CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

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The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won. 

THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life, but in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention this just to spotlight one of many aspects of commercial comics that changed once they were directed not at children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

NEAR-MYTHS: "VALHALLA CAN WAIT" (DEFENDERS #66-68, 1978)

 

An online review of DEFENDERS #66 reminded me that it's been a very long time since I first surveyed the early iterations of Marvel Comics' first female powerhouse, The Valkyrie. 

When I began THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE in December 2007, I didn't do many reviews. The first two I later included in my list of mythcomics when I finally committed to that ongoing project, LINUS THE RAIN KING and TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE. Following that, I devoted a series of posts to the evolution of Marvel's Valkyrie, and, somewhat tangentially, her alleged "creator" The Enchantress. Those posts were:

DAUGHTER OF LOVE AND DEATH-- devoted to the first appearance of the Enchantress and her paramour the Executioner, this analysis also counted as a mythcomic.

FEMALE TROUBLE-- This was about the AVENGERS story in which Valkyrie was supposedly "created" by Enchantress. Not a mythcomic.

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY-- This talked about the provenance of the two mortal women who became the vessels of the Valkyrie's spirit, Barbara Norris and Samantha Parrington. By my current criteria, none of the Barbara stories are mythcomics, but the HULK story with Samantha, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?," does count as such.

KNIGHT MOVES-- And here I discoursed again on both the Enchantress and her involved history with the Black Knight character, and then concludes at last with the events of DEFENDERS #4, in which the persona and power of the Valkyrie was imposed upon the mortal body of Barbara Norris. No mythcomics here.

I noted in the last essay that Valkyrie became "the glue" that held the Defenders group together from then on, for she was a tabula rasa who was not grounded in being anything but a "Scandinavian superhero." I expressed some intention to examine her "gender-kinship with other women," but I never did, and I think it's because this aspect of her character never signified anything but a particular form of "valkyrie-kryptonite." And, having recounted all of my analyses of Early Valkyrie, I can at least comment on the significance of DEFENDERS #66--

--which, perhaps fortunately for me, isn't all that much. The three-part story whose third part has the sporty title "Valhalla Can Wait" receives the cover-copy, "At Last! Valkyrie Enters Asgard!" I'll take the Marvel raconteurs at their word. When I read the story back in the day, I certainly had the impression that this was the first time she'd been in Thor-country. I believe it's also the first time any writer suggested that Valkyrie had an Asgardian body to match the Asgardian spirit that Enchantress had manipulated. However, David Kraft's script for "Valhalla" is extremely rushed. Kraft tells us that somehow the villain Ollerus not only gets hold of Valkyrie's comatose Asgardian form, he manages to transfer the spirit of Barbara-- which has apparently been slumbering in the body controlled by the Valkyrie-persona-- and put Barbara in Val's ACTUAL form.

This could have been a fun bit of body-switching, both in terms of drama, comedy, or both, but Kraft rushes past this potential. He doesn't even do a good job of establishing that Barbara is still something of a madwoman due to her experiences with the Nameless One. Instead, Ollerus focuses on using his phony Val to persuade the Defenders to fight Ollerus' rival Hela for possession of the Asgardian death-realm. 

Ollerus is of course defeated, and the whole "lords-dueling-over-the-death-realm" thing never acquires any mythic significance. If there is a myth here, it might be a myth of exorcism. By story's end Kraft tells us (though we do not see it) that Valkyrie's immortal body with its mortal spirit will join her master in the crappy afterlife of Niffelheim, while Valkyrie will return to Earth with her immortal spirit in Barbara's transformed mortal body. 

And there I believe Kraft leaves things for the remainder of his tenure. Eventually another writer tackles the already complicated Valkyrie-Enchantress narrative and makes it even more complicated, and if time permits I suppose I may eventually delve into this story-line as well. So "Valhalla," despite being very confusing on many points, still earns some status as a near-myth that started a major retcon of the Valkyrie character.

I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON

Icon: in semiotics, a sign characterized by iconicity, the resemblance to what it signifies

Since the early days of this blog I've flirted with many terms for the various presences inhabiting fictional world-scapes. I've called them  focal and non-focal, centric and eccentric, coes and subs, and finally, superordinate and subordinate presences. But I've stuck with the term "presences" since I first started writing about such things, because the term was the best one I could find for all the various fictional figures that can influence the outcome of a narrative: not just human beings but also flora, fauna, environments, imaginary beings both sentient and non-sentient, artifacts created by humans or by similar entities, or even discarnate forces like "The Crazy Ray" of Rene Clair's 1924 film.

But now, before I write the next section of COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I have to specify a better term than "presences," because "presences" is not good enough to imply the matrix of motives that will cause one authorial will to emulate the products of another authorial will. What I formerly called "presences" I will now call "icons."

Though my above quote from Wikipedia uses the term "icon" as it appears in modern semiotics, I'm not invoking that discipline in any way. I would imagine that when some semiotician decided to import the term into his system, he was roughly thinking about how religious icons were supposed to represent either religious figures or aspects of religious belief, as opposed, say, to figures whose resemblance to what they represented was more abstract.

For the purpose of my discussion of interordination, an icon is any kind of strongly definable entity in a given narrative. Icons are either superordinate, meaning that the action of the narrative centers upon the nature of the subordinate icon, or subordinate, meaning that these icons exist to support and explicate the mythology of the superordinate icon. The superordinate icon is the icon-type which later authors most often seek to copy from earlier authors, whether those earlier authors established an earlier icon as part of a legal franchise or as a figure in informal folklore. When a later author emulates the subordinate icon produced by an earlier author, it's usually because said icon generated some level of special popularity -- the Joker, the Wicked Witch of the West. 

Now, popularity is not strictly necessary. It's possible for even the most minor figures to be adapted for whatever purpose the derivative author wishes to accomplish. For instance, in all likelihood no play-goer watching HAMLET ever gave much thought to the extremely minor characters of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. However, in 1966 Tom Stoppard made these toss-off icons into the stars of his absurdist play ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, and within that play, these formerly nugatory characters become the stars of the show.

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named. For instance, the giant molluscs in the 1957 film THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD have no name as such. In Jeff Rovin's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MONSTERS, he chose to denote the creatures by the action described in the title, even though the title was inaccurate in suggesting the presence of only one monster, so a better description for that assemblage of mutants would be one based on their species and inordinate size: "The Giant Molluscs" or the like. However, icons that really do very little beyond stereotypical actions don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan." 

In a practical sense, even an unnamed icon must have some special identity on which a critic can hang some distinction. In INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962), Lee and Kirby devoted one panel to an anonymous soldier who gives a name to the big green monster who shows up on the soldier's base. Many years later, because the nameless soldier had that distinction, writer Peter David constructed a short, stand-alone story about "the man who named the Hulk" for one of the HULK annuals-- which one, I'm not sure at the moment. In my 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER, I defined the focal presence of the EC story "The Destruction of the Earth" (WEIRD SCIENCE #14) as the Earth itself, since the story spends most of its time showing how the planet will be annihilated, while in contrast all of the human characters in the story remain bare stereotypes. So if I were making a designation of the story's focal icon, I would concoct a distinctive name for that version of the planet, such as "The Destroyed Earth."

In my next essay it will become evident as to why a more felicitous term was necessary, when I start expounding on the concept of emulation.

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.

R.I.P. MARIE SEVERIN AND GARY FRIEDRICH

Synchronicity strikes thrice. On August 30 of this year, two comics professionals, best known for  their Silver and Bronze Age works, passed away. Both had endured lingering health problems (a stroke for Marie Severin, Parkinson's for Gary Friedrich).

An additional odd "meaningful coincidence:" Severin and Friedrich had briefly collaborated, principally (if not exclusively) on Marvel's INCREDIBLE HULK feature right around the time that it shifted from the "split-book" TALES TO ASTONISH to its own title, which has continued in one form or another since then.

A third coincidence meaningful only to me: just yesterday, an anonymous commenter on my blog called my attention to an error in this essay, wherein I'd written about a run of SUB-MARINER comics (#9-13, not long after Subby departed the title he'd formerly shared with the Green Goliath). The commenter pointed out that I'd credited John Buscema with the pencil-art on that sequence of stories, when said art was actually produced for two issues by Gene Colan and three by-- Marie Severin.

And finally, though it's in no way a coincidence, my personal acquaintance with the Hulk in his own feature started with that period in which Severin and Friedrich briefly collaborated.

Technically, the last issue of TALES TO ASTONISH, before it was re-titled THE INCREDIBLE HULK, was a collaboration by Severin-- who had already done assorted earlier stories-- and Stan Lee. TALES TO ASTONISH #101 was the first part of a two-part story, and the first part was scribed by Stan Lee, who hurled the bellicose behemoth into the fantasy-otherworld of Thor's Asgard.

So this was my first exposure to the Hulk in his own series, beginning with a killer scene wherein the monster-hero thrashes Heimdall, guardian of Asgard's Rainbow Bridge.

Gary Friedrich picked up scripting-duties for the second part of the mini-epic, which, among other things, involved Bruce Banner being saved from death by two of Marvel's dastardly demigods, the Enchantress and the Executioner.

The Enchantress actually strikes the Hulk dead in this issue, but Odin conveniently brings the monster back to life and sends him home. The sorceress meets the Hulk in numerous stories later on, but she never seems to remember that handy instant-death spell. But I digress.

In HULK #104, Friedrich and Severin collaborated on a kickass battle between Old Jade-Jaws and Spider-Man's foe, the Rhino. The story ends with the villain's apparent death, which I found very impressive at the time. Naturally, the Rhino got better as soon as some writer needed him.

Finally, Severin bid farewell to the feature. at least for several years, in TALES TO ASTONISH #107-108.  This two-part tale pitted Old Greenskin against Iron Man's villain, the Mandarin. Friedrich again wrote, though Severin contributed only layouts for a penciller who would soon become dominantly associated with the Hulk: Herb Trimpe. Here's a panel in which the monster saves Nick Fury from the villain, not so much out of a desire to benefit Fury as to thwart Mandarin.

Today I can't say the Friedrich-Severin HULK stories are any sort of pinnacle in the history of the character. Still, even aside from these issues being my quasi-introduction to the character, I still think they're better-than-average formula entertainment. I'm not even claiming they're the only times the two professionals crossed paths, but these stories were probably the most meaningful to me.

ASSORTED NEAR MYTHS AND ONE NULL MYTH: FIGHTING AMERICAN (1954-55)

In the short run of Simon and Kirby's FIGHTING AMERICAN-- seven issues, published from 1954-55-- one can find a rich harvest of near myths. Only one story in this corpus-- to which I'll devote a separate essay-- brought together its mythic elements with sufficient density to create a mythcomic.

In interviews given long after this run, Joe Simon talked as if the feature came about when he and Kirby sought to show comics-makers of the period how to do an action-packed superhero comic in the tradition of their Captain America, the classic WWII champion whose rights were owned outright by Timely Comics. However, it may have been more of a desperation ploy on their parts, of trying to find something, anything, that would catch on with audiences of the period. The superhero genre had declined in popularity since the post-war years, and not until 1958-- when DC Comics began emphasizing the genre in their line-- did the genre catch fire again.

In addition, Simon and Kirby sought to apply all the rock-em, sock-em storytelling strategies they'd used in the 1940s. But Captain America and other Simon/Kirby productions benefited from existing in an apocalyptic world, where it seemed like the battle between good and evil was taking place as a part of everyday life. The real-life Axis powers provided an enemy of unbridled aggression, and any fictional characters modeled on them could be just as pulpishly violent. And even when Captain America chose to fight other forms of evil, such as vampires and mad scientists, these too could take on the stature of larger-than-life villainy.

Fighting American was positioned to be a Commie-smasher in the same way Captain America was a Nazi-smasher-- but even I suspect that even had the feature premiered at a boom time for superheroes, it simply didn't work to substitute Commies for Nazis. Even allowing for the fact that Simon and Kirby were drawing on superficial images of real Communists for their stories, the years of the Cold War didn't present Russian Communists as great symbols of aggression. (Chinese Communists are not very important in the FIGHTING AMERICAN stories.) Rather, the average American knew Communists primarily as spies and subversives, and so that was how Simon and Kirby treated them. But because of this, Fighting American's villains lacked the formidable qualities of even the lesser villains of Captain America. As if the artists were dimly aware of the problem of making Commies into great villains, by the third issue of the comic, Simon and Kirby began portraying the Commies as goofy ne'er-do-wells, with names like Poison Ivan and Hotsky Trotsky.

Additionally, Simon and Kirby were probably somewhat influenced by the example of Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, one of the few indubitable sales-successes of the early 1950s. The influence isn't so much in content-- Kurtzman was a master satirist, while Simon and Kirby depended more on goony comedy-- as in style. American comics were often produced by Jewish-Americans, including these three artists. But while a few American comics-characters might have oddball accents, like those of Brooklyn or the Wild West, a reader almost never encountered a character who sounded like a New York City Jew. Kurtzman changed that, slipping in yiddische words like "goniff" and "meshugenah" for MAD's largely goyim audience, and occasionally having characters speak in the elliptical fashion favored by many New York Jews of the time. Rarely if ever had Simon and Kirby reproduced the Jewish cadence of speech, but it came to the fore in remarks like this one:

'Get this guy! A real "eager beaver!" If I suddenly yelled "Fighting American," he'd hide under a bed!'-- FIGHTING AMERICAN #7.

To my ears, at least, this is the same mode of speech Jack Kirby used in his problematic scripting for his 1970s work, which gives FIGHTING AMERICAN a certain cachet in terms of Kirby-history.

Yet despite his wearing a gaudy,, star-spangled costume, Fighting American was a very colorless character, and so was his kid-partner, who had so little background that he didn't even possess any other name than "Speedboy." In the 1940s both Captain America and Bucky were at best two-dimensional characters. Yet their creators infused both of them with a passionate hatred toward evil, whether it took the form of a Nazi Bund or a guy dressed in a buttefly-costume. Fighting American and Speedboy were just bland, though the former boasts an origin that had great psychological potential-- only to drop the ball on developing it, so that it became no more than a null-myth.

Captain America was a weakling whom the U.S. government transformed into a muscular superman with a special serum. Simon and Kirby kept the basic idea of the government creating a superman, but threw in a strange, barely acknowledged sibling complex.

Though the story initially focuses on Johnny Flagg, a radio celebrity renowned for attacking American Communists, the real star is Johnny's brother Nelson. Johnny is the typical Simon-Kirby he-man: square-jawed and broad-shouldered, though he was injured during his stint in the armed services, so that he has to walk on crutches. Johnny's radio-colleague Mary, your basic "Lois Lane" figure, openly admires Johnny, and so does his less impressive brother Nelson, though what Nelson doesn't say about his brother is as important as what he does say:

"Johnny was always the pride of the family-- a brilliant student, a prize athlete, and a war hero."


Nelson doesn't say what it means to him to dwell in the shadow of his brother, but he does touch on the irony that his crippled sibling can no longer be a man of action, "depending on his weak little brother to do his leg work." Later Nelson tries to stand up to a bad guy and gets beat down, living the reality of Clark Kent-- until evil Communists kill Johnny, making it possible for Nelson to banish his sibling envy in a macabre manner.

After Johnny is killed, the government, without so much as a by-your-leave, takes possession of his body, and somehow rebuilds the corpse to be "the agent of the future." But they can only bring this super-agent to life by transferring Nelson's mentality into the body of his late brother-- and Nelson, grieving for the brother he loved (even with resentment), quickly agrees.

Thus the weak body of Nelson dies, erased as the weak Steve Rogers was erased-- and yet Nelson lives on, to enjoy the skills and muscular powers of his brother's body. (Mary doesn't stick around much longer, but from then on, she seems to dote less on her co-worker than on his superheroic alter ego) For the remainder of the hero's short career, there's no further acknowledgement that the person everyone sees is not Johnny, but Nelson. As far as Simon and Kirby were concerned, Nelson existed only to bring about a magic-like transformation of weakness into strength. Still, this strategy didn't do a lot for making Fighting American work, even as a two-dimensional character.

However, though in FIGHTING AMERICAN Simon and Kirby never got any further than opening a door leading to dark psychological corridors, later Kirby, in partnership with Lee, would return to the theme with better results. Another weakling-- Bruce Banner, whom Nelson slightly resembles-- would not need to get his power from an envied sibling, but from his own "id," the wellspring of his desire for power and violence. True, early issues of THE INCREDIBLE HULK are all-over-the-place, in which the hero-monster varies between being a brutish villain to a muscular "genie" manipulated by his youthful buddy. But even so, Kirby seems to have grasped, in partnership with Lee, that Bruce Banner's problem had to be front-and-center this time. instead of being swept under the proverbial rug.

NULL-MYTHS: OLD MAN LOGAN (2008)

It was only after watching the 2017 film LOGAN that I learned that it had been based on a graphic novel-- actually a compilation of stories from Marvel's ongoing WOLVERINE title-- and that the writer was none other than one of the worst scripters currently in the business, Mark Millar. This is not entirely a fair opinion, since I've read few of Millar's works since my bad experience with the atrocious WANTED.

However, once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

Though LOGAN is far from being a game-changing movie, I can appreciate that Mangold uses some subtlety, refusing to dilute his story by telling the viewer what happened to the heroes. In contrast, Millar's OLD MAN is just Millar regurgitating the same brain-dead concept that informed the WANTED graphic novel: that all the super-villains get together and wipe out most of the heroes, sparing only a few like Hawkeye the Archer and (inevitably) Wolverine. 

As with WANTED, Millar's work is made visually bearable by his collaboration with a good if somewhat slick artist. Conceptually, though, it's just channeling the same old vibe that had begun to get tedious in Alan Moore's work in his "grim and gritty" period: What If the Superheroes, the Ones Who Always Win, Went Down to Dusky Death (and Degradation)? Incidentally, though I've scoffed at Alan Moore's claims that every writer in the business is guilty of ripping off his wonderfully ironic and deeply intellectual concepts, in the case of Millar Moore's ire would be fully justified.

 In OLD MAN Millar trades on the cumulative histories of the standard Marvel heroes for cheap shock-with-no-awe, showing no appreciation for said histories. For instance, Millar knows that Wolverine started out life as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk, so by the rules of fannish consistency, Logan as an old man must once again face the Hulk. But this is a Hulk who, for no stated reason, has become as much of a villain as the Red Skull. He's also become a gross hillbilly who rules his territory in the villain-conquered U.S, alongside a passel of green, gamma-mutated offspring. There had been other attempts to show the Hulk becoming a darker figure-- Peter David's "Maestro" iteration of the character, not to mention a few intimations of Hyde-like nastiness in the character's first appearances. But as far as I can tell, the only reason that Bruce Banner becomes a cannibalistic redneck is because he couldn't find any regular humans to have sex with. So he had sex with his first cousin, the She-Hulk, and-- presto, Instant Hillbilly!

About the only nice thing I can say about this worthless work is that I smiled a little when Hawkeye and Wolverine start tooling around in a rebuilt Spider-Mobile. But it was definitely a smile of short duration.

SOMETIMES HE FEELS LIKE A NUT; OTHER TIMES, HE JUST IS

To David Goyer's suggestion that the She-Hulk was created as an implicit sex-fantasy for all male readers; i.e., " the chick you could fuck if you were Hulk." Stan Lee responded in this Washington Post piece by saying, “Only a nut would even think of that.”

As I detailed in HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, Goyer's actual comment is lame and smacks of facile attention-whoring-- a verb I find appropriate, given how free Goyer and Craig Mazin with their use of the term "slut." That said, though the specific accusations are all but worthless, they do raise the spectre of unfair sexual representation once more. Note this passage from the "Comic Riffs" section:

So, how about She-Hulk’s tremendous physique, Stan the Man? “As for her looking beautiful and curvy,” Lee tells Comic Riffs, “show me the superheroine who isn’t.”

From a hardcore ultraliberal standpoint, this light-hearted statement would confirm the Goyer allegation that She-Hulk was designed as a "wank fantasy." I don't think Stan Lee would ever admit to having written "wank fantasies," nor that he would ever fully understand modern objections to them. But though I've argued earlier than SHE-HULK was not poised as an especially "sexy" comics feature, there can be no doubt that Stan Lee has edited and created many comic books that fit that bill.

I've previously cited this MY FRIEND IRMA panel as one of the few overt boob-jokes I've found in a commercial comic book of the period.

And of course prior to the Marvel era Stan edited and/or wrote a vast number of "working girl" comics-- none of whom were about the type of "working girls" Goyer and Mazin would've referenced.

And then there were the curvaceous jungle-queens, like the 1950s LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL, written for the most part by Don Rico.

No one would doubt that all of these female characters are drawn to be ostentatiously sexy-- certainly more so than the 1980s She-Hulk, IMO.  And I for one don't blush to admit that any time a female character was drawn to be ostentatiously sexy, there's a better than even chance that publishers knew that a lot of young horndogs would indeed use such comics for "wank fantasies."

At the same time, overt sexiness was not the only avenue through which young horndogs fulfilled themselves.
I admitted in the previous essay that it's quite possible that the Vosburg-Springer She-Hulk met with approval with some fans, even though the artists did not strive to be extremely titillating. Perhaps the semi-ripped clothing did it for some people-- possibly including the estimable Kurt Busiek-- even though I for one found She-Hulk's attire about as sexy as the Hulk's pants, since it was evident that the clothing was never going to get torn any further, no matter how much physical punishment the character endured.  But there's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine male comics-readers being turned by any number of relatively unexceptional images. As problematic as Frederic Wertham is, his testimony that some readers were turned on by nothing more than high heels seems to be a typical enough phenomenon-- and certainly not one confined to comic books.

Having established that sexual titillation can take place whether or not an image is structured to be titillating, we're back to the Square One established by Goyer. Even if he's wrong, wrong, wrong about the motives behind She-Hulk's creation, there can be no doubt that some comics have been created to be "wank fantasies."

But even when they are created with the conscious intent to have such an appeal-- are they all the same?

Some comics aren't much more than this. Stan Lee features like SHOWGIRLS and MY FRIEND IRMA had occasional moments of snappy dialogue, but I doubt anyone bought the titles for the dialogue.

On the other hand, the example of LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL presents a different paradigm. I didn't choose the panel above at random; while LORNA certainly is a comic book featuring a pneumatic jungle-princess, it rises above the mediocrity of most jungle-comics with its ongoing gender-humor. LORNA had just one basic gag: the protagonist's boyfriend keeps telling her to quit playing jungle-heroine because women can't hack the adventure-game, and she proves him wrong every time. No one would claim LORNA to be the comics-version of Noel Coward, but there's obviously more than just titillation at work here.

More on these matters in a future essay.

HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2

This article for THE BEAT is my source for the following remarks of film-scripter David Goyer:


Goyer: I have a theory about She-Hulk. Which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So the Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like, most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids getting the s**t kicked out of them every day… And so then they created She-Hulk, right? Who was still smart… I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could f**k if you were Hulk, you know what I’m saying? … She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So it’s like if I’m going to be this geek who becomes the Hulk then let’s create a giant green porn star that only the Hulk could f**k.


Now, though I've often caviled against elitist remarks by critics, whose dominant aim is to persuade readers to read "better stuff." Goyer, a sometime comics-fan himself, is no critic, or even much of a thinker, despite his inappropriate use of the word "theory" above. As far as I can tell, his remarks are merely a means of attention-getting, a common enough practice in the world of self-publicizing, the primary object of the podcast in which the remarks were made.  Making inflammatory remarks for publicity's sake, however much they may or may not be the speaker's real beliefs, is a tried-and-true strategy older than the comic-book medium itself.


Goyer's remarks had the usual effect: triggering objections from fans who didn't like what he said, and keeping his name prominent in the blogosphere. One may object, of course, that a scripter who has become a Big Deal in terms of adapting comic books to big-budget movies hardly needs such publicity. So it's possible that on some level Goyer doesn't just want publicity for his own projects; that he wants to castigate certain aspects of the genre by which he's currently making a living, as a means of convincing himself that he is "above" such politically incorrect content as "male sex fantasies."


I hardly need point out the self-serving superficiality of Goyer's "theory." The only significance of Goyer's screed is that it once more points out the seeming desperation of those who would ascribe "negative compensation" as the defining characteristic of whatever they happen not to like.


Happily, one of the posters on THE BEAT defended the remarks of Goyer and others in the podcast, giving me the chance to make this response:

The problem with your interpretation, as with those of Mazin and Goyer, is that you’re assuming that a character like She-Hulk can’t also be a power fantasy for any male readers. only a sex fantasy, which speaks poorly for your view of your own gender, if you are indeed of the XY persuasion.

(I assume from the way you start off your post– “Women love Power Girl,” and so on– you do admit that female heroes, even scantily clad ones, can be power fantasies for women.)

The fact is, though, female heroes are not only sex fantasies for men, any more than male heroes are only power fantasies for their male readers. There are a small number of male heroes, particularly the Hulk, who are not particularly attractive and who may be judged as almost pure power fantasies. But the great multitude of male heroes are also sex fantasies in the sense that they are designed to be thought of as “handsome” or “studly.” The hetero male then identifies with the character getting action because of his hot bod, his chiseled chin, etc.

Conversely, it should be obvious that hetero men can and do identify with female characters in the sense of power-struggles. She-Hulk wins most or all of her fights for the same reasons the Hulk does; nearly nobody wants to see the main character beat down.

Some female characters sell the sexual aspect more aggressively than others. She-Hulk, though, is not a particularly good example of this syndrome. But people will see what they want to see.

By way of supporting my above claim-- that She-Hulk was not automatically grounded in the appeal of "good girl art," I cite the remarks of the character's first regular penciler, Mike Vosburg, on the subject of She-Hulk's attractiveness:

The oddest thing about that book was that [inker] Frank [Springer] drew really beautiful women, I drew really beautiful women, and yet, the She-Hulk was never overly attractive.

I would concur with Vosburg's appraisal, that both he and Springer could draw attractive women very well, but that for whatever reason, the art of the original She-Hulk magazine was not conceived as "good girl art," as evinced by this example:

In stating this I'm not saying that no male-- or female-- reader ever derived sexual pleasure from this iteration of She-Hulk. I'm only saying that the art here is not oriented on "selling" the character's sexuality. I don't think any fan will doubt that when Marvel Comics wanted to sell sex, they generally knew how to sell sex.

So if anything, despite the character's artfully ripped clothing, the original SHE-HULK comic book does seem poised more to offer the character as a "power fantasy" than a "sex fantasy."  Later iterations could, and did, sometimes place more emphasis on She-Hulk as a "FBB," or "female body builder," which may also have offered sexual titillation.  But even in these versions, the titillation-factors would not necessarily exclude the possibility of hetero male readers identifying with the character's struggles with her assorted opponents, as opposed to seeing her as a "giant green porn star that only the Hulk could fuck."


I'll note, though, that this notion of the sex-object's supposed inaccessibility has been expressed in other venues: I recall one poster who was convinced that the beauty of female stars on some STAR TREK show "proved" that the target audience was convinced in advance that they, the Trekkies, had no chance with such women.  Just as with Goyer, this is merely an ad hominem attack on such fans, rather than any sort of sustained analysis of the mechanisms of psychological coping.

APES AND ANGELS PART 2

Having coined two new terms-- "idealizing will" and "existential will"-- in Part 1, I'll proceed to give examples of how they apply to characters in fictional narrative.

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other, by the same logic I pursued in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY and other essays with regard to the admixture of mythos-elements in a given work.

Consider the Hulk.  He is possibly the most famous comic-book icon to combine aspects of both the negative "existential will" of the monster-- in that he both yearns for normalcy even as he rejects its demands on him-- and the positive "idealizing will" of the hero.  I've commented here that one of the factors that causes audiences to regard him dominantly as a "superhero" is because he has a rogues' gallery:

However, it must be admitted that some characters best characterized as "monsters" may also have, if not a rogues' gallery, an assemblage of colorful opponents.  Godzilla has one group of foes in his movies, another in his 1978 cartoon, and yet others in his Marvel Comics adaptation.

However, most of Godzilla's foes tend to be either rival giant monsters like himself, or aliens, who may also be considered a species of "monster" depending on their treatment.  Their motive for fighting the Big G usually come down to variations on the theme of persistence: the other behemoths resent someone trespassing on their territory, or the aliens want to get rid of humans in order to enjoy the fruits of Earth. In contrast, most of the Hulk's enemies are villains who desire to rule the world, or to become famous for kicking the Hulk's ass, and other such glory-based motives. 


Both the Hulk and Godzilla are called "monsters" in their respective texts again and again.  There's no question that both do incarnate the "existential will" in this respect.  However, most Godzilla fans cringe at those films that attempt to directly posit the King of Monsters in a superheroic role, as was seen at its worst effect in the stupefying GODZILLA VS. MEGALON.  This scene of a "heroes' handshake" is particularly egregious:

Arguably some fans' rejection of "Superhero Godzilla" in the 1970s had a decided effect on the film series' development.  Only two more films in the so-called "Showa Series" followed MEGALON, after which that series was followed by the "Heisei Series," wherein "the 'new' Godzilla was portrayed as much more of an animal than the latter Shōwa films." Since then, Godzilla has yet to show heroic tendencies again.  Therefore I think it fair to consider the Big G to be a figure almost completely based in the "existential will."

In contrast, from the Hulk's first six-issue series, he has been portrayed as a character in which "hero" and "monster" constantly struggle.  In this scene from INCREDIBLE HULK #112 (vol. 2), we see the Hulk playing the Good Samaritan as one would not expect of a total monster.

The Hulk's adventures are full of such examples of the "idealizing will," often credited to his alter ego Bruce Banner's better nature.  His sometimes membership in various versions of the Avengers supergroup-- not to mention the Defenders-- also contribute to this reputation.  Thus I would judge that though the "existential will" is present in the Hulk, the "idealizing will" is the one his raconteurs chose to emphasize in most if not all of the character's exploits.

Then we have a figure that was conceived as an overt competitor to Toho Studios' Godzilla, Gamera.

In contrast to the usually ferocious Godzilla, Gamera was given a wholly inexplicable loving attitude toward children, probably because Japanese children became inordinately fond of the turtle-monster, like these two from GAMERA VS. VIRAS:

Gamera, unlike Godzilla, was re-conceived as a defender of Earthpeople early in his career (though not in his initial film).  The giant turtle's motives for fighting monsters on the behalf of humans remained murky in its own "Showa series," but in a later "Heisei" series, Gamera was given a new origin that explained his protective instincts.

So was Gamera a hero, in that he often acted as heroically as did the Hulk?  I would say not.  Even under the revised origin of the Heisei version, Gamera is still dominantly a monster first, even if his "existential will" has been channeled into a heroic tendency by his creators, Atlanteans who impressed their "idealizing will" upon the turtle-creature's habits.  Even though Gamera is beneficent, he inspires fear more than invigorating identification, and so he becomes one of the "monsters who do good" even though the vast majority of them have only negative impact.

The Hulk does bad things at times, whether his character is that of the bemused, childish giant or the tougher "Mister Hyde" persona of Bruce Banner.  In fact, he's proven more capable of destructive pique than Japan's genial turtle.  But on the whole, the raconteurs of THE HULK create the expectation that he will usually do the "right thing"-- the idealistic thing.  In contrast, the primary function of monsters is to destroy stuff, whether they do after the baffled manner of a hostile animal (Godzilla) or like an animal trained to be a "watchdog" (Gamera).

MONSTERS, DEMIHEROES, AND OTHER WILLING BEASTS

In this essay I said:

In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts." But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts." I will use this basic opposition here, though I'll substitute "intellectual" for "abstract" purely for euphony.

A little later "instinctual" took the place of "intuitive," but I don't think I adequately explained that these representations are not inherent in the hearts and minds of the characters themselves, which is a mistake I find in the opinions of other genre-sussers cited in that essay, such as Jeff Rovin and S.C. Butler.  Rather, these Schopenhaurean representations are narrative patterns imposed upon those characters by their respective authors, irrespective of how "intellectual" or "instinctive" the characters themselves may be.

So I am not claiming that the character denoted as a hero must be intellectual, nor that the character denoted as a demihero must function by instinct alone.  The willing aspects of the characters are to be found in the narrative functions given the characters by their authors, not in the personalities of characters themselves. 

In this essay I defined Vincent Price’s character Dr. Craven as a demihero, saying that he was defined by "instinctive will."  This doesn't mean that instinct alone rules the character; rather, it rules the pattern of his narrative.  Craven is certainly more intellectual than many of the characters that qualify as heroes.  Craven is governed by “instinctive will” because even though he makes a heroic effort to oppose the villain of the story, he doesn’t become a hero.  He remains defined by his own personal goals alone, without any hint of a transcending altruism.

I’ve defined the persona of the “monster” as the generally negative counterpart of the demihero.  Usually the monster is also defined principally by self-preservation, whether the creature is destructive on a large scale (Godzilla) or covets some forbidden prize (King Kong).  Self-preservation and endurance also typify even benign monsters, like Man-Thing, of whom I said in D IS FOR DEMIHERO PT 3: 

A comics-series like MAN-THING portrays its monstrous protagonist doing good not as a conscious act but in response to instinctive tendencies. 

 

And yet there are monsters who do good as a conscious act.  A prominent example is the Incredible Hulk.  In Peter Coogan’s 2006 SUPERHERO: THE SECRET ORIGIN OF A GENRE—referenced here—he denies that Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be a superhero due to his method of “genre exclusion.”  Yet he doesn’t disallow the Incredible Hulk from superherodom despite that character’s clear alliances to the horror-genre.  And he’s correct in the latter instance.  The Hulk, though a character with no more than a brutish intelligence, exemplifies the same “intellectual will” in his narrative function, in that his authors emphasize that he makes conscious choices to battle evil.  While there are various stories in which the Hulk himself proves an unwitting menace to humanity, it’s far more typical to see him engaged in combat with outright villain-antagonists. The Hulk even has a "rogues' gallery," which is atypical for the majority of monsters of purely kenotic orientation.

The greatest exception are those serials in which a monster is drafted to become a hero in terms of plot-function, even though the monster retains the kenotic *character* of a monster.

Some examples include the 1966 KING KONG kid-cartoon:

Not to be outdone, several of Japan's Godzilla films from Toho Studios also cast the Big G in the unlikely role of Earth's protector.  In GODZILLA VS. MEGALON the Zillinator even allies himself with Jet Jaguar, one of the many progeny of UltraMan, in the battle to save Earth.

Toho's competitor Daiei Studios went even further in "super-heroizing" their monster Gamera.  After just one film in which the giant super-turtle proved a menace to mankind, every other film cast him as a heroic monster who acquired a "rogues' gallery" of mostly one-shot menaces.  A later revival even gave Gamera a backstory to explain why he was so darn beneficial.

Hanna-Barbera revisited the "hero-monster" idea in the 1978 GODZILLA TV-cartoon.  To be sure, though every episode Godzilla had to pit his reptillian righteousness against the Monster of the Week, at least the writers kept the sense that Godzilla was a big irritable beastie rather than a crusading hero.  He only protected the show's human regulars inadvertently, because his son "Godzooky" hung out with these mediocrities and the Big G had to put the welfare of his family above any possible preferences to fry the humans like so many ants beneath a magnifying glass.

So are of these permutations of respectable monster-personas "heroes?"  Only if one prioritizes the *dynamis* of plot over the *dynamis* of character.  I first established the separability of plot-dynamis from character-dynamis in KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC, but my fullest examination as to this sort of division appeared in RISING AND FALLING STARS.  Examples here focused purely on the opposition of the "adventure mythos" to the "drama mythos," so that:

Observations include:

STAR WARS serves as an unreserved example of the "pure adventure," in which both plot and characters evoke the dynamis of adventure.

...in STARGATE the mythos of drama pervades the plotting of the series, overshadowing characters who would otherwise fit adventure-archetypes.

Another negative example, but one in which the mythos of drama dominates the characters rather than the plot, would be the 1978-80 versions of BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA. The plot, in which noble humans repeatedly faced the menace of Cylon invaders, clearly takes inspiration from STAR WARS, but the characters lack the *dynamis* of the adventure-mythos, tending toward drama in its manifestation of "melodrama." 

DC Comics' STARMAN, in most of the iterations of the franchise, has usually been a "pure adventure." However, the Starman introduced by James Robinson, whose continuing series ran from 1994-2001, exemplifies the type in which the plot is the main source of the adventure-dynamis.

My final example must be one in which characters with the adventure-*dynamis* override a plot with a dramatic emphasis. My choice here is the 1978 American STAR BLAZERS, adapted from the Japanese anime TV-series SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO (which I have not seen in its original form). 

I didn't give an example in which both plot-dynamis and character-dynamis were both aligned to the drama.  But in other essays I have mentioned Classic STAR TREK as one such, so I include it to fill in that space for symmetry's sake.

I mention all these mythoi-examples because I propose the same ambivalence applies to the narrative "persona-patterns."  King Kong, Gamera and Godzilla may follow the plots of heroes in these assorted works, but I assert that in terms of fundamental character they still represent "instinctive will," while the not much more intelligent Hulk represents "intellectual will."  So the Hulk does make that hypothetical "wiki-list of all superhero works that fall into the adventure mythos," mentioned in RISING, while the three big honking monsters cited would still fit the persona of the "monster" rather than that of the "hero."