MYTHCOMICS: "MASTER OF THE PLANT WORLD" (THE ATOM #1, 1962)

                   

 

In many ways "Master of the Plant World" is a better example of a cosmological myth than my other entry for the Silver Age Atom, seen here. But for now I'll just dilate upon "Master's" introduction of the character who is arguably the hero's best known villain, certainly more so than "The Bug-Eyed Bandit."                         

 

 

An ordinary guy happens to be on the street at night when he alone witnesses the robbery of a bank by a flying wood dryad and a couple of improbable plants, both of which disappear by the time the cops show up. John Q is arrested and he hires lady lawyer Jean Loring to represent him. Jean, having passed the bar at Perry Mason U, plays gumshoe and seeks info from a horticulturalist to find if there's any chance of real plants being able to display aspects like the ones John Q described. Jean's opinion of her client's story about the flying wood dryad is not recorded for posterity, but she does put off her ardent, proposal-happy suitor Ray Palmer by telling him a little about her case. Palmer, in his secret ID of The Atom, watches as Jean stakes out the horticulturalist's greenhouse, on the flimsy theory that because someone stole something from the greenhouse, the thief may return that very evening and provide material evidence for the case of Jean's client. 

 

The culprit's henchpersons, this time two flying wood dryads, do indeed return to the scene of the crime. Jean gets gassed and does not see them, but the Atom trails the miniature ripoff artists to the laboratory of their master Jason Woodrue. Woodrue overcomes Atom with a combination of touch-me-nots and a Venus flytrap, but the villain doesn't check to see that his adversary is really truly dead.         

 

As the hero reconnoiters, he comes across the captive queen of the wood dryads, Maya, who provides some much needed, if confusing, exposition. Maya is under Woodrue's control, and she in turn compels her dryad subjects to do Woodrue's bidding. When Gardner Fox reveals that both Maya and Woodrue are extra-dimensional beings, the author seems to be setting the reader up for the old trope "exiled criminal comes back to the kingdom that exiled him and takes over." Instead, for some reason that must've made sense to Fox at the time, he claims that Maya and Woodrue came from two separate dimensions where people have lots of knowledge about plants in terms of both scientific and mystical lore. Artist Gil Kane either didn't follow Fox's train of thought or didn't care. In panel 5 of page 12, Kane simply draws "Faery-Woodrue" being exiled by a bunch of small spirits who look just like Maya and her dryads. In later iterations of the villain, everyone pretty much forgot that Woodrue had such origins and just treated him like an Earthman mad scientist.  

       
The long game behind Woodrue's criminal activities is that he unleashes what one assumes to be a plant-conqust of the world. Of motives he has none: Woodrue just wants temporal power over the whole world because he's "wicked," as one text-box calls him.  The Atom scores the deciding victory when he turns one of Woodrue's plant-weapons against him. Woodrue is imprisoned, the dryads go back home and Jean's client is liberated.                                   

The main virtue of "Master" is almost entirely all the clever plant-weapons the evildoer comes up with, though arguably Fox mixes in a little plant-metaphysics by bringing in dryads, even other-dimensional ones. On one page Woodrue even chants a sleep-spell to put out Maya's lights, so the writer's definitely mixing his mad scientist and evil sorcerer tropes here. Fox distinguishes himself by trying to find real-world analogues for his fantasy-plants, and I give him a pass on the more far-fetched conceptions. (Touch-me-nots don't shoot missiles, but they have some sort of pseudo-muscular apparatus that allows them to close their petals when someone tries to touch them.) Speaking of touching, the Palmer-Loring relationship might seem a bit dysfunctional to modern readers. Jean wants to be Ray's wife some day, but first she wants to make her mark as a lady lawyer, though it's not clear what her endgame will be when she gets there. Ray helps her in cases like this one not because he's altruistic-- although he's that in a general sense-- but because he figures that if Jean chalks up enough wins, she'll eventually feel validated and quit her profession to become a housewife. But this was set up as a sitcom problem with no real solution, not a negotiation between two adults, so by the end of the sixties the relationship sputtered out in the hands of other raconteurs, and finally was trashed by the superficial IDENTITY CRISIS. But the original relationship wasn't that much better and doesn't rise to the level of a psychological myth.  

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

MYTHCOMICS: "REVENGE OF THE ROBOT REJECT" (BRAVE AND BOLD #55, 1964)

DC's title THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD is known primarily as the "Batman and--" team-up feature. However, at various times the title played host to swashbuckling tales, "strange sports stories," and showcases for possible regular features. But for about two years before Batman became the feature's exclusive selling-point, the title also played host to a number of more inventive crossovers. I assume that the men behind the comic approached these crossovers in the same spirit as the Golden Age JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA: a title in which the company's strong sellers could theoretically boost the weaker properties.

By the time "Revenge of the Robot Reject" appeared on stands in 1964, the Atom had enjoyed his own feature for roughly three years, edited by Julius Schwarz, and the Metal Men for two, edited by Robert Kanigher. This story, edited by George Kashdan, shows writer Bob Haney and artist Ramona Fradon-- best known for their co-creation METAMORPHO-- attempting to mimic the relevant aspects of both franchises. Haney's script delves far more into the Metal Men mythology than that of the Atom, though he finds a satisfactory premise that allows him to play the Tiny Titan off Doc Magnus's six robot heroes-- who are, for any not hip to the feature, are Gold, Iron, Mercury, Tin, Lead, and Platinum (the only female robot, and the only one who gets a nickname, that of Tina).

In the regular METAL MEN feature, Kanigher tended to soft-pedal any intimations of the robots' inventor as being their parent, even in the figurative sense that one sees in Mary Shelleys' FRANKENSTEIN and the Universal adaptations thereof. In contrast, "Reject" starts out with Magnus having his six robots visit an orphanage to entertain the kids. Tina, the only female robot in the group in 1964, was always seen expressing her undying love to her creator, and "Reject" is no exception. However, I don't think Kanigher's METAL MEN ever showed Tina waxing maternal, and in the opening scenes of "Reject," Tina is apparently so charmed by all the munchkins that she suggests that she and Magnus should marry and have kids. When her bemused creator reminds Tina that a robot can neither marry nor conceive, she cheerily responds that Magnus could just build "cute little robot replicas of you and me."

Once Magnus and his six quixotic creations return to their HQ, Tina's burst of erotic enthusiasm is still with her, and as a result she dances about, unintentionally courting thanatos so that she falls to her death into a generator. In the regular title, this isn't a problem, since the Metal Men are always getting reduced to piles of mangled scrap, only to be magically resuscitated by their inventor's peerless skills. But this time, Magnus can't restore Tina, because her atomic structure has been altered somehow. The next seven pages then read like a quickie version of "Ten Little Indians," as each of the other Metal Men also fall victim to peculiar accidents, and again, Magnus cannot revive any of his "children."

Magnus sits alone in his laboratory, emulating Dorothy Gale as he muses that he'll miss his sexy female robot most of all (not exactly in those terms, of course). Then the villains responsible for the Metal Men's decimation appear. One is the first robot Magnus ever created, Uranium, and also the "reject" of the title, since Magnus attempted to destroy him. The other villain is Uranium's own creation, a silver female robot named Agantha, who bears a nodding physical resemblance to Tina and whom Uranium designed to be his version of Magnus's "girl robot creation." (In other words, Uranium may not be Magnus's literal child, but the robot-reject's doing his darnedest to follow the scientist's example.)  Uranium announces that through his command of all elements, he was able to remotely guide the Metal Men to their respective dooms and then to alter their atomic arrangements so that Magnus couldn't bring them back. He did all this because he resents that Magnus tried to destroy him-- even though a flashback shows Uranium being callously destructive, much like the element he's made of-- and because now he wants Magnus to help him devise a world-conquering weapon. Agantha is just as vicious, though she does pay the scientist a backhanded compliment: "If it weren't for [Uranium] here, I could go for you-- now that your platinum girlfriend is gone."

Threatened with immediate death for non-compliance, Magnus helps the project to buy time. He also manages to send out a distress signal. Ray (The Atom) Palmer receives the signal in his own lab, dons his costume, and rushes over to Magnus's HQ to help. Being unobtrusive, the Atom's able to infiltrate the HQ and figure out what's been happening, and being a physics major, he assembles the remains of the Metal Men and figures out how to use his "atomic"  skills to restore their integrity-- at which point the robots reconstitute themselves.

Meanwhile, Uranium's project is finished, but he's still victim to daddy issues, unable to kill Magnus because "he is the man who gave me life." Agantha, who's become Lady Macbeth in a few pages, has no such compunctions and prepares to destroy the robot-maker.

In burst the Metal Men, and Tina, though she didn't witness Agantha flirting with Magnus, immediately calls her a "silver hussy." The two ductile damsels fight it out, with Tina winning due to her greater knowledge of the elemental sciences (is silver really more vulnerable to sound-waves than platinum? I dunno). Uranium proves a tougher nut to crack, for his creativity doesn't stop with making his own robot-doll. He reveals that he can manifest the radiation in his body into three missile-shaped mini-minions, who are named after their types of radiation, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. (The reader shouldn't need more than one guess as to why these energy-constructs look like missiles.)

Though the radiation-minions can't harm Lead, the other Metal Men get kicked around pretty good. The Atom, who's been confined to the sidelines during this high-powered scuffle, suggests that they take Mercury aside and bond his atoms to those of Lead. That way, when Mercury attacks Uranium again, the radiation-minions can't hurt him. Uranium can't understand what's happening, and keeps bombarding Mercury until the villainous metal exhausts himself and devolves to a hunk of inert radium. Magnus does express some regret for his own hubris: "It was really all my fault from the first! I made you wrong, to start with!"

The psychological myths about robots and their creators are fairly lightweight here, but Haney does a good job-- better than many of Kanigher's stories-- at putting forth the cosmological myths necessary for both of the crossover-features. Maybe all the elemental research in this toss-off tale helped inspire him to co-create the Metamorpho concept with Fradon.

MYTHCOMICS: "AMAZING ARSENAL OF THE ATOM-ASSASSIN" (1967)

In the first section of AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I dovetailed my concept of "concrescence" with my current penchant for addressing the things being "concresced" as "epistemological patterns:"

...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

But as I've consistently emphasized, this "greater whole" only comes into effect when the various *quanta* belonging to a given potentiality reinforce one another. For instance, an author doesn't create a cosmological myth just by trotting out a handful of cosmological factoids in a given story.

Gardner Fox does just this at the opening of the story that introduces DC-comics readers to the awkwardly-named villain, "the Bug-Eyed Bandit." (To be sure, in THE ATOM #26 the felon isn't given this name in Gardner Fox's script, but only on the cover-- though Fox falls into line by using the "bug-eyed" name in the character's second and last Silver Age appearance.) Long before Ray (The Atom) Palmer has any inkling that he's about to meet an insect-themed villain, the scientist holds forth to his fiancee's nephew about the wonderful aspects of our buggy friends, like the aphid and the atlas moth. Afterward, the scientist stumbles across a burglary, and changes into the Atom just in time to fight the burglar's aide, a mechanical flying insect.

To be sure, the Bandit (real name "Bertram Larvan," which sounds a bit like the name of comic Bert Lahr) has created his robot insect as a model designed to kill real insects, but he resorts to robbery to make said model. Once he starts stealing things and fighting superheroes, though, Larvan's project of mechanized mini-exterminators is pretty much forgotten, and he becomes just another super-villain. However, though the Bug-Eyed Bandit is the same sort of "theme villain" that I described in this essay, Larvan doesn't incarnate a cosmological myth, because he doesn't pattern his mecha-insect after the capacities of real insects, aside from the thing being able to fly.

The Bandit's second appearance, though, shows Fox exploiting the cosmological appeal of the "theme villain" for all it's worth. It starts out with Larvan in prison for his crimes, though he's forgotten his experiences with the Atom due to an amnesia-gas. (If he doesn't remember his crimes, couldn't his lawyer have pleaded temporary insanity?) Amnesiac-Larvan actually seems to be a nice guy, making toy insects for kids.

However, Larvan's memory comes back, and the first thing he does is to use the robot-insects' powers to break him free, (Why toys for kids can bite through prison-bars is not enlarged upon.) Then he does everything a good theme villain should do, unleashing a tide of crimes with other robot insects who also imitate the properties of real insects, like a robot centipede (which carries a lot of "cents," ha ha) and a robot grasshopper.

Inevitably the Atom tracks down his insect-happy adversary, and once again the major part of his battle takes place against the same size-changing robot he met before, This time the robot even has a buggy application, entangling the hero in a spider-web. It also has the ability to make the Atom sneeze, but this is just an unhappy accident, having nothing to do with any particular insect-power.

Toward the climax Larvan captures the Atom and accidentally reverts him to his Palmer form. He works in one last insect-themed weapon, threatening to crush Palmer in a contracting "cocoon." The hero escapes, of course, and both defeats the villain and returns him to his amnesiac state, so that he can't reveal the Atom's secret ID.

I should note in passing that, just as the first Bandit story contained a dramatic subplot about Larvan's former girlfriend-- who just happened to be a Jean Loring lookalike-- "Atom Assassin" has a subplot in which the hero gets some minor aid from a little girl, "a Korean war orphan." I suppose there were still orphans from Korea emigrating to America for adoption in 1967. But that was over ten years after the Korean War, so I can't help but wonder if Fox had some idea of making the kid a survivor of the then-current Vietnam War, only to be overruled by the editor.