This mythcomics essay didn't start as a blogpost, but as an essay for Robert Young's
COMICS INTERPRETER magazine. The issue for which the essay was intended wasn't published to my knowledge, and since the last recorded issue came out in 2004, I probably wrote it around that time. The magazine's demise anticipates the overall death of the print-magazine comics-fanzine, culminating in the end of the print COMICS JOURNAL somewhere around the beginning of this decade.
Since it's an essay, it's longer and gets more into my personal aesthetics. I had occasionally thought about re-reading the FLASH issues analyzed in order to see if they still met my mythopoeic standards, and finally, I did so. I cleaned up a few cumbersome sentences, and I follow up the essay with a couple of extra comments, but substantially this post is the same as the essay submitted in 2004.
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In WHAT WAS LITERATURE?, critic Leslie Fiedler
observed that the “mythopoeic power” of works, whether of high or low
literature, was “independent of formal excellence.” If I had a hammer capable of pounding
this insight into the skulls of comics-readers everywhere, I would use that
hammer—on about 50% of the readers. The
other 50% could go on being elitists, populists, or nothing in particular, which would still leave me opponents with whom to debate. But the converted 50%, thanks to their newfound appreciation of
Fiedler’s insight, would be granted greater understanding of the the amazing variety
of myth-symbols present in all levels of literature, not to mention better
posture and 75% fewer cavities than the other group. But as I have no such hammer, I had to write
this essay instead.
Fiedler does not explicitly define in the book what he
means by “formal excellence." As far as this essay is concerned, it
connotes the totality of literary qualities that have traditionally impressed
the cultural elite against which Fiedler was reacting. It would thus take in
elements like distinctive style, originality, mature content, and the one that
concerns me most here, what I call “thematic complexity.” I stress this over what’s usually called
just “theme” because almost any coherent narrative has some sort of theme, no
matter how simple—the triumph of true love, the defeat of the forces of evil.
But simple themes do not generally impress the elite. I have nothing against
the appreciation of thematic complexity in literature, but I think that often
readers of an elitist bent overlook another kind of complexity in their search
for deep themes about the meaning of life—what I will call “symbolic
complexity.” This complexity may be what
gives some of these simple works about love and death the power to survive over
generations, even when the works may have crafted as “throwaway entertainment,”
and certainly lack much “formal excellence.”
At this point I should probably warn any elitists reading
that they should probably just stop right here, as most of them have hardened
their hearts (and heads) against the notion that myths and symbols have any
value apart from how they are used in a narrative to enhance the theme. Many of them have expended considerable
intellectual resources to sound the clarion call for “comics as respectable
art,” which often (though not exclusively) means comics with complex
themes. Because theme is predominant in
the minds of elitists, they often have no ability to see how symbols can work
apart from theme even as they work together, not unlike harmony and melody in
music. In any case I have a little
tired of answering the charge of being simply a “superhero apologist” (as one
Milo George was good enough to tag me on a message board), as well
as being bored with the usual predictions of what will happen if the barbarians
of pop culture should ever be allowed past the gates of respectability in any
way: the downfall of civilization, rioting in the streets, and no new issues of
EIGHTBALL.
In one way, though, fans of trashy genre-literature
(whether they are myth-critics or not) have one thing in common with the
elitists: both groups are faced with an often-staggering mass of garbage
through they must dig to find gemstones. Most elitists solve this problem by
ignoring everything that seems thematically conventional, unless it is given
the gloss of superior technique. Fans, for their part, will keep on trucking
through the muck and mire in search of whatever kind of gems they prefer, but
most of them are guided by their individual tastes. The unique situation of the Hunter of Modern
Myths, though, is that he may find himself discerning interesting
gems—mythologems, to be precise-- in works he doesn’t particularly like (as I
will be doing here). However, assuming
that even a cynical elitist will take that critic’s word on the matter of his
own tastes, one might consider this relative detachment a rebuttal of a classic
elitist canard: that the myth-critic is merely attempting to use archetypal
discourse to justify his nostalgic affection for things he read in
childhood. Indeed, the sequence I’ll be
critiquing from the adventures of “the Fastest Man Alive” is actually devoted
to tearing down much of what I have liked, in a nostalgic sense, about the
character of the Flash.
But then, at times destruction can be as interesting as
creation, as is testified by Camille Paglia’s interpretation of Friedrich
Nietzsche’s famous opposition of Apollo and Dionysus in art:
“Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in
nature, only the grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating,
grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid… Dionysus was identified with
fluids; blood, sap, milk, wine. The
Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. Apollo, on the other hand, gives form
and shape, marking off one form from another.
All artifacts are Apollonian.”—Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 30.
The most common characterization of the superhero by the
elitist is an Apollonian one. The
superhero is, we are told, the staunch defender of order at all times, which in
itself proves him a potential fascist.
And even many of those who style themselves fans of the superhero genre
would prefer to see their character unsullied with Dionysian darkness. As I began this essay, issue #2 of DC’s
crossover-miniseries, IDENTITY CRISIS, came out, occasioning considerable ire
from many fans for its flirtation with such darkness. This darkness took the form of the rape and
murder of Sue Dibny, a character of some thirty years’ vintage (and who
originally appeared in the FLASH comic).
The fans that did not like this development did not think such excessive
violence belonged in a superhero comic, which was meant to be a fun, “all ages”
form of entertainment.
Though I disagree with this conclusion, I sympathize on
one symbolic level. Most characters of
genre-literature, particularly those in continuing series, are “Apollonian
artifacts,” conventions given human form that do not even try to be
three-dimensional human beings. One does not have to be Leslie Fiedler to
suggest that it must be something akin to a mythopoeic power that keeps certain
genre-characters fresh over generations.
Further, the superhero may be the most artificial of cultural artifacts,
for he resembles nothing “real,” in the way that the fictional cowboy is
patterned on his historical forbears.
There’s some logic behind the idea that the superhero’s adventures
should be as strictly ritualistic as a Noh drama: nothing but endless tales of
good conquering evil, in the form of a bizarre superhero constantly thwarting
equally-absurd supervillains—which formula does, in truth, describe the early
adventures of the Flash.
When DC Comics introduced the character in 1956, he
represented the first major attempt to revive the genre of the superhero, which
had seen its greatest popularity during WWII and had been largely unpopular for
almost ten years following the end of the war. Perhaps because of the period in
which he began, the Flash then developed into the most Apollonian of
superheroes. Whereas even Superman had
the catastrophe of planetary destruction lurking in his past, the Flash barely
possessed any background at his start, and certainly not a tragic one. He began as police scientist Barry Allen,
first seen sitting around his laboratory reading a comic book of the original
FLASH (the first, WWII-era version of a speedster-hero, also from DC Comics),
and wondering what it would be like to have super-speed. With that, mirable dictu, a lightning
bolt crashed through his window, splashed various chemicals upon Barry, and
endowed him with the desired power of super-speed. From there he went on to encounter a
colorful “rogue’s gallery” of villains, most of whom chose some natural
phenomenon on which to base their powers or weapons—the Mirror Master, Captain
Boomerang, the Top-- and who would go around stealing things mostly so that the
Flash would come out and fight them.
As
developed under the aegis of editor Julie Schwartz, artist Carmine Infantino,
and writers like John Broome and Gardner Fox, this Flash was distinguished by
all sorts of Apollonian charms—a breezy humor, ingenious psuedoscientifc
rationales for all the absurdities, and almost no emotional conflicts. (I might except a tale in which the Flash’s
“evil double,” a speedster called Professor Zoom, tries to steal Barry Allen’s
fiancée Iris West: the Flash actually gets refreshingly angry at this act of
bride-stealing.)
And yet, the Dionysian was in the early superheroes as
well: in the violence of most of their origins (like the aforementioned death
of Krypton), and often in the fear-invoking appearances many of them assumed in
their crimefighting identities: the Batman, the Hangman, the Spectre. When the Flash appeared in 1956, the
industry had been largely purged of overt sex and violence by its acceptance of
the Comics Code Authority as a means to assure parents’ groups that comics with
the Code seal were safe for Little Timmy.
Without knowing whether IDENTITY CRISIS will prove to be anything
possessed of any sort of complexity, I can say that the Dionysian will always
invade even the most conservative-seeming genres, and that both the elitist
scoffers and the nostalgic fans are both wrong: one for not recognizing those
dark undercurrents, and the other for not appreciating what complexities they
can engender.
And so at long last I come to that version of THE FLASH
that was in many ways the antithesis of the “classic FLASH” of Schwartz and his
creative team. I recall being rather
less then enthralled in 1979 when this new version took shape. New
editor, Ross Andru took over the FLASH feature, promising on the cover of #270
that “starting with this issue—Flash’s life begins to change, and it will never
be the same again!” Andru’s editorial
tenure lasted only thirteen issues, from #270-283. Cary Bates, who had been the
principal writer on the title for some years, executed all of the Andru-edited
issues, though the tone of the Andru tenure was so different from what Bates
had been doing under editor Julius Schwartz, so I hypothesize that Bates was working
from an editor’s plan. The artists
probably had next to no influence on these issues, given that during this
period the penciling-chores changed hands five times.
From an aesthetic angle, I’m ambiguous about the
aforementioned changes, but in retrospect I see that there is method in the
madness that editor Andru and writer Bates inflicted on the Flash’s life: a
method that consists of disrupting the Apollonian pattern of the hero’s
adventures with elements of chaos—drug running, police corruption, madness,
suspicions of infidelity, and ultimately, the death of the Flash’s longtime
spouse, Iris West-Allen. For writer
Bates this was fairly new territory, as he’d written the Flash’s adventures in
“classic mode” for many years previous. Andru, for his part, was essentially continuing in the more
Dionysian mode of one of his earlier seventies’ assignments: as penciller for
Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN series, during which, perhaps not coincidentally, that
hero’s longtime girlfriend also bit the dust. Other motifs from the SPIDER-MAN
series seem to make the leap as well: Barry Allen becomes more of a “Hard Luck
Harry,” with his boss busting his chops and his wife nagging him about missing
dinner to fight crime. But symbolically,
the most interesting thing is Barry Allen becomes implicated in an experiment
that creates a Frankenstein-like monstrosity that almost incarnates the chaos
overtaking his life—as well as his wife.
Indeed, the literary myth of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN
bears strong resemblance to certain aspects of the Andru years, particularly in
respect to the symbol of the doppelganger, the “evil twin” that does the things
his good twin will not. In contrast to
many of the cinematic adaptations of FRANKENSTEIN, Shelley’s monster hews close
to the doppelganger pattern, obsessively killing off all the persons, friends
and family, whom Frankenstein values, including his new bride. The Andru-Bates continuity also manages to
duplicate many of the same motifs, though one cannot be sure how conscious the
creators were of such parallels.
I wrote before that Barry Allen was “implicated” in the
creation of a monster, but his contribution is more indirect than
Frankenstein’s. In the first issue,
Barry is invited to a demonstration of a new “aversion therapy” process
designed to reform criminals; a process which its inventor, Dr. Nephron, based
on a criminology thesis Barry Allen wrote in college. Possibly Bates introduced this twist only to
give Nephron a reason to invite Barry to see the process demonstrated, but the
effect is to render Barry complicit for having “postulated the possibility of
organic causes for criminal behavior.”
Barry has considerable reservations about Nephron’s use of aversion
therapy, and eventually uses his authority to have the project shut
down—temporarily, as it later develops.
And as if all this is not enough to come down on the poor
fellow, at the same time his wife’s giving him grief, a much younger girl, name
of Melanie, comes into his life; a girl who idolizes him for being a powerful
superhero. No, it’s not a presentiment
of “American Beauty,” given that Flash never actually seeks her out. At the outset
she seems to be stalking him, using her mind-control powers to
facilitate her search for her idol. Yet
it could be argued that within the greater pattern of the story she is Flash’s fantasy-projection, since she's younger than his wife and much more appreciative of his
superhero career. Indeed, she becomes
something of a siren-like figure in the early issues, twice using her powers to
summon him to her. The first time she
does so, in #272, she causes him to crash into a wall, much the way the sirens
wrecked sailors on their reefs, and then stands over his unconscious body,
saying, “I made you come to me, Flash.
I desired it—and it was so! This
proves I can make you do anything I want.”
This scene is the cliffhanger at the end of #272, but in #273 she
doesn’t end up either making Flash do anything-- or doing anything to him-- and
simply leaves the hero to wake up perplexed by the whole experience.
However, by the end of #273 Flash has a more deadly opponent. Despite Barry Allen’s censure, Nephron continues his experiment on
convict Clive Yorkin. The process turns Yorkin into a drooling, super-strong
madman who imprisons Nephron in the same “therapy” device, reducing Nephron to
a “vegetable.”
Yorkin then escapes and
somehow makes his way to Barry Allen’s house, motivated by a belief that Barry
was one of his tormentors. The madman
spies on Iris, potentially setting up a scenario like the one where
Frankenstein’s creation kills the scientist’s bride—but nothing happens at that
point. In #275 Iris, suspicious of her
husband’s absences, uses a homing device to track him down—coincidentally, on
the second occasion when Melanie decides to summon the Flash to a motel room. Since Flash has no power to resist the
teenaged psychic, the stage seems set for Iris to walk in a nonconsensual
tryst—but the ditzy young teenager herself short-circuits that potential, for
when she mentally forces the Flash to unmask, she’s disappointed by his
“ordinary” looks (“I guess I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but
whatever it was—you haven’t got it!”)
She leaves just as Iris arrives, and though Iris doesn’t catch her
husband en flagrante, she still leaps to the usual conclusion. Despite this, Barry manages to convince his
wife of the truth, partly because he’s visibly distraught at having been called
“ordinary.” Thus the character that
appeared poised to break up Barry’s marriage ends up bringing about a
reconciliation between hero and wife, and even a brief discussion about having
children.
That same evening, it seems the Frankenstein theme comes
back into play. Barry and Iris attend a
costume party (with Barry in his own costume, and Iris dressed as Batgirl). The
mad Yorkin follows them to the scene.
Barry is separated from Iris by circumstances too complicated to detail
here, but by the issue’s end, Barry hears Iris being attacked. He bursts into a
room and sees Yorkin standing over her dead body, in what seems a direct emulation
of the famous bride-slaying scene from FRANKENSTEIN—though in a world of
Dionysian chaos, all is not as it seems.
In #276 Yorkin escapes, and Flash goes a bit mad himself
for a time, trying to convince his fellow Justice Leaguers to help him bring Iris
back to life, and fighting with them when they profess helplessness. By #277 he recovers enough to attend Iris’
funeral and to decide he should quit the superhero game. Issue #277’s cover how divided against
himself he is, in that the cover shows Flash rushing at a seeming duplicate of
himself. As it happens, it’s merely a
trick of Flash’s old foe Mirror Master, who causes the hero to collide with a
mirror-created image of himself before the hero manages to vanquish the
villain. But it’s interesting
nonetheless for showing another take on the doppelganger theme, as are the
words Barry uses when he goes before an audience to confess his “double life,”
prefatory to resigning. The crowd,
fired by rumors of the Flash’s quitting, fails to understand what he’s talking
about and drowns him out yelling, “We want the Flash!” At that point Melanie reappears, having
thought better of her dismissal of Barry’s “ordinary” nature, and persuades him
to keep his superhero identity. By doing
so, she effectively puts to rest any “temptress” image she might have
originally projected, and becomes not only an ally to Flash, but something of a
“faithful daughter” to take the place of the one he never had.
Of course, with the apparent murderer of Flash’s wife on
the loose, there wasn’t much likelihood of Flash really quitting, and he and
his new “daughter” continue looking for the elusive madman. Things come to a head in issue #280, in
which Melanie manages to track down Yorkin to a condemned town, abandoned
because the “whole place had become one giant sink-hole!” (One might call the town a physical
reflection of Yorkin himself, whose thoughts, Melanie finds, “reek of death and
decay.”) She also learns she cannot use
her mind-powers on him, which stands as something of a reversal of her dominant
position over Flash earlier: where earlier she controlled him, and could
perhaps have “raped” him had she so chosen, here Melanie first perceives Yorkin
as “that cold vile sensation! I feel as
if my mind’s been GROPED!” She isn’t
even able to summon Flash to her side, though conveniently the hero finds
Melanie and Yorkin through following an unrelated lead. Melanie then becomes a temporary enemy to the
speedster, for her psychic powers boost Yorkin’s evil thoughts and repel Flash
with “waves of fear.” A seesaw battle
then causes the three combatants to fall into one of the sink-holes. Then, at a point when the madman has almost
bested Flash, Melanie projects into his mind the image of Iris, which fortifies
the hero and allows him to escape the sink-hole with her, leaving Yorkin to be
deluged by falling mud (“his fall the final insult to the groaning earth
beneath”).
So is the villain well and truly sent to his proper
hell? Well, as I hinted above—yes and
no, for at the conclusion of this issue (the last in which either Yorkin or
Melanie appears), new evidence comes to light, affirming that though Yorkin was
a madman and murderer, he was not the killer of the Flash’s wife. Once again the ground is pulled out from under
Flash’s fleet feet, as he runs from pillar to post trying to find the real
killer. And when he does find him, the final and most important doppelganger
motif crops up, for it’s revealed that Iris’ true killer was an earlier rival
for Iris’ affections, the aforementioned Professor Zoom.
Zoom, unlike other villains, was dependent
on the Flash for his identity, being that he was a denizen of the future who
despised the historical records of Flash’s heroism and so used his
super-science to become a speed-powered criminal version of Flash. He even adopted a costume exactly like the
hero’s, except for a reversal of its primary colors-- hence his secondary
cognomen, “the Reverse-Flash.” Only in
one way is he exactly like the Flash, for he confesses that “I truly loved Iris
Allen with a passion… the same passion that compelled me to snuff out her life”
when she rejected his advances. (As an
odd doppelganger touch by Bates, Zoom even mentions that he disliked the hair style
Iris had adopted at the time of her death, a style with which Barry Allen
himself was less than taken.)
Once
again Flash manages to defeat Zoom, and despite his temptation to take full
vengeance, spares the villain’s life, purposing to take him back to the future
in Zoom’s time-machine, for legal execution.
But Zoom booby-traps the machine to take them “to an era where no human
being can possibly exist—before the very creation of the universe itself” and
mocks Flash, saying, “You and I are going to die together!” Flash leaps from the time machine to take
his chances in the time-stream, while his “other self” yells, “You can’t leave
me to face the end alone--” The
circumstances at the end of Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN are not precisely the same,
but there is some resemblance, in that creator and creature pursue one another
through an arctic waste, terminated only when the creator dies and leaves the
creature alone to face eternity. Unlike
Frankenstein, the Flash (indirectly responsible for both the creation of Zoom
as well as the maddened Clive Yorkin) is
seen to survive in his next issue, but by that time the editorial reins passed
to Len Wein, so that Ross Andru’s last issue ends, perhaps fittingly, with both
the hero and his double apparently lost “beyond the brink of time itself!”
As has so often been the case in comic books, the
insidious Professor Zoom also did not meet his final fate in eternity, but
returned for more encounters with the hero: indeed, he outlived the Flash, who
perished in the DC crossover-event CRISIS.
I doubt any later writer would have cared to bring back either Clive
Yorkin or Melanie, though, since many fans considered this something of a low
point for the series (which largely went back to “classic mode” until the title
was finally cancelled). For although Zoom
killed Iris, both Melanie the “beauty” and Yorkin the “beast” were the
principal Dionysian elements introduced by Andru, and can be seen as having
symbolically presided over the death of Iris and all other changes in Flash’s
life. Indeed, the cover of their last
appearances, #280, latches onto the story-element of Melanie having been
accidentally turned against Flash, but exaggerates it for maximum effect,
showing the beauty being cradled in the arms of the beast while nonchalantly
telling Flash to “buzz off,” as if Melanie and Yorkin are allies under the
skin. So perhaps it’s fitting that the
two of them disappear at the same time, just a few issues before Andru left the
book.
Now, in focusing on the symbolic complexities of this
story, it’s true that I’ve left out a fair amount of narrative material that
wasn’t all that complex: the aforementioned subplots regarding drug smuggling
and police corruption, for instance.
And I can practically hear some smartass Journalista saying, “You also
left out the detail that the story SUCKED.”
My reply, of course, would be that I said early on I only esteemed
certain elements of the story, not the story as a whole: in terms of its
conscious thematics it’s rather mediocre, and visually hindered by a hodgepodge
of conflicting art-styles. I can’t
even claim that it’s as entertaining on the level of simple genre-fare as is a
better-conceived saga like the “Kree-Skrull War” from the Thomas/Adams
AVENGERS—and yet, though I find the latter more entertaining, I don’t discern
that extra level of symbolism in the AVENGERS tale. The Andru/Bates FLASH also has the added
attraction that it demonstrates how easily the elements of the Dionysian could
invade even the most Apollonian of heroes, a full six years before the so-called
“grim and gritty” movement in comics supposedly began with Miller’s DARK KNIGHT
RETURNS and Moore’s WATCHMEN, and a much longer time prior to IDENTITY CRISIS.
There are certainly better works out there, some possessed
of both thematic and symbolic complexity, and surely given the old “what comics
would you take to a desert island” test, any of these would make the cut before
this FLASH tale. But since none of us
is voluntarily going to that desert isle any time soon, we are left with
sorting out questions of merit in all its manifestations, and with trying to
constantly hammer our interpretations into others’ skulls. And whether this hammering serves to let in
some light into darkness, or just increases the degree to which the skulls are
already cracked, also remains to be “sorted out” by posterity. ______________________________________
Two minor additions:
One odd detail about Clive Yorkin's transformation is that it comes about because he's dyslexic, which supposedly causes his brain to interpret the negative input from Nephron's aversion process as pleasurable. Writer Bates doesn't even try to make this bit of "comic book science" seem logical-- much less giving a reason as to why Yorkin gets super-powers from the process. Yet the explanation proves modestly interesting in that it means the reason Yorkin can shrug off the aversion therapy is that he reverses "pain" into "pleasure," a symbolic reversal that slightly resembles that of Milton's Satan saying, "Evil be thou my good."
And though I made copious comparisons of Clive Yorkin to Mary Shelley's monster, I see I neglected to toss in a possible influence from James Whale's two FRANKENSTEIN films, both of which starred-- Colin Clive.