MYTHCOMICS: FABLE OF VENICE (1977)

It's long been observed that American genre-comics tend to travel a more straightforward, plot-determined path to get to their destinations, while similar works in Europe tend to wander about in peripatetic fashion. I don't make this observation for the reasons of elitist critics-- to tout the innate superiority of the European approach-- but to apply the distinction to this week's mythcomic.

Milton Caniff's comic strip TERRY AND THE PIRATES cast a long shadow over the world of comics long after Caniff departed the strip in 1946. The Italian Hugo Pratt was one of many artists who to some extent emulated Caniff's bag of visual tricks. For a comics-critic confined to the English language, it's difficult to assess Pratt's overall work. Almost the only works translated are Pratt's stories of Corto Maltese, and these stories caught the attention of American fans largely thanks to Frank Miller talked up Pratt's work during the height of Miller's popularity.  

The titular hero bears a loose resemblance to the tough adventurer Pat Ryan of Caniff's TERRY, but Pratt's Corto Maltese is much more laid-back and eccentric, and where Ryan is confined mostly to China, Corto wanders many parts of the world during the early 20th century. His creator knew some of these locals from personal experience. According to a preface in NBM's 1990 translation of FABLE OF VENICE, Pratt based this 1977 album-novel on his own experiences growing up in Venice. 

Given the protagonist's name, I find it logical that a particular influence on FABLE must have been Dashiell's Hammett's 1929 novel THE MALTESE FALCON and/or its film-adaptations. The novel is named for a fabulously valuable statue of a falcon, over which the novel's hero and his antagonists contend. The novel, much like Caniff's strip, is usually concerned purely with worldly concerns of profit.

But Pratt, who claims to have experienced uncanny phenomena in his encounters with the variegated cultures of Venice, takes the same idea of a character seeking a fabulous treasure but uses the idea to illustrate the arcane traditions of the Mediterranean cultures. FABLE starts with Corto falling through the ceiling of a room in which a group of Venetian Masons are convening. But where this might lead to some wild brawl in a Caniff storyline, the Masons simply escort the unfortunate sailor out of their sanctum. But the scene gives Pratt a chance to establish Corto's philosophical status with the reader. He shows that he knows something about the esoteric tradition, and yet tells the Masonic leader that "I'm just a free sailor-- at least, I  hope I am!" 

From then on, Corto wanders the streets of Venice, encountering both old acquaintances from past visits and new people, most of whom are directly or indirectly associated with esoteric matters. He has a few dust-ups with the authorities, just like Caniff's hero:

But on the whole, the wandering plot is mostly about the mysteries of Venice, where Corto observes that anything can happen. The treasure he seeks is a supposedly magical emerald, but he quests after this prize not for personal gain, but because a late associate, Baron Corvo, challenged the sailor to find the emerald. The emerald has a storied history like that of the Maltese Falcon, but the gem goes much further back, supposedly passing through the hands of myth-figures like Cain and Lilith and into the slightly more historical-seeming figures of Simon Peter and Simon Magus.

While trying to track down the elusive jewel, Corto meets various people associated with occultism, particularly Hipazia, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Hypatia, the renowned Neoplatonic scholar who lived in Egypt during the 4th century A.D.  Hypazia projects the sense of being almost other-worldly, though Corto tells a friend "that girl can only love what she can't have."

FABLE puts forth a cornucopia of arcane references from the Greco-Roman world, the Bible, Islam, and even Nordic mythology. I don't think any of them add up to much individually, but these references, like the characters I discussed in this essay, "take on mythic status through their association." No literal magic is seen, so the novel registers an uncanny phenomenality through the trope of "weird societies." In addition, Corto has a bizarre dream in which he has a long conversation with a genie who looks like one of his old adversaries. And though he awakens from this dream, after the treasure-hunt (and murder-mystery) is solved, it turns out that the novel itself is something of a dream. FABLE ends with Corto bringing all of the characters "on stage"-- even those who have died-- to take their bows, and then leaves to appear in his next story. In my experience, this is one of the few times that a "delirious dream" took place WITHIN the context of a "fallacious figment."

INCORRECTLY CORRECT

Reader A. Sherman Barros brought to my attention a comment that HU columnist Robert Stanley Martin made about Milt Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES: After linking to Digital Comics Museum's copy of TERRY AND THE PIRATES #7, Martin wrote: "Those who click to read the online scan should be aware the stories feature racist caricatures." He wrote some other stuff in the comments-section as well, but first I'll deal with the actual comic book itself, which reprints a selection of Caniff's famous comic strip. What exactly happens in the issue to merit the caution about racist caricature?

Well, as far as I can tell, the only "racist caricature" in the story is that of recurring character Connie. Here's a representative scene:

As far as I can tell, Connie's offenses are twofold: he speaks in a comic dialect, and he's as homely as sin, with big ears and buck teeth.

Now, I'm not at all a fan of Caniff's character. I think Caniff writes his dialect in an ootsy-cutesy manner I find abominable. However, he's far from the only character who speaks in an affected or stilted manner, and that includes the titular Terry's nominal guardian Pat Ryan. What I take away from Connie's fractured dialect is not that he's part of some racist conspiracy to make Chinese people look stupid, but that Caniff wasn't especially good at rendering English in dialect-form. 

As for his ugliness-- well, yes, Connie's not pleasant to look at, but I for one would look for other evidence that proved him to be a racist construct. For instance, Connie would definitely be racist if all other Asians in the strip were similarly depicted. If they're not-- and I think Martin would admit that they are not-- then Connie may be more in the vein of the "funny looking sidekick" than of the "racist caricature."

Most of the funny looking sidekicks of comic strips are forgotten now, but superhero comic books gave the form a new lease on life-- and a fair number of them are Caucasians.

One of the most famous is Doiby Dickles from GREEN LANTERN:

And here's Stretch Skinner from WILDCAT:

Notice the common factors: both sidekicks talk funny, and both are homely.  Both function, in essence, to make the main hero look and sound even better than he ordinarily would.


Now, I'm not denying that it's possible for an artist to create a racial caricature that does communicate ill will toward the race depicted, and to do so subtly . It's even possible that an artist might depict most of the characters in his story as relatively normal, yet choose to single one character out to make him the butt of racist jokes. Certainly Connie is the target for sidekick-humor. But is it racist humor?

Here's an interesting scene from TERRY #7:

To fill in some blank spaces: the fellow getting hung up on the dragon by Big Stoop-- a Swedish character very improbably disguised as a Chinese laborer-- is a rich white guy named Sandhurst. Not long after some of the locals disparage him for being an American who puts on airs by talking Brit-style, Sandhurst orders his car's driver to run Connie down. Stoop pulls Connie out of the way. Sandhurst orders the car to stop. Then he attacks Connie, hitting him with his cane-- at which point Stoop introduces him to the dragon. So the sequence ends with Connie the racist caricature having the laugh on the rich WASP. Moreover, when the story was first published readers did not yet know that the silent strongman was not Chinese, and so the original effect is that of two Asians having the laugh on a nasty white guy.

All of which raises two questions:

(1) Is it possible to have a POC sidekick without having him look at least nominally handsome, as with the reboot of THE SPIRIT?

(2) If the only ugly, dialect-using sidekicks out there are white guys like Doiby and Stretch-- does that not constitute a subtle form of racism in itself?

JONNYQUESTING: THE AUM THEORY IN PRACTICE PART II

Often, after I've attended a convention-panel and heard a professional make an interesting statement, I've wished myself trained in shorthand, to write the statement down quickly before the memory fades. Not having so trained myself, I'm relying only on memory when I recall the following--

At a convention in the 1990s, JONNY QUEST creator Doug Wildey was on a panel, and I remember him saying that he wasn't crazy about having to introduce sci-fi/fantasy monsters into the JQ mix, and that he did so as a means of appealing to kids. He gave me the impression that he much preferred the JQ episodes that focused on realistic adventure, such as "Shadow of the Condor." He also had choice things about what he and his fellow animators would've liked to have done to the cartoon-dog Bandit, but that's grist for some other mill.

Now, when JONNY QUEST debuted in 1964, it did so as a evening show for ABC-TV. So, unlike the Saturday morning cartoons directed wholly at juveniles, JONNY QUEST was trying, like Hanna-Barbera's earlier nighttime success THE FLINTSTONES, to appeal to both kids and adults with "all-ages" material. Unlike FLINTSTONES, JQ did not last more than a year and so ended up being recycled to Saturday mornings during those pre-cable days, where most juvenile watchers may have noticed in the show a harder edge than one usually found in the Hanna-Barbera superhero shows around the same time.

That harder edge, that element of rigor is important to the subcategory of popular fiction I've termed "adult pulp" in other essays. This hardboiled take on the adventure genre shows up in many fictional works of the early 20th century, such as those of Jack London and Dashiell Hammett. In GUNFIGHTER NATION literary critic Richard Slotkin refers to this form as the "blood-and-thunder" genre, and though American comic strips didn't seriously embrace this approach until the late 1920s, they had a pertinent effect on popular culture as a whole and on specific pop-cultural works, including, as a quote from this site makes clear, JONNY QUEST:

Although at first Jonny Quest seems most closely related to the Tom Swift, Jr. juvenile science fiction novels of the 50's and 60's penned under the name Victor Appleton, Hanna-Barbera co-founder Joseph Barbera in his autobiography My Life in 'toons cites the comic strip Terry and the Pirates as being the primary inspiration for Jonny Quest.

"It was a major departure for us, but both Bill and I had been hooked on adventure stories and superheroes since we were kids. As I've said, Bill and I really don't have much in common, but we both spent our nickels and dimes on movie serials and had read Frank Merriwell and Tom Swift novels as kids. I particularly admired Milt Caniff's long-running newspaper comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and that was the main inspiration for Jonny Quest - not only for some of the characters...but also in the sharp, angular look of the artwork, the emphasis on scientific gadgets and high-tech hardware, and the far-flung, exotic locales for the action."

Now, what's interesting about this reminiscence is that it shows JONNY QUEST as having a foot in two worlds: that of Tom Swift, which was directed wholly at juveniles, and of Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, which was technically "all-ages" but written in a melodramatic vein meant to appeal a little more to adults than to children. Unlike Tom Swift, TERRY, as any comics-maven should know, did not actually have much in the way of "scientific gadgets and high-tech hardware," and it certainly did not have such kid-appeasing figures as Egyptian mummies and Tibetan yetis.

Indeed, I would say that Caniff, comic strips' foremost (albeit not first) proponent of realistic "blood-and-thunder" adventures, is also a Great Ancestor to many comic-book artists-- Severin, Kubert, and Toth as well as Doug Wildey-- who preferred to work in a more realistic vein of adventure. At least one could call it more realistic in comparison to the major superhero artists of the period: Kirby, Simon, Schuster, Kane, Peter et al. Kirby and the rest of these worked in an idiom where the marvelous, the uncanny and the atypical could merge at any given time, and none of the characters involved would give a second thought to clashing phenomenologies. The Caniff tradition, however, strove for realistic depiction, and so generally speaking the pulpish peregrinations of works in this tradition concerned *atypical* occurences within an *isophenomenal* setting.

JONNY QUEST may have the isophenomenal TERRY AND THE PIRATES as a major model, but in terms of phenomality the program bears more resemblance to the classic superhero model, in which stories may center about any combination of atypical, uncanny or marvelous elements. And because the original run of the teleseries was only 26 episodes, it will be easy to break down on this blog just how often the serial fell into each of the three AUM modes. By doing so I can then determine whether or not the series-concept qualifies to be placed within the category of the superhero idiom, much as I considered Zorro's fitness in this essay.

The breakdown will begin in Part 3 of "Theory in Practice."

RAYMOND'S RACIAL MYTHOS II

Following up on some of the thoughts expressed in "Raymond's Racial Mythos," here's the most substantial item I could find in FLASH GORDON's first year that suggested the racial mythologizing that gives the strip its greatest claim to symbolic complexity. In the sixth 1934 FG strip, villainous Ming threatens to subject Dale to a "dehumanizing machine" which will make her like the races on the planet Mongo. He even specifically says "We on this planet," not just his own Chinese-looking race. He claims that Mongo has "progressed far beyond you Earthlings. The reason for our success is that we possess none of the human traits of kindness, mercy or pity-- We are coldly scientific and ruthless."

Since the dehumanizing machine never appears again in FLASH GORDON's first year, I doubt Raymond and/or Moore ever brought it up again. In terms of what mythicity the machine has, it clearly fits Joseph Campbell's "sociological" matrix of meanings, since the machine is a device to explain the contrast between the ruthless society of Mongo and the civilization of Earth, which in theory lives by the very traits Mongo renounces.

This opposition was certainly not original with Raymond and Moore. Since the rise of the "Yellow Peril" concept in Europe and the States, works in this category showed a particular fondness for portraying American characters as the salt of the earth-- essentially kindhearted despite being able to beat bad guys to jelly-- while the foremost representatives of the Yellow Peril, the Chinese, were often seen as both hyperintellectual and devoid of mercy. Raymond and Moore could easily have derived this conception from the early books in Sax Rohmer's FU MANCHU series; certainly they follow Rohmer's idea of naming a Chinese (or Chinese-looking) villain after an entire Chinese dynasty.

But just how complex is this sociological myth? Not very. Indeed, it may be the closest one can get to the state of null-mythicity without losing any claim to complexity whatsoever.

It's not just that the use of this narrative device is brief. I've noted in "Dragon Lady Dreams" that Milton Caniff put forth a single Sunday strip in which the Dragon Lady claimed to be a literal incarnation of a Chinese dragon. The explication of this idea occupies no more or less space than the bit about the dehumanizing machine does, and it too is a narrative element that is probably never visited again by the author. Yet I would say that the TERRY strip possesses a high degree of mythicity.

The reason is that the essence of symbolic complexity is its propensity to create resonances between different parts of a narrative, particularly one that develops in a serial fashion. The dehumanizing machine is a typical enough sci-fi device to explain a sociological disparity between Earth and Mongo-- the sort of thing Edgar Rice Burroughs might have used in similar tales-- but if FLASH GORDON kept coming back, again and again, to the sociological disparity, even if the machine itself never appeared again, then the resonance would have been consistently developed. And based on my scattered readings, I don't think that the strip does so in any significant way. Indeed, Raymond and Moore didn't even keep their own notion of the disparity consistent within the next few strips, for, as I noted earlier, Flash garners his first alien ally, the lion-man Thun, because he wins Thun's sympathy with the tale of Dale's imprisonment. Clearly not all races of Mongo have been dehumanized, and indeed many of those who look inhuman are more humanistic than the Asian-looking "Mongolese."

In contrast, the sociological myth of East vs. West is generally consistent in Caniff''s TERRY, and the one strip about the Dragon Lady's supposed inhuman credentials is merely a small part of that larger mythos, and her mythic characterization does not vary the way various FLASH characters change at the author's fancy. Therefore within TERRY's first year that strip expresses high mythicity while FLASH's remains pretty low at the start. That Raymond's art greatly improves over time goes without saying, but I would have to subject the rest of his oeuvre to further analysis before I could say whether or not Flash proves more than a mythic "flash in the pan."

DRAGON LADY DREAMS

I had read the 1934-36 stories from Milton Caniff's classic TERRY AND THE PIRATES in various arrangements before this, but IDW's big 2007 collection of all the strips for these three years makes for heady reading. Although a couple of indie comics-authors have chosen to view the blossoming of the adventurous comic-strip as a decided comedown for the comics medium, it's clear to me that the early adventure-strips-- exemplified by TERRY, PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN and DICK TRACY-- represent an elaboration and deepening of that medium's storytelling potential. The adventure-strips may have been born of cultural myths that became less and less believable by the 1950s, so that thereafter the themes of the adventure-genre could only find expression in the related medium of the comic book (however mixed the results). But even knowing that newspaper comics could never have sustained such myths, even knowing that the medium would eventually revert back to the gag-strips of its beginnings (YELLOW KID, meet DILBERT), I can't comprehend any critic with half a brain not appreciating the high adventure of Caniff's TERRY.


Most of Caniff's sequences follow a pretty basic pattern. Footloose adventurer Pat Ryan and his boy sidekick Terry go gallivanting in some part of a post-dynastic China controlled by various warlords (the "pirates" of the title). They get caught by some warlord and then have to resort to assorted strategies, both comic and daring, to keep themselves alive before making a Great Escape. This pattern allowed Caniff to toss in lots of jokes to keep the overall mood light, which may be viewed as Caniff's way of keeping some appeal with the audience that still mostly liked their funnies for the gags. Anyone looking for the sometimes heavy-handed political ideology of Caniff's later STEVE CANYON will look in vain: though the navies of Britain and the U.S. are around, hovering like emissaries of a more rational world-order, here Caniff generally uses the forces of the West as little more than cavalry. An exception here is a 1936 sequence that has Ryan venturing into Steve Canyon's regular territory when Ryan elects to play spy for the British government. This sequence was the harbinger of the less footloose paths the strip would take during the years of WWII, but most of the stories here are still focused on glamorous, sublimely-nonsensical adventure.



There are fair criticisms one can make of Caniff's opus. The racial stereotyping must be acknowledged, though it's always qualified by the fact that Caniff's most mythic character-- far more so than his two American protagonists-- is a woman usually identified as Chinese (though possibly intended to be Eurasian in origin, like Fu Manchu's half-Chinese, half-Russian daughter). I refer to the Dragon Lady, who is one of the more formidable femmes in any of the popular media of the 1930s. Aside from having her speak less than perfect English in her first appearance, Caniff thereafter always characterizes as courageous and possessed of a razor-sharp intellect. The character deserves to inspire much more allegiance from comic-book feminists & fangirls than she does presently-- more so than Caniff's rather routine heroines (Normandie Drake and a couple of other forgettables in this volume) and his trademark "shady lady" Burma. Arguably Caniff did far more versions of Burma throughout his many years on both TERRY and STEVE CANYON, but to my knowledge he never did another female character as formidable as the Dragon Lady.

As a "realistic" adventure-author, Caniff does not evoke mythology very seriously, but he does use a myth to suggest how the Dragon Lady, despite her gender, might have advanced to the position of leading a band of male pirates. In a 12-15-35 strip, comic relief "China-boy" Connie asks the imprisoned villainess as to why she's called "the Dragon Lady." In answer she relates that "when the last actual dragons were killed their evil spirits were preserved in other living things," and then seriously asserts that she is a dragon in truth. The last panels then provide a comic set-up at Connie's expense, where Connie's pet goat contrives to drink gasoline and eat matches, resulting in its "fire-breathing." It's not much of a joke, and I doubt that the story was ever referenced again, but it seems feasible that Caniff had some notion of the Dragon Lady using such a myth-tale to manipulate her superstitious underlings.

BATMAN fans may enjoy some of the similarity between the first Dragon Lady tale and the first few stories where Batman and Robin encounter Catwoman. Both stories have a stalwart mature hero and his preteen sidekick encountering a formidable female who makes no bones about wanting to jump the bones of said mature hero. The kid-hero then becomes a sort of Jiminy Cricket to his mentor, advising him to steer clear of such dangerous shores, or even interrupting a potential lovemaking scene (as in TERRY's 1-6-35 strip). As a character, DC's Catwoman is originally closer to the mold of TERRY's other shady lady, Burma, in being an independent adventuress without a pocket-army at her command, but after a while Catwoman also attracts a coterie of the usual hero-fighting henchmen, though she never quite attains the Dragon Lady's reputation for ruthlessness.

While the campy interpretation of these goings-on might suggest sexual jealousy on the part of Terry and/or Robin, it seems a lot more likely, given the targeted readers, that the only love Terry and/or Robin feared losing was the love of adventure, if their mature mentors got themselves entrapped by the coils of Venus. Notably, though, Terry doesn't seem to have a problem with Pat hooking up with a less "fatale" femme like the aforementioned Normandie Drake, whereas Robin always seemed threatened by any feminine incursion. But maybe this had something to do with the comic books heroes existing in a hermetic isolation, where no one ever aged, while some comic strips did allow for advancing years. Some commentaries (on strips I have not read) even assert that Terry eventually "takes over" from Ryan in the department of romancing the dangerous Dragon Lady-- which, if true, would be a lot more Oedipal than I would expect of a Caniff comic strip.