NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 3

In the first two sections of this intermittent essay-series, I argued with myself that the "significant values" of a given work, or set of works, could affect the "narrative values" of the item under discussion.  However, only recently did I consider this effect could be metaphorically illustrated in mathematical terms.

In the original ACTIVE SHARES, PASSIVE SHARES argument, I surveyed the Silver Age Marvel comic-series, of which I said:

I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

But this presumes that every metaphenomenal story in the series has exactly the same value as every isophenomenal story; that one story equals a value of "one." Yet in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, I said:

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

By this paradigm, a story with metaphenomenal elements is "stronger" than one without them, if only in the degree to which the former type forces the reader to utilize his imagination. Given that strength even in the non-imaginary world carries more value than comparative weakness, then it's arguable that every metaphenomenal RAWHIDE KID story ought to have a value of more than one.

To be sure, I fudged the original percentages by allowing a value of "one" simply to each issue of RAWHIDE KID, even though some of the earlier issues contain more than one story with the starring character. Since I felt that the feature progressed away from multiple stories fairly soon, I decided I didn't want to count out every story, with the result that I regarded the whole run of the KID as comprising 113 "points" (at least two issues featured reprints before the title went all-reprint).  Of those 113, I considered that 15 of the stories had metaphenomenal content, though I'll note here, as I did not in the earlier essay, that only two of them are "marvelous" and all of the others are "uncanny."

Now, whatever calculator gave me eight percent I evidently misused, because when I tried the operation today, it came out as a little over 14 percent. The error makes no difference to the 51 percent rule: eight and fourteen are equally unable to enjoy a "controlling interest."

So, if I posit that each isophenomenal story, because it makes no great appeal to the imagination, is only worth one point, then that gives 98 points for the roughly 98 isophenomenal stories in the Kid's original run.

Now suppose that I say that a marvelous-metaphenomenal story is worth not one, but five points. Only two stories in the run are unquestionably marvelous in nature, the "Red Raven" story and the "Living Totem" tale, so with those added we have 10 points for the stories themselves, 108 points for the grand total.

Then there are thirteen "uncanny" stories, so I'll arbitrarily assign them three points to each of these. So the subtotal of metaphenomenal stories becomes 10 + 39, equaling 49, and the total points overall are 147. Out of 147, 49 is roughly 33 percent. It's still not 51 percent or more, but it begins to look more like the sort of "passive share" I argued about earlier.

Now, I could continue to jigger the ratings of the metaphenomenal stories until they did raise above fifty-one percent, but if I set that standard in stone, then it would be totally arbitrary. By asserting greater values for the metaphenomenal stories in a merely theoretical manner, this adjusted paradigm adequately illustrates the principle of the passive share I sought to explore.

A contrasting example, brought up in NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 2. was that of the 1960s TV serial LOST IN SPACE. I wasn't concerned with sussing out phenomenology here, but the appearance of the combative mode, and as with RAWHIDE I assigned every story (including parts of continued stories) just one point. Eighty-three stories meant eighty-three total points, Nineteen of the episodes were combative, which registers as 23 percent of the whole.

But to be consistent with my assertions in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, the higher dynamicities of a combative work should be valued higher than those that lack this dynamicity. So the total number of points for the subcombative episodes, assigning each one point, is 64.

Since combative dynamicity doesn't make quite the same appeal to the imagination as does metaphenomenality, I'll conservatively assign the value of three to the nineteen episodes. So the subtotal for the combative episodes is 57 and the overall total is 121. The subtotal is about 44 percent of the total, so it too does not meet the 51 percent criteria, though it too is closer to being a "passive share." However, because combative adventure does not seem to have been as important to LOST IN SPACE as metaphenomenal content was to RAWHIDE KID, it's possible that the significant value of the former might have a negativizing effect upon the whole of the teleseries. More on that later, if I get suitably inspired.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE

Once more I return to the endlessly fascinating subject of the process of domain-transgression, of moving from the domain of the subcombative to the combative, from the isophenomenal to the metaphenomenal, from the functional to the super-functional, and so on. In FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT, I used the term "amplitude," or more specifically "peak amplitude," to designate the energy a creator needs to bring to a work to move from one level to another:

Wheelwright is not saying that there is an archetype of "Eagle-ness" that sends its *eidolos* down to the huddled masses that they might worship the Glory of the Eagle. The "characteristic amplitude" is not bestowed upon the "eminent instances" by something outside history, and yet, the eminence of the eagle is not *simply* the humdrum concatenation of all the particular times that various human cultures decided that eagles looked cool, as a materialistic blockhead like Roland Barthes would insist. Wheelwright compares his notion of "archetypal content" and "amplitude" to Goethe's concepts of beauty, though personally I think Kant's concept of the beautiful and the sublime might make a better comparison.

I enlarged upon this idea with respect to functionality in THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PART 3:

"Peak amplitude," then, represents the artist's ability to go beyond the mean values of both modes, and to "storm" into the more rarified domains of the sublime. Of course the artist will always have some need of the mean values, what I've also called "the purely functional." But the term amplitude may serve better to bridge abstract concepts like "functional" and "super-functional," or any other such concepts I continue to explore here.

One "abstract concept" to which I've not yet applied the "amplitude" concept is the knotty problem of assigning serial works to a given domain-- that of the combative mode, or of the metaphenomenal-- when all stories in the series don't share the same characteristics. I first addressed this in 2012's  CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST, putting forth the idea of a "51 percent rule:"

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

Yet I decided that this was not quite enough. Therefore I articulated the idea of "active shares and passive shares" in an essay of the same name, seeking to explore why it should seem to me that, say, a gunfighter who fought just one metaphenomenal threat was an example of a passive share, while another gunfighter who fought a greater number of metaphenomenal threats-- though not even close to a "51 percent majority"-- comprised an "active share."

Still, even this was an imperfect solution, given that in the real world of high finance, active minority shares are still based on their numerical superiority over passive minority shares. If I were to state that RAWHIDE KID could be metaphenomenal based on 7% of his adventures, then why would I not state that the teleseries LOST IN SPACE was in the combative mode, since 23% of that show's adventures qualified as combative, as I put forth in PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE:

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality. However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series.

However, there was a better way to speak of this distinction than the perhaps confusing references to a given serial work's "mythos." Thus I return to the distinction Northrop Frye made in his essay "Archetypes of Literature:"

We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we 'see' what he means.

Since both the original run of THE RAWHIDE KID and the original broadcast of LOST IN SPACE are completed serials, it's possible to look back at them and gain a "mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance." Neither serial satisfies the "51 percent rule," which might be best compared to one of Frye's "narrative values." But RAWHIDE KID satisfies the significant value of the metaphenomenal, giving it an "active minority share." By contrast, LOST IN SPACE  does not satisify the significant value of the combative mode, for the reasons stated above, and so it proves a "minority passive share."

This linking of two disparate critical concepts, then, provides a more systematic rationale for the verdict announced at the end of KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2:

...it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

CLEANING AROUND THE CENTER

In CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 3 I compared my early use of terms like "dominant" and "subdominant" in the early history of this blog, and why those terms fell to the wayside:

The word "dominance" descends from the Latin dominus, meaning a lord or master,  and this imagery more or less accords with the thoughts I expressed in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY. And yet, though I don't reject any of these meditations, in recent years I've been drawn less to the image of a "master" lording it over lesser elements, and more drawn to the image of the circle. If a given narrative has elements characteristic of all four Fryean mythoi, one may see the centermost circle as being the myth-radical that most determines the total content of the narrative.  

I attempted, not very frequently, to work out a terminology for describing the way "lesser elements" give way to a "sovereign element," whether speaking of a given work's myth-radicals or of its distribution of spectacular and/or functional forms of violence, as seen in CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 2. In fact, most of what I've theorized about the "centric/diffuse" word-pair concerned differing forms of dynamicity, as seen in THE NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE PT. 2:

When opposed megadynamic forces exist in a narrative but are not the main focus of the narrative, such a work is "subcombative" and the opposed forces are what I will term "diffuse forces" rather than "centric forces"-- on which I may write sometime later.

On this blog I've only occasionally mentioned  Northrop Frye's geometrically based distinction between "the centrifugal and the centripetal:"

"Frye uses the terms 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world."-- Wikipedia, "Northrop Frye."

Despite not making reference to those precise terms, though, this section of Frye's ANATOMY was a great influence on me. I would imagine that when I wrote these words, I was thinking to some extent about the "diffuse forces" being like unto the so-called "centripetal" force, that tends outward from the center, while the "centric" were like unto "centrifugal force," tending toward the center.

The big problem, though, is that "centric" and "diffuse" aren't really viable opposites, though the former does have a more workable antonym: From Dictionary.com:

CENTRIC: "pertaining to or situated at the center."

ECCENTRIC: "not having the same center; not concentric."

Usually when I've introduced a new term in place of an old one, I've simply let the old blog-label remain unchanged and started new tracings for the new term. However, since as of today I only had six tracings for the labels "centric force" (or "will") and its original opposite, I've scrubbed away the old, mixed-up terms in the labels, but not in the essays themselves. From now on, I'll use only "centric will" for any element that assumes a central position in the narrative, and "eccentric will" for any element outside the center.

While most bloggers don't trouble to revise old essays, even in their labels, I do so whenever I come up with a formulation that better clarifies my position. I've revised these two forms of authorial will with the expectation of using them to further illustrate another theoretical concept. The concepts of both the "51 percent rule and of its corrollary of "active and passive shares," last referenced here, has become vital to my method of sussing out the importance of divergent elements within narratives. This terminological "house-cleaning" has thus come about in order to bring the two forms of authorial will in line with the general idea of how centricity is achieved, and what it means.

ADDENDUM 1-25-2026: Amusingly, years later the active/passive share concept has not remained "vital" to my system. It seemed like it at the time. 

 

PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE

I've now completed my survey of the 1965-68 teleseries LOST IN SPACE, in order to determine whether or not this clearly marvelous-metaphenomenal series should be judged as belonging to the combative mode, and therefore as belonging to the category of "the superhero idiom." I've addressed this topic in various essays but the essay most relevant to this investigation is 2012's CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST.  Though this piece concentrated primarily on how to make determinations as to a given work's "Fryean mythos," it was in this essay that I put forth the "51 percent rule,"which I'd formulated earlier in order to suss out what serial works belonged to the superhero idiom by virtue of being dominantly both metaphenomenal and combative. Here's what I wrote about the rule in CHALLENGE:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

In 2015 I decided that the 51 percent rule, modeled on my perceptions of economic patterns, needed to be supplemented by a corollary principle, described in ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE:

Yet as I played around with the rule in the provisional "super-idiom list" that I mentioned in the first "51 percent" essay, I realized that even some characters who didn't satisfy the "51 percent rule" seemed important to the list... [so] I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid. And yet, it's evident that for a time, the Kid's creators Lee and Kirby were making a significant attempt to place their combative cowpoke into superhero situations.

Thanks to a little more research, I evolved my corollary principle:

...from the strict view of the "51 percent rule," both Ringo and Rawhide are "minority shareholders" in the realm of the metaphenomenal. However, to extend the above distinction into the realm of literature, Ringo Kid's adventures display only a "minority passive interest" in matters metaphenomenal, while Rawhide Kid's display a "minority active interest"-- that is, Rawhide's encounters with metaphenomenal presences remain a vital part of his mythos, even if they're not numerically superior to all the naturalistic exploits.

So the "Marvel" serial character The Ringo Kid does not belong to the category of the superhero idiom because he satisfies the combative qualification but does not satisfy the qualification of the necessary phenomenality. LOST IN SPACE was my first attempt to evaluate a serial work in terms that was clearly metaphenomenal but was more "ambivalent" in terms of its combative elements. I posed the question thusly in the first LIS-survey essay:

...on what occasions is it possible for a given series to achieve the combative mode, less because of an emphasis on the continual encounter of megadynamic forces than because of an emphasis upon the outward *form* of such an encounter?...By way of exploring this "outward form" possibility further, I'm going to devote a series of posts to a television series whose status with regard to the combative mode has always been dubious to me.

"Outward form" was a clumsy way of saying that the work under investigation reproduced the form of some pattern that had been articulated frequently enough to become a literary archetype. My example in that essay, the Spectre of the Golden Age, conforms to the archetype of the "metaphenomenal combative" even though he spends an awful lot of time taking on enemies who can't really fight him, and only occasionally vying against entities of comparable power. So the Spectre would be an example of an "active share" type of character-- not in terms of his pheomenality, which is clearly marvelous-- but in terms of the rarity of his truly megadynamic encounters. Mundane gangsters are thus a lower manifestation of the general evil that the Spectre fights.

Now, I've defined the LOST IN SPACE characters as demiheroes in this essay, but characters belonging to that persona can belong to the category of the superhero idiom as easily as the other three personas of hero, villain, and monster. It's easy to determine a demihero's status with respect to the combative mode when he gets into fights all the time, like the one examined here.

From 1965 to 1968 LOST IN SPACE portrayed an ensemble of eight regular spacefaring characters: John Robinson and his wife Maureen, their children Will, Judy, and Penny, ship's navigator Don West, the cowardly stowaway Doctor Smith, and the ship's robot, known only as "the Robot." Doctor Smith had no combative abilities whatever, and Maureen and her three kids sometimes wielded guns but were never seen doing much of anything. As for Don West, he acted like a tough guy and could clearly handle a gun, but he was always played as "the sidekick who gets knocked out to make the main character look good." Ship's captain John Robinson-- played by the same actor who had played Zorro in a 1957-59 teleseries-- was the only human character who showed megadynamic power in his battle with aliens and androids. However, the Robot became something of an "ace in the hole" for the space travelers, and often used his superior technological arsenal against enemies too tough to be taken down by a human wielding a ray-gun (or a sword). Since the Robot soon evolved from a simple resource into a full-fledged (if cornball) character, I have no problem in judging him to be part of the ensemble, and thus the automaton and the ship's captain are the only "megadynamic" presences who starred in the series.

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality.

However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series. (NOTE: in this and in ACTIVE SHARE PASSIVE SHARE, I'm using the word "mythos" in a general, non-Fryean sense.)

Some stories are resolved by overt peacemaking between factions who just need to know each other better, as in "The Sky is Falling." There are also enemies who display megadynamic powers and use those powers to menace the Robinson party, as in "Kidnapped in Space," wherein the group is attacked by androids serving a super-computer. However, in that story a combative conclusion is put aside in favor of another negotiation. Sometimes enemies are persuaded to abandon their hostile intentions, as with the Junkman of "Junkyard of Space," and sometimes villains who are utterly intransigent are destroyed by chance rather than pitched combat, as when Doctor Smith accidentally blows up the nasty alien in "The Golden Man." And as I covered in the survey, there are many stories in which some functional violence occurs at a narrative's end, but none of the spectacle one needs to create megadynamic conflict.

Thus I conclude that despite the presence of a few "superhero-like" adventures within the mythos of LOST IN SPACE, the dominant ethos is directed away from combative resolutions, in contrast to the serial's contemporary competitor STAR TREK, which talked a lot about peace and understanding but took a lot of pleasure in the spectacle of fight-scenes. For this reason LOST IN SPACE possesses only a "minority passive share" in the category of the combative, and so does not belong to the larger category of the superhero idiom.

ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE

In my previous essay I visualized the "geometrical approximations of the two sublimities" as a series of "fields of force,." or "domains." In both cases the sublimity-affects were determined by what sort of phenomenal universe they took place in. However, the domains relating to dynamicity did not interpenetrate. For the time being I will designate these domains as DSDs, "dynamic-sublime domains."

The dynamicities of the marvelous and the uncanny cannot manifest within the sphere of the naturalistic at all, because they depend on the alteration of one or both of the rules of causation, and anything that even resembles the tropes of the uncanny or marvelous is subsumed into the naturalistic. An example of this process is cited in this essay, where the uncanny character of PSYCHO'S Norman Bates is recast into naturalistic terms for the teleseries BATES MOTEL.

 In the sphere of the uncanny, marvelous dynamicity cannot manifest, and though naturalistic dynamicity does exist in this sphere, the dynamicity of the uncanny, given the special name "potency," overrules all naturalistic dynamicity. An example of this process is cited in this essay, wherein the only source of the uncanny is the masked vigilante the Durango Kid, whose presence dominates storylines that are in all other respects identical to those of more naturalistic "horse operas."

Finally, dynamicities of the uncanny and the naturalistic can manifest within the sphere of the marvelous, as I showed here with regard to the serial ACE DRUMMOND, where the science-fictional nature of the villain's ray-gun defines the entire narrative as marevelous, overruling the potency of the same villain's uncanny death-trap as well as the naturalistic prowess of the titular hero.

In contrast, the domains relating to the combinatory-sublime-- the CSDs-- interpenetrate quite a bit, because their form of the sublime is not physical, but symbolic. It was because of this symbolic interpenetration of the three phenomenalities that I evolved my 51 percent rule:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.

From the beginnings of this blog, I've frequently dealt with the problems of how narratives contain diverse elements that may conflict with one another-- not just elements of phenomenality, but also elements relating to Frye's four mythoi, genre-elements, and so on. It's impossible-- and not really desirable-- to come up with a formula that would faultlessly determine what element held "sovereignty," as Jung called it. The "51 percent rule" was my only attempt to imagine what a statistically determined rule might look like, and I applied it in only a few essays, here, here, and here.  The second essay brings up the example of the Atlas Comics character the Ringo Kid, whose series I decided not to deem metaphenomenal, given that the hero had only one encounter with a metaphenomenal antagonist. a "Doctor Saturn."

  The cinematic version of Ace Drummond also had only one metaphenomenal protagonist, but this version of Drummond-- whom I don't consider identical with the one from the 1936 comic strip-- only had one installment. Thus Ace Drummond satisfies the "51 percent rule," and the Ringo Kid doesn't.

Yet as I played around with the rule in the provisional "super-idiom list" that I mentioned in the first "51 percent" essay, I realized that even some characters who didn't satisfy the "51 percent rule" seemed important to the list. I mentioned in one essay that the protagonists of the comic strips LI'L ABNER and DICK TRACY encountered a substantial number of marvelous or uncanny presences, but that it wasn't feasible to make a statistical breakdown for strips that ran for many years.

But I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

And yet, it's evident that for a time, the Kid's creators Lee and Kirby were making a significant attempt to place their combative cowpoke into superhero situations.

Sometimes he encountered crooks who simply wore uncanny outfits, like the Bat from RH #25:

In #35, he encountered a costumed crook with a literally marvelous power.

Like a fair number of Western heroes, he also encountered at least one lost civilization:

And few Marvel-readers can forget Rawhide's momentous "first contact" with an alien resembling an Indian totem pole.

The sum total of these adventures pale in comparison to Rawhide's more mundane adventures-- and yet, something's going on here that isn't going on in the RINGO KID feature. The creators-- not always Lee and Kirby, BTW-- are making substantial use of metaphenomenal elements, so they make up an important, if subordinate, part of Rawhide's fictional mythos.  The "51 percent rule," while helpful as a guiding principle, is too rigid to deal with this loosey-goosey approach to phenomenal integrity.

So, by dint of reading a few posts on shareholder rules, I've happily come across a definition that solves my cowboy conundrum, on this site:

The minority investment can be either minority passive interest or minority active interest. Passive means that the company does not have material influence on the company in which it has this minority interest. Active means that the company is in a position to influence the company in which it has minority interest.

Thus, from the strict view of the "51 percent rule," both Ringo and Rawhide are "minority shareholders" in the realm of the metaphenomenal. However, to extend the above distinction into the realm of literature, Ringo Kid's adventures display only a "minority passive interest" in matters metaphenomenal, while Rawhide Kid's display a "minority active interest"-- that is, Rawhide's encounters with metaphenomenal presences remain a vital part of his mythos, even if they're not numerically superior to all the naturalistic exploits.

This metaphor also solves my above-referenced problem as to how I should rate long-running strips like LI'L ABNER. It have enough fantastic content to satisfy the 51 percent rule, or it may not-- but certainly a strip that produces such weird entities as "Evil-Eye Fleegle" and "the Schmoos" has at least a "minority active interest" in matters metaphenomenal.

UNCANNY CITY

In this essay I cited the comic strips LI'L ABNER and DICK TRACY as examples of long-running serials that might or might not be metaphenomenal fantasies based on the considerations of my "51 percent rule." At the same time that I raised the question, though, I also dismissed it, in that I confessed my lack of interest in attempting to figure out just how many storylines in these features possessed metaphenomenal content. There are just too damn many of them.

Frank Miller's series of loosely related SIN CITY "yarns," however-- which this Wikipedia entry helpfully breaks down by plot-- proves much more useful as a test of the rule.

SIN CITY is a concept that does not, at first glance, appear to be metaphenomenal, unlike Miller's superhero books and his ventures into futuristic fiction, such as GIVE ME LIBERTY. Like Chester Gould's DICK TRACY, Miller's series centers its narrative in a supposedly "down to earth" setting: a modern metropolis overrun with crime and corruption. Whereas Gould grounded DICK TRACY in procedural crime-detection techniques, Miller evokes the downbeat story-tropes of noir fiction as his method of "keeping things real."

And yet, both Gould and Miller go out of their way to make things "unreal" as well, by evoking the sort of story-tropes I have termed "uncanny." TRACY isn't well known to younger fans any more, but I would argue that even the old farts who grew up with the Gould strip in one era or another remember the crime-solving sequences much less well than the artist's gallery of grotesque villains: Pruneface, the Brow, the Mole, et al.-- most of whom partake of the trope I call "freakish flesh." Usually Gould did not bother supplying an etiology for his deformed crooks: they're ugly because their bodies reflect the ugliness of their souls. (That said, I should note that most of Gould's heroes aren't much better looking: they're just not especially off-putting.)

Miller's SIN CITY universe has become well known to the public through film adaptations, and though the author's evocation of noir sentiments plays a big role in the serial's reception, I would say that Miller, like Gould, knows how to "grab" readers with intimations of the metaphenomenal.  Going in the order of the "yarns" as cited by Wikipedia, here's how they shake out.

THE HARD GOODBYE boasts four uncanny tropes. Marv himself is a bit like a cross between Dick Tracy and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, with features of flintlike angularity and a bulky, forbidding physique. He's not technically a "freak," but the narrative repeatedly emphasizes his ugliness beyond the realm of ordinary homeliness; so much so that any story in which Marv appears becomes uncanny by his presence. In addition, in his signature exploit Marv finds himself pursuing the murderers of a hooker. At least one of the two is what I term a "perilous psycho," since he becomes ecstatically aroused when he eats human flesh (implicitly, only the flesh of beautiful females). The psycho conspires with an "enabler" who is implicitly his lover, so that the two together comprise a "weird family." And though not every instance of cannibalism may qualify as a "bizarre crime," in this case the modern-day flesh-eaters keep "trophies" of their specimens, which in a less noir-ish setting would make most audiences think in terms of the horror genre.

A DAME TO KILL FOR, however, is naturalistic in its plot, focusing on viewpoint character Dwight as he gets sucked into the murderous schemes of his old girlfriend Eva.  However, Marv appears, lending his gargantuan presence to one of Dwight's schemes, and his presence alone gives the story uncanny content. There's also the questionable figure of the character Miho, arguably Miller's stand-in for his popular Marvel character Elektra. Yet Miho doesn't wear what I would deem a "costume" as with Elektra, or even an outfit that screams "ninja." During the story Miho is seen leaping around rooftops in a manner that seems beyond the capability of a naturalistic practitioner of the martial arts, and yet I don't see a specific skill or weapon in her repertoire that seems "uncanny," merely "exotic."

THE BABE WORE RED, a collection of SIN CITY, chalks up three entries for the naturalistic. One of the three stories is another Dwight tale, but the questionable Miho does not appear in it.

Miho does appear in THE BIG FAT KILL, and here she comes closer to performing an uncanny act of violence. When one of her charges is threatened by a gun-wielding cop, she hurls a swastika-shaped shuriken at his arm with such force that she severs his hand. While leaping around like a mountain-goat seems just barely possible in the realm of the naturalistic, severing a hand with a thrown weapon seems beyond the capabilities of a very small Japanese woman. This might argue that by dint of some special training Miho is a "superwoman" in the uncanny mode. She's also seen slashing off heads with a samurai sword, which action I might regard as merely naturalistic if it weren't being done by a petite female. Thus the second Dwight story, even without Marv, roughly qualifies as "uncanny."

"SILENT NIGHT" is a story of Marv going up against a gang of child traffickers. he alone makes it uncanny.

THAT YELLOW BASTARD, featuring hard-bitten cop John Hartigan, creates Miller's most memorable villain, Junior Roark. Though Roark starts out as a child-murdering psychotic at the story's opening, he is not precisely a psycho in the uncanny mode. However, after Hartigan maims him, he undergoes reconstructive surgery that makes him into a literally "yellow" bastard. Roark makes the story uncanny thanks to his "freakish flesh."

Four of the next six SIN CITY short stories are all naturalistic: "Blue Eyes" has Marv in it, even though he doesn't figure into the plot, while "The Rats" concerns a psycho-killer.

The two stories in SEX AND VIOLENCE are also naturalistic. Then, the last of the Marv-centered stories, "Just Another Saturday Night," is another one for the uncanny side.

Finally, the last two SIN CITY novels provide an even split. FAMILY VALUES is another Dwight story, and again Miho goes beyond the bounds of what the well-trained martial artist can do. However, the final novel, HELL AND BACK, falls into the naturalistic mode, even though main hero Wallace does experience a weird set of drug-induced hallucinations in which he talks to such figures as Hellboy, Hagar the Horrible and Lone Wolf and Cub.

Thus, going strictly on a story-by-story basis, ten of the nineteen stories fall into naturalistic mode, and nine into the uncanny mode. Still, the majority of the naturalistic yarns are very short, so it's not quite the same situation as we saw with DICK TRACY, where the creator of those yarns executed almost ten years' worth of naturalistic story-arcs before he finally brought in a significant number of uncanny grotesques. 

Other considerations abound. At present Miller's SIN CITY doesn't line up with the "51 percent rule" as an overall series, but it's debatable as to whether stories focused on non-continuing characters should be factored in with those featuring recurring figures. This is a problem that doesn't come up with a single-hero feature like DICK TRACY.  No doubt in future installments I'll have more to say about the nature of phenomenal attribution in "shared universes," to say nothing of anthology-projects-- such as the SIN CITY film-adaptations.

FIFTY-ONE PHENOMENALITIES, OR FIGHT!

I've been giving more thought as to how my "51 percent rule" applies to the form of serials and related formats.

Any regular readers of this blog shouldn't be thrown by this reference, for I've only brought up the rule three times over the years, and only once did I use the concept to discuss the intermingling of pheomenalities in a serial format. In ABNER ORIGINE I remarked upon the fact that the comic strip LI'L ABNER had made copious usages of marvelous concepts, though it was not usually classed as a fantasy-comic. I put this down to the fact that marvelous concepts only appeared in ABNER in an irregular fashion, and that the strip was better known for naturalistic tropes, like having its hillbilly characters run into society snobs and gangsters. At the same time, I mentioned that one of Al Capp's running gags was to portray both the strip's star Abner and frequent support-character "Mammy" as possessing inhuman levels of strength.  I opined that if this running-gag appeared as frequently as I thought that it did, then LI'L ABNER deserved to be considered a metaphenomenal strip, even if it wasn't as open about its fantastic nature as LITTLE NEMO and FLASH GORDON.

I conceived of the "51 percent rule" in keeping with the phenomenological considerations covered in the essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS. All works with dominantly metaphomenal content-- whether they are stand-alone works or parts of an ongoing serial narrative-- cannot help but reference the phenomenal principles typical of naturalistic narrative: that there must be some degree of causal coherence and intelligibility, if only to provide contrast to the violations of one or both of these two principles.

That said, there are serials that only very rarely stray into metaphenomenal territory, which is what originally caused me to formulate the rule. Over the years Marvel Comics reprinted, to the best of my knowledge, all of the adventures of 1950s western hero "The Ringo Kid." Of those adventures, only one possessed metaphenomenal content, a story from RINGO KID WESTERN #8 (October 1955). In this issue the heroic Kid encountered a mad scientist, Doctor Saturn, who invented a super-scientific device with which he temporarily blinded people, whom his gang then robbed.

I'm reasonably sure that no one would induct the Ringo Kid into the ranks of metaphenomenal heroes on the basis of one lousy adventure. But things get a little more dicey with a serial concept like LI'L ABNER. The strip lasted several years, and even if I had access to all of the ABNER strips, I wouldn't have any interest in sedulously noting exactly how many metaphenomenal storylines appeared in all of the strips, and what percentage of all the story-arcs possesses such concepts. Yet I wanted to formulate the rule as a *theory* that could account for the dominant proclivities of any series, no matter how long-lived. Once more, from the essay where I first propounded the term:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  

As I've noted elsewhere, the context in this essay has to do with sorting out the Fryean mythos that dominates a given serial narrative, but the same logic applies to its phenomenality as well, and I've been using it in this manner in my informal determinations, though not so much on this blog.

Still, even with this "rule of thumb" in place, it should be obvious that even if LI'L ABNER's metaphenomenal storylines did not make up over fifty percent of the total storylines, it's obvious that Al Capp possessed a creative passion for coming up with metaphenomenal concepts on a regular basis, while the guy who put a mad scientist into a RINGO KID story may have simply been tired of the usual cowpoke sagas, and so elected to "bend the Kid's genre," so to speak.

I said in the except above that "51 percent" didn't give the holder of such stock an "unqualified dominion," and the same applies to serial concepts. Sometimes one can see that a given author has a real passion for playing with metaphenomenal concepts, while another author may just be tossing out whatever seems to work.

To draw once more upon comic strip examples, DICK TRACY debuted in 1931, and if it had been cancelled in 1940, we would hardly remember it as having any metaphenomenal content, as Chester Gould only rarely used weird, freaky crooks in his 1930s stories. However, from the 1940s and on, TRACY became famous for its "rogue's gallery" of bizarre criminals. TRACY might or might not exceed the formal "51 percent rule" in terms of metaphenomenal content, but as with ABNER, one can hardly doubt the influence of said content on the strip as a structuring principle.

ABNER ORIGINE

Since I'm about to do a review of the 1959 film LI'L ABNER, I decided to take a quick look at the phenomenality of Al Capp's original 1934-77 comic strip.

During its long run the strip featured a considerable number of marvelous entities in assorted adventures, such as the Wolf Gal (seen above), the Schmoos (a race of creatures that love to be devoured by mankind), and Joe Btfsplk, the "world's world's jinx."  However, despite the presence of these and other bizarre characters, ABNER might not be considered a "fantasy comic strip" in the minds of its readers, in contrast to a literal science-fiction comic like FLASH GORDON or even a strip dealing with outre dream-fantasies like LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. 

Of course, I too might hesitate to deem ABNER a marvelous strip.  In this essay I put forth my "51 percent rule," which I applied not to the phenomenalities of features but to their alignment with particular Fryean mythoi.  Still, the principle remains the same.  If it's the case that the majority of Abner's adventures legitimately fall within the domain of the naturalistic, then ipso facto it must be judged a naturalistic feature. And when one looks at the first ten years of the strip as reprinted by Kitchen Sink, one may tend to consider the bulk of those adventures to be naturalistic, concerning the comic confrontations of Abner Yokum and his hillbilly kindred with snooty society and big-city gangsters.

There is, however, one element that, though it was not *constantly* referenced, might tip the strip into the domain of the uncanny, and that would be the unusual levels of strength attributed to Abner and his mammy, a.k.a. "Mammy Yokum" (seen below).

Indeed, within the first year of the strip, Li'l Abner undergoes an unexplained transformation.  In his first sequence in 1934, he's just a big brawny guy, capable of being knocked down by another brawny guy.  By 1935, he's taken on a near-Herculean level of power, amazing ordinary audiences when he beats down an angry gorilla.  Though Abner does this without full knowledge-- the fight takes place in a dark room, causing the hillbilly to mistake his opponent for a fellow in a fur coat-- clearly artist Capp was extending the limits of what Abner could do for comic effect.  Later episodes make Abner practically invulnerable, at least in the head region, as items like safes and concrete blocks bounce off the hillbilly's skull without giving him more than a headache.  This might not be quite the level of the mythic Hercules, but it's on the same uncanny level as many of the less extraordinary cinematic versions of the Greek hero, two of which I reviewed here.

The one objection that might be made to this observation is: did Capp keep referring to this "trope of the uncanny," or did he drop it over time?  If it ceased to be utilized at all in the strip's later days, then it might not be applicable to judging the overall fantasy-content of the strip, any more than the frequent fantastic guest-stars.  But that question is rendered moot until such time as the entire run of the strip becomes available.

I'll note that I tend to believe that once an author has established this sort of phenomenality-trope, it usually still has applicability unless expressly contradicted.  On my movie-blog I've been slowly reviewing episodes of the 1972-75 KUNG FU teleseries.  Some episodes show the hero Kwai Chang Caine as being capable of feats that belong to the uncanny-phenomenality; some episodes do not show him as anything but a skillful man.  But I tend to believe that once an author establishes that heroes-- even those as unalike as Caine and Li'l Abner-- possess such unusual properties, they should tend as narrative properties that don't disappear simply because the author isn't using them every time.

GENRE-FENCES MAKE BAD THEORY

"In the beginning was the word"-- John 1.1

"In the beginning was the act"-- Goethe, FAUST.

In CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST I stated:

I'm aware of no list that seeks to list any protagonists, superheroic or otherwise, according to the Fryean mythos to which they belong.

The lack of such a list isn't surprising; a list-maker has to be highly motivated to delve into the Fryean categories, particularly those of the mythoi Frye may or may not have derived from Theodor Gaster. 

What one usually gets, to extend the above parallel somewhat, is not meditations on "the word"-- the immense and imponderable potential principle that theoretically unites all manifestations of literature-- but on "the act," or rather the "acts" of individual genre-boundaries; the things that distinguish one hypothetical genre from another.  "Genre" is, as I also noted in the above essay, much "more limited" than the Fryean mythos.  To think upon genre is to meditate on limitations, on the fences that keep one genre apart from another, as will be the case with the online essay I'll be critiquing here.

First, though, what is genre?  Merriam-Webster says:

a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content

This is perfectly adequate, though when dealing with modern popular culture-- my sole concern in this essay-- I like my own definition best: "genre" is any category in which works are included on the basis of similarities in terms of (1) character, (2) setting, or (3) plot.

For instance, the "mystery-genre" is often spoken of as a thing separate from the "detective-genre."  The principal reason for this separation is that the former genre is based on a type of plot, but it can include the solution of a mystery even if there is no character who is a detective.  Thus any number of old-dark-house stories, in which protagonists merely stumble over the mystery's solution, are mysteries but not detective stories. By contrast, to be in the "detective genre" the story must have an actual detective.

Portmanteau genres present similar category-hopping opportunities.  If a work is labeled a "western," it has been principally characterized by its setting.  However, a "horror-western" merges the concern for setting with that of a horror-based plot.  It is of course possible to reverse the emphasis: perhaps transferring story-tropes of the western into some non-western setting and still using them for horrific plot-purposes-- but then no one would call said work a "horror-western."

As far as combining aspects of genres, that of the superhero-- which I view as not a thing in itself, but as one potential genre amid other related types-- is certainly marked by this kind of trope-transference. 

In an essay entitled "Flash is the only DC superhero," Scipio of the blog ABSORBASCON argues this assertion largely on the purity of Flash's generic nature:


"The Flash is an actual superhero. An otherwise regular guy who gains superpowers and fights crime with them. He fights villains who are mostly normal people with superpowers or the technological equivalent thereof. It’s cops and robbers but on the superheroic level."

In contrast, other DC heroes are defined by their alliances to other genres:

"Batman is a detective in a detective genre."

"Superman is a science fiction character."

"Wonder Woman is a fantasy character."

Scipio notes that the Flash, like Superman, has numerous "sci-fi elements," but argues that "... they aren’t the core of his world; they are just the added elements that take him and his world from the mundane to the “super.”

In keeping with my newly announced "51 percent rule," I decided that the only way to determine if Scipio was right in his determination that Flash's "sci-fi elements" weren't "the core of his world" would be to demonstrate this statistically.  So I used the first issue of SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE FLASH as a starting-point. I made two columns: one for all Flash-adventures in which the hero faced any sort of "sci-fi" menace, ranging from aliens, cloud-monsters and talking gorillas (Grodd knows why), while the other column only included relatively mundane adventures, whether it was the hero fighting car thieves or costumed super-villains who only used science-fiction as a quick gimmick, rather than borrowing from the tropes of science-fiction in other media.

As it happens, Scipio's observation is borne out by the statistical method. In the first column, out of a total of 38 stories (including those of the backup "Kid Flash"), only fifteen are strongly determined by the tropes of science fiction, while twenty-three lack these or any other generic elements.  Thus it seems to be true that Flash's adventures, in this volume at least, are dominated by the sense of the hero as "an otherwise regular guy who gains superpowers and fights crime with them."

Nevertheless, while Scipio is right in this one specific respect, I don't take seriously the notion that "superhero" is defined by a lack of tropes from other genres, which seems Scipio's implicit definition.

Returning to my simplified definition of genre, "superhero" would seem to be a genre defined first and foremost by "character."  I have seen attempts (not Scipio's) in which a given fan tries to confine superheroes to modern-day cities, thus making it impossible for costumed cowboys like the Two-Gun Kid or the Black Rider to qualify. I reject these as mere fannish preference, not logical deduction, for the irrelevance of setting should be confirmed simply by the existence of a superhero feature set in the future, as evidenced by DC's "Legion of Super-Heroes."

Similarly, "plot" cannot be the determining factor, if only by Scipio's own reasoning, where he claims that Flash uses "sci-fi elements" but is not determined by them.  Scipio does not cite compelling evidence as to why, say, Superman is defined by such elements, and I believe that at differing periods, Superman's feature could be just as light on "sci-fi elements" as Flash's.

Therefore "character" would seem to be the determining factor in the superhero genre.  From this affiliation it would follow that a superhero is no less a superhero for having plot-elements borrowed from science fiction, detective stories or even westerns.  Scipio actually does argue that Aquaman is "a western character in a frontier setting," though I respond that no one is any more likely to term Aquaman a genuine western than, say, the sci-fi film OUTLAND.  On  a tangential note, I think a case could be made that Silver Age Aquaman was every bit as much of a "fantasy" as Wonder Woman in its Golden/Silver Age manifestations, though over time both of them became closer to being "regular superheroes."

The superhero genre, then, is a character-determined genre like that of the detective-genre mentioned above.  I note in passing that many fans think of "the detective" as a modern-day figure, going back in history no further than Sherlock Holmes but more often represented by Philip Marlowe and Miss Marple, a conception which parallels Scipio's conception of the regular-guy superhero.  However, detective prose fiction of recent years has undergone a positive mania for transferring the concept of the detective to a wide variety of historical periods: ancient Rome, medieval Europe, etc.  Thus for me, even a superhero in a different period-- whether an uncanny type like the original GHOST RIDER or marvelous types like the Ditko STARMAN-- still belongs to the superhero idiom no matter how many other genre-tropes may intrude.  Thus I certainly don't think modern-day superheroes with SF or fantasy tropes, like Superman or Wonder Woman, are any less "true" superheroes than the Flash.

ADDENDA: One of my correspondents seemed unclear on the applicability ot the Legion to this definition, so I wrote the following:


"To clarify a bit more, one of my points is that, given that "Legion of Super-Heroes" actually has the word "superhero" in its title. This suggests to me that, in a colloquial sense at least, DC Comics felt confident that their readership would recognize the feature as being about superheroes in the future, rather than thinking (along with my target Scipio) that the Legion's sci-fi aspects would detract from readers thiniking of it as a "superhero book.

Thus I deduce that from a marketing standpoint (whatever one thinks of the theoretical standpoint) a character's status as a "superhero" trumps the time-period or trappings of that character."

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST

Having arrived at a deductive conclusion as to the progression of the affect of identificatory conviction throughout the four mythoi, I should add that the same degrees of conviction apply to the *dynamis* of the characters typical of these mythoi.

I've seen a fair number of superhero lists over the years.  Mikel Midnight  still maintains a page that correlates many of them, though unfortunately the most inclusive known to me, THE COMICS INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE, seems to have gone the way of the dodo.  Jess Nevins still maintains a list called the GOLDEN AGE HERO DIRECTORY, but this list aims at collating all adventure-heroes in Golden Age comic books.  But the most problematic aspect of most such lists is that they're generally focused purely on external points of similarity.  I'm aware of no list that seeks to list any protagonists, superheroic or otherwise, according to the Fryean mythos to which they belong.

I've compiled a provisional list for my own use, but I admit that when I first began it, I focused, as most comics-fans do, upon external resemblances.  Thus I would list, say, THE INFERIOR FIVE within the superheroic idiom simply because the characters did their thing in costumes. 

Now, as a result of investigations such as this one, however, I've determined that the Inferior Five would be appropriate only in a list of superhero-idiom types within the comedy-mythos.  Considered in terms of the level of conviction aroused by the Inferior Five, they have more in common with "non-costumed" types like Johnny Thunder or Ranma Saotome than with even the most tongue-in-cheek version of Batman or Plastic Man.

This formulation doesn't merely help distinguish between types of superheroes, of course.  Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are both magically-powered teen heroes, which would move some critics to dump them both in a vague category called "young adult fantasy."  But, if I can judge Percy Jackson by his one film adaptation, that character is far more oriented toward adventure than toward the *purgative* aspect of drama seen in J.K. Rowling's famous character.

I will note in passing that it is possible for different iterations to change a given character in terms of his mythic alignment.  An example appears here on You Tube, a 5-minute Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by producer William Dozier after the success of the BATMAN teleseries.  IMDB describes it thusly:

'At the height of the popularity of "Batman" (1966), producer William Dozier produced this short film in hopes of getting approval from Warner Brothers to produce a pilot episode for a "Wonder Woman" series, based on the comic book. Unlike "Batman," which was campy adventure, "Wonder Woman" was going to be a straight comedy series, along the lines of "Captain Nice." The resulting short written by several writers on the Batman series failed to win Dozier that approval.'

It's interesting that the synopsis-writer makes the same distinction I did above, to the effect that an adventure with comedic touches is not the same as a "straight comedy," oxymoronic though that phrase may sound.

There are perhaps more impressive examples of mythos-shifting than this unsold pilot, of course.  The late Don Markstein's TOONOPEDIA chronicles one example in Dick Briefer's Golden Age FRANKENSTEIN feature, noting how Briefer's version of the famous monsters started out with serious undertones (what I'd probably label "drama"), then shifted to comedy for a time, and then back to a serious theme before the feature perished.  This degree of change might encourage some critics to scoff at any attempts to schematize such a character, precisely because he and his author could shift in approach that much from year to year.  But I reject that as a know-nothing approach to the problems of categorization.

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

The same rule can be adapted for use in determination of the more limited categorizations that we call "genre," and my next essay will explore such genre-divisions in response to another online fan's genre-dicing endeavors.

CORRECTION TO EARLIER STATEMENT: Apparently it was only the link I tried that was bad:
AN INTERNATIONAL CATALOGUE OF SUPERHEROES is still extant after all.