MYTHCOMICS: "ROBIN DIES AT DAWN" (BATMAN #156, 1963)

 

There might not be a lot of subjects on which long-time Batman-fans agree, but almost all seem united in despising the Caped Crusader's "alien period" of roughly 1958-1964, largely under the influence of editor Jack Schiff. Schiff, who was not personally a fan of the science fiction genre, didn't rely only upon pitting the hero against weird ETs. I noted in my essay PARADIGM SCHIFF that he also introduced more costumed villains in Batman's post-Code adventures, possibly in order to downplay the Wertham-created stigma of "crime comics." Batman's alien invaders were also probably Schiff's attempt to emulate the financial success of the Superman books under fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger, who increased the frequency of sci-fi elements in the Man of Steel's stories around the same time. However, though Batman had encountered alien threats sporadically during the Golden Age, few if any fans embraced the importation of so many extraterrestrials into a Bat-cosmos that was usually comparatively mundane. Yet one Schiff-story proved the exception to all that fan-hostility.                               

Before launching into the contents of said story, the Bill Finger/Sheldon Moldoff opus ROBIN DIES AT DAWN, I should note that writer Finger almost certainly took inspiration from the debut episode of CBS's TWILIGHT ZONE series, first airing in 1959. The Rod Serling script for the debut story, "Where is Everybody?", depicted a solitary man wandering about a deserted town, freaking out at the total absence of other people while equally concerned at not being able to remember his own identity. The Big Reveal is that the man is an astronaut trainee who has hallucinated his experiences in the empty town after having been confined for many hours to an isolation booth. Finger utilizes the same basic notion of a government experiment, meant to train astronauts in resisting the rigors of loneliness, but takes that basic idea in a direction specific to Batman's mythos.                                                                   

 Like the protagonist of the TWILIGHT ZONE tale, Batman experiences a sudden shift into a world he does not recognize. Unlike the trainee, Batman remembers everything about himself, but he has no clue as to who brought him to this place, or why that entity deprived him of his weapons. As with the other protagonist, everything Batman perceives is a hallucination conjured from his own mind due to being isolated from human contact. But instead of seeing an Earthly world bereft of people, the crusader imagines himself on a night-shrouded alien world, where he encounters only beasts, mutated plants, and one huge symbol of the world's past habitation.   

  Batman finds a deserted city as does the ZONE protagonist, but not only does he find no sentient life, he's attacked by a mutant plant. Unable to free himself, he wishes that his boon companion Robin would render aid, and in marked contrast to the ZONE story, the object of Batman's desire for companionship does materialize and frees the senior hero. The two heroes walk around a bit-- if they compare notes on their respective advents, we don't hear it-- but Batman feels even more acutely the surveillance of some unseen intelligence. The sun dawns, but this only presages a new horror, as the duo stumble across a four-armed idol that comes to life and pursues them.                                                                                         

Unable to fight such a threat, the heroes hope to maneuver the giant into falling into a chasm. It's Robin's idea to provoke the colossus into a rash attack, and the Boy Wonder's ploy succeeds-- but at the cost of his own life. Finger's caption implies the irony that the dawning sun, so often associated with life and human activity, bears witness to Batman's "terrible catastrophe." There had been various Batman stories in which the hero had become enraged when criminals injured or threatened Batman's young partner. But this seems to be the first in which Robin suffers from the fact that Batman called upon his partner for succor-- making it the first time Robin's injury can be seen as directly Batman's fault. There is nothing remotely like this "survivor guilt" in the Rod Serling story.                              

Batman continues to experience the feeling of being watched, and this feeling manifests in a four-footed alien beast with huge eyes that glow yet possess no pupils. It's just when Batman is about to give up on life that the scientists behind the isolation-experiment terminate the hero's torment. As in Serling, the whole test has been to gauge how well even a superb specimen like Batman can cope with the demon of loneliness, all in some dubious service to the space program. But the consequences of the experiment have yet to play out.                                                                                                            

It's while Batman and Robin undertake a nighttime attack upon a band of thieves, the Gorilla Gang that Batman experiences a new hallucination, and in trying to prevent Robin's death a second time, the hero almost kills both of them. 

On yet another night, history repeats itself: this time, Batman re-experiences a sense of sacrificial guilt and almost lets himself be run down by a car he associates with the glow-eyed monster of his nightmare. Now that the psychosis has occurred twice, Batman concludes that he must now hang up his cowl, for he can no longer function in a crimefighting partnership that endangers him, his ward or both of them.                                                                                         

  Ironically, it's these small-timers in the gorilla-suits who make possible Batman's continued career. They capture Robin and send Batman a message that they're going to execute the Boy Wonder at dawn. Batman's mad detective skills show that he can still suss out clues that take him to the gangsters' hideout, and Finger teases readers one last time with the possibility of a Bat-blackout.                     

 But a true threat to Robin's life activates Batman's "reality principle," and provides a shock to his system that permanently erases the effects of the deprivation-test. It can be fairly said, too, that Batman's return to a protective parental status-- where he's the one who does the rescuing of his junior partner--also banishes what may be seen as fears of inadequacy. And so this time, when the sun dawns, it's to banish nightmares, rather than to reveal them.  

MYTHCOMICS: ZEBRAMAN (2004?)

  In my December review of the 2004 Takashi Miike film ZEBRAMAN, I originally wrote the essay without knowing that a manga version existed, so I attempted a quickie correction when I discovered the manga's existence, saying, "Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read."                                                                                                                                              However, according to the automatic translation of a Japanese-language Wiki, it now appears that the movie came about first-- partly celebrating Miike's career, as it was his 100th feature film-- and that the manga apparently came afterward, ostensibly more the creation of artist Yamada Reiji.                                                                                                                                                                                            'Although the basic setting is borrowed, the story and other aspects are almost original to Yamada. In the movie version, the monsters who appear are "aliens who invaded the Earth", but in the manga version, they are "ordinary people who have been brainwashed because they have darkness in their hearts and have committed evil deeds according to their desires". Even the people who "play" the phantom also have loved ones, and the main character's own feelings and conflicts, which are suffering just like the monsters while playing the hero, and the process of the protagonist reexamining himself through battles and awakening to true family love are depicted more vividly than in the movie version, and the themes of "humanity" and "family ties" are more brought to the forefront.'-- Japanese-language Wiki.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I'm familiar with the fact that manga serials are sometimes responses to anime serials or to "light novels." On this blog, I've reviewed a couple of manga-serials concocted from such prose novels, such as MAYO CHIKI and ZERO'S FAMILIAR. But now that l have read Yamada's version of ZEBRAMAN, it seems to have been designed to oppose much of the content in the Miike films.                         

 First, as the Wiki-article states, the 2004 Miike movie (like its 2010 sequel) takes the view that Shinichi Ishikawa, forty-something schoolteacher in Yokohama, has idolized the "Zebraman" tv show of his youth without knowing that, all along, he has always lived in a tokusatsu world. By the time Ishikawa reaches age forty-two, alien influences abound so much that bizarre entities are spawned, many of whom are strange recapitulations of monsters from the tv show. The same ET phenomenon confers special powers upon Ishikawa, allowing him to become Zebraman and combat the evil aliens. But in the manga, there are no genuine aliens, only human beings who dress up in weird costumes. Some have odd resources, such as hypnotism. but that's the extent of the metaphenomenality here.         

                                                                                            

 Ishikawa's contempt from his family is about the same as what the movie depicts, with a son who finds his father lame, a wife who cheats on Ishikawa with a younger man, and a daughter who signals some weird Oedipal issues by sleeping around with older men. Yamada alters the dynamic between the teacher and his daughter, though, by showing that as a child Midori idolized her father and wanted to marry him. Ishikawa encounters Midori while he's dressed as Zebraman, though when the unwitting hero encounters his first opponent, he ends up saving another teenaged female victim from the TV-monster "Crabjack the Ripper " Yamada doesn't pursue the psychological trope of "knight rescuing damsel" to any transgressive conclusions, though, because the author wants to build upon the film's suggestion that Ishikawa may get the chance to choose between his bad real family and a potential new one.                             

  Ishikawa's relationship to Shinpei, a "better son" to take the place of the real one, stays roughly the same, and the manga even keeps a version of the scene in which Shinpei overcomes the mental block that keeps him in a wheelchair. But Yamada builds up the character of Kana, Shinpei's mother, to the extent that now she's Ishikawa's childhood girlfriend, the "good wife" to take the place of the unfaithful one-- who's never particularly sympathetic, despite the gospel of forgiveness put forth in the late chapters.                             

                                                

Crabjack like Zebraman, is really a forty-something man in a costume. This serial killer, Kitahara, has been dating if not definitely screwing Midori, and he finally decides to massacre her like his previous victims. Zebraman saves his daughter and eventually regains her respect, but Kitahara introduces a new wrinkle not in the film: that he goes after sinful young women because he himself possesses a young daughter he believes to be pure-- which comes up again in later chapters. Kitahara also tells Zebraman that he thinks they both come from "the Galactic Church," founded by a mystery man named "Gray." Yamada will build up the contrast between the opposed "black and white" of the Zebraman-ethos and that of Gray.         

                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

For brevity's sake I'll pass over the next sequence, which more or less duplicates the Midori sequence, but with a killer named "ScorpioDahmer," who preys upon on unfaithful wives, yet targets both the bad wife Sachiyo and the good potential wife Kana. Toward the sequence's end, though, Kana introduces the ethic of forgiveness that Zebraman will articulate later. Before dying, ScorpioDahmer articulates the same ethic of "black and white decisiveness" vs. "gray equivocation" that Zebraman has dreamed of.                                             

   Yamada then introduces his last sequence, which runs through most of the remaining 26 chapters: one in which the emissaries of Gray seek to manipulate children-- including Ishikawa's son Kazuki -- into becoming maniacal killers. During this continuity Yamada introduces two more female high-schoolers, Rin and Sayaka. I found Rin something of a waste of time, and not much better conceived than Kazuki. But Sayaka proves a little more interesting, because she's the supposedly "pure daughter" of Midori's erstwhile psycho-lover Kitahara.                                                                                                               

                                                                                                      Gray's servant "Shrike-Manson" (who wears presumably artificial wings) is another adult employee at Ishikawa's school (and thus another reflection of Ishikawa). He seduces the high-schooler Sayaka in the process of turning her into one of his killer minions, and at one point she even beats down Zebraman himself with some sort of knuckle-dusters.                                                                         

                                         

This part of "the Kazuki arc" includes Zebraman countering Shrike-Manson's pernicious claim that his adherents can take on special powers by serving him and emphasizes the common clay of all human beings instead. Kazuki doesn't forswear his master due to Zebraman's speech, though, so Yamada pivots to the unsolved mystery as to who created the Zebraman TV show and who's the architect of the imitation monsters. Ishikawa then gains access to the final, never-filmed script for the show, which seems to end with the death of Zebraman.                                                                                         

Ishikawa ultimately wins back the heart of Kazuki, and for good measure, Sayaka aids the hero against Crabjack, without even knowing that he's her father Kitahara. After dragging out the "Shrike-Manson" sequence far too long, Yamada then concludes his epic with the hurried revelation that the mastermind Gray was a failed idealist who became frustrated when his television show was cancelled. Gray's reasons for forming his "Galactic Church" and fostering real versions of his fantasy-monsters never makes much sense, and I have no idea why so many of the phony monsters have serial-killer names. At best, Yamada loosely implies that Gray, by making monsters, wanted to bring forth a real version of his hero-- which he did. Zebraman does avoid dying like the hero of the script, leaving him free to decide whether he will stay with his old family or choose the new one.                                                                                                                                                         ZEBRAMAN the manga is thus distinct enough from the film to be viewed as a separate work with its own themes, and a different orientation, hewing closer to the drama than to the film's ironic mythos. The series is definitely uneven, possibly because the author was sometimes making things up on the fly while trying to keep at least a loose connection to his source material. But it's one of the few adaptations of a contemporaneous work that seeks to strongly deviate from the source material, the only other precursor being the Robert Aldrich film of Mickey Spillane's KISS ME DEADLY.                                                                                                                                                                             

MYTHCOMICS: "WOMEN HOWLING AT THE MOON" (FUUSUKE, 1969)

Osamu Tezuka became widely associated, in both his own country and in others, with squeaky-clean (usually) kids' entertainment. But he had attempted more adult works even before his ASTRO BOY breakout, such as 1949's METROPOLIS. And toward the end of the 1960s, the God of Manga became increasingly involved in manga with pronounced sexual content.

FUUSUKE is a minor work, consisting of eleven installments in the life of the title character. There's no real continuity between the stories, a few of which take place back in Japan's feudal era. The only point the tales have in common is to show the hapless Fuusuke getting humiliated, like a "salaryman" version of Dagwood Bumstead. But for all Dagwood's ignominies, at least he didn't have his sexual capacities trashed. True, everything that happens in the one mythic FUUSUKE story, "Women Howling at the Moon," happens within the main character's dream. But Tezuka wasn't describing , Jules Feiffer-style, the shortcomings of one protagonist, but of the male sex generally, at least in 1969 Japan.

Fuusuke's dream imagines that Earth's hunger for the commodity of "moon rocks" following the 1969 lunar landing results in the strip-mining of Luna. Though the second panel gives us the image of the moon-rocket as penis, it's Earth's vaginas that are empowered by increased lunar radiation. (Tezuka's explanation of the moon's increased shininess oddly invokes an image associated with male aging.) Tezuka also loosely references the moon's much storied influence upon women's periods, though he doesn't sustain the allusion.

The lunar radiation has a pronounced effect on women (possibly in the rest of the world too, though Japanese life alone is spotlighted).  The females of the species become endlessly horny on full-moon nights, so much so that they not only attack their husbands, but any males they can find. To Fuusuke's immense aggravation, he seems to be the one Japanese male that none of these rapacious women will bother with. Meanwhile, women everywhere celebrate their newfound sexual freedom, just as if moonshine had taken the place of the Pill.

Though it's impossible to gauge passage of time in Fuusuke's jumbled dream-world, things swiftly escalate from isolated attacks to hordes of women attacking the police forces. Moreover, in a move that seems counter-intuitive, some females become "black widow" cannibals. Not surprisingly, Tezuka is careful not to include any references in the dream to the fate of Japanese children amid all this hullabaloo.

One of Fuusuke's comrades avers that "none of this would have happened if men hadn't become so weak." This sentiment is echoed by the ending, in which, just before the protagonist wakes up, he's being lauded as the only male immune to being ravaged, though only because of his unexplained total lack of sex appeal. Tezuka's final word is, "This is the sad dream that the most unpopular men in the world have to comfort themselves."

But this isn't the final word according to the dynamics of the story. Tezuka certainly puts a lot more effort into elaborating his sex-scenario than he needed to simply explain Fuusuke's sexual alienation-- especially since the dream doesn't really "explain" anything. 

Traditional "the fox and the grapes" rationalizations usually follow some pattern of criticizing the tastes of the opposite sex-- women are superficially attracted to money, social position, good looks or displays of macho physicality. But the Moon-Howlers display no discrimination whatever. None of the victimized men are better looking than Fuusuke, and there's nothing to mitigate the opinion of Fuusuke's friend, that all Japanese men have become weak. And what do money or social position matter, since the women aren't forcing their conquests into marriage, and at least some of those conquests end up in a cook-pot?

In the Howlers' near-total lack of discrimination, they resemble the male of the species, who constantly want sex with any available female. Western culture, in fact, compares horny men to another creature known for howling at the moon: the venerable Canis Lupus. It's just as simplistic to say "rape is only about power" as it is to say "rape is only about sex," but clearly ravishment depends upon some power differential. Does the weakness of Japanese men trigger the Moon-Howlers to assume the role of rapacious males? Tezuka doesn't precisely say this, but claiming that lunar radiation makes women want to kill and devour their mates recalls a remark attributed to Simone Weil: that male rapists physically dominating women prior to sex is comparable to a butcher "tenderizing" meat.

The reason for Fuusuke's exclusion is a joke without a punchline. He's certainly not being excluded because he's bad breeding material, because the Moon-Howlers are utterly unconcerned with breeding, There's no answer to Fuusuke's existential question in the dream as such, but there's the suggestion of a clue in Tezuka's invocation of the menstrual cycle. Accepting the generalization that the cycle can be distinguished into two main phases-- the follicular, which encourages female horniness, and the luteal, which discourages sexual responsiveness-- then the Moon-Howlers seem to enter the follicular stage whenever they stalk Japanese men. Only Fuusuke, for whatever unknown reason, shifts them into the luteal phase, in which his mere presence "switches them off." 

"Moon's" image of rapacious women finds an echo in his next-year work APOLLO'S SONG. In this more developed work, Tezuka focuses on a young male who's just the opposite of Fuusuke-- being a more traditional aggressive male-- but who is still utterly trammeled by female influences that leave him "cut off at the knees," or some similar compromise of his masculinity.

MYTHCOMICS: "LONG LIVE THE KING" (POPEYE, 1932-33)

Though the popularity of Popeye had already hit new heights three years after his introduction in E.C. Segar's THIMBLE THEATER, 1932 also provided the one-eyed salt with a new venue, as he made the transition to animated theatrical shorts. As many before me have mentioned, the mere fact that Popeye had just had a week-long battle with a pirate named Bluto resulted in this one-shot comics villain becoming ensconced as the go-to evildoer for the cartoons.

The Bluto arc and the one after it were just business as usual for Segar, wherein he would generate some loose concept and use it as an excuse for an assortment of gags. However, the arc after the arc that followed Bluto's managed to form the gags into a spoofy satire of politics. 

The post-Bluto arc involved Popeye and various other characters rendering aid to King Blozo as he sought to harvest gold from a sunken city in order to solve the economic problems of his postage-stamp kingdom Nazilia. (Whatever the origin of the name, I think it's unlikely that Segar derived the country from a notorious German political party.) However, in Blozo's absence his foremost general Bunzo tries to take over the throne. After being ejected, Bunzo forms a new scheme, hiring a hot young foreign woman to vamp Blozo. Her name is "Dinah Mow," eventually explained by her ability to "spark." 

Bunzo only wants Dinah to trick Blozo with the idea that she'll become his queen later (despite the fact that Bunzo is married). But Dinah pitches some woo in Popeye's direction as well. Despite his intention to remain true to his sweetie-pie Olive Oyl, Popeye does yield to the "vampirate's" blandishments. "I thought I could resisk ya by bein' a man of steel, and here ya happing to be a woman fulla magnetism. Arf! Arf!" Olive rails against Popeye, who makes no excuses for his waywardness, though to be sure the sailor's idea of "sparking" is to sit holding the vamp's hand. Dinah conveniently decides she's really in love with Popeye but leaves Nazilia of her own accord.

Blozo's own citizens are still not very impressed with his kingship, so Popeye suggests that Blozo hand out a big nugget of gold to each of his subjects. However, in the tradition of welfare states everywhere, Blozo then finds that no one in Nazilia wants to work for a living. At first Blozo thinks he'll simply tax everyone heavily, but Popeye has a quicker solution: using his skill with dice to turn everyone back into paupers.

But Bunzo challenges Blozo in an election. This is one of the funniest sections, in that Popeye, despite his notorious intregrity (intekrity?), cheerfully tampers with the ballot-box as much as Bunzo's agents do. 

Despite all this perfidy, Bunzo appears to win the election, and he demotes Blozo to office-boy. Bunzo's wife then decides to exert her queenly powers, bringing "dance boys" into the palace. However, Popeye finds a bunch of uncounted votes and Blozo returns to the throne. Bunzo threatens revolution, but Popeye buys off the rebels by tossing gold nuggets at them, so that they fight one another over the gold. In other news, Olive copies Dinah Mow by dolling herself so that both Popeye and Blozo don't recognize her but still pitch woo to her. When she removes her false face, Popeye is duly ashamed of his faithlessness-- for a while, at least.

The master-thread of this arc comes down to "everyone's a dick," but Segar puts across the moral failings of all the characters with such joie de vivre that KING remains a sprightly comedy rather than a depressing irony. In contrast to some of Segar's other arcs, Popeye doesn't perform any marvelous feats, though he's seen to be strong enough, even without gimmicks, to hit a guy hard enough to send him flying out a window.

"MAD LOVE" (BATMAN ADVENTURES, 1994)

I've already done a short review of the animated adaptation of this one-shot comic here and gave that episode a strong mythicity rating. While a number of beat-for-beat adaptations don't necessarily duplicate the myth-discourse of their originals, both original and derivation are equally good at depicting the psychological morass in the mind of Harley Quinn.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini has stated that he had no notion that the girl in the jester outfit was going to become one of the most enduring characters of nineties comics. Originally Dini only meant to give Joker a female henchwoman loosely akin to the molls who accompanied many male villains on the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. However, even the few molls who patterned their attire after that of their male leader were usually just there to look pretty. Even though Harley was not intended to appear more than once, Dini had her voiced by his college buddy Arleen Sorkin, and even in that one episode there was more back-and-forth between Harley and Joker than one ever found in a 1966 Bat-episode.

Since Harley's character evolved organically, it's possible that Dini never really thought about the Harley-Joker relationship changing in early episodes. However, MAD LOVE shows the writer, teamed with artist/co-creator Bruce Timm, finally decided to portray that interaction as fundamentally toxic. Joker was, after all, a manic killer, and it may not be coincidence that in her animated episodes Dini didn't actually show Harley callously killing anyone, however often she fought with Batman and his allies.

So LOVE starts out showing Joker and Harley trying to knock off Commissioner Gordon. Batman prevents this, but Harley is instrumental in stunning the crusader so that the two criminals escape. (Note: the cartoon improves on the Joker's farewell line, having the villain say, "may the floss be with you.") On the same page, though, Joker is seen to be completely ungrateful for Harley's help.

Batman then converses with Alfred, musing on Harley's origins. Two details that were omitted from the cartoon: that Harley got into college on a gymnastics scholarship, and that she apparently used sex to pad her college resume.

Meanwhile, Joker is taking it hard about getting defeated again, and he's so desperate for a new Batman-slaying scheme that he starts reviewing old schemes he already discarded. After being maltreated by her "puddin'" once again, Harley almost has a moment of clarity about her rotten love-life. 

This leads to an extended flashback, in which she goes to work at Joker's perennial prison, Arkham Asylum. She's secretly hoping to garner big-time secrets from some of the celebrity inmates in order to write a best-selling tell-all book, But Joker sees in Doctor Harleen Quinzell a mark to be played, and he plays her so well that she abandons all her small-time ambitions, making her into what she believes to be the perfect "Clown Princess of Crime."

But at the end of her flashback, Harley ends up blaming Batman for all of her troubles. She uses Joker's discarded piranha-fish death-trap and traps Batman in it. Batman's only hope is to play on her psychological vulnerabilities, in a more honest manner than Joker did, by convincing her to call Joker in to witness his eternal foe's demise.

Joker comes. Joker is not pleased that his girlfriend trumped him.

So Harley's reward for patterning herself after a clown-themed stone killer is almost getting killed. Batman escapes thanks to having brought Joker into the mix, and Joker seems to "die" in his own big fall. At story's end, Harley returns to Arkham but as an inmate. This time, she almost comes to terms with her own egotistical follies. But Dini wasn't quite ready for Harley's reform, and LOVE ends with her re-descent into the best known "amour fou" of the superhero genre.

But she didn't stay lost in that delusion, and over time Harley became the poster girl for women working their way out of toxic relationships with men, as seen in the 2016 SUICIDE SQUAD. (No one seems interested in whether her girl-on-girl friendship with Poison Ivy might prove equally-- or even literally-- just as toxic, but -- baby steps, baby steps.)