TIMELY MEDITATIONS

 So far my most extensive ruminations about how icon-crossover is affected by temporal considerations appeared in last June's TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT. And now, as if so often the case, I find myself repenting at leisure some of the proposals I put forth-- though in my case I've never explicitly been "married" to any of them.

So in ALIGNMENT, I said:

 A major aspect of my crossover-theory is that of alignment; the principle that every literary cosmos, particularly with regard to serial concepts, is dominated by one or more superordinate icons whose are the "center" of the narrative, while all subordinate icons orbit around the central icon or icons. In CROSSING GODS I gave several examples of innominate figures from mythology being "crossed over" with one another, and sometimes with newly created serial characters, the example of the latter being Atticus of "the Iron Druid Chronicles." In COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 3 I spoke of a different form of innominate character, that of a fictionalized version of a historical personage. I asserted that no crossover took place when a narrative associated legendary characters already associated in history-- Jesse James and Cole Younger-- but that it was one if the author depicted an association between characters not known to have encountered one another, like Jesse James and Belle Starr.

Characters involved in time-travel, though, break down normative categories of alignment, and for that reason even figures I've rated as properly "legendary" don't rate as crossovers when they interact with characters who (more or less like authors) are no longer bound by restrictions of the time-space continuum. Thus, a goodie-good Billy the Kid meeting a version of Dracula? Crossover. A vampire-version of Billy the Kid, who has no real connection with the historical figure, meeting Bloodrayne? Crossover. But Billy the Kid, as portrayed by Robert Walker Jr. in the scene above, meeting one of the Time Tunnel guys? Not a crossover. And the same principle applies to works in which the time-travelers bring together assorted characters from different eras, as Billy the Kid, Napoleon and Socrates are brought together by those excellent time-dudes Bill and Ted.

So, in re-assessing this theory, I ask myself: why was it important to me that all subordinate icons in a serial narrative should be aligned in terms of time? Arguably, there are many serial narratives wherein the superordinate icons are not aligned with the subordinates in terms of space. All of the adventures in the 1960s STAR TREK take place within a certain time-frame, roughly aligned with the life-spans of the main characters. But the TREK superordinates never visit the same precise location once, aside from appearing on Earth, but in different time-frames. A couple of times, Enterprise heroes meet figures that appear to be such innominate legends of history as Genghis Khan and the Clanton Gang, but these are merely lookalike constructs.

I suppose my basic feeling was that protagonists who traduce the boundaries of time aren't "playing fair." Such TREK antagonists as the Metrons and the Excalibans are so separated by the gulfs of space that they're unlikely to meet-- but as long as they're in the same time-frame, they COULD. But there would normally be no way that a 20th-century "Time Tunnel guy" could meet the legends of other eras, like Ulysses, Merlin, or Billy the Kid, without crossing the gulfs of time. Conquering space with the use of a star-drive may be sheer fantasy in reality. Yet it seems a believable extrapolation from the way Planet Earth has grown "smaller" thanks to technological advances that allow, say, James Bond to jet over to Italy or Japan. 

Nevertheless, I have to admit that in my ALIGNMENT statement I accidentally alloted crossover-status to a different form of "time-travel." I said that Bloodrayne's meeting with Billy the Kid counted as a crossover. But the heroine is only able to meet her universe's version of the  Kid in the late 1800s because she's an immortal dhampire. Bloodrayne becomes a mature female in the early 1800s, but she looks the same age in the late 1800s, and the same is true in her final cinematic adventure, where she's still unaltered age-wise, in WWII, kicking Nazi ass. So, if I'm going to allow for Bloodrayne meeting The Kid thanks to a fantasy-factor, I suppose I ought to make the same allowance with regard to time tunnels, TARDIS-machines, and the like. 

However, not all fantasy-factors are equal. I would maintain that non-legendary historical figures still carry no innominate crossover-mojo when they appear in modern times, whether it's Ben Franklin whammied up by Samantha Stevens or Bill and Ted using their time-traveling phonebooth to summon Napoleon and Socrates. But Billy the Kid remains a legendary historical figure, so I guess his meeting with the excellent dudes-- who, to be sure, are both superordinate icons-- does count as a crossover. And the same would be the case for their interactions with innominate figures of myth and legend, like Satan and the Easter Bunny-- particularly when Bill and Ted meet both in the same narrative, giving rise to a "Super-Legend Crossover."

I also raised issues with the Quality Comics character Kid Eternity, whose super-power allowed him to call upon various figures of myth and fiction to fight on his behalf. I even cited a page from one adventure in which the hero calls up Sherlock Holmes. A side-character rightly remarks that Holmes was created in fictional stories, and Holmes answers that "Doyle's stories made me seem real to so many readers that I became a real person." Because of this sort of jiggery-pokery, I'd speculate that the hero's power didn't summon actual humans or deities from the past, but merely images of them, who were able to flawlessly emulate the skills or powers of their models. 

If these figures were all just spectres of the original models, then Kid Eternity isn't actually summoning anyone from any time-frame, not even contemporary heroes like Blackhawk and Plastic Man, and thus that they aren't any more diegetically "real" than the illusions of Genghis Khan and the Clanton Gang in STAR TREK. So it might be the case that none of the characters the hero summons are crossover-figures-- and the same would be true of legendary evildoers called forth by the Kid's polar opposite, Master Man from KID ETERNITY #15 (1946).

However, if the time-travel summoning is veracious, then innominate  manifestations can be crossovers. This would include such interesting if quirky examples as AVENGERS #10, in which newly-minted super-villain Immortus invokes innominate figures of fiction and history such as Attila the Hun, Paul Bunyan, Merlin, Goliath, and a version of Hercules presumably unrelated to the Marvel-Earth incarnation that would debut a year or so later.

And just to give an example of a "team" of innominate legends drawn purely from recorded history, here's a 1947 BLUE BEETLE story from ALL TOP COMICS #8. The titular hero encounters, thanks to a time-travel device, a "super-menace team-up" whose members are culled from different eras: the pirate Blackbeard, the serial killer Jack the Ripper, and the wife-murderer Doctor Crippen. In fact, the writer of this tale made an overt attempt to "mythify" the historical Crippen-- who only killed one woman according to the law-- into some sort of odd "Bluebeard" type who killed multiple wives.

SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT

 A major aspect of my crossover-theory is that of alignment; the principle that every literary cosmos, particularly with regard to serial concepts, is dominated by one or more superordinate icons whose are the "center" of the narrative, while all subordinate icons orbit around the central icon or icons. In CROSSING GODS I gave several examples of innominate figures from mythology being "crossed over" with one another, and sometimes with newly created serial characters, the example of the latter being Atticus of "the Iron Druid Chronicles." In COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 3 I spoke of a different form of innominate character, that of a fictionalized version of a historical personage. I asserted that no crossover took place when a narrative associated legendary characters already associated in history-- Jesse James and Cole Younger-- but that it was one if the author depicted an association between characters not known to have encountered one another, like Jesse James and Belle Starr.

Characters involved in time-travel, though, break down normative categories of alignment, and for that reason even figures I've rated as properly "legendary" don't rate as crossovers when they interact with characters who (more or less like authors) are no longer bound by restrictions of the time-space continuum. Thus, a goodie-good Billy the Kid meeting a version of Dracula? Crossover. A vampire-version of Billy the Kid, who has no real connection with the historical figure, meeting Bloodrayne? Crossover. But Billy the Kid, as portrayed by Robert Walker Jr. in the scene above, meeting one of the Time Tunnel guys? Not a crossover. And the same principle applies to works in which the time-travelers bring together assorted characters from different eras, as Billy the Kid, Napoleon and Socrates are brought together by those excellent time-dudes Bill and Ted.

The same applies to figures of myth and folklore, as when Bill and Ted take a bogus journey that brings them into contact with both the Easter Bunny and Satan, or when the Time Tunnelers meet the equally innominate figure of Merlin.

There's also a cognate figure of characters who summon up innominate characters without those icons leaving their own time-frame. In comics the hero who did this most often was Quality's Kid Eternity, who was forever enlisting characters from both myth (Nepture, Midas, Achilles) and from history (Annie Oakley, Abraham Lincoln). None of these would even be charisma-crossovers, either with one another or with Kid Eternity.

However, unlike the time travelers Kid Eternity did possess the power to plumb the vasty deeps of fiction as well-- and so, when he conjured up Sherlock Holmes or (more amusingly) Blackhawk, THOSE would count as crossovers with nominative icons.