NEAR-MYTHS: "VALHALLA CAN WAIT" (DEFENDERS #66-68, 1978)

 

An online review of DEFENDERS #66 reminded me that it's been a very long time since I first surveyed the early iterations of Marvel Comics' first female powerhouse, The Valkyrie. 

When I began THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE in December 2007, I didn't do many reviews. The first two I later included in my list of mythcomics when I finally committed to that ongoing project, LINUS THE RAIN KING and TO DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE. Following that, I devoted a series of posts to the evolution of Marvel's Valkyrie, and, somewhat tangentially, her alleged "creator" The Enchantress. Those posts were:

DAUGHTER OF LOVE AND DEATH-- devoted to the first appearance of the Enchantress and her paramour the Executioner, this analysis also counted as a mythcomic.

FEMALE TROUBLE-- This was about the AVENGERS story in which Valkyrie was supposedly "created" by Enchantress. Not a mythcomic.

WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY-- This talked about the provenance of the two mortal women who became the vessels of the Valkyrie's spirit, Barbara Norris and Samantha Parrington. By my current criteria, none of the Barbara stories are mythcomics, but the HULK story with Samantha, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?," does count as such.

KNIGHT MOVES-- And here I discoursed again on both the Enchantress and her involved history with the Black Knight character, and then concludes at last with the events of DEFENDERS #4, in which the persona and power of the Valkyrie was imposed upon the mortal body of Barbara Norris. No mythcomics here.

I noted in the last essay that Valkyrie became "the glue" that held the Defenders group together from then on, for she was a tabula rasa who was not grounded in being anything but a "Scandinavian superhero." I expressed some intention to examine her "gender-kinship with other women," but I never did, and I think it's because this aspect of her character never signified anything but a particular form of "valkyrie-kryptonite." And, having recounted all of my analyses of Early Valkyrie, I can at least comment on the significance of DEFENDERS #66--

--which, perhaps fortunately for me, isn't all that much. The three-part story whose third part has the sporty title "Valhalla Can Wait" receives the cover-copy, "At Last! Valkyrie Enters Asgard!" I'll take the Marvel raconteurs at their word. When I read the story back in the day, I certainly had the impression that this was the first time she'd been in Thor-country. I believe it's also the first time any writer suggested that Valkyrie had an Asgardian body to match the Asgardian spirit that Enchantress had manipulated. However, David Kraft's script for "Valhalla" is extremely rushed. Kraft tells us that somehow the villain Ollerus not only gets hold of Valkyrie's comatose Asgardian form, he manages to transfer the spirit of Barbara-- which has apparently been slumbering in the body controlled by the Valkyrie-persona-- and put Barbara in Val's ACTUAL form.

This could have been a fun bit of body-switching, both in terms of drama, comedy, or both, but Kraft rushes past this potential. He doesn't even do a good job of establishing that Barbara is still something of a madwoman due to her experiences with the Nameless One. Instead, Ollerus focuses on using his phony Val to persuade the Defenders to fight Ollerus' rival Hela for possession of the Asgardian death-realm. 

Ollerus is of course defeated, and the whole "lords-dueling-over-the-death-realm" thing never acquires any mythic significance. If there is a myth here, it might be a myth of exorcism. By story's end Kraft tells us (though we do not see it) that Valkyrie's immortal body with its mortal spirit will join her master in the crappy afterlife of Niffelheim, while Valkyrie will return to Earth with her immortal spirit in Barbara's transformed mortal body. 

And there I believe Kraft leaves things for the remainder of his tenure. Eventually another writer tackles the already complicated Valkyrie-Enchantress narrative and makes it even more complicated, and if time permits I suppose I may eventually delve into this story-line as well. So "Valhalla," despite being very confusing on many points, still earns some status as a near-myth that started a major retcon of the Valkyrie character.

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 2

 

Kelly Thompson's April attack on the male gaze inspired this mini-satire, but here I'll go into my specific problems with her definition of the "beauty factor" in superhero comics.

On one hand, her most famous essay, "No, It's Not Equal," acknowledges that there is some appeal, even for female readers, in identifying with characters who are damn good looking.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want or expect all characters to be unattractive. I understand that we all want to lose ourselves to a degree in fantasy. That fictional worlds provide an escape that we all want. Hell, I grew up wanting to be these heroines because they were powerful and beautiful, I’m not immune to it.

So far, so good.  Where Thompson and I part company is that she sees this tendency toward inequality as purely a consequence of "social conditioning."

We’re all socially conditioned to want youth and beauty, and we’re all conditioned to think specific things are beautiful, but that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to educate ourselves against it. And it doesn’t make it equal between the sexes. It’s much more frequently true that women are required to be beautiful no matter what, while men have much more flexibility.

This education apparently comes down to harping on the inequality of (1) the prevalence of beautiful people in superhero comics, as opposed to ordinary looking people, and, to a lesser extent, (2) the tendency to allow male villains to be ugly but not female villains.

From anti-heroes to superheroines, and from femme fatales to full blown supervillains it’s rare to find a female character that isn’t drop dead gorgeous.

It's true that there is no statistical "equality" in this situation, as was apparently claimed by some defensive fans.  What Thompson and some of the more monomaniacal Sequart readers chose to overlook is the question as to whether it's ethical to impose equality upon the depictions of fictional characters within a corpus of works dominantly aimed at an audience of a particular gender orientation.

As I did in Part 1, I advocate whatever narratives devices work for the type of fiction the author is attempting.  If one is attempting a work in the vein of "thematic realism," as with the LOVE AND ROCKETS works of the Brothers Hernandez, then great variation in body types such as Thompson advocates is to the good of the narrative.  However, if one is attempting "thematic escapism"-- as I would categorize the Stan Lee-Don Heck IRON MAN continuity I cited-- then a more standardized approach to questions of physical beauty may be necessary.  In the IRON MAN stories cited, the physical upgrades of Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan exist to further the admittedly simplistic aims of the superhero/soap opera narrative.  I speculate, then, that Thompson would characterize Stan Lee's standardization of these two not-too-glamorous characters as a capitulation to social conditioning, rather than a reflection of the influence of beauty (be it socially conditioned or something more complex) in the real social order, on which the narrative is partly modeled.

This seems to me a fair extrapolation, since by that last-quoted statement above, Thompson defines the tendency toward "drop dead gorgeous" characters as just such a capitulation, particularly since a lot of male villains are "allowed" to be ugly while female villains are not.

What this blinkered view overlooks is that while some female villains' beauty *may* be gratuitous, in many cases it's a narrative necessity.  Take the Enchantress-- a character introduced in the original "Thor" feature in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #103, and one of those Thompson includes in her gallery of gorgeous evildoers.

I'm sure that Thompson would be aware that the Enchantress' raison d'etre depends on her being gorgeous far more than, say, Moonstone.  What she probably would not appreciate is that even though extra-diegetic fans may well have ogled the curvaceous conjurer, the main purpose of Enchantress' beauty is its use in tempting the hero of the story.

This scene is one of two in which the villainess tries and fails to seduce Thor.  As with my IRON MAN examples, the purpose of utilizing glamor is to encourage the reader's identification with the soap-opera travails of the main character and his girfriend.  Because the dominant reader is so invested, the only possible threat to that relationship must come from some character whom the reader can believe would be capable of making Thor's hammer stand up straight (as it seems to be doing in the scene above).

I'm not saying that "thematically escapist" works don't include any situations in which a less-than-attractive female makes up to an attractive one.  Changing media for convenience, here's a scene from a 1967 WILD WILD WEST episode in which the hero (Robert Conrad) is being vamped somewhat by the villainess of the story, essayed by 67-year-old Agnes Moorhead.

While the late Ms. Moorehead looked pretty good for her years in this episode, almost no one viewing the show is likely to believe that Moorehead's character has any chance to seduce the hero, which indeed she does not.  And if one replaces the factor of age with any of the "realistic" attributes I mentioned in my satire-- having a bald spot, a harelip, a needle-nose, etc.-- then once again the reader is unlikely to believe that the villainess can seduce the hero.  And so if an author WANTS the reader to believe that the hero can be tempted-- even if his ultimate aim is to have him resist temptation in the name of true love-- then narrative logic demands that the represenative of "vice" be as attractive, or more so, than "virtue," as we also see in this medieval image of Hercules choosing between the two.

With these examples in mind, it should be evident that comic-book artists and writers, like almost every other toiler in the vales of thematic escapism, may have good narrative reasons for emphasizing beauty in their villains: as a constant temptation to the hero or heroes.  In contrast, despite all the silly-ass cant by critics who find deep homosexual patterns in superhero comics, the depiction of male villains as statistically less-than-lovely indicates the fact that they are not constructed to be sexually appealing to the heroes.  Perhaps these critics are revealing their own atypical attractions by their getting boners from male-vs.-male battles.

Not that there's anything wrong with that--

Except when it leads to really bad logical conclusions.