NULL-MYTHS: "VENGEANCE! CRIES THE VALKYRIE" (DEFENDERS #108-109, 1982)

The "cry" of the title is more like a whimper, given the long history of Marvel's Valkyrie character. When I analyzed Dave Kraft's DEFENDERS story "Valhalla Can Wait," I noted that I'd started off this blog by surveying most of the early stories that established the history of the heroine. One of the things that intrigued me about the character is that, being produced at seventies Marvel, she wasn't created in the same manner as the Hulk or Spider-Man, who began in stand-alone serials devoted to their exploits. Instead, Valkyrie started as a tabula rasa character, an Asgardian powerhouse who, at first, seemed to be no more than a fantasy-creation of the evil Enchantress. Further, both she and her mortal "identity" were loosely intertwined with various prominent Marvel heroes (like the Black Knight and Doctor Strange) to menaces (the Nameless One and the Celestials) in a way that was not characteristic of heroes invented for the sixties, when there existed no overriding Marvel continuity-mythos. 

In DEFENDERS #4 Steve Englehart grafted the persona of the Valkyrie upon the madwoman Barbara Norris (who had been introduced in an unrelated HULK story). But though Englehart  established that the mortal Barbara still shared the body with the Asgardian being, he did nothing more with the history of Barbara. Steve Gerber began exploring Barbara's past in order to give more human context to the heroine, particularly by having the warrior-woman interact with Barbara's mortal husband Jack-- though Barbara's spirit during this time remained quiescent, effectively out of the picture. Once Gerber left, subsequent DEFENDERS writers largely wrote Jack out of the series. 

"Valhalla" suggests that Kraft toyed with the idea of writing Barbara Norris out of the Valkyrie mythos. His was the first tale to suggest that Valkyrie had never been a creation of her sorcerous mistress; that she had an identity in Asgard: Brunhilde, leader of the Valkyrior who gathered slain souls for Valhalla. Brunhilde's original body still existed in Asgard, and a scheming Asgardian deity caused the current Valkurie to come in contact with the comatose Brunhilde form, causing the soul of Barbara Norris to exit what had technically been her own body and entering that of Brunhild. By the adventure's end Mad Barbara in Brunhilde's body ended up going to the Asgardian hell, and Brunhilde's consciousness totally controlled the transformed Barbara-body.

I commented that Kraft's story possessed mythic potential but was very rushed, But at least it was a story, and not a farrago stuffed with continuity points, like Marc de Matteis' 'Vengeance." 

DeMatteis passes lightly over the Kraft story and begins his story by having Valkyrie's mortal body slain. Though the Enchantress had nothing to do with the murder, she conveniently shows up and issues a demand to Brunhilde's colleagues the Defenders. The original Brunhilde-body is now in the witch's possession, and she wants the Valkyrie's fellow Defenders to find an item with which to ransom said body, since it is now the only receptacle that can house Brunhilde's liberated spirit. There's some paltry debate amongst the heroes about the morality of the transference, since it will possibly doom Barbara Norris' spirit, but some of the Defenders attempt to do the Enchantress' bidding. 

I'll pass over the specific treasure they seek, because it's irrelevant to the story as a whole. Slightly more interesting is Enchantress' motivation for wanting the treasure. Out of the blue, she decided one day to conjure up The Spirit of Love and incarnate the being (not seen in Marvel comics prior to this story) so that Enchantress, the consummate loose woman, can bond with the Spirit. Somehow, the aforementioned treasure will restore the villainess's "purity," which is a point De Matteis does not explore overmuch. 

The heroes assigned to get the magical thingie end up choosing not to deliver the goods. Thus Enchantress tries to slay Brunhilde's body, but the Defenders forestall her. Love, who hasn't said much about all these goings-on, suddenly announces that he doesn't love Enchantress's manipulations, and he not only deserts her, he takes the spirit of Barbara Norris with him for some sort of heavenly union. This makes it possible for Brunhilde's spirit to become incarnated in her rightful body, and then issue #109 is taken up with Valkyrie taking her vengeance on the sorceress.

I don't envy DeMatteis trying to make a story out of all the body-switching complications he inherited, and I get that it's tough to focus on the main conflict, the one between Valkyrie and Enchantress, given that DEFENDERS was a team book and the writer was expected to give the other members of the super-team some activities to keep them busy. But De Matteis seems to go out of his way to make the matter MORE complicated than necessary, as with shoehorning non-members Spider-Man and the Beast into the mix. I should note that Mark Gruenwald was credited with a "plot assist," probably because that writer finished (but did not start) the "Celestials Saga" in the pages of THOR a few years previous. In fact, the latter part of "Vengeance" is a complicated sorting-out of Valkyrie's interaction with her lord the All-Father Odin, and maybe Gruenwald's role was mainly filling DeMatteis in on all the continuity complications from the aforesaid saga. Speaking as a fan of Marvel continuity, I *did* want to see the relationship of Valkyrie and Enchantress defined, just as I wanted to see the one between Valkyrie and Odin sorted out. But I didn't want to see a bunch of sterile plot-points trotted out in a desultory manner.

Artist Don Perlin was totally out of his depth with this sort of multi-character epic. I'm not familiar with much of his Golden or Silver Age work, but he was competent with simple, single-character titles like Marvel's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. It's astonishing that so limited an artist remained in place on DEFENDERS from 1980 to 1986, and I tend to assume that he kept the position because the title was perceived to be a dog, even though the book must have made enough money to avoid cancellation during those years. To be sure, Perlin's visuals got better with the DEFENDERS scripts of Peter Gillis, since those scripts were clearer and more straightforward than De Matteis's labored gobbledygook, and I even favorably reviewed one of the Gillis-Perlin collaborations here.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KNIGHT MOVES

As I come to the third iteration of the Valkyrie concept, I find myself forced to divert into yet another tangled skein of the Marvel Universe, because of that skein’s entanglement with the Valkyrie’s “mother” the Enchantress. Thus, here’s a short summation, then, of Marvel’s superheroic Black Knight (also the third iteration of a much looser concept):

The first version of this concept appeared in the early 1950s. This Black Knight was a medieval hero who had no relation to any Marvel superheroes until being retroactively linked to them in the 1960s. The second Knight was an Iron Man villain who became a member of that group of Avengers-adversaries known as the Masters of Evil. (As such this made him a loose associate of the Enchantress, though I don’t believe the characters ever interacted in any story). This villain’s modus operandi included using medieval-style weapons with advanced-tech gimmicks, and riding into battle on the back of an ebon-hued, genetically-engineered winged horse—at least until the villain died of injuries taken during a battle. But in AVENGERS #48 (January 1968) he bequeathed his gimmicks to his nephew Dane Whitman, who decided to use them to become a superhero. As a stereotypic device to signal the change from bad to good, writer Roy Thomas had Whitman breed a new winged steed; one that was lily-white instead of black like the previous horse. Thomas also gave this new aerial equine the heroic name of Aragorn, in an odd derivation from a human character in Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS.

Following a few appearances this good Knight abandoned his uncle’s high-tech gizmos, and began to sport a magical “black blade” inherited from the original Knight of medieval times, who now became Whitman’s ancestor. Retroactive though the relationship was, this made Whitman the figurative spawn of two ancestors, much as the Valkyrie enjoyed an immaculate descent from a love-goddess mama and death-god papa.

In AVENGERS #84 (January 1971), Thomas decided that this “Black Blade” should become sort of a road-show version of the cursed blade “Stormbringer” from Michael Moorcock’s Elric series. Suddenly, the Knight finds that his own sword is urging him to kill his enemies. The hero consults with his ancestor’s ghost, who tells him to journey to another dimension to dispose of the sword in a magical well (another LORD OF THE RINGS borrowing for the Knight’s mythos). But this realm happened to be ruled by a sometime foe of the Avengers named Arkon, who took the Knight prisoner. And just to heap on the coincidences, it was also the place where the Enchantress was transported when her spell backfired at the end of AVENGERS #83. The goddess, having wormed her way into Arkon’s confidence, works her seduction-mojo on the Knight to get his story out of him, and then accuses him of being a pawn sent by the Avengers—all of which leads to the usual dust-up between Arkon and the good guys. In the end the Black Blade ends up in the well and the Enchantress escapes.

However, the events of AVENGERS #98-100 (April-June 1972) prove that the spirit of the original Black Knight wasn’t so good in the department of destroying cursed blades, though he was great at giving comics-writers new plot-complications. The Black Blade isn’t destroyed, but ends up in Olympus, home of Marvel’s version of the Greek gods, where its power is co-opted by another Avengers foe, Ares the war-god. The Enchantress, despite having shown no interest in the Blade back in AVENGERS #84, chooses to follow in the Blade’s wake and promptly joins forces with Ares. It’s arguable that Ares, like Arkon before him, takes the place of her long-time partner the Executioner, though the character says nothing to corroborate this. During this three-part tale the Enchantress seems to have forgotten her original goal of getting back to Asgard, and now decides to help Ares wreak destruction on both Earth and her own home-realm. The Avengers thwart the villains’ plot, with the aid of short-lived former member the Hulk (who, by coincidence, had also come into conflict with the Enchantress twice in his solo feature) and of the Black Knight, who reclaims his cursed blade.

During the same year this seasoned super-group defeated the Enchantress’ plan, leaving her imprisoned in Olympus, Roy Thomas made a new team, the Defenders, out of the three characters he’d intertwined in his “Undying Ones” saga. For three issues of MARVEL FEATURE written by Thomas, Doctor Strange, the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk battled evil, and then, two months after the conclusion of AVENGERS #100, the Defenders got their own book, with Steve Englehart writing. Englehart promptly returned the heroes to fighting emissaries of the Undying Ones for their first three issues, as well as inducting the Silver Surfer into the group, though that hero departs at the end of issue #3. In #3 the four heroes are spirited into the Undying Ones’ dimension and immediate behold Barbara Norris in her magical cage. With the aid of the Silver Surfer, Doctor Strange breaks her free, but Barbara has in some sense returned to her status of “traitorous female” seen at the outset of HULK #126, for it’s revealed that out of maddened loneliness she became the “mate” of the demons’ leader, the Nameless One, even merging her body with that of the two-headed monster so as to become his “third head.” The heroes manage to stymie the demon-lord and Doctor Strange frees Barbara from the creature’s influence, but Barbara goes screaming-mad from the separation. The heroes return to Earth and the Surfer deserts their company.

With DEFENDERS #4 (February 1973), Englehart puts aside the Undying Ones thread in favor of a new wrinkle on another Thomas-created thread: the interlinking of the Enchantress, the Black Knight and the Black Blade. The Defenders just happen to materialize outside Dane Whitman’s ancestral castle, which for no clear reason is linked to the dimension where the Enchantress and Executioner were imprisoned by Odin, and where a nameless sorceress stole the demi-god from the side of the demi-goddess. The Defenders, along with Barbara, are taken prisoner by the sorceress (now named Casiolena) and by her consort the Executioner. In their dungeon the Defenders then meet the Enchantress and the Black Knight. It seems that the Enchantress escaped Olympus and suddenly decided to go back to Casiolena’s dimension and fight for her man. To this end Enchantress decides to engage the services of the Black Knight—a peculiar choices, as even with his sword the Knight was no powerhouse— but in any case she uses her magical smooching-power to bend him to her will. (Narratively, she becomes identical with the Black Blade: a force that seduces Dane Whitman to serve evil, so that he becomes morally “grey” if not actually “black.”) The Enchantress and Whitman are beaten and imprisoned, but though the goddess doesn’t have the power to break out by herself, the Defenders have brought her a vessel that Enchantress can transform. Over the heroes’ objections, Enchantress transforms mad Barbara into the Valkyrie, who breaks them all free. The heroes, joined by Enchantress and her more-or-less willing servant the Knight, summarily trounce the Executioner, Casiolena and all of the queen’s men. Interestingly, when the Valkyrie appears, she’s carrying a war-spear identical to the one in her earlier appearances, though after she uses it to disarm the Executioner this weapon, like its sister in HULK #142, simply disappears from the ongoing Valkyrie narrative.

But though the spear’s absence isn’t accounted for, that doesn’t mean there’s no reason for it to disappear; it goes away so that the Valkyrie has a reason to appropriate the sword of the Black Knight.

After the dust-up is finished, Enchantress decides to “forgive” Executioner for his waywardness, with the clear implication that she’s once more in the driver’s seat while he must return to being her lapdog. Dane Whitman, having become totally besotted with the goddess, protests and threatens the axe-man, but Enchantress shows her preferences by turning the mortal hero to stone, and then fleeing with her immortal lover. This development has the effect of leaving Whitman’s sword and winged horse up for grabs, and Valkyrie duly takes possession of them. It may be that writer Englehart and editor Thomas thought that a sword would prove less cumbersome than a spear, and better able to deal out non-lethal force when desired (in later issues Valkyrie swats her merely-human opponents with “the flat of the blade.”) Valkyrie doesn’t keep the Black Blade, though, for in Englehart’s final DEFENDERS issue, #11 (December 1973), it’s revealed that the Black Knight’s spirit has manifested in another body back in the days of the Crusades, and so the Blade is returned to Dane Whitman once more. But in the succeeding issue, writer Len Wein gives Valkyrie a new super-sword called Dragonfang, which she keeps for the remainder of the super-team’s first run, just as she keeps custody of winged horse Aragorn.

In some sense Valkyrie soon becomes, far more than the group’s technical leader Doc Strange, the glue that holds future incarnations of the super-team together. Given that she appears as a tabula rasa, with no conscious memories of being Barbara Norris, she might even be considered the “child” that unites a troubled family. As noted before she is the first Marvel superheroine to register as a “powerhouse,” able to exchange blows with the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, but even at the start there’s some mitigation of her power—what one might call a “curse,” given that it’s predicated on her gender-kinship with other women. I’ll discuss this more fully in what should be my cumulative essay on the nature of Marvel’s Scandinavian superheroine.

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY

The next two chapters of the Marvel Valkyrie-mythos appear over a year apart. The first tale (INCREDIBLE HULK #126, April 1970) introduces Barbara Norris, a one-shot support-character who would become integral to a later iteration of the warrior-woman, while the second (INCREDIBLE HULK #142, August 1971) gives the Valkyrie her first appearance as an entity clearly separate from her “mother” the Enchantress. The first tale is, like AVENGERS #83, just an enjoyable entertainment, but with the second attentive readers will begin to see a deeper symbolism shaping up, albeit one which is likely to strike the casual reader as rather risible.

Recapitulating HULK #126 is complicated by its being the third part of a tale that loosely associates the future charter members of the Defenders. Said tale begins in DOCTOR STRANGE #183 (November 1969), wherein the mystic hero learns of a breed of demons, the Undying Ones, who desire to cross into the Earth-domain for the usual nasty reasons. As #183 was also the final issue for that incarnation of DOCTOR STRANGE, writer Roy Thomas was constrained to continue the story in other titles, which next appeared in SUB-MARINER #22 (Feb 1970). This tale ended with the demons thwarted again, though Doctor Strange became a captive in their unholy realm—which is where HULK #126 picks up.

Barbara Norris, member of a cult of Earth-mystics that worships the Undying Ones, plays the part of both a betrayer and a savior. The cult’s leader gets the idea of using the Hulk as a catspaw to help the demons invade Earth., and pretty Barbara, despite expressing some reservations about “toying with a man’s life,” nevertheless helps her fellows drug Bruce Banner. Then the cultists hurl Banner into a dimension ruled over by a insectile tyrant called “the Night-Crawler.” This dimension is an “alternate pathway” which the Undying Ones can use to invade Earth once their old enemy the Night-Crawler is out of the way, and so the cultists hope that the Hulk will clear that path for their masters (who, incidentally, are still keeping Doctor Strange captive in a magical prison).

Banner throws a wrench in the gears: knowing that he’ll endanger the Earth by fighting the Night-Crawler, he represses the transformation. The frustrated cultists see all this via the usual crystal-gazing, but when Barbara develops a somewhat-tardy conscience, the cultists toss her in after Banner, hoping (correctly) that Banner will be forced to fight to save a damsel in distress. Sure enough, once the Night-Crawler menaces Barbara, Banner “hulks out” and monster battles mystic tyrant. In the end, the Hulk manages to both beat the Night-Crawler and foil the cultists’ plans as he unleashes a cataclysm that destroys the tyrant’s world, thus making it impossible for the Undying Ones to use it as a pathway. The Night-Crawler then teleports himself into the Undying Ones’ realm to fight them for their cosmos, and for some unexplained reason he pulls Barbara and the Hulk along with him instead of leaving them to die in the cataclysm. While demons go at each other, the Hulk and Barbara happen across the imprisoned Doctor Strange. Barbara, who learned from her fellow cultists of Strange’s self-sacrifice, somehow divines that she can free Strange by taking his place in the prison, thus making amends for her earlier misdeeds. This also helps writer Thomas solve the problem as to how to get both heroes out of this alien clime, for Strange then magicks them both back to Earth. The Hulk transforms back to Banner, and the two heroes exchange some pleasantries before parting (though no word is spoken of poor Barbara’s unenviable fate).

Compared to the earlier Hulk-tale, HULK #142 isn’t nearly as entertaining on the visceral level, being a labored satire that overtly references its inspiration, Tom Wolfe’s book RADICAL CHIC. But unlike AVENGERS #83 it does manage to put a more complex spin on the “war between men and women” myth-theme that AVENGERS #83 botched.

The story in short: during one of the Green Goliath’s jaunts into New York City, two rich social-climbers, the Parringtons, decide to advance their social status by persuading the man-monster to attend a benefit designed to raise money for his “cause:” i.e., not being hounded by human beings any more. The only reason this daffy plan works is because the Parrington’s cute young daughter Samantha goes along and talks the Hulk into going along with it all. However, the Enchantress is watching from her prison-dimension and transforms Samantha into the Valkyrie, the better to kill the Hulk for wrecking the villainess’ plans back in HULK #102.

Now, although the Enchantress’ motives have no more to do with “women’s lib” than they did in AVENGERS #83, Samantha is emotionally invested in the cause, though she’s never given even the most shallow reason for being a “libber.” She’s a cartoony sketch of a feminist, and Thomas makes her actions even more erratic than those of Barbara Norris. Samantha’s first seen complaining that her father ought to “throw a bash” for women’s lib, which he refuses to do since he’s got his more original “Hulk-benefit” idea. However, despite deeming the Hulk “the biggest male chauvinist pig this side of Norman Mailer,” Samantha goes along with her folks on their crusade to bring the Hulk to heel. She even uses judo to hurl an Army guard out of their way, and then, when her parents fail to persuade the Hulk of anything, manages to talk the monster into trusting her. (The female as betrayer again, sort of.) Then, after her father holds a press conference for his benefit—that is, doing exactly what he said he meant to do—she becomes irrationally irritated at him. Showing a dizzying blend of practicality and goofiness, she refuses to tell the Hulk of her parents’ superficial motives for fear of getting them hurt, but she organizes a women’s lib picket to protest the Hulk-benefit. (One could easily suspect her of piggybacking on the publicity generated by the benefit for her own cause, though Thomas doesn’t make this explicit.)

Now, this course of events is fairly silly, even in the context of a fantastic universe, but these plot-elements aren’t what give the story a mythic (if inadvertently funny) quality. This mythic element comes to the fore in the location where the Enchantress chooses to transform the wind-changing women’s-libber into “the vengeful Valkyrie”—said location being a skyscraper that bears a marked resemblance to (but is never identified as) the Empire State Building. It’s near the summit of this building that the transformation takes place—a building later described as symbolic of male hegemony, in that it was “built by the hands of males.”

So here we have a sorcerous female transforming a slightly-strident feminist into an Amazonian powerhouse, atop a big, tall building that symbolizes maleness.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But then other times, it isn’t. And sometimes the letters “p.e.” don’t stand for physical education.

Following Samantha’s transformation, she quickly beats a path to the Hulk-party, which is about to fall apart anyway, partly because the Hulk’s impatient to see Samantha again, as she’s the only one he trusts. The Valkyrie bursts in—ironically, only the Hulk recognizes her despite her costume—and attacks the man-monster, demonstrating that she’s strong enough to hurt him when she hits. Her battle-dialogue suggests that she’s fighting him largely for the pleasure of beating a representative of the stronger sex, and only a couple of pages later is it revealed that she’s under the Enchantress’ magical control. Sexual politics are further polarized by the Hulk, who refuses to hit a girl and is (for once) prepared to leap away rather than continue the fight. However, Valkyrie again resorts to womanly deceit, pretending to make peace with him so that she can Spock-pinch him into dreamland.

Then, still a couple of panels before we see that Valkyrie’s being controlled by the Enchantress, the warrior-woman seems quite prepared to murder the monster so that ‘every egocentric male” should “tremble” at the deed. For one panel she even drags the unconscious behemoth by his hair, reversing the old caveman-courtship joke. But when Valkyrie hauls the Hulk all the way to the top of the maybe-Empire ‘scraper, it’s evident that we’re not just dealing with a little penis-envy symbolism, but a reversal of a prominent cinematic myth, which also involved a monster and a girl going to the top of a towering building that maybe represented what the monster wanted to do to the girl—

This time, at least, beauty genuinely tries to kill the beast, and so the Hulk takes the high dive (though after the deed’s done, Sam-Valkyrie does suffer, like Barbara Norris, a tardy attack of conscience). Gamma rays being a greater source of potency than prehistoric evolution, the Hulk survives the fall, though it does irritate him enough to consider breaking his rule about hitting girls. However, at that fortuitous moment the Enchantress’ spell wears off, returning Samantha to humanity and somehow changing Hulk back to Banner as well. The two of them recover without recognizing each other from their one-night stand-off, and then go their separate ways. Samantha has no memory of being Valkyrie, but Thomas closes the tale with a literally-pointed suggestion that the Valkyrie may return— for the Valkyrie’s spear is seen laying in the rubble. By the logic of the story the spear should’ve vanished when the spell ended, but it comes to nothing in any case, for this phallic token of the first Valkyrie is (to the best of my knowledge) completely forgotten by everyone. When the Barbara Norris Valkyrie manifests in DEFENDERS #4, she possesses an all-new magic spear—more on which later.

I’ve stated that this whole Kong-lomeration of myth-motifs is amusing, at least to me, but I also stand by my notion that it’s also strongly mythic, possibly more so because Thomas doesn’t seem to have consciously drawn on the 1933 film for the story’s sexual content. I have nothing against the various websites that amuse themselves by seeing penises in every comic-book missile, but at the same time, I think I’m aiming a little higher than that. It’s damn near inevitable than any story presenting the fantasy of a strong woman is going to invoke a certain amount of sexual content, and I regard such content is entirely valid in a mythopoetic sense. Some archaic myths are solemn and portentous, like the Gilgamesh epic, and some are salacious and funny, like certain Thor-tales (in particular, the one which shows Thor being unable to outwrestle an old woman). HULK #142 isn’t consciously salacious, nor is it nearly as complex as its cinematic forbear. But, for a story that seems dimly hostile toward feminism, it takes an important step in the direction of articulating a new feminine myth-figure.

FEMALE TROUBLE

The previous tale discussed may not be a major comics-myth, but it fits my definition for complex symbolism. In contrast, the story to be discussed here—the Roy Thomas/John Buscema tale from AVENGERS #83 (December 1970)-- possesses only a rudimentary symbolic structure. Still, this story will help illustrate one of my earlier points as to how mighty mythic oaks can grow from nutty little null-myths.

The story—titled “Come on in—the Revolution’s Fine” (henceforth just “Revolution”)—is basically entertaining, despite its considerable lapses in logic. It’s not my intention to bag on a story tossed together over 30 years ago, but in my retelling it’ll be pretty obvious that those lapses are of Weisingerian proportions. (For the uninitiated in comicspeak, Mort Weisinger was known for having edited a number of wildly overcomplicated Superman tales, as well as being a onetime boss of Roy Thomas). Lack of logic never prevented a story from having strong mythicity, but “Revolution” is nothing more than an exercise in the sort of overinflated “relevance” that appeared in many pop-cultural works of the period—in this case, Superheroes Meet Feminism.

Since for this series of essays I’m mainly interested in the first appearance of the Valkyrie, I’ll summarize “Revolution” in reverse, pursuing it from the POV of the villainous Enchantress who stage-manages the plot as well as giving birth to her armor-breasted alter ego. Following the attempt of the Enchantress and Executioner to conquer Asgard in HULK #102, Odin exiles them both to a barren nether-world. The Enchantress (telling her story for an audience of captive heroes) relates that her exile with her demi-god partner was at least bearable thanks to their companionship. Were we dealing with modern “mature” superheroes, one would presume that the villainess, no longer able to call upon a host of other swains, may have finally let the Executioner “execute” an assault upon her holy of holies— which would be consonant with the Enchantress’ wrath when Executioner deserts her for another woman, an unnamed sorceress of that nether-dimension. In fact, as the villain takes his leave of Enchantress, he reminds her of how she once “pined for Hercules,” and sadistically hopes that she’ll pine for him as well—which suggests that for some time the axe-man has resented being kept at arm’s length, especially because of the sorceress’ affections for other men. The end of their idyll turns this Asgardian Ishtar into a man-hating termagant, which leads her to assume the guise of the Valkyrie, sort of a road-company Wagnerian Brunhilde.

Upon jumping to Earth from her dimensional prison, the Enchantress’s main goal is to return to Asgard, where her powers will be at their greatest. Writer Thomas doesn’t explain her reasons for wanting to do so, but to be charitable, I’ll assume that Thomas meant that once she returned to Asgard, she would somehow avoid getting kicked out again by Odin and would then use her powers to seek revenge on her ex-lover. Somehow Enchantress finds out about a scientist who’s invented a dimension-hopping device that she thinks can return her to Asgard, but it seems she can’t find a way to approach the scientist in private because he’s being guarded from kidnap-attempts by four of the Avengers—coincidentally, all males. In addition, four male villains—the Masters of Evil, with whom the Enchantress sometimes ran in her mundane supervillain years—are planning to kidnap the aforesaid scientist.

Needing some pawns to run interference against both all-male groups, the demi-goddess somehow hits on the idea of forming the Liberators, a sisterhood of superheroines, which she, as the Valkyrie, will lead into battle. By devices unknown she manages to assemble four heroines in Avengers Mansion. Of the four, two of them, the Wasp and Scarlet Witch, are already members of that super-group. The third, the Black Widow, was then something of a hanger-on with the group, and the fourth, Medusa of the Inhumans, had no substantive connections with either the Avengers or the Enchantress, and is apparently brought in just to give each of the three groups four players.

With a little bit of sophistry about how the male superheroes have always kept the women down, the villainess-in-valkyrie-garb convinces the heroines to join her. The official explanation is that the Enchantress also uses “subtle spells” to influence the ladies, but in order to make his climax work, Thomas claims that those spells depended on the heroines having some “trust” in the Valkyrie and her mission to liberate women. But the arguments that the Valkyrie uses to persuade the heroines are so thin, especially considering that they come from a completely unknown source, that the women look pretty stupid for having believed anything out of the Valkyrie’s mouth. By itself “Revolution” is probably not a fair representation of whatever Roy Thomas might think or have thought about feminism, but on the face of it the story bears strong resemblance to the “myth” (note the quotes) propounded by anti-feminists, viewing feminists as either deluded females or women resentful of not being able to get/keep a man.

The closest “Revolution” comes to the status of fully-realized myth is in aping the basic pattern of the “women-revolt-against-men” tale-type, less typified by the Valkyries of Norse myth than by the Greek Amazons. It’s marginally interesting that the real Valkyries were spirits of death—just as I’ve argued the Executioner is a sort of minor death-god—so that if any death-symbolism appeared in this early iteration of the Valkyrie, one could view the story as showing how easily an incarnation of Love becomes a representation of Death. But the general character of the Enchantress’ alter ego is more Amazon than Valkyrie, though her only martial act in the story is to blast a couple of heroes with rays from her spear. (Despite the resentment-of-males theme, this time a spear probably is only a spear.) Later iterations will stress those Amazonian aspects, and eventually the Valkyrie will be one of the first heroines at Marvel to rate as a “powerhouse” (to use one hero’s word for her in DEFENDERS #4). I’ll talk about some of her differences from other, earlier heroines in a future essay.

By the way, the captive Avengers all get loose and vanquish the villainess, just in case you wondered. And though at the end the Scarlet Witch calls Goliath a “male chauvinist pig” and implies that a real all-girl group is still a possibility, the Liberators never made a comeback, implying something of a “win” for the Y-chromosome set.

DAUGHTER OF LOVE AND DEATH

In my previous post I stated that I could only evaluate the character of the Defenders character Valkyrie by exploring other narratives that contributed to her mythos. The first of these tales appears in the THOR story entitled “The Enchantress and the Executioner”, which appeared in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #103 (April, 1964). The story’s archetypal plot is that “the spurned and/or jealous goddess” that readers will know best from Greek myths, which is fitting since, despite sharing title-credit with her male partner, the Enchantress is the real star of the story. Arguably this witchy woman is also the first villainess of significant stature in the Marvel Universe, though this status didn’t keep her and her axe-wielding swain from enduring some distinctly un-mythic stories.

At the time of this story’s genesis, the continuity of the THOR feature still followed the founding premise that the character of Thor was no more than a superheroic identity assumed by Doctor Don Blake whenever he stamped his magically-endowed cane (which likewise transformed into Thor’s hammer). Creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby probably derived their basic idea from Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, to whose 1940s saga Kirby briefly contributed. However, in CAPTAIN MARVEL Billy Batson, the alter ego to the Captain, was clearly the “true identity” of the two, complete with mortal relatives, while Marvel was in essence a magical idealization of Billy’s self-image. In THOR, however, Blake had no ties with mortal life save his romantic interest in his nurse Jane Foster, who was alternately attracted to both Blake and his thunder-god alter ego. But the character of Thor did have an identity separate from the moments when Blake summoned him into being. The otherworldly realm of Asgard wasn’t just a place where Thor could go to hang his winged helmet, but a place where he had familial connections, such as Loki, the brother who hated him, and Odin, the father who wasn’t crazy about his son potentially hooking up with a mortal woman. Given that Thor was more “real” than Blake in the ongoing narrative, in later years Don Blake was downgraded to being a vessel magicked up by Odin, in which Thor’s spirit could sojourn for a time in order to be humbled by mortal experiences. Jane Foster’s role in the series lasted even less long than the Blake persona, but at the time of JIM #103, both Blake and his romantic interest in Jane were ongoing concerns of the narrative—and of Odin, who wanted to break them up. To this end Loki encourages the father-god to send a “bad woman” to break up their romantic attachment; i.e., the Enchantress, sort of a faux-Norse version of love-goddesses like Aphrodite and Ishtar.

Curiously, though most of Lee and Kirby’s Asgardians have regular names, either drawn from Norse mythology or created to sound vaguely Nordic, the Enchantress and the Executioner are always referred to by what one might call their “supervillain names,” and don’t acquire personal cognomens until the 1990s. The text calls them “demi-gods,” which may have been Lee’s rationalization as to why his readers wouldn’t find the two of them listed in any Norse mythology books. In any case, the Enchantress happily accepts Odin’s mission, her demeanor making it clear that she looks forward to conquering Thor’s heart for the sheer sport of it. She’s also a sorceress, which gives her name a dual meaning that equates feminine attractions with literal witchery.

The demi-goddess’ mission to break up Blake and Jane proves indirectly successful. Posing as a mortal woman, the Enchantress visits Blake’s office and tries to work on him with her womanly wiles. But Blake, who apparently knows everything Thor knows, recognizes her as an Asgardian, and knows something’s up. However, Jane barges in on Enchantress trying to get Blake in a lip-lock, and then flees the office, having been (a caption helpfully tells us) “heartbroken.” Blake ignores the goddess and pursues his mortal love, leaving the goddess mightily insulted. She still wants to win Thor’s heart, but now decides that she can only do so by getting rid of Jane Foster, to which end she returns to Asgard to pay a call on one of her many frustrated suitors, the Executioner.

The title of this essay evoked the images of “love and death,” and if the Enchantress fills the bill for the first, clearly the name of her partner by itself evokes the opposite. However, unlike the demi-goddess the Executioner seems more of a blending of many mythic motifs. He is kin to various gods of death in that, when he finds Jane Foster, he consigns her to “limbo,” which is one of the abodes of afterlife spirits in Catholic theology. However, in terms of his character as the goddess’ subordinate servant, he reminds one more of Aphrodite’s ugly husband Hephaestus, and though the villain isn’t expressly a craftsman-god he does embody a sort of weapons-fetish, as later events in the story show. And lastly, the scene in which Enchantress sends her servitor to eliminate Jane has strong resonances with similar scenes in the folktale SNOW WHITE—a euhmerized version of the “jealous goddess” tale-type-- where the evil queen sends a huntsman to dispose of a younger competitor. Indeed, Lee’s script even specifies that the Executioner seeks out his victim with “the eyes of a hunting falcon,” though in no other way does he resemble mythic huntsman-figures (one of whom includes the archaic version of Odin).

After the Executioner descends to Earth and sends Jane Foster into limbo, Thor shows up and battles the villain, battering him to his knees. At this point the reader might rightfully expect the hero to use force to make the Executioner return the mortal girl to life, but this possibility never occurs to either hero or villain. Instead, the Executioner asserts that “Slaying me will avail you nothing,” but that Thor can recover Jane by giving up his hammer, which the villain says he desires “more than anything on Earth or Asgard.” This is a curious turn in the tale, in which the Executioner seems to have forgotten that his original motive for exiling Jane Foster was to win the heart of a certain sultry sorceress. There’s nothing in the text to explain such a change of heart, but I don’t regard it as a simple mistake.

On one level, the villain’s mid-stream motivational change serves a “furniture-moving” purpose in the tale. Because Thor does surrender his hammer to the villain, Thor’s nobility is emphasized, because losing his hammer means that when he next reverts to Don Blake, he will “remain so for all time.” Thus with this development Lee and Kirby create more suspense than they would have by simply having Thor beat the malefactor into compliance, and the suspense is furthered when the Executioner brings back Jane and then is frustrated by his inability to actually wield the hammer, which can only be lifted by one who is worthy.

Though as I said there’s no textual explanation of the villain’s motives beyond what he says about having always desired the weapon, it’s possible to see some deeper motives at work. The Executioner never asks his witchy woman why she wants some mortal removed, but one can imagine that he puts two and two together, and knows that he’s basically paving the way for the Enchantress to become romantically entwined with the thunder-god. By taking Thor’s hammer the villain hopes to both eliminate a rival and obtain his power—perhaps with the idea of conquering the Enchantress’ heart in future, or just for the gratification of power in itself, embodied in the aforementioned “weapons-fetish.”

In any case, his independent actions are a clear affront to the goddess he claimed to serve, and the Enchantress, watching from afar, takes vengeance by turning the axe-wielder’s limbs into tree-branches. Her intrusion inadvertently saves Thor, for the Executioner, desperate to save his life, gives the hero back his hammer so that Thor will combat the villainess (thus putting the formidable Executioner in the position of the “damsel in distress.”) The combat between Thor and the demi-goddess is short: she tries to change his hammer into a “deadly serpent,” but the hammer is proof against enchantments due to its being forged by the supreme father-god Odin (ironically enough, since the Enchantress is serving as Odin’s catspaw here). With male power reasserted over that of the jealous goddess, Thor returns both demi-gods to Asgard. Later Don Blake finds Jane and makes up with her, returning their relationship to square one and further aggravating all-father Odin.

As remarked earlier, most 1960s uses of the Enchantress and the Executioner did not attain this level of mythic complexity. Often the two were treated as little more than standard super-villains, whether separately or together, though a few stories have the Enchantress become infatuated with another archaic myth-hero, Hercules, making her the ironic victim of unrequited love. The main exception to this comedown appears in INCREDIBLE HULK #102 (April 1968). In this tale by Gary Friedrich and Marie Severin, the titular green-skinned star travels to Asgard, where he becomes embroiled in the attempt of the Executioner and Enchantress to become major players by leading a troll army against Odin and Asgard. In doing so they go from being minor incarnations of “love” and “death” to attempting their own Titanomachy. However, their failure returns them to something of the status of also-rans in the hierarchy of Marvel villains, and over the course of the next two decades their ambitions rarely attain the grandeur of attacking Asgard. However, the villains’ punishment by Odin for the attack on Asgard, as chronicled in AVENGERS #83 (December 1970) has the more far-reaching effect in beginning the first action that will lead to the birthing of their symbolic daughter, the Valkyrie—which will be further addressed next post.

MOVING FURNITURE, TRADING SYMBOLIC SPACES

Following the death of Steve Gerber I did what I imagine many admirers did: I revisited some of his most-celebrated works, one of which was his stint on the superhero team-book THE DEFENDERS.

After hauling out that particular part of my collection and reading not only Gerber’s take on the group but that of other authors, I began to wonder: how much of the feature would stand up to myth-critical scrutiny? The concept of THE DEFENDERS—a loose coalition of several of Marvel’s “outsider-heroes”—had often received from fan-critics favorable comparison with Marvel’s AVENGERS, often considered to be more generic, and thus less creatively anarchic, than THE DEFENDERS. However, the appearance of creative anarchy is hardly a guarantor of a work’s possessing the complex symbolism I’ve dubbed mythicity.

To repeat what I said in “Myths Without Fantasy,” any kind of story may attain to the complexity of myth, and any element of narrative storytelling—a plot-event, a setting, a piece of dialogue, or a turn of characterization—can have the potential to go from a simple variable to a complex one. At the simple level, such elements are manipulated by the author to serve the ends of the story, which (as per this article’s title) I consider to be akin to the simple act of moving one’s furniture from one place to another. However, where one encounters the author bringing in extra levels of associational complexity, often not necessary as such for the story’s smooth functioning, one is dealing with another level of symbolic discourse, where the simple is “traded” for the complex, rather than simply being moved from one spot to another.

The first six adventures of THE DEFENDERS—three in issues of MARVEL FEATURE, and the first three issues of the super-team’s own magazine—are entertaining instances of “furnitute-moving,” which, for the superhero genre, means lots of lively fights. For Marvel superheroes in particular, it also means that the furniture one is moving has been passed down through many hands, as in theory every story in the so-called Marvel Universe may be viewed as part of an ongoing palimpsest, an endless series of texts which authors may add to, correct, or even erase. With that in mind, though I can say that I think DEFENDERS #4 is the first tale in the series to attain mythic complexity, it’s hard to speak of that story alone because it’s imbricated with so many other elements in past tales. Some of these elements possess mythicity, and others are just unadorned furniture, but before I can speak of the first mythic element that proves significant, I have to speak of all the others that contributed to the character of The Valkyrie. I’ll begin that next post.

On a side-note, I don’t want to give the impression that every single story in the Marvel corpus is referential in the extreme, but obviously, from the time of the company’s conceptual retooling in the early 1960s, the idea of rewriting other discourses, even by the same authors, became part of Marvel’s dominant narrative strategy. For instance, between issues 1 and 2 of the company’s flagship title FANTASTIC FOUR, one can see some changes that were simple mistakes: the trip to the moon in #1 is remembered as a trip to Mars in #2. However, Lee and Kirby also changed their original notion of the Fantastic Four from one issue to the next, with the first issue showing them as shadowy, freakish outcasts—not too unlike the much later Defenders, in fact—while the second, with no explanation, posits that the group-members are suddenly lionized celebrities, heirs to such heroic fame that even the alien Skrulls have heard of them. The latter change is not simply a “mistake,” but involves a shift from one discourse to another. This ability of discourses to shift from one level to another will be easy to observe as I begin surveying the textual history of the Valkyrie.