MYTHCOMICS: "CLOUD OF WITNESS" (SON OF SATAN #4-7, 1976)

NOTE: I'm using "Cloud of Witness," the title of the first story in this four-issue arc, to denote the whole arc. I'm not sure why writer John Warner chose this title. Curiously enough, "Cloud of Witness" is the title of a 1891 compilation of devotional prayers, but this would seem to have nothing to do with the content of the arc. If anything, "Cloud" seems to be moving away from the Judeo-Christian basis of the "Son of Satan" mythos.

The brief run of the "Son of Satan" feature in two Marvel magazines, MARVEL SPOTLIGHT and THE SON OF SATAN, followed the pattern of Satanic films that became more popular following the success of 1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY. Daimon Hellstrom, the son of the Devil and a mortal woman, is first seen as an adult who has renounced his paternal heritage but undergoes periodic werewolf-like transformations from a super-powered devil's spawn to a Catholic priest. The priest angle was quickly dropped, and when writer Steve Gerber took over the series, Hellstrom became sort of a combination superhero/exorcist. Gerber also brought in some non-Christian elements into the mix, but during the MARVEL SPOTLIGHT run the whole never exceeded the sum of its parts.

John Warner became the writer for the series when SON OF SATAN became a solo title. The first three issues delve heavily into the opposition of Hellstrom and his father, but this sequence ends with Satan foreswearing any more involvement with his son's life. Warner almost certainly took this tack in order to ground the feature within the Western tradition of ceremonial magic. The arc from issues #4-7, however, were Warner's last hurrah on the series, and the title was cancelled following the publication of an inventory story, reviewed here.

In this essay, I observed that certain stories, such as the Golden Age HAWKMAN origin, might be fairly simple with respect to their dialectic overthoughts, but complex with respect to their symbolic underthoughts. "Cloud of Witness" follows the same pattern. Starting with issue #3, Warner and his assorted artists (mostly Craig Russell and Sonny Trinidad) set up a new direction for Hellstrom, including a new job (occult instructor at Georgetown University) and a new support-cast. The first new addition to the Hellstrom cast is a fellow teacher (and inevitably romantic interest), Saripha Thames. She's later revealed to be a practicing witch who doesn't believe in Hellstrom's father, thus refuting the common conflation of witches and Satanists in American pop culture. To some extent Hellstrom finds himself alienated from this hotbed of occultism, since in his earlier exploits he rarely interacted with large groups, as he does when he's obliged to teach a course to a roomful of students. Thus Warner uses the standard revising of a serial character's setup to delve somewhat into the character's lack of socialization.

But since he's also a superhero as well as an occultist, he has to meet a new villain. although his introduction to this foe comes through a hieratic dream. Once he arrives at his university apartment, the hero falls asleep and finds himself beholding a procession of Egyptian votaries. There's also a "cloud" of incense-vapor that the dreaming Hellstrom likens to "ambrosia," the food of the Greek gods, and inhaling this shifts him to another dreamscape. He meets the image of his mother, who claims that she's about to enter a convent. Hellstrom is never less than aware than he's in a dream, not least because in life his late mother only talked about becoming a nun.

However, the Christian piety is immediately undercut when this "bride of God" greets and embraces her "demon lover" Satan, and Hellstrom is repulsed by his mother's acceptance of this unholy union.

As the dream-parents fade, Hellstrom encounters the puppet-master of the dream: an androgynous, satyr-horned being named Proffet, who claims to be an oracle. Despite the satan-son's attempt to escape the dream, Proffet keeps propelling the hero into more dreamscapes, not least being a confrontation with the two parts of his own soul, the destructive "darksoul" and a normal-seeming Hellstrom who's able to wield a cross to subdue the evil "dark half." Finally the dream ends and Hellstrom wakes up in his apartment, but his next conflict is signaled by a mysterious explosion from the apartment neighboring his own.

Though Hellstrom never met the other apartment's occupant, it's plain that the latter was involved in occultism, because the explosion throws his corpse against a wall in the posture of the Tarot "Hanged Man." Hellstrom reads the "symbolic allegory" of this supernatural manifestation, interpreting the body's posture as that of "a pyramid surmounted by a cross-- or an ankh." Warner does not mention that this opposition of images duplicates that of the dream-fight between the two Hellstroms, where a symbol of life (an Egyptian ankh) transcends an image of death (a pyramid, which is, of course, a glorified tomb, and thus reflective of all the death-imagery in the dream).

To be sure, Warner's beginning is more mythic than his resolution. The villain who caused the occult student's death is a megalomaniac who's taken the supervillain name "Mindstar," and he was attempting to capture the student, for very involved reasons, to turn him over to his divine perceptor, the Egyptian god Anubis. Because Mindstar screws up his mission, he attempts to confuse the issue by convincing the god that the Son of Satan is Anubis's quarry. This proves a rather weak plotline, largely setting up Hellstrom's superheroic battles with Mindstar. Still, at least Anubis conforms to the representation of both death and destruction, the negative elements with which Hellstrom regularly contends. Indeed, Saripha, though not yet romantically involved with Hellstrom, invokes the pagan powers of life to help Hellstrom against the Egyptian god of death.

Had the series continued for a time, Warner probably would have come up with some inventive takes on Marvel characters with an esoteric edge. As things stand, the short run of the SON OF SATAN comic merely hints at some tantalizing possibilities.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 2

In Part 1 I said, "I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction." To be more specific, while most of my writings here about persona-types have concerned focal presences-- i.e., the stars of whatever stories I'm discussing-- the idea of personas applies just as much to any support-characters. I've touched on these classifications on occasion, though it's occurred to me that it might be enlightening to explore a particular type of supporting-character: the authority-figure who either empowers or initiates the central protagonist (what Vladimir Propp might call the *donor.*)

I did touch on an example of a powerful figure who was not the star of his show in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES:

Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

As I said in my review of the manga-collection, the two stars of the series are Rintaro, a minor sinner consigned after his death to a lesser form of Hell, and Koyori, the female demon assigned to levy punishment on him. However, Hell itself is a "character" in the story, for most of the narrative deals with Rintaro learning the ropes of an afterlife that looks suspiciously like the life of a living wage-slave. Both Hell and its usually-unseen ruler mirror the quality I've termed elsewhere "positive persistence," and so they, like the protagonists, are also demiheroic.

"Negative persistence," however, dominates the persona of the monster. The monster desires the ordinary life which the demihero usually obtains as a matter of course, but for whatever reason the monster cannot fit into that matrix, and usually either parodies its nature (the vampire, who seeks a new aristocracy of the undead ruling the living) or tears the matrix to pieces in fits of unreasoning rage (Godzilla, the Frankenstein Monster). The persona of the monster can even be attached to entire races of sentient beings who function as monsters to human protagonists: the Martians of H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS are a familiar type, and in the same line are Buck Rogers' nonhuman adversaries, The Tiger Men of Mars.

Villains, however, have a quality of "negative glory" that makes them more pro-active than monsters. I touched on two authority-type villains, both of whom were coterminous with their environments, in ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2:

In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

As for heroes, it's fairly easy to see the heroic virtue of "positive glory" in support-characters like Odin, Lord of Asgard, or Doctor Strange's perceptor The Ancient One. It's perhaps a little harder to conger the mantle of heroism on donor-figures who merely gets the ball rolling, such as the mysterious "Voice" that gives powers to the Hawk and the Dove, or the goddess Rama Kushna in the original DEADMAN story. Still, even if these presences don't do anything more than place the heroes on the path of heroism, they too align with the plerotic value of positive glory.

The same formula applies with respect to donor-figures who initiate heroes but are not sources of numinous authority. This would include types like Mr. Miracle's teacher from the story "Himon," who seems relatively human even though technically he, like the aforementioned Highfather, is a "good New God." Another parallel example is the character of Io from the 2010 film CLASH OF THE TITANS. A new creation with no parallel in the original 1981 film. Io doesn't precisely set Perseus on his heroic path, but she does watch over him from his childhood onward, and she gives him a certain modicum of martial training that aligns her with the figure of the authoritative donor.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

This is not so much a follow-up to the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS essay as to my recent myth-analysis of LOVE IN HELL-- reason being that this is the first mythcomic I've examined in which one might argue that the locale is just as important to the story as the two principal characters.

Environment varies in its amplitude throughout the mythcomics, just as that of any presence, even a focal character. In one of my earliest essays on focal presences, I mentioned that in Arthur Conan Doyle's original novel THE LOST WORLD, Doyle's heroes were the focal presences, but that the Lost World itself became the focus in the 1925 film.

There's great precedence for this sort of "man vs. nature" opposition, but this formula has never been nearly as popular as "man vs. man." It's not uncommon, even in the most strongly mythic narratives, for the environment to fade into the background, even if that environment is sometimes a major generator of mythic content. Thus, even though many THOR stories describe the power of the Lee-Kirby Asgard to generate all manner of Nordic strangeness, in "The Mangog Saga" Asgard might as well be the Pyrenees for all the impact that the locale has upon the struggle between main character Thor, his various allies, and the seemingly invulnerable Mangog.

In some situations, the environment retains its mythic nature within a given narrative, but its myth-power stems from a particular character. In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

 There's also a sort of ambiguous middle ground. as seen with"the Palace of Ice," In this extended dream, Nemo experiences what I termed "a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole." McCay probably does not mean to assert that either Jack Frost or his realm possess any reality independent of Little Nemo's imagination. Nevertheless, this ice-world possesses far more amplitude than most real dreams.

In contrast, the Hell of LOVE IN HELL does not seem to be an expression of any character's imagination or personality. Hell does have its ruler, Japan's traditional hell-lord King Enma (who according to some references is actually female), but Enma only makes one appearance in the narrative, and then only toward the very end, where the ruler's gigantic foot intrudes upon the inferno to mete out justice. Rintaro, the "new fish-soul" in Hell, is not especially mythic in himself, any more than any other "everyman" character, given that most such characters are meant to heighten the significance of other characters by their ordinariness. The demoness Koyori serves to explain the ways of Hell to Rintaro, but she's new to the job of being a soul-torturing demon, so she's not a pure representative of Hell, in the same way Darkseid is a pure representative of the ethos of Apokolips.

All this said, though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."


Note: since writing the above I've changed my mind: Rintaro and his sins comprise the series' focal presence, with Koyori qualifying only as a support character.

MYTHCOMICS: "DANCE WITH THE DEVIL, MY RED-EYED SON" (SON OF SATAN #8. 1977)

“Son of Satan” may well be the oddest comic-book title to host any sort of Christmas story, much less one with an impressive level of mythicity.

To be sure, the  “Son of Satan” feature was always centered upon the creation of a pop-cultural Satan-mythology, as opposed to delving into purely Christian tropes. A fannish anecdote claimed that once Marvel Comics began to pursue horror-themed features in the early 1970s, Stan Lee noticed all the “Satan” films in the movie-houses and suggested the idea of a series about the Big Bad Devil himself. Though comics had sometimes dealt with Satanic emissaries as main characters—notably, Timely Comics’ original “Black Widow”—a title starring Satan himself probably would have proved an epic fail.  The follow-up idea-- that of a “son of Satan”-- at least allowed for the main character to maintain some reader-sympathy. To be sure, the origin-story for Daimon Hellstrom—the offspring of the Devil and a mortal woman—was badly drawn and badly written. Yet this ignoble beginning didn’t keep “Rosemary’s Superhero Exorcist” from developing a fairly intelligent hero-mythos of his own, particularly through the efforts of writers Steve Gerber and John Warner. Marvel’s editorship didn’t allow the use of many Judeo-Christian concepts beyond the name of the Devil himself, so the writers tended to employ names and images taken from paganism or ceremonial magick. The one major exception is the last issue of the original “Son of Satan” title, ”Dance with the Devil.” This is a Christmas story only in that it takes place on Christmas Eve—“the night Lord Satan sleeps,” as one of the Devil’s minions helpfully informs us.

“Dance,” the letters-page of SOS #8 tells us, was a stand-alone inventory story assembled over a year before its publication, against the possibility that someone would miss a deadline in the ongoing continuity. At a 1990s convention I asked Russ Heath for any memories of the story, but he didn’t seem to remember much; not even the way he had artfully emulated, for his portrait of Marvel’s hell, the paintings of the 16^th-century artist Hieoronymus Bosch. Based on that conversation, I speculate that the main plot for “Dance” came from writer Bill Mantlo. Of course, since the two of them would almost certainly have been working “Marvel-style,” Heath was probably responsible for all of the layouts and dramatic pacing.

One advantage of “Dance” is that because it stands independent of any ongoing storylines. There’s an indirect reference to Daimon’s then-current love-interest, probably inserted by an editor. But aside from that reference, the story concerns nothing but Daimon’s relationship with his devilish dad, and with the image, though not the reality, of his mother, who was deceased and “out of the picture” when the series began. Daimon’s “daddy issues” are a major aspect of the ongoing series, but “Dance” is the only 1970s story that deals with the character’s “mommy issues.”

The entire adventure takes place within the dream of sleeping Satan, though apparently his trident-toting son is physically drawn into it, and into a dream-version of Hell itself. At times Daimon himself is swept along from one setting to another, as if he is the dreamer, thus suggesting a similitude between the hero and the father he rejects. However, the first entity Daimon encounters is a robed figure, the one who has summoned him into the dream. Daimon gets pissed and zaps the summoner with “soulfire” from his trident-weapon. The robed individual removes her cowl and shows herself to be his mother, whom Daimon has never seen, in any form, since her passing from the mortal coil. The cowled woman-- who is never called by the name given her in the hero's origin--accuses her son of having sinned by “aspiring to humanity,” and alludes to her own sin—the sin of lust—for having cohabited with the Devil. Daimon promptly faints—a fairly typical response to the association of the ideas “mother” and “lust.”

Waking, Daimon finds himself in the Boschian version of Hell, which horrifies him far more profoundly than any of the cut-rate Dante-scapes that he’s beheld in other Marvel visits to the inferno. An unnamed young beauty appears as his guide, and tries to persuade Daimon that he ought to take over Hell while his father sleeps, and become a more merciful overlord to Hell’s residents. (Whether dreaming-Satan himself is manipulating the female guide is never made clear.) Of the many demons Daimon sees, he’s only introduced to two of them: the witch-queen Morgane Le Fay and her son Mordred. These characters are indubitably the most famous mother-and-son pairing in Arthurian narratives, and thus provide an implicit analogue to Daimon and his own mother. Mordred, of all the condemned in hell, is not in any way malformed, but Morgane is, having been stripped of her beauty by Satan (whom Morgane curiously calls “Lucifer”). Morgane evinces some off the guide-woman’s hostility to Satan as well, and then the guide persuades Daimon to dance with her (hence the title). She kisses him and tries to make him pledge himself to them—but he holds off long enough to see her beauty dissolve into the face of a skull. Daimon flings her away and all of the demons attack him, trying to defeat him with carnage once cajolery has failed (as Stan Lee more or less said elsewhere).

A blow on the head allows for another dream-transition, and Daimon winds up in a vaguely Middle Eastern world. Joining a pilgrimage of robed people, he enters a city, where a guide tells him that “events are enacted in endless repeat.”  Inside the city, Daimon sees a man wearing a crown of thorns, being rousted by Roman-looking soldiers, but this man has Daimon’s own face. While the real Daimon watches, the crowned figure breaks his bonds, becomes a tailed red demon and assails the people with fiery chaos.

Daimon faints again, and wakes in a chamber with a medieval tapestry. Though he never comments on his birth having been a parody of the Immaculate Conception, he’s shaken to have seen “himself” cast in a demonic parody of the Passion. At this moment, he notices the figure of a unicorn in the tapestry—and sees that the unicorn has the face of a woman, with her tongue lolling lustfully out—and that it’s the face of his mother. Then two more figures appear in the chamber: Daimon’s devil-father, and his unnamed mother, lustfully caressing her demon lover. Daimon’s spirit almost succumbs to the notion that if his mother was as purely evil as his father, then he too must be purely evil. But with the eleventh hour he throws off the deceptions of Satan’s dream, and he sets the dreamworld on fire. This action apparently “exorcises” Daimon himself back to the real world, while in the “real Hell,” Satan awakes from his dream. A minion tells Satan that “Christmas Eve is past,” ending what the female guide has called “the madness above.” One might think that Christmas Day, rather than Christmas Eve, would be the last moment before “humanity is returned to its normal posture of petty evils and greed.” But maybe Mantlo just liked the image of Satan’s enforced sleep ending with the coming of the day, which is certainly a common enough trope elsewhere.

I deem this a metaphysical myth in part because it dwells upon such Judeo-Christian concepts as sin and damnation. But it can also be read as a psychological myth with heavy indebtedness to Oedipal wreckage. True, the main conflict throughout the story is still centered on Satan’s attempt, whether conscious or subconscious, to suborn his rebellious son. Still, the Devil’s dream centers not upon male posturing, but upon the idea of female desire, which is made synonymous with the corruptions of the flesh. It doesn’t matter whether Heath or Mantlo had the idea of inverting the traditional association between the unicorn and the Christian virtue of virginity. What matters is that even though the Son of Satan rejects the attempt to recast his “saintly mother” as a slut, the reader is given the chance to meditate on the truth-value of one of the aphorisms from Satan’s dream:

“Purity, Daimon, may exist both in its light—and dark forms.”