CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 4

 Prior to posting my second mythcomic review for the month of January 2021, I find that I need to add a new category to the ones set forth in the original STRUCTURAL LENGTH essay.

In that essay, the first four categories I mentioned were “the vignette,” “the short arc,” “the short story,” and “the long arc,” I further stated that the short arc could take the form of a subplot within a greater context, be it a novel or a continuing feature, though the short arc did not always take the subplot form. This quality of “relatedness” is the main thing that distinguishes the short arc from its relative-in-length, the short story. A short story by its nature suggests an item that can read apart from any greater context, as per Edgar Allan Poe’s encomium on the form. Though his three “Dupin” stories qualify as a series, a reader need not read them all to understand any single story. The short story takes a moderately different form in a more regularly published series, such as a Batman comic book. Any given Batman short story makes more sense if the reader does know something about the Batman mythology, about the ways in which he battles crime and the types of criminals he encounters. That said, before one reads a particular standalone story of Batman fighting the Penguin, one does not have to read any other particular Batman-Penguin story to understand what’s going on. However, not every medium handles the short story identically. It’s rare, though not impossible, that anyone ever issues a prose short story in installments, but the practice is fairly common in the comic book medium. A relevant example appears in the two-part QUESTION story “Saving Face.” As much as any prose short story, “Face” has a definite beginning, middle and end, though it’s extended over the course of two serial issues. I would say, however, that there’s a limit on how much an author can extend a short-story continuity within a comic book format before said continuity morphs into something else. I would tend to say that in comic books three issues would probably be the upper limit.

Now, a short arc has similar length-restrictions, but it parts company with the short story in being more intimately tied in to a greater continuity. A relevant example is the three-part TOMB OF DRACULA narrative I’ve entitled “Where Lurks the Chimera.” The plot also has a beginning, middle, and end, but the events of “Chimera” are not independent from other ongoing TOMB stories as the events of “Saving Face” are independent from other stories in the QUESTION series. The main plot of “Chimera” revolves around the vampire-lord’s search for a mystical relic, and it concludes with Dracula failing to obtain his goal. Yet the narrative also intertwines with other events from previous narratives, such as the Count’s ongoing conflict with another villain, Doctor Sun, and his ongoing romance with a young woman, Sheila Whittier, and the reader who has not read previous or subsequent Dracula-tales dealing with these characters has missed a lot of content.

Going by my original list, the “long arc” would be the next category, but I’ve come to think that a new category is necessary, to signify an arc that’s a little more involved in terms of both length and story-content. This I’ll term the “medial arc,” and as far as installment-fiction is concerned, I would say that it usually lasts from six to eight installments, while its narrative is much more strongly imbricated with the ongoing continuity. One example of the medial arc is the five-part arc “Motherland” from the series Y THE LAST MAN. Now, “Motherland” was published late in the history of the ongoing feature, and it happened to solve a lot of the mysteries the author propounded about why almost all the males on Earth perished. But it’s just as possible to see the same level of continuity-involvement in a medial arc published at the beginning of a series. “The Black Pearl” occurs near the outset of the INU-YASHA series and serves to establish one of the dominant plotlines of the narrative: the relationship between the heroic Inu-Yasha and his more ruthless brother Sesshomaru.

At present I would not seek to fix a length of chapters for a long arc. I mentioned in LENGTH PART 1 that long arcs were best known to audiences through the form of the television soap opera. Since the only soap opera I’ve seen in its entirety is the 1966 DARK SHADOWS, I would tend to regard each season of this program as comprising a long arc—which, in the case of Season One, came to 135 30-minute episodes. With such a quantity of episodes, there’s certainly no sense of a unifying beginning, middle, and end. Every time a given story-conflict is resolved, some other conflict emerges from the metaphorical wings to take its place, and the final episode of the season is usually just a stopping-point rather than an organic conclusion.

Long arcs in comic books are rarely that long. In practice, I would say that they rarely exceed twenty installments, allowing for variations in story-length, before the author shifts to another arc or short-story. The events of the plot are not as strongly focused as those of the shorter arcs, though there may be an overreaching purpose unifying all the events. In the NISEKOI long arc I’ve entitled “Limit,” all sixteen installments are principally concerned with the teenagers rescuing their classmate Marika from an arranged marriage. Given this expansive narrative, each of the principal characters is given some feat to perform that serves the aim of rescue, and, given that NISEKOI is a comedy, many of these feats draw upon running jokes in the overall series. For instance, one such joke involves the erratic cooking skills of Kosaki, whose meals are almost always vomitous in nature. During the rescue operation, the operation’s planner assigns Kosaki to cook for the guards attending the wedding, with the humorous result that any guard who ate the girl’s meal become sidelined by virtue of stomach pains.

I mentioned in the cited essay that some comic-book serials are unified enough that they could function as “episodic novels” in the vein of Melville’s MOBY DICK. I noted that some long serials, like Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA lacked a “structuring principle,” be it related to plot or to theme, and thus I did not regard these as episodic novels, only as assemblages of arcs and short stories. NISEKOI, however, qualifies as such an episodic novel, in that it combines several of these structural forms into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

MYTHCOMICS: “MOTHERLAND” (Y THE LAST MAN #49-52)

                                             

 

Men have long been a necessary evil for the continuation of the species, but the moment that evil become obsolete, nature righted its course.—Doctor Matsumori, Y THE LAST MAN.

The above quote is not precisely the theme statement of Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s highly touted series Y THE LAST MAN, though any such theme would have to admit to a fair amount of anti-masculine rhetoric. In addition, the quote reveals a third level to the series’ title.

Two levels will be readily apparent to anyone who even skims the early issues. Vaughan and Guerra’s world suffers a mysterious disease that wipes out almost every on Planet Earth who possesses the “Y” chromosome, leaving a nearly all-female world. The one remaining male, at least according to early issues, sports a name that begins with the same letter of the expunged chromosome. Protagonist Yorick Brown—named, like his sister Hero, for a Shakespearean character by an academically-inclined father—isn’t precisely the empty skull over which Hamlet soliloquizes. That said, it’s highly significant that Yorick’s sister gets both the name and the assertive qualities of a “hero.” It’s quite as if Vaughan and Guerra have designed their entire tapestry to answer the implied question “Why the last man?” Or, to word the question more precisely, “why should anyone want men in a world where it’s constantly proven how self-sufficient women can be without the male of the species?”

Clearly the creators conceived this project as a reaction against more familiar versions of the “Amazon society” trope. This trope usually appears in one of two principal forms: either women have taken over a society once ruled by men, continuing to co-exist with men as their societal inferiors, or women have established some separate domain without the participation of men. Given that all of these stories were written for an audience where men and women co-exist in varying states of equity, the dominant denouement is that the female-centric society is overthrown or modified in some way. A tiny number of tales may allow the female society to persist, as we see in the WONDER WOMAN mythos and in occasional stand-alone works like the 1945 film TARZAN AND THEAMAZONS. But LAST MAN was formulated to advance the ideology that women can and should be able to run the whole world, even though those who desire the extinction of all men—including the unfortunate Yorick—are condemned as extremists who don’t get a seat at the table.

Unlike more masculinist forms of the male hero, Yorick has no desire to overthrow the new order. He’s naturally invested in the project to learn what unknown forces brought forth what is termed “the gendercide,” but even this knowledge isn’t a priority in his quest. His foremost desire is to find Julie, the love of his life, so that the two of them can share a happy ending. Not surprisingly, Yorick does not get a happy heterosexual union at the story’s end, and Brian Vaughan more or less telegraphs this development with his repeated rejections of what some academics call “heteronormative desire.” This is particularly underscored by the fact that throughout most of Yorick’s quest, the youth—portrayed as a slacker whose only modest talent is that of picking locks—needs the help of three strong women, all of whom have sex with one another at some point, though only two are committed lesbians and the third is actually in love with Yorick.

In terms of structure Y THE LAST MAN follows the form I've termed "the episodic novel,” in that its events are unified by a pre-determined plot with a specific conclusion. Despite its obvious strengths—Guerra’s skill in depicting facial emotions, and Vaughan’s skill with Yorick’s many humorous asides—the symbolic discourse is not organized enough to stand as a mythcomic in standing with other long works like HELLSING and DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. It’s certainly not impossible to come up with a serialized novel in which the exaltation of the double-X gender attains mythic concrescence; I’ve cited numerous examples of mythcomics wherein the author’s didactic overthought complements his symbolic underthought. But LAST MAN is just a little too facile to reach those depths.

The one story-arc that manages to be mythic is what might be termed the “origin-story,” not of unheroic Yorick but of the gendercide. “Motherland” reveals the somewhat ambiguous answer to this mystery late in the series, prior to the sorting-out of Yorick’s romantic destiny. During this arc, Yorick and his three female allies travel to China, in part because the physician of their group, the coyly named Allison Mann, suffers from an illness brought on by her research into cloning. Allison comes from a family of scientists and has reacted to the gendercide by attempting to create male clones from Yorick’s cells, not because she holds high esteem for men—she’s one of the lesbians—but because she feels the need for “equilibrium” in human affairs. Her illness stems from her having carried one of her clones to term in her own womb, so she tells her compatriots that she needs help from Doctor Ming in China. Allison had an ambivalent relationship to Ming in that the latter was sleeping with Allison’s father Doctor Matsumori while he was married to Allison’s actual mother. But Yorick and the other women contrive to get Allison to China nonetheless.

In that land the protagonists discover not only that Allison’s father is the only other living man on Earth save Yorick, but also that he is responsible for the gendercide. The explanation proves more inventive than the usual world-doom brought about by a bomb or a pestilence, for Vaughan invokes Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of “morphic resonance.” Matsumori believes that this quasi-mystical phenomenon caused the immediate extinction of almost all men on Earth, and that through this medium “Nature” was responding to Matsumori’s creation of a female clone in his laboratory, some time before Allison birthed an unviable male offspring. Given that Matsumori has been thought dead for most of the series, Vaughan didn’t spotlight his role in Allison’s own psychological development, but the writer makes up for it here. The reader is told that Matsumori and his daughter had a fractious relationship, and that he was jealous enough of her own clone-project to sabotage it, making it possible that his project succeeded first, albeit with catastrophic results. Vaughan explains that not only was the first clone taken from Allison’s cell-material, Matsumori has also created several other Allison-clones, many of whom have grown to pre-teen status—all, it would seem, with the object of creating a more perfect daughter to replace the one with whom he just could not get along.

That said, Matsumori has also decided that his own gender has outlived its usefulness, and so he announces his plan to exterminate “the Last Man” prior to taking his own life. The fact that Yorick must be saved by a woman—as usual—is not surprising, nor is it surprising that the woman is the original Allison, bringing her father’s reign to an end. But Yorick’s response to Matsumori’s threat is rather peculiar:

Every guy goes through a period where he’s scared shitless and completely baffled by girls, right? But then we’re supposed to grow up, figure out that the best place for all the great women probably isn’t behind every great man.

This is a singularly tortured play on the old saw “Behind every great man is a woman,” not to mention a weird lecture to come from a man in danger of being killed. But it’s the sort of phrase that reveals how often Vaughan bends over backwards to adhere to ideology, even when it makes no sense to the fictional situation. It’s implied that at some time Matsumori may have been a typical exploitative male, one who wanted to keep his daughter from exceeding him in scientific repute—though this isn’t quite the same as keeping his daughter “behind” him. But following the gendercide, Matsumori is anything but a “males first” guy. He tells his captive audience that he considers his sex to be “flawed animals,” and if his later actions are in any way motivated by egotism, one might suppose him to be exalted by seeing his daughter continue his research. He tells Yorick that Allison “can continue my work. She and her mother will see that women live on beyond this generation. But you and I—we didn’t belong in this world before the plague, and we certainly don’t belong here now.”

While Matsumori doesn’t succeed in ending the life of the “penultimate man,” Vaughan never really refutes his villain; never articulates any strong reason why men should continue to exist in a world of strong women. Yorick lives to create others of his sex, but there’s no suggestion that men can ever recapture their hold over the post-gendercide world, and even Allison’s notion of “equilibrium” is barely referenced after “Motherland.” I believe this arc was strong symbolically because, despite his overall glibness, Vaughan had to grapple with some of the issues about the natures of men and women in order to make the origin-story work. And even though the revelation of the villain’s gender suggests that “Fatherland” might have made a better title—since Matsumori literally fathers a mostly-female world—the combative relationship between Allison and her father is a worthy addition to the many myths of “the war between men and women.”