INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 3

 As I reviewed the original INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE, I decided that I had been too vague in giving my reasons for stating that a particular pair of icons had transitioned from being defined by "individual stature" to "collective stature."

In that essay, I stated:

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

I did not give any reasons for saying why I believed the Wasp and the former Ant-Man/Giant-Man had, by their appearances in the AVENGERS title,"excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series." I didn't make it a matter of the sheer number of the two icons' appearances in AVENGERS as opposed to their own feature, though one might construe as much. If so, that would relate to my established principle of Quantitative Escalation.

However, my intent as I recall it was that the appearances of the two icons was of greater qualitative consequence than their appearances in their own feature. This distinction relates, rather, to the principle of Qualitative Escalation, first mentioned in ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2.

There, too, my earlier statements require expansion. A quantitative assessments requires little explanation; it only signifies, "how many times did a serial icon appear in distinct narratives?" But I possibly should have expanded on my definition of "qualitative," though I've made clear, throughout many other posts, that I believe that "literary quality" always inheres in an author's mastery of one or more of the four potentialities. 

If the corpus of stories that starred Giant-Man and the Wasp had shown mastery of one of the potentialities, then I might consider that that corpus was a qualitative success, even if the series failed to catch on with readers and become successful. But on the whole, the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN serial was marked by generally inferior art and writing in comparison with the other Marvel serials of the period. 

In contrast, though there were some subpar AVENGERS stories following the re-entry of Goliath and the Wasp, the overall level of quality was much higher in all four of the potentialities (even there wasn't much more *didactic* appeal in AVENGERS than there had been in ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN). 

For instance, if I choose to focus upon "the creation of new villain-icons" as an indicator of a superhero serial's mythopoeic potentiality, then most of the ANT-MAN/GIANT-MAN villains barely stir one's memory, except for The Egghead and The Whirlwind.  (And they, like their enemies, generally got better stories when they made appearances in AVENGERS.) In contrast, the AVENGERS feature, even confined only to the first period in which Goliath and the Wasp were members, boasted characters like Ultron and the Grim Reaper, both of whom generated far more consequential narratives for the evolving Marvel mythology. And writer Roy Thomas was certainly at his most inventive in terms of extending parts of the mythology that he did not invent, as with the Kree-Skrull War.

Therefore, Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne benefit from their association with the better stories of AVENGERS, as opposed to those of their own feature, and "qualitatively" their Collective Stature supervenes their Individual Stature. And of course, this is also true given that these two icons made many more appearances in AVENGERS in the ensuing decades, and remain best known to comics-fans as members of that team, not as solo acts. Even stories that may be dramatically bad, like "Henry Pym, Wife Beater," have become inextricable to the cosmos now designated as "Earth-616" in a limited mythopoeic sense.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 3

 In ICONIC BONDING PT. 1 I formulated three types of bonded ensembles using the Dick Grayson Robin as an example of a character who had participated in all three, to wit:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

In all of these examples, Robin is a superordinate icon, as are the majority of fictional heroes. In contrast, most fictional villains function as subordinate icons. So when villains appear in ensembles, they usually do not possess the quality of stature, only charisma. But this charisma-action also manifests in line with the three models seen above.

"Unbonded ensembles" would be any sort of short-term teams, or teamups that prove loose at best over time. For instance, there have been many gatherings of Bat-villains in the Bat-verse, ranging from RESURRECTION NIGHT to HUSH. No reader expects these peripatetic assemblages to have any durative value. The same applies to teamups that may last a few issues before dissolving, such as the alliance of Daredevil's foes the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. However, in the above cases the charisma-crossover action depends on the fact that the villains have been previously established. So when both the Enforcers and their boss the Big Man first appear in SPIDER-MAN #10, they had no crossover-charisma because they had no previous iterations. Further, their ensemble expires with that issue, for the Big Man never returns. When the Enforcers make their second appearance, which is also the first appearance of the Green Goblin, the "familiarity" of the Enforcers sustains a "proto-crossover" with the "novelty" of the Goblin, but only because the Goblin himself will go on to future appearances.

"Semi-bonded ensembles" are those that have some impressive duration, even when the icons aren't joined at the hip. I've written a couple of times about how Stan Lee took two THOR villains who no longer fit that feature, the Cobra and Mister Hyde, and made them a semi-regular team. However, even in the period when the two malcontents were most often allied, one would occasionally appeared independently of the other, or in alliance with some other super-fiend. In the 1980s Cobra severed his alliance with Hyde and his short-lived 1970s group of serpent-themed villains, the Serpent Squad, became reworked by later hands into the Serpent Society. I can't speak about Cobra's status in current Marvel comics, but up until the end of the 20th century he became much more prominent as the member of the Society than he was as a solo player, or as the partner to Mister Hyde.

"Bonded ensembles" are those in which the durative value is even more noteworthy, and may involve qualitative escalation as well as the quantitative kind. The Enchantress and the Executioner appeared together in their first appearance, and tended to appear together more often than not, with a slightly different angle: that the Executioner desired Enchantress as a bed-partner. There's a hint that this finally came to pass in a 1970 AVENGERS story, and future stories built on that development. None of the THOR stories in which Enchantress and Executioner are the only villains are charisma-crossovers, any more than Batman and Robin are stature-crossovers when they're the only heroes in a given story. And if the renegade Asgardians appear together in a non-aligned feature like THE HULK, it's not any more a charisma-crossover than Greenskin squaring off against a single non-aligned villain like Maximus the Mad.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there, any more than Sergeant Rock being separate from the grunts under his command. An exception was the Apokolips-Lord's brief role as the organizer of the first "Secret Society of Super Villains." But even there, the charisma-crossover would be between (a) Darkseid and any minions, such as the pictured Kalibak, and (b) the Secret Society as a whole, which functions as a semi-inclusive team. 

Heroes and villains may be the only two of the four personas that regularly appear in all these configurations. Even I, the author of said personas, will probably not bother trying to suss out if my models to apply to the other two, the "monster" and the "demihero."

 

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE

 In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5 I formulated three types of ensemble features. One is the Exclusive Ensemble, in which all members of the team are original with the feature, which means that this type by itself does not sustain any qualities of a crossover-narrative. The other two, however, will display such qualities. albeit in differing configurations. 

The Inclusive Ensemble is one in which the members of the team all originate in other features, and thus all of the starring characters have some degree of stature when they appear in the team feature, a stature independent of the ensemble feature. DC Comics' Justice Society of America in its original run was devoted entirely to characters who all had their own features independent of the team. Because the Inclusive Ensemble is meant to cross over all these independent characters on a regular basis, all episodes of such features are crossover-stories.

The Semi-Inclusive Ensemble must include at least one icon that earned either stature or charisma in another feature before joining the team, while all the rest of the ensemble's members may be new icons. Marvel's feature The Avengers started out using the Inclusive template, in that the charter members-- Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Giant-Man, and the Wasp-- had all enjoyed the stature of featured heroes, and so all of these Avengers-stories are crossover-tales, as are those which added Captain America to the mix. However, AVENGERS #16 changed the template to that of the Semi-Inclusive when the new lineup consisted of one Prime with strong stature, Captain America, and three that had only been charismatic Subs within the universes of other featured heroes. Since Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch only accrued stature once they'd been in one AVENGERS story, the first appearance *alone* was a charisma-crossover. From then on, they all possessed "collective stature" due to their continued membership in the team, and the more they appeared in the team, by the principle of escalation they progressed from being Charisma Dominant Primes to Stature Dominant Primes. Captain America remained a Stature Dominant Prime with the individual form of stature, and so stories which included him and the three former Charisma-Dominant types remained crossovers, but once the star-spangled sentinel departed, there was no crossover-mojo arising merely from the association of the three who possessed the collective form of stature.

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

However, any time that such a team-- with only one or two members possessed of high stature-- harbored a temporary guest-star, such as Thor or Iron Man, this too would be a crossover of the "guest star" variety.

More to come. 

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5

 I might well have placed this post under a title like ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLED, but I chose the above series-title instead because the premise is rooted in some of the crossover-notions I've introduced here.

For instance, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2, I mentioned that a solo Golden Age character, Miss Victory, had been inducted much later in the Bronze Age super-team Femforce, and that I did consider this to be at least a static crossover, because Miss Victory had accrued a certain stature in her original appearances.

This led me to the realization that team-features as a rule fell into three ensemble-configurations.

The one most popular during the Golden Age was The Inclusive Ensemble, in which a team was composed entirely of protagonists who had their own features. A few of these teams were one-shots, as with this Black Cat story, but the most memorable such teams were the long-lived ones like THE MARVEL FAMILY and THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA.

Less prevalent in the 1940s was The Exclusive Ensemble, whose members all debut in the same team-feature and for the most part remain confined to that feature. The best known example would be THE BLACKHAWKS, none of whom appeared in other features, though one member, Chop-Chop, appeared for several years as a humor feature-- but this was always in magazines wherein the BLACKHAWKS were the stars. 

The last type was barely ever seen in the Golden Age, and I term this the Semi-Inclusive Ensemble, in which either one featured character gains a group of new characters to share the spotlight. I only know of one in the period, THE GIRL COMMANDOS. A solo character, "Pat Parker War Nurse," had appeared on her own for about eight stories, and then the editors put her in a girl-group for the remainder of her career. Much later, though, comics from the Bronze Age onward began cobbling together new teams out of characters who had appeared elsewhere, often in failed solo features.

ADDENDUM: On reflection, there are probably a lot more Exclusive Ensembles than Inclusive ones in the Golden Age, but many of the former were short-lived, and even those that enjoyed longish runs have been forgotten. A few old comics fans may recall Jack Cole's "Death Patrol." But "Red, White and Blue?" Or "The 3 Xs?" Not so much.

INHUMAN DESIRES

 In a recent post on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO Rip devoted a few posts to Marvel's Inhumans features and noted, "The Inhumans always proved to be a hard sell for a self-titled ongoing series."

I had made a similar observation in my review of the 1998-99 INHUMANS graphic novel by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee:

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

 

Now, to pull at these threads somewhat, I should not that a "viable group dynamic" is not a guarantee for success. The Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970) gave rise to a larger number of adventure-teams than had been typical for the Golden Age. One of the few teams that had endured from the early 1940s until the mid-fifties was Quality Comics' BLACKHAWK, and this was the only feature that DC Comics continued, starting in 1956, after allegedly purchasing all of the properties owned by Quality once that company dissolved. It may be no coincidence that Jack Kirhy and Dave Wood initiated another team of uniformed crusaders the very next year, resulting in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which endured throughout the remainder of the Silver Age. Then within the next three-four years DC and Marvel respectively debuted JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and FANTASTIC FOUR, which both enjoyed more long-lasting success than any team that debuted in the Golden Age. JUSTICE LEAGUE survived even though it did not originally boast any sort of "group dynamic," while the FF practically defined said dynamic. Both BLACKHAWK and CHALLENGERS, which were "old school" in terms of interpersonal drama, were gone by the early seventies. At least one of Marvel's team-books with the new emphasis on drama, THE AVENGERS, prospered. However, a good group dynamic didn't save X-MEN, which concluded its first run in 1970, even though it was resurrected to spectacular success in 1975. And of course a number of solo Silver Age characters from both Marvel and DC also pooped out by the early seventies, notably THE SILVER SURFER, which had received just as much promotion in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR as had THE INHUMANS.

All that said, the thing that currently interests me most about the Inhumans is that Jack Kirby designed them at a point where Marvel was doing very well with most of its line, even if Kirby himself felt that he was getting the short end of the stick in a business sense. Some fan-sources assert that Marvel had some notion of launching THE INHUMANS as a full series sometime in the mid-sixties, but that this plan was dropped, so that the characters didn't get their own berth until debuting as a "co-feature" in 1970's AMAZING ADVENTURES. I tend to believe that Kirby thought the characters up without much input from Lee when the group appeared in 1965 (not counting the solo appearance of the character Medusa, who had appeared sans origin a year or so earlier). But the fact that Kirby didn't seem to have imagine any raison d'etre for these characters suggests to me that in his own work he didn't focus on interpersonal drama to the degree that Stan did. Kirby certainly knew how to evoke drama and pathos, and he probably contributed his fair share of such moments in FANTASTIC FOUR. Nevertheless, I think he did it largely because that's what his editor Lee wanted, not because the continuing "heroes with problems" was his creative preference. Indeed, most if not all of the "team-books" that Kirby did after ending his collaboration with Lee hearkened back to the "old school approach" of the Golden Age. Whether Kirby did the Boy Commandos or the Forever People, a Newsboy Legion for the forties or for the seventies, the team-members were mostly "a swell bunch of guys," which phrase was once applied to the Justice Society of the forties.

To be sure, Kirby's Inhumans, whether in the pages of the FF or in their own feature (a few of which Kirby wrote and drew), were more dour than brimming with bonhomie. But I'm not sure that anyone who followed Kirby's act with these characters ever managed to give them more complex or evocative characterizations-- even though, as noted above, Jenkins and Lee did a better than average job.