee devotes just a handful of scenes to winding up his mini-debate about meliorism and radicalism. In the first of the two scenes above, Joe is aghast that a son of his was involved not just in protest, but in causing damage to personal property, which is something neither Randy nor Josh apologizes for. (In the next issue, Lee changes his mind and says no damage was caused by the protesters.) Randy, probably channeling whatever Sidney Poitier movies Stan had seen, complains that he has to be more "militant" because his meliorist father is part of "the White Man's establishment." Joe makes the more reasonable argument about proving oneself, though oddly, Josh gets the last word, claiming that "we" (meaning Black people) won't get anywhere unless they "kinda shake Whitey up a little." Given that Stan Lee was almost certainly a meliorist, it's fairly generous that he at least acknowledges the rationale of the radicalist in this issue. In #70 the voice of the "Must Keep" authority is at last heard, as the dean admits having failed to listen to the voices of his students, and that he was on their side but was busy fighting the real entrenched interests. the college's trustees. Josh admits the need to think about things a bit more, but no one's ever privy to his thoughts since I don't think he ever appears again.  

So in this late 1960s tale, some respect is accorded the "You Must Share" ethos even if the "You Should Share" is clearly the superior ethic. Yet what about one of the principal franchises of the era of identity politics?

The 2018 MCU film BLACK PANTHER presented audiences with a world where "You Must Share" is the only game in town. However, it's not a power structure based on the racial politics of America. Rather, Wakanda, an idealized African fantasyland, is called upon to pledge fealty to the radicalist ethos. In a loose way Wakanda is also governed by an Ethos of Keeping, though it's implied to be a world without the racial divisions found in the outside world, only a heritage of tribal quarrels that can be solved with rituals of combat. Wakanda keeps its miracle element vibranium out of the hands of the powerful and the powerless alike. However, their isolationism takes a major blow thanks to a poor relation of the realm's hereditary ruler, The Black Panther.   

Considering that T'Challa's uncle N'Jobu is critical to the end of Wakanda's isolationism, the character is barely more than a bare function of the plot. We are never told what radical influencer managed to persuade N'Jobu, brother of the reigning Wakandan king T'Chaka, to betray his country's policies and try to sell weapons to radicals in that hotbed of political activity, Oakland. Nor does the film tell us why T'Challa is so traumatized by the death of his traitorous uncle. N'Jobu's main purpose in the movie is to spawn Erik Killmonger, whom many critics described as the film's "real hero." Even though Killmonger takes over Wakanda with zero concern for its people and with the agenda of using their weapons for his network of blacktivist conspirators (also never defined), all that counts is forcing Wakanda to Share with the downtrodden, "By Any Means Necessary." Of course, Whitey is still the main villain even when no White person is directly involved in Killmonger's plans. Thus CIA agent Everett Ross is automatically a "colonizer" according to one of T'Challa's guardians. Yet none of the Wakandans uses that term for Killmonger, even though he's applying CIA tactics to ruin their country for his own agenda. Even though Killmonger dies, he succeeds in ending Wakanda's isolation. And the audience knows this must be a good thing because the nation starts donating money to American Blacks-- who I guess are supposed to be way worse off than all the impoverished tribes of real-world Africa.            

It's clear from BLACK PANTHER that without any sort of compensatory ethos, the radicalist ethos loses all control of whatever moral compass it might potentially possess. I would like to think that PANTHER's success at the box office was a short-lived anomaly, since most of the radicalist MCU movies since then have tanked. But as another famous Liberal-with-Conservative-tendencies observed, "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance."                 

   

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE GRIM HUNT" assorted Spider-Man comics (2010)

 

This post is more of a notation than a proper review. I only picked up GRIM HUNT from a local library because I noticed that, though its main plot concerned the return of Kraven the Hunter from the undiscovered country, a subplot dealt with an alliance between the prophetess Madame Web and at least two Spider-Women. None of the HUNT narrative bears any strong resemblance to the storyline of Sony Pictures' recent flop MADAME WEB. But since the subplot about the "Spider-Clan" precedes the action of HUNT, it's possible that either this arc, or another like it, gave the Sony scripters the idea that Marvel's "school for spiders" concept could be converted into a "girl power" movie.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Ironically, the subplot could have made a better film than the upscale Lifetime movie that Sony came out with. Every fan knows that Marvel Comics began to come out with assorted "spider-women" to protect and/or enhance the franchise created by Spider-Man. That's one reason I'm not giving HUNT a proper review: it's referencing all sorts of continuity-based developments that I'd have to research over many assorted SPIDER-MAN comics. In any case, as far as the origin-stories of characters like "Arana" and "the Julia Carpenter Spider-Woman" are concerned, the heroines' resemblance to Spider-Man is mere coincidence. Someone-- I might assume the dominant writer of HUNT, Joe Kelly-- elevated the coincidence to the level of a metaphysical possibility, that all of Marvel's Spider-people are bound within a "web" of influences. Madame Web asserts the existence of this intertwinement, while Peter Parker and the other Spider-people are more skeptical. This sort of metaphysical uncertainty might have been produced a better dramatic arc for a movie about spider-heroines, even one that was obliged to erase Spider-Man from the (literal) picture.                                                                                                                                                                                                      Then there's the main plotline about the rebirth of Kraven the Hunter. I was loosely aware that, following the demise of the villain in the 1987 continuity "Kraven's Last Hunt," other pretenders to his throne had popped up, at least one of whom was Kraven's son. By 2010, there's a whole family of Kravniofs, all of whom quarrel with one another over their patrimony but who are united in the quest to bring down their nemesis, "The Spyder"-- also sort of a symbolic representation of all the spider-people, I think. Joe Kelly's definitely a much better SPIDER-MAN writer than most of the people who followed in the wake of Stan Lee, but I can't really judge this HUNT without having seen more of the surrounding terrain.                                                                                                                                    

SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

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First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

CRISES AND CONTINGENCIES

 Though I don't follow any regular serials from "the Big Two," the TPB market makes it quite evident that both companies remain as heavily invested in "multi-feature crossovers" in 2024 as they were in 1986, when such rival serials as SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS duked it out for sales supremacy. In fact, because "multi-feature crossovers" is an unwieldy mouthful, I'm considering a new term,"clusterfubars." The whole purpose of most crisis-events since 1986 has been to fuck up the status quo beyond all recognition, even if the original status quo later reasserts itself or is replaced by some other manageable state of affairs.

I have not written a great deal about clusterfubars here, though the most involved essay is probably 2008's EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE. I argued that the commercial comics-medium's penchant for "earth shattering changes" was nothing new. In fact, though I didn't explore the topic in a more systematic manner, I quoted anthropologist Lee Drummond on the subject of crises in fiction, be they in myth or in popular fiction:

...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?

Before examining the applicability of "crises" to myth and fiction generally, though, I would be remiss not to define what would be the opposite of "crisis narratives" (especially after one of my recent essays  faulted Joseph Campbell for not providing counter-examples to a proposed term).

I duly looked up antonyms for the word "crisis," and was surprised to find "contingency" listed as a SYNONYM for the word. Every connotation in which I've heard the two words suggests the opposite. A crisis is some event that few if any participants can foresee or avoid. A contingency is some event with which forethought can cope, at least up to a point. The application of each term may also depend on a given subject's span of knowledge. For the majority of persons around the globe, the appearance of the Covid virus was a crisis. For Anthony Fauci, who coordinated the use of gain-of-function research with the Chinese lab in Wuhan, the virus' appearance would have been a contingency, something he could anticipate happening if things went south.

Drummond is broadly correct that a lot of fiction of all genres and mediums depends on "crisis narratives." The theatergoer who views OEDIPUS REX learns nothing about the day-to-day life of King Oedipus or his family. Everything in that play and its sequels is defined by an unforeseeable crisis. And comedies are no different from tragedies in a structural sense. The AMPHITRYON of Plautus centers upon the merry mix-up that ensues when the title character returns from the wars, and must be prevented from finding out that the supreme god Jupiter is schtupping Amphitryon's wife, at least until Jupiter successfully impregnates the woman with Hercules.

But what would be a "contingency narrative," which is to say, a narrative whose conflict does not hinge upon some larger-than-life crisis? There are some archaic examples of such narratives in theater and in folklore, but it's correct to stress that contingency narratives really took off with the rise of naturalistic literature, particularly in 18th century Europe. I deem Daniel Defoe's two best-known works, ROBINSON CRUSOE and MOLL FLANDERS, to be novels built around a constant flow of contingencies relating to what the main characters must do to survive and/or prosper.

And since I'm primarily concerned with the medium of comic books, where do contingency narratives appear in the history of comics? Even most of the celebrated comics-stories, as agreed-upon by elitist critics, depend largely on types of crisis, even when they may be predicated on such low-level "crises" as mistaken identity (which is a not infrequent "gotcha" in a lot of one-shot horror stories). Teen comedies like ARCHIE are probably the least "crisis-like," being usually predicated on simple formula situations that the thoughtless protagonist fails to foresee (Archie makes a date with two girls on the same night; they find out and beat him up or the like.) Most such stories are one-shots, too. Some continuing comic strips, such as GASOLINE ALLEY, presented an ensemble of characters having low-wattage adventures without any dire consequences. The first superhero to regularly exploit both narrative forms was the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, who would support himself and his ailing aunt with money (contingency) made from photographing his own heroic actions (crisis), quelling the rampages of Doctor Octopus or The Lizard.

At some point in the eighties, many superhero fans-- those that dominantly embraced the superhero genre above all other genres-- clamored for low-wattage incidents in the lives of the characters they liked. These pleas brought forth various "day in the life" contingency narratives. Arguably, in subsequent decades, this fannish preference increased the frequency of other stories in which slow-paced drama took the place of fast-paced adventure. However, the same decade, as noted above, also cemented the new business model of the clusterfubar. The Big Two sought to monetize crises by having them affect numerous features at the same time, on the theory that interested readers would purchase titles they didn't normally buy in order to keep apprised of all segments of the extended crisis narrative. I have no idea as to how well this practice works as an overall sales strategy, but it's been in place for about forty years, so someone must be making money from it.

Single features like the venerable SPIDER-MAN appear to be far more guided by crisis narratives overall, rather than by a balance of both narratives. Features with large character-ensembles-- X-MEN, TEEN TITANS-- are even more awash in constant fervid crisis narratives, so that what used to be called "soap opera" is more like "disaster opera." 

More observations on this theme to come later, possibly.

SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #31: YET ANOTHER SPIDER MAN

 This one's a villain from FEATURE COMICS #66, taking on the superhero team of the Spider Widow (no relation) and the Raven.

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.

 

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD PT. 2

(Note: in writing this sequel to my one essay on the topic of novelty and recognizability, I've decided to replace the latter term with the term "familiarity." Accordingly I've altered the tag to reflect the change, but not the text of the first essay. I will try to replace the unwanted term in any other essays written since the first one, though.)

My meditations on the linked concepts of novelty and familiarity, beginning here, lead me to correct one of my earlier statements: that all crossovers are interactions of two or more familiar icons, with or without subordinate icons of their respective "universes." 

One of my main examples from Part 1 contradicts this: Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE. Whether the individual reader experiences Scott's story in its original prose form or in some adaptation within some other medium, Ivanhoe and all the subordinate figures in his orbit (which, as I said earlier, may even include historical figures like Richard the Lion-Hearted) comprise their own universe. And since that universe never appeared anywhere before, and since Scott wrote no sequels, the novel is forever characterized by novelty. The only elements of IVANHOE that possess familiarity are those relating to the universe of Robin Hood, and thus IVANHOE is a crossover between one "novel" universe and one "familiar" universe. Further, as mentioned in the CONVOCATION series, this stand-alone novel became such a major literary event that its universe possesses a high level of stature of the Qualitative kind, which means that despite only appearing once Ivanhoe is the same exalted company as those icons more dependent on Quantitative Escalation, such as Batman and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Books of Pellucidar.

(Parenthetically I will note that other authors created serial versions of the Ivanhoe universe-- a 1958 TV show starring Roger Moore, and a 2000-2002 teleseries with lots of XENA-style action. But, while it's possible for adaptations to outstrip their source material in terms of stature, neither of these shows did so.)

So IVANHOE is a crossover meeting of two icons, one characterized by "eternal novelty" and the other by "eternal familiarity." It qualifies as a High-Stature Crossover because the two icon-universes interact in a significant way, even though the stature of one results only from Qualitative Escalation, while the stature of the other arises from both Qualitative and Quantitative forms.

The 1972 BLACULA provides a comparable example of the intersection of a novelty-icon and a familiarity-icon, but in a mode of lower stature. Though Robin Hood and his Merry Men are subordinate icons within the story of Ivanhoe, they are important to the narrative, which affects the stature of the crossover. Dracula, despite having a Qualitative Stature as great as that of Robin Hood, exists in the 1972 film only to spawn Blacula and to bestow on him a familiar if somewhat risible cognomen. From that point on, Blacula is only slightly dependent on the mythos of Dracula, for the whole project of the film is to re-interpret that mythos in keeping with seventies cultural concepts, such as "Black Pride." Blacula, unlike Ivanhoe, has one more installment in his universe, but two entries in a series do not confer much Quantitative Escalation. Blacula has a certain degree of Qualitative Escalation, but not enough to raise the level of this crossover above a low position. 

Proto-crossovers within a serial context offer a slightly different view of novelty, in that the novelty of a newly introduced character can suggest an aura of "future familiarity." AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #14 is from the get-go a hero-crossover for the presence of starring hero Spider-Man and his admittedly fractious "guest star" The Hulk. But I've also argued that it's a villain-crossover between The Enforcers, who were familiar from one previous appearance in the title, and The Green Goblin, who made his debut here. Yet though the Goblin can only possess formal "novelty" at this point in his career, it's clear from the narrative that the authors intended for him to become a regular opponent of the hero. But The Goblin only possesses a "future familiarity" because later readers know how significant he proved to be within the Spider-mythos.

But authorial intent only counts when the intent is made manifest. A 1942 Batman story introduced a new Bat-foe, a thief named Mister Baffle (clearly modeled on the prose character Raffles). The story ended with the villain's escape and the suggestion that he might come again, though he never did, so the suggestion of his re-appearance counts for nothing in the Escalation game. In contrast, the villain Deadshot, appearing just once in 1950, was also characterized only by pure novelty. But thanks to his mid-70s reworking, he became not only a regular Bat-foe but one who was involved in a "static crossover" series, THE SUICIDE SQUAD-- though almost all of the characters had been, like Deadshot, subordinate icons within the universes of various heroes.

PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS

 In ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), published on 7-27-22 I made the following inexact statement: 

Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

I added a note to the blogpost to the effect that I would trash this opinion in another essay, and this is it.

The problem with my previous formulation is related to my ongoing theory of personas, given its final form in 2012's DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1. I feel as if I've implied, though never stated outright, this necessary rule:

"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."

An example: 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.

 

To return to the Spider-Man cosmos once more, Fred Foswell may have started out as a super-villain, but he spends the majority of his career as a demihero in the Lee-Ditko stories, wherein he's reformed and become a crusading reporter, generally being of aid to Spider-Man or the police but only with the limited actions of a demihero. Lee and Romita change him back to a villain who conspires with the Kingpin, probably because neither creator cared anything about Foswell and simply wanted to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Foswell's gratitude toward J. Jonah Jameson causes him to betray the Kingpin to save Jameson, which means that his brief conversion back to villainy was less than consequential in summing up his character arc. So Foswell dies, according to my system, a demihero.

So by my newly stated rule, Foswell might in theory interact with another demihero in the SPIDER-MAN cosmos, and that might be a charisma-crossover. Nevertheless, such a crossover would have to have something unusual about it, rather than just Fred Foswell bumping into Betty Brant or Jonah Jameson in the news room. For that matter, Foswell bumping into any of Peter Parker's college-chums-- which I don't believe ever happened-- would also prove inadequate to sustain any charisma. Now, if Stan Lee had written a bizarre story in which Fred Foswell was revealed to be the real father of Flash Thompson, then THAT might be a charisma-crossover, but even then it would be largely because the two characters had spent a long time in the Spider-cosmos acting independently of one another. 

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. But if the two of them joined forces to accomplish some mission, as the characters did in an episode of "Gotham," I would consider that a charisma-crossover. This principle builds on what I said here about viewing the meeting of two URUSEI YATSURA support-types as a charisma-crossover, because they immediately challenge one another.

Now crossovers of demiheroes from different universes are a different matter, since those are dynamic by definition. On my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS I devoted a post to a multi-demihero crossover, a TV-cartoon entitled POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER. Although the humorous hero Popeye is the star of the show, he's conned into bringing together a few dozen characters from funny comic strips, all under the aegis of King Features Syndicate, and including both famous types like Blondie and Dagwood and near-forgotten types like Snuffy Smith. Some "serious" heroes are mixed in as well, but almost all of the crossover-characters are of the demiheroic persona.

Similarly, there's no problem crossing over demiheroes with other persona who originate in separate conceptual universes. When DC Comics finally brought back their late sixties character Brother Power, who belongs to the "monster" persona, they did so in 1989's SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5. But the Brother didn't cross paths with the monster-protagonist of the feature, but with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters, Abby Arcane and Chester Williams. A crossover with Swamp Thing would have been a stature-crossover, but Brother Power meeting Swamp Thing's friends only works on the level of cosmic charisma.

 

ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA)

 I confess that my fascination with categorization sometimes gets the better of me. This is in no way a rejection of my critical methodology, nor an endorsement of the lack of critical thought in most comics-critics of my experience. But any practice can go in the wrong direction occasionally.

For instance, I'm mostly rejecting the theories I promoted in May of this year, in the essay NULL VS. NASCENT STATURE/CHARISMA. The biggest problem with this essay is that I now think I was trying too hard to "back-door" the concept of crossovers between characters possessed of either Prime stature or Sub charisma. 

In this, I believe I accepted, without adequate consideration, the tendency to lump together crossovers and spinoffs. This site, Poobala's Crossovers and Spin-Offs Master List, is one such exemplar of this tendency. However, in the NULL VS. NASCENT essay I think I went too far in eliding the biggest difference between the two forms.

--a CROSSOVER depends on the association of two or more characters (or other focal entities) from established properties. The prospective reader may be familiar with all of the crossover figures, only one, or none at all, but the appeal is to pull in the reader who wants to see the association of established characters.

--a SPINOFF depends on the association of one or more completely new characters (or focal entities) who "tailgate" on the back of one or more established characters/entities. The usual intent is to create a new franchise, usually one in serial form, that then stands for the most part independent of the established franchise. At best, then, a SPINOFF is a DEMI-CROSSOVER, using "demi" less in the exactly proportional sense of "half" than with the equally valid connotation of "lesser."

Another way of framing the difference is to state that the FULL STATURE CROSSOVER is oriented on THE PAST in the sense that, even if one franchise is newer than the other, the producer has already launched both franchises and is trying to increase the appeal of both. With the DEMI STATURE CROSSOVER, the producer's orientation is on THE FUTURE of a brand-new franchise, given greater fame thanks to its association with the established franchise. 

Obviously either strategy can be a success or a failure for whatever reasons. DC's Metamorpho had already begun his 1960s series when he was given a Full Crossover over in the Justice League, but the association didn't do anything for the relatively short run of the Element Man's first series. In contrast, Marvel's Daredevil, who was never a major seller in the same Silver Age decade as that of Metamorpho, was probably boosted to some degree by his Full Crossovers in more popular serials like SPIDER-MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR.

As for demi-crossovers, my frequently cited example of the  teleseries MAUDE would be one that successfully capitalized on its two-episode association with ALL IN THE FAMILY, and continued its independent success without (to my recollection) ever mentioning the FAMILY connection again. The most unsuccessful form of demi-crossovers are those in which the new franchise never gets launched at all, with the result that the unsuccessful franchise-characters just became Subs within the cosmos of the established franchise. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN had two back-door pilots, entitled "Enemies" and "Radio Free Tremaine," which went nowhere, and a third, "Top of the Heap," which did air for six episodes before cancellation. (The show was retooled under another name, but that only lasted seven episodes before it too bit the dust.)

Having made this distinction for stature-type crossovers, I'll try to keep things with regard to charisma-crossovers and demi-crossovers.

FULL CHARISMA-CROSSOVERS are also rooted in THE PAST. The reader of Batman comics is principally concerned with Batman, or with Batman and Robin, but a constant reader will be familiar that certain villains get more fame than others. Thus, when a story depicts the meeting of two Bat-villains, Joker and Penguin, the appeal to the reader rests in past associations of the two criminals.

DEMI CHARISMA-CROSSOVERS attempt to boost a new Sub villain for THE FUTURE by association with an established one, as I described in the scenario of SPIDER-MAN #14:

In SPIDER-MAN #14, the "repeat offenders" are The Enforcers, though they had made but one previous appearance. The Green Goblin was the "first timer," and though his creators patently intended for him to be a repeat villain, his first appearance can only be seen as having "nascent c-charisma" from the perspective of knowing that the Goblin made further appearances. But from the current historical perspective, most comics-fans know that the character became far more iconic as a Spider-villain than the Enforcers ever could have been, and so SPIDER-MAN #14 also can be deemed a charisma-crossover. 

 

I made some convoluted attempts to view the Goblin as having regular crossover-potential based on a "historical" view, but now I consider this (and all the null/nascent terminology) unnecessary. It's enough to say that the Goblin was being "spun off" via his association with The Enforcers, even though Lee and Ditko ended up using the Goblin far more than they did The Enforcers. After the Goblin became an established figure, he did have a demi-crossover with a new villain, the Crime-Master, who only appeared in one two-part story and then died. 

Though I've addressed heroes and villains for the most part so far, and will probably continue to do so, I will note one case in which a one-shot villain from the SPIDER-MAN series went on to greater fame as a demihero support-cast member. Fred Foswell started out in SPIDER-MAN #10 as a minor employee of Jonah Jameson, but in that same issue he was revealed to be the criminal mastermind The Big Man, also the boss to his flunkies The Enforcers. Foswell never again appeared as the Big Man, but Lee and Ditko teased readers by having Foswell return to work at Jameson's paper. When the newspaperman began taking up a secret identity as an underworld informant, "Patch," there was the possibility that he might again take up the super-villain game. Instead, some time after Ditko left and Romita became the resident artist, Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

ADDENDUM 8-27: I'm contradicting the above statement for reasons I'll enlarge upon elsewhere, but I'm now of the opinion that demihero support-characters don't forge any sort of crossovers with any other persona-type.

NULL-MYTHS: SPIDER-MAN * THE HULK AT THE WINTER OLYMPICS (1980)

 Since I just reviewed CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS, I took a quick first-time look at the Marvel Treasury Edition that preceded it, #25, in which Spider-Man and the Hulk found themselves brought into a conflict centered around the Winter Olympics. 

It's an even more average story than CONTEST, with the same story-concept stemming from Steven Grant, Mark Gruenwald and Bill Mantlo, with Mantlo scripting dialogue and the always dependable Herb Trimpe supplying pencils. The two heroes are largely pawns in a war between two underground-dwelling villains, Queen Kala and the Mole Man, and the story, unlike a lot of the Treasury stories, is firmly in mainstream continuity, following up a story featuring both villains in the pages of the FANTASTIC FOUR. For good measure Mantlo also thrown in another Lee-Kirby creation, the subterranean Lava Men, as well as three real-life Olympic champions turned into super-powered combatants and a handful of mutant characters whom I don't think ever appeared again. So the crossover of Marvel's major down-under characters is the main feature of interest here.

DITKO AND FIGHTIN' FOOLS

I wrote this in response to a CHFB poster who wondered why Ditko had expressed (in a conversation) a dislike of seeing heroes fight amongst themselves, and why he liked Ayn Rand, whose "characters only cared about themselves."

_______________

I've only read a handful of Rand works, but IMO it's not correct to say that the characters only care about themselves. They care about high ideals based in rational choices, and such rationality is conveyed even through the medium of aesthetic accomplishments, such as Howard Roark and his architectural designs. I think Ditko believed that he conveyed such rational ideals through his art as well. 

I don't think Ditko was ever that crazy about the concept of heroes fighting each other. He drew things like Spidey/Human Torch battles because Stan Lee was the editor and Stan, at that time, emphasized heroic crossovers, often with fights brought on by big misunderstandings. I don't think you'll find any such hero-fights in SPIDER-MAN when Ditko began to be credited with plotting. After Ditko left Marvel for Charlton, he created the Question and a new version of the Blue Beetle, but though the characters appear together in mufti in BLUE BEETLE #5, they never team up in costume. In the Question story for MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, an anonymous character gushes about how great it is to see "heroes with feet of clay," but Ditko frames this enthusiasm so as to make the opinion seem foolish.

Given that Ditko's history shows him to be uncompromising in his ideals-- at least, as much as he could possibly be in mainstream comics-- I would bet that at the very least he resented having to be a tool of the company, being required to hype other characters that he had nothing to do with. (Think of SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1, where he pretty much had to work in almost all the 20th-century Marvel characters into his story.)  Kirby, who co-created so much more of the Marvel Universe, had no problem with working in characters he didn't create, though fan-critics have opined that he never really got the Spider-Man design right. There's no way to be sure whether Lee or Kirby first came up with "quarreling heroes." Either one of them could've been inspired by the example of DOC SAVAGE, as well as remembering the fan-excitement that accompanied the battles of the Golden Age Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. But Ditko just didn't dig that sort of thing.

I am pretty surprised that he would even comment on the Avengers fighting amongst themselves. I have a dim memory that he did a few make-work AVENGERS issues, so maybe even at that late date he was rather discouraged to see that Stan Lee's meet-and-fight trope was still regnant. 

As for Hawk and Dove, Ditko could've used the same excuse he used once for Spider-Man's faux pas: that they were too immature to know better.The Atlas character you remember, the Destructor, starts out as a punk but quickly gets religion and becomes a stand-up guy.

MYTHCOMICS: 'SPIDEY SAVES THE DAY!" (SPIDER-MAN #40, 1966)

“I had a big argument with Steve Ditko, who was drawing the strip at the time. When we had to reveal the identity of the Green Goblin, I wanted him to turn out to be the father of Harry Osborn, and Steve didn’t like that idea,” Lee explained. “He said, ‘no, I don’t think he should be anybody we’ve seen before.’ I said ‘Why?’ He said ‘Well, in real life, the bad guy doesn’t always turn out to be someone you’ve known.’ And I said, ‘Steve, people have been reading this book for months, for years, waiting to see who the Green Goblin really is. If we make him somebody that they’ve never seen before, I think they’ll be disappointed — but if he turns out to be Harry’s father, I think that’s an unusual dramatic twist that we can play with in future stories.’ And Steve said ‘Yeah, well, that’s not the way it would be in real life.’ And I said ‘In real life, there’s nobody called The Green Goblin.’ And so Steve was never happy about that, but since I was the editor, we did it my way.”

According to this essay, Ditko later claimed that the argument about the Goblin happened, but that it merely served as a "straw that broke the camel's back." It appears, then, that when Ditko worked on his next-to-last issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, all of the setup elements in #37-- in which Norman Osborn assaults Spider-Man and seems implicated in the attempted murder of Professor Stromm-- were completed "under protest." Ditko then walked away from Marvel with SPIDER-MAN #38, obliging Lee to coinplete the remainder of the Green Goblin story in #39 and #40 with the artistic aid of John Romita.

It's interesting that in this much later expatiation about the Green Goblin story, Lee emphasizes "an unusual dramatic twist that we can play with in future stories." In 1966, though Lee couldn't have known back then how long the Spider-Man franchise would last, he must have guessed that the concept had more than a few good years in it. However, there's no indication in the previous Lee-Ditko stories that either creator had much of an idea about what I'd call "the myth of the Green Goblin." He was, in all of his appearances, simply a masked mystery villain who haunted the hero's tracks. Lee and Ditko occasionally exploited the mystery of the Goblin's identity very briefly, but there was no real sense as to why he was more of a menace than, say, Mysterio. Even the story in #39-- the punnily-titled "How Green Was My Goblin"-- is little more than set-up.

However, "Spidey" in #40 shows Lee going from zero to sixty. For all the blather from fans who want to believe that Lee's artists created the whole show, it's patently absurd to think that John Romita--who had just assumed the job, and who subsequently claimed that he assumed Ditko would eventually return to the feature-- was the primary creative force here. Lee understood that continuing readers wanted a payoff, and thus he almost certainly reverted back to the much-lauded moment in SPIDER-MAN #10, where Jonah Jameson reveals his jealousy of the featured hero in a self-examining soliloquy.

The bulk of the story falls into two main sections. It begins with an unmasked Spidey chained and captive in the Goblin's lab, and trying to get the villain-- who has just revealed his identity-- to keep talking until Spidey can break free. The Goblin does indeed keep talking, revealing his origin as he does so, and then he sets the hero free for a culminating fight. The hero wins, but with the knowledge that even if the villain goes to jail, he'll reveal Spidey's identity. Fortunately for the hero, Norman loses his memory of ever having been the Goblin. For a time, his threat was ended, though every time the character re-appeared, Lee teased the reader with the possibility that the Goblin might still return, as indeed he did, though not for several years.

It's the origin, though, that gives the story the mythic resonance earlier Goblin stories did not have. In essence, it's a Jekyll and Hyde story, but one in which the villain is changed by accident, a la the Hulk. But unlike the majority of latter-day Jekylls, Norman happens to be a father, whose son Harry is one of Peter Parker's friends.

While Norman tells Peter the story of his origins, he ends up revealing that his idea of being a father is tied up in conspicuous consumption:

Note that in the second panel, Norman considers his excellence as a parent dependent on what other people would think:"I wanted everyone to see what a great father [Harry] had." Lee's main purpose in making Norman a ruthless businessman was to show how he had lost his way: that he'd become obsessed with making money, deluding himself that he was doing it for Harry. Thus he's a Jekyll who's already given in to his dark side before he ever comes across the "Hyde formula"-- which he examines for no reason but to see if it can make him more money. Significantly, the formula was created by Professor Stromm, the man Norman sent to jail, so in a sense Norman's transformation into the Goblin might be seen as Stromm's revenge.

I would imagine that the main reason that Lee has the formula turn green before it explodes in Norman's face was to give a reason as to why he later chose to become a green-hued super-villain.

Still, it's interesting that, though Lee doesn't make the connection, one of the main associations of the color is that of-- money. One thing neither Lee nor his collaborators even comment on, even subconsciously, is the question as to why a tough-minded businessman would chosen a Halloween motif for his super-villain costume. I realize that originally Lee and Ditko merely wanted a mystery villain with no particular motive for riding a mechanical broomstick and tossing explosive pumpkins. Yet, since a goblin is one of many impish creatures who were designed to be caricatures of human beings, Norman's decision to become a murderous man-witch makes a certain amount of sense.