MYTHCOMICS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK (1994-96)

 There's a certain irony that for many decades the Disney Corporation invested heavily in promulgating its version of "Americana" to the American public, through adaptations of historical events like "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" and theme-park attractions like "Frontierland." Yet, when their widespread commercial interests resulted in producing their own genuine Americana-- something with arguably deeper roots than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck-- the corporate gatekeepers treated both the creator of the work, and the creator's most ardent disciple, with something less than approbation.                                           

 I confess that though I read most of the important Carl Barks "duck books" when they were just comics that cost a dime or so, I recognized their special quality. Yet I did not become passionately devoted to the duck-world as did my rough contemporary Don Rosa. He started out simply doing fannish pastiches of Barks, but over time Rosa graduated to submitting his own art and scripts to publishers-- not to Disney, which didn't allow artists to keep original art, but to the European publisher Egmont, who kept the Disney funny-animal brand circulating overseas even when such "kids' comics" were fading from American comics shops. And his grand project, "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," was Rosa's ultimate homage to Barks. Barks had taken the originally rough character of Scrooge, in large part the epitome of the Skinflint Scot, and made him into a paean to the American success story. Rosa took the next logical step: to assemble all the data that Barks had conveyed about Scrooge in a panoply of largely discontinuous stories-- and make it into a biography that was a more organized portrait of American capitalistic triumph.                                                    

All twelve of the stories in LIFE are stand-alone stories, beginning with Scrooge's childhood in late 1800s Scotland. During these formative years, the boy becomes obsessed with making his fortune, and he keeps the first dime he ever made-- his "lucky dime," as some Barks stories called it-- as a marker of his intention to amass wealth rather than spending it.                                                                                            

One thing that distinguishes Rosa's project from simple continuity-building is that once Scrooges makes his inevitable journey to the United States to seek his fortune, Rosa exerted himself to research each historical situation in search of unique factoids, like the perils of navigating steamboats on the Great Mississippi, or a unique law about laying claims to mining property.                                                   

   

 Just like Barks, Rosa also points out both the dramatic and comedic consequences of making money, as when Young Man Scrooge finds his fair-weather friends turning away from him once he's become a man of means.                                                                                               
 

Like many fortune-hunters, Scrooge's primary relationship to the many exotic lands he visits is that of hunting for precious metals in the earth. However, on occasion the young adventurer encounters some of the metaphysical mysteries of older cultures in spite of himself, as with this Close Encounter of the Dreamtime Kind.                              

Now, in general Scrooge deals fairly with those who deal fairly with him and wreaks vengeance on those who seek to rob or swindle him. He's not the typical capitalist exploiter of the land and native cultures-- except once, when it's funny.                                                        

Rosa continues his trope of "money makes no one friends" when Scrooge returns to his native Scotland, now a millionaire. He's unquestionably arrogant about his success, but the humbler denizens of Scrooge's burg are something less than charitable. And though the above exchange was written in the early 1990s, it sounds very contemporary, with one Scot insulting the rich duck, getting insulted in turn by Scrooge, and then complaining that Scrooge is "repressin'" him.                                                                                                         

Scrooge soon returns to his adventuring ways, with his two sisters in tow (since none of his future wage-slaves, nephew Donald and Donald's own nephews, have been born yet). This time the arrogant billionaire, still focused on making more money but only through his own personal efforts, runs up against a fearsome native who's fully aware of how Scrooge means to exploit him.                                                  

This tale is also Rosa's partial rewrite of a famous Barks story, "Voodoo Hoodoo," in which the billionaire duck cheats the above-shown native chief Foola Zoola. In the Barks story, Scrooge shows no regret for his actions, but Rosa attempts to make his deviation from honest if hard-dealing labor to be a lapse in judgment-- one that Scrooge briefly regrets, only to conveniently forget about making things right.                                                                                                       

 In the final story Rosa retells the story in which the elderly, reclusive billionaire at last meets his nephew Donald and his three grandnephews, with whom he will go on to a new series of world-spanning adventures. In his notes for this story, Rosa attributes to Barks the central idea: that Scrooge's real reason for holding on to all his self-earned wealth is that every dollar, every coin is a memento of the uncompromising life he's lived. I leave it to Duckworld scholars to determine if Rosa is being overly modest on the subject. I think it's possible that Rosa is more deeply in historiography than Barks was, not least because Barks's editors may have encouraged him to avoid any topics not appropriate to children's comics-- though, because Barks was a genius, such topics made their way into the mix anyway. Incidentally, Rosa's passion for real-world history leads to the only crossover aspect of the work, apart from the final-story appearance of Donald and the nephews. As I said, all of the stories in the volume are fundamentally stand-alones, so that none of the Scottish mallard's famous foes-- Flintheart Glomgold, Soapy Slick, and the Beagle Boys-- "cross over" with one another in a given story. However, in one story Scrooge has a brief encounter with none other than the legendary Wyatt Earp. True, it's Wyatt Earp depicted as a funny animal-- but it's a charisma-type crossover all the same.      

MYTHCOMICS" "TRALLA LA" (UNCLE SCROOGE #6, 1954)

I'm not an expert on either Carl Barks or his work on Disney Ducks, so I don't know exactly how many Uncle Scrooge adventures Barks had done before the millionaire mallard got his own comic in 1953. UNCLE SCROOGE #1 seems to have set the pace for future adventures, in that its lead story "Only a Poor Old Man" shows how Scrooge McDuck could be alternately admirable, for his great skill in making money, and yet laughable, for being so ineluctably tied down by the task of guarding his riches.

"Tralla La" (a name patently indebted to the famed "Shangri-La" of the 1933 James Hilton novel LOST HORIZON) starts with Scrooge being more desperate about his money than ever. Everyone wants a piece of his vast wealth, and he's become exhausted by the job of maintaining it. The bonkers billionaire even says he hates his money, so Scrooge's subordinates summon his nephew Donald to see what he can do. 

Because Scrooge needs a vacation from his responsibilities, he decides to seek out a remote Himalayan country called "Tralla La," a "place without money." So Scrooge, Donald and Donald's three nephews head for the Himalayas. With their scientific acumen, Huey, Dewey and Louie locate the hidden valley of Tralla La with ridiculous ease, and after some setup about the peculiar conditions of the country's unique geographic situation.

At first Tralla La seems to be everything Scrooge wants in a vacation paradise. No one uses money, so no one bugs McDuck for handouts or expenses. The high muckamuck boasts that "friendship is the thing we value most," and Donald observes that "nobody wants anything that anybody else owns." However, Ugly Duckbergian Scrooge is responsible for bringing a serpent into this Edenic world. Scrooge loses a bottlecap, and as soon as one Tralla-la-an finds it, it becomes valuable precisely because no one else in the land has anything like it. 

I should note at this point that Barks' story greatly resembles the premise of the 1984 movie THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY. wherein a group of African Bushmen quarrel over a Coke bottle, fallen into their domain from a plane. But there's a crucial difference. The Bushmen all want the bottle because it's useful in their daily lives, as a pestle and whatnot. The Tralla La-lans don't care that bottlecaps are trash; to them, they're rare curiosities because they're not common items. It's apparent that the only reason the natives weren't greedy was because everyone owned the same sort of things, so there was no opportunity for conspicuous consumption. The nephews assert that they can eliminate the rarity of bottlecaps if Scrooge hires a plane to bombard Tralla La with more of the rare items, so that they won't be rare any more.

Unfortunately, Donald orders far too many bottlecaps dropped into the valley, so that the alien objects begin to threaten life itself. In a quick wrapup, the nephews petition the ruler to release them, so that they can reach the outer world and cancel further deliveries. Since it is a kid's comic, Barks couldn't very well portray the Tralla-la-lans as having had their economy wrecked by modern-day outsiders, so the artist just loosely suggests that the natives will muddle through somehow (admittedly, through their own folly). The story ends with Scrooge briefly imagining that all the excitement has immunized him against the mere fear of being asked for money. But then the kids ask for their promised pay, and Scrooge is no better off than he was before-- though I imagine that his specific phobia, having served its comic purpose, simply doesn't show up again.

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2

My first crossover-category is that is THE HIGH STATURE CROSSOVER. This is usually a crossover of two or more characters/presences that have embodied PRIME stature in earlier narratives, though there are some exceptions to this rule.

An early example of a literary crossover is that of Rider Haggard's SHE AND ALLAN, in which Haggard's two most famous characters encountered one another for the course of one novel.

In comics, of course, Timely Comics provided a major model for the future when its editors crossed over two of its continuing features, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. However, the character's intermittent encounters were not limited to one interaction, but went on for much of both characters' original runs.

These characters also briefly crossed over in the very short-lived team title, ALL WINNERS SQUAD-- which factoid leads me to mention that I've reversed the position I expressed in THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS, where I said that I did not deem "hero-teams" to be crossovers. Now I tend to say that they definitely are when the majority of the team-members maintain their own separate features. The principle may even extend to characters who had moderately substantial features of their own before being revived by other publishers. Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

All of these characters are incidents of two Primes interacting. However, in some cases a Prime may appear in another Prime's series in such a way that the former becomes a Sub-- but without a concomitant loss of charisma. For instance, Donald Duck was conceived as a 1931 animated cartoon character long before Uncle Scrooge appeared in a 1947 comic book. Yet whenever Donald and his three nephews appeared in the UNCLE SCROOGE stories, Scrooge was the Prime, as the stories were primarily about him. Yet in a sense Donald and the nephews were an integral part of the Scrooge mythos, in part because regular readers always had some knowledge that Donald existed in his own cosmos alongside that of Scrooge.

To conclude this post, I'll add that on occasion an iconic character will be partly revised for the needs of a later crossover. The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon.

More to come.

MYTHCOMICS: "ODDBALL ODYSSEY" (UNCLE SCROOGE #40, 1963), "FOR OLD DIME'S SAKE" (UNCLE SCROOGE #43, 1963)

One of the more interesting characters introduced in Carl Barks's UNCLE SCROOGE stories was the sorceress Magica De Spell.

In this essay Don Rosa opined that "Barks... seemed to really disdain the use of a character with occult powers." I agree that this seems to be the way the villainess started out. In her first appearance (UNCLE SCROOGE #36, 1961), Magica appears at Scrooge's door, billing herself as a "sorceress" and asking to buy one of his dimes for a dollar. Scrooge, though laughing up his sleeve at the idea of a modern-day sorceress, takes her up on the offer, but mistakenly lets her take his "Number One Dime," the first dime he ever earned, and thus the foundation of his fortune. (Barks gets good comic mileage out of the rich duck's scorn for folkloric beliefs, only to reveal his own superstitions.)

For the rest of the story, Scrooge and his perpetual allies, nephew Donald and his three nephews, strive to get back the dime before Magica-- who is, interestingly enough, an Italian duck-witch, loosely patterned on Gina Lollobrigida-- plunges the Number One Dime into Mount Vesuvius, all to make the talisman into a "super amulet." In this tale and in Magica's next two appearances, the witch-lady shows no special powers, and can only defend herself with sleep-gas bombs. However, in the character's fourth appearance, Magica gains control of the wand of the ancient witch Circe, and from then on, Magica assumed the persona of a mystical powerhouse. Though Barks did not write/draw many Magica stories, it was this version of the villain that became enshrined in later comics and cartoons-- and, contrary to Rosa, I believe that Barks re-worked her to make her more "occult" so that she would prove a more formidable opponent.

"Oddball Odyssey" opens with Scrooge seeking out Donald and his three nephews to invite them to join him in seeking the treasure "that Ulysses took with him from the ruins of Troy." Scrooge's source of information is a letter written by a supposed descendant of the enchantress Circe, who claims that Ulysses left the treasure on her island. The three nephews observe that Scrooge seems enthralled by the idea of finding this mythical treasure, and that their uncle Donald, as soon as he catches the perfume on the letter, also becomes captivated with this grand quest. Once the nephews hear that the mysterious benefactor wants Scrooge to bring along his Number One Dime, they're sure that it's all a scheme of Magica De Spell. Unable to dissuade Scrooge and Donald from this exploit, the nephews go along on their one-sail boat all the way to some Mediterranean island.

The nephews' guess is confirmed when a disguised Magica tries to make Scrooge give up his dime in exchange for phony treasure. However, though the nephews rescue Scrooge, Magica's low-level con leads her to new heights. In her frustration, she kicks through a wall in the old temple where she's run the con, and breaks into a hidden room. There she finds the wand of Circe, and uses it to force the ducks to remain on the isle, just as the original enchantress did with Ulysses.

Magica also forces Scrooge to choose between his beloved dime and his beloved relations. Reluctantly, Scrooge accedes to the will of the sorceress.

Scrooge escapes being turned into an animal, but his relatives then carry the fight to Magica, using their various skills as animals-- Donald as "slow but steady" turtle, the nephews as pigs-- to thwart Magica's plan to melt down Number One.

Scrooge then shows up and manages to break the wand, thus returning his relations to normal. The ducks don't get detained on the island as long as Ulysses did, but their leavetaking is less dignified, since as they flee Magica tries to bean them with her phony treasure-trinkets.

Three issues later, though, Magica's back with a restored wand, and she evinces almost godlike powers. Scrooge's money bin is repeatedly assailed by lightning bolts and cyclone winds, and Scrooge explains to his relatives that Magica's still trying to acquire Old Number One.

For her part, Magica provides exposition for the reader about her great new powers, about having "scrounged secrets" from old temples and caves that have given her control over the elements. Most interestingly, Magica advances a fairly sophisticated theory for the origin of the Greek pantheon: "those gods were more likely live sorcerers than figments of ancient dreams." This theory allowed Barks to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't have to show his witchy villain garnering power from either old gods or, for that matter, Satanic sources. Instead, it's implied that ordinary mortals can generate magic powers from study of the universe's secrets, which is certainly an odd thing to find in a Disney comic book of the period.

Magica journeys to Duckburg and makes more direct assaults on the money bin, but Scrooge counters her efforts with advanced technology. On top of this, one of Magica's assaults even makes Scrooge richer, thanks to the luck given him  by the dime.

At last Magica uses her wand's shape-changing power on herself, capturing Scrooge and becoming his double in order to gain access to the bin.

However, once again those smart little nephews suss out the deception. Scrooge intervenes as well, stealing back his dime from her, only to get a few painful "souvenirs" of his tilt with the witch.

Barks didn't use the character much longer, but these prove his best stories with Magica, in that they show a clever opposition between the days of modern-day science and the eras of ancient mysteries.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GOLDEN FLEECING" (UNCLE SCROOGE #12, 1955)

In my essay GRAND ALLUSIONS I set down some of my criteria as to why mythicity was not related to an artist's penchant for simply loading various references to archaic myth within the story. I gave a definition of "null-myth" that no longer applies in my more current essays: "an empty allusion to something that the author thinks will grab the reader's attention." The earlier isn't entirely without relevance to the definition founded in the concept of consummation, but it doesn't take in all those forms of "null-myths" that may make no actual allusions but still manage to drain any symbolic potential from the narrative via confused or inadequate depiction.

In the earlier essay I came down on Jack Kirby's ETERNALS for simply making empty allusions. Yet it's quite possible to "empty" a given myth-concept of its original content and yet "fill" it with a new content. (Kenosis and plerosis, all in one operation.)

Carl Barks' 1955 retelling of the "Golden Fleece" narrative manages to perform this operation. Because "The Golden Fleecing" is a humorous comic-book story aimed at young readers, it's a given that Barks had to leave out huge chunks of the best-known version of the story, the ARGONAUTICA of Apollonius Rhodius. Barks does include copious references to characters like Jason, Medea, and some of the Argonauts who sailed with Jason. But it's a given that the artist can't possibly allude to the more adult aspects of the Jason-tale. The principal elements Barks borrows are the Fleece itself (which may or may not have been woven from the wool of a golden ram), a sleepless dragon who guards the Fleece, and a gang of half-woman, half-bird "harpies."

Indeed, the very name of the harpies carried an unexpected adult connotation: according to the commentary in Fantagraphics' reprint of this story, some Disney editor forbade Barks from using the classical name of the bird-monster, because the word was slang for "prostitute" in some cultures. Barks was forced to change the name of his bird-women to "Larkies." But in classical myth, the harpies had an even more dire significance: they seem to have been death-spirits that "snatched" up people (their name is often translated as "snatchers")  or, alternately, stole food from mortals and caused them to starve to death. In the ARGONAUTICA the harpies are not directly concerned with the Fleece: Jason and his men seek out the soothsayer Phineas for his counsel, but they can only get his aid if they dispel the harpies, who keep Phineas in a state of near-starvation by befouling whatever food he tries to eat.

Uncle Scrooge's motives for seeking out the legendary Golden Fleece are necessarily not as noble as those of Jason. He's sitting around his vault one day, when he takes it into his head that he ought to have a new "loafer coat" like those worn by "other rich men." But because Scrooge is the incarnation of Scottish stinginess, he doesn't just indulge in the usual rich man's pursuit of "conspicuous consumption." Rather than buying an expensive coat at a retail store, Scrooge decides that he wants a coat of gold, made from one of his many golden bars. His tailor informs him that a coat made from metallic gold would not be practical, but he puts into Scrooge's head the classical idea of the Golden Fleece.

Scrooge regards the legends of Jason as quaint old stories. Fortuitously enough, a mysterious Arab named Ali waylays him, telling him that he Ali can lead Scrooge to the Golden Fleece itself, and as proof, Ali displays a small hunk of golden wool. Donald and his nephews are suspicious of Ali and his burnoose-cloaked brethren, but Scrooge is caught up in the fantasy of becoming a "modern Jason," and agrees to go with the Arabs all the way to fabled Colchis in their ship, explicitly modeled upon the example of the antique Argo. As the ship embarks, one of the Arabs catches Donald spying and snatches him up. Once the ship is under way, the Arabs cast off their burnooses and reveal to both Donald and Scrooge their true natures: they are not brothers but sisters, and they are all the half-bird, half-woman beings called "Larkies." At the same time, Donald's nephews give chase with their own resources, aided in part by the Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook, a "reservoir of inexhaustible knowledge" (the 1950s answer to the modern Internet tablet).

In no narrative time at all, the ship reaches "the Valley of the Mists" in Colchis, where the Larkies make their home, not far from the ancient temple where the sleepless dragon guards the Fleece. Donald and Scrooge are imprisoned in a bird's nest atop a tall pinnacle, and only then do they find out why the Larkies wanted Scrooge. He was meant to serve as a "taster" in a cooking-contest designed to determine which of the Larkies will become the new queen, and now that Donald has been brought along for good measure, he too must perform the same task.

One of the Larkies makes a secret deal with the Ducks: if they will give her dish the thumbs-up, she'll give them the knowledge they need to capture the Fleece (in effect, she serves the function of Phineas the seer in the epic of Apollonius). However, once the Ducks are gone, the Larkie gets the idea that her sisters won't like the tasters having escaped, so she overtakes the Ducks and gives them some bad info that will lead to their re-capture. The Larkies overtake the Ducks before they can enter the temple of the Fleece, but fortunately, the nephews also show up and drive away the bird-women.  The five Ducks are then able to enter the temple, and though they still have the sleepless dragon to deal with, the nephews cleverly manage to use the Fleece itself to lull the dragon to sleep.

In the end, the Ducks all manage to return to Duckburg, and Scrooge has the Golden Fleece woven into the coat he so desired. But it proves useless to him, because the new coat is "the coldest contraption" he's ever worn. To make a very bad pun, "All that glitters proves to be cold."

I've skipped over a lot of Barks' characteristic details, which add far more verisimilitude to the Ducks' adventures that one usually found in children's comics-tales. But there are a couple of psychological myths here of deeper import.

One is the myth of the folly of desire. Scrooge's desire for easy profit is, as in many Barks stories, the motor that makes the story run, as he drags Donald and the nephews into perilous adventures. I'll forego the ultraliberal cant about Scrooge being the epitome of capitalism and imperialism. The Larkies are just as driven as he by foolish egotism, and one can hardly call them either capitalists or imperialists. In fact, while Scrooge does play treasure-seeker in foreign lands many times, which at first glance might *seem* to conform to the outline of the demonic imperialist, it's worth noting that this time the foreigners come looking for Scrooge. who just happened to be "the first sucker to fall for our Golden Fleece story." In other words, they use the allure of their ancient legends to play the modern capitalist for a fool, and while Barks clearly means for us to laugh at Scrooge's stinginess and rashness, the Larkies are certainly not innocent victims of modernity.

The other myth concerns the association of the Larkies, and their Greek progenitors, with ordure and foulness. The humor behind the "tasting-contest" rests on the absurdity that all the Larkies can make are nauseating foods that the Ducks can hardly stand to eat. The original Harpies had nothing to do with bad cooking, of course, but Barks has very cleverly taken from the epic poem the bird-women's association with bad food. Whereas in the poem Phineas' food is made bad because the Harpies (presumably) shit on it, the Larkies are monsters of feminine pride, taking pride in their awful cooking and demanding that helpless males choke it down to stroke the Larkies' egos. Significantly, Barks also wrings humor out of their defeat. The nephews try to divert the Larkies with fireworks, and then, rather than actually shoot rockets at "ladies," the nephews scare the Larkies away with-- mice, carried into the air by balloons. I've raised objections on other occasions to the old "ladies are all scared of mice" schtick, but it's hard to see the routing of the Larkies as any sort of assault against feminine courage.

In closing I'll note that a few of Barks' efforts to provide verisimilitude come close to being "cosmological myths" in their own right, though they're nothing I care to analyze at this time.

A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE PT. 3

Although the definition of "violence" is my titular purpose, I've been obliged to discuss the topic of "might" first.  The formula "might makes right" is practically the unacknowledged motto of those practicing the politics of ressentiment, as I pointed out here  with respect to Noah Berlatsky's rewording of that motto:

"For the superhero genre, the best person in the world is the one with the greatest power; beating evil is a matter of hitting it harder."

Parts 1 and 2 of the long definition have thus situated "might" as every kind of conceivable activity.  Though the person who conceived the aphorism almost surely was thinking of "might" as a superior capacity for violence, "greater might" does not really make right in all circumstances, either in fiction (WATCHMEN) or in the real world (the struggles of Nelson Mandela).  It is demonstrable that "lesser might" can make right even as "greater might" does.  Admittedly one sees "lesser might" in ascendance, both in fiction and real life, far less often than the converse.

So violence cannot be equated with might. In fact, many forms of might in modern society depend on money rather than guns.  An easy example would be the current battle regarding state-sanctioned abortion, in which some organizations attempt to "freeze out" the government by refusing to let their tax dollars be utilized for that purpose.

It is sensible, then, to see violent activity-- as well as sexual activity, to which the former is inextricably linked, if only in a cultural sense-- as a subset of a larger set comprising "all forms of activity/might." I propose this arrangement even though I realize that most ressentiment-critics will fail to make such distinctions, and fall back on the equivalence of might and violent expressions of power.

The next question is, what if anything distinguishes violence and sex-- which I see as violence's "mismatched partner in a buddy-cop film"-- from all other forms of activity?  In literary analysis I've usually referred to them as "kinetic elements" or "kinetic effects," but these determinations are not sufficient for a definition taking in both fiction and the real world.   This essay approached the question by negotiating the intellectual insights of Francis Fukuyama and Georges Bataille.

First Fukuyama:

Fukuyama's re-defines Plato's *thymos* as a spectrum of esteem ranging from how an individual seeks his own esteem from others to the way whole societies seek such validation. He then provides a dualistic schema as to how differing versions of thymotic action manifest in society. One version is "megalothymia," whose prefix means "great or exaggerated," and the other is "isothymia," with a prefix meaning "equal

Then Bataille:

There is certainly a somatic sense in which sex resembles violence, which is the principle reason why Freudians in particular have associated the two. But Bataille concentrates too much on the somatic similarity, the arena of an eros that may include the "sensuous frenzy" to destroy an enemy as much as the frenzy to consummate the sex-act.

This is where Fukuyama's formulations about thymos provide a theoretical guide to steer one clear of the rocks of Freudianism.

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority

 So of all forms of human might/activity, violence and sex are the perfect exemplars of competition and cooperation, and therefore of the thymotic tensions that pervade all human societies and cultures.  Further, violence and sex are also the primary sources of what Bataille calls "sensuous frenzy," which may be termed the perception that one's thymos has become so expanded as to escape the confines of one's body.  People may love their money-- or, if they give it up, love dictating what it should or should be used for, as with the Little Sisters of the Poor-- but few real people get a feeling of ecstasy from it, a la Uncle Scrooge.

Assuming that the ressentiment-critic is even aware of the arguments that posit violence as a fundamental aspect of human nature, said critic will almost certainly reject the argument out of hand.  Attempts to conflate superheroes-- or violent heroes generally-- with fascism are always built upon the supposition that violence is not intrinsic; that it is a demon that can banished by invoking comparisons to anti-liberal forces like the KKK and proponents of eugenic control, as Berlatsky does in the cited essay.  Though Berlatsky knows that American superheroes were not produced in a literally fascist society, the spectre of fascism-- supposedly the worship of force-- is an ever-present danger, if one happens to swear by that great insight: "monkey see monkey do." Here's Berlatsky in the comments-section:

...fascism in particular tends to equate violence and goodness, and power as itself righteous. That’s not the case for left ideologies, which are about equality, and so don’t tend to elevate individual power as the apotheosis of goodness.

Berlatsky's "violence=goodness" equation misrepresents the appeal of fictional violence as being one of crypto-fascism.  It's also significant that where he's willing to invoke "the hermeneutics of deceit" to find fascism in violent conflict irrespective of the circumstances, he doesn't apply the same hermeneutics to those supposedly more "equal" societies:

Fascism is particularly inclined to promote might as right; it’s a worship of power. Like I said upthread, liberal and communist philosophies don’t do that; they tend to be interested in promoting equality (though of course they’re perfectly capable of supporting state violence.)

By framing his observations on "liberal and communist philosophies" in this manner, Berlatsky contrives to make it sound as if the exercise of force is not a central aspect of those philosophies, as it is with fascism.  A true hermeneutics of deceit would assume, with Machiavelli, that states built on those philosophies would simply have more roundabout ways of expressing their might, even when they are not "supporting state violence."  Certainly, though I support Obamacare in its overall intention, I would never deny that it is a manifestation of might, even if its purpose is to promote a particular form of "equality."

To keep the more liberal philosophies from being temporarily affected by fictional displays of violence-- that is, to keep the monkey from seeing, and perhaps imitating what he sees-- the ressentiment-critic must constantly harp on the supposed similarities between Superman and storm troopers. 

This is the last of the essays under this heading, though some of the following essays will also investigate issues of violence in fiction.  So the really long definition is hardly concluded.