MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963)

 

In my overview of Chic Young's BLONDIE comic strip series-- parts of which were sometimes reworked for newsstand comic books-- I took pains to emphasize that Young had a special talent for formulating certain repeated gags that took on almost folkloric status. I observed that most of these gags were articulated in the BLONDIE strip after 1933, when the feature changed its focus from "young rich guy pursuing flighty young girl" to "middle-class husband constantly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous matrimony." However, one humor-trope appeared even in the pre-matrimonial years, and that was the trope I termed "the Peacemans and the Bickersons."

This trope isn't exclusive to married couples. One can find the Bard himself plowing that particular field with the two couples in 1599's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which follows the travails of two non-married couples are depicted. Hero and Leander fit the bill as "Peacemans," for under normal circumstances they appear to be entirely lovey-dovey. Benedick and Beatrice, though, are "the Bickersons," expressing their deep affection by sniping at each other. It's a fair assumption that for Elizabethan audiences, the Peacemans supplied an idealized vision of romantic love, but the Bickersons were the fun couple to watch, even though they only battled verbally.

This dynamic continued through most popular romantic comedies throughout the 20th century, with a secondary romantic couple being contentious with each other while the primary couple was depicted more "seriously." And as I also observed in the overview, Blondie and Dagwood were, on the face of things, "the Peacemans," because they weren't repeatedly shown fighting with one another, verbally or physically, while other couples filled the role of "the Bickersons." Further, one reason it wasn't necessary for Chic Young to focus on fights between Blondie and Dagwood was because Dagwood was constantly being tormented in one way or another by almost everyone he encountered. Young's infusion of frequent slapstick into the Bumsteads' middle-class world ensured that Dagwood was almost always the Goat. His endless sufferings-- mostly from sources outside the home, but occasionally also from Blondie, his kids or his pets-- were the source of the strip's successful humor.

That's what gives the strip I call "Ringside Blondie" the heft of a psychological myth; that of Chic Young expanding on the context of a familiar repeated gag by taking it in a relatively new direction. "Ringside" is almost certainly an earlier twelve-panel Sunday comic strip by Young, reworked for Harvey's publication in a comic book format, so I'm glad to have found an example of Young himself playing with his tropes, in contrast to the earlier BLONDIE mythcomic I examined here. 

In effect, "Ringside" gives Dagwood the chance to be the chance to be on the inside looking out, enjoying the spectacle of another male being tormented. In the first four panels, Blondie scolds Dagwood for openly watching a neighbor-couple, the Flizbys, having a "battle royale." Dagwood notices that Blondie herself peeks at the ongoing fracas before pulling down the window-shade, but she makes a lame excuse that doesn't fool the reader. She'll shortly show herself to be a hypocrite, for she takes just as much pleasure as Dagwood viewing someone else's marital troubles despite saying that it's wrong.

I'll note at this point that no one reading this strip would confuse any of these married martial battles with real spousal abuse. That's why, on the second page, Dagwood keeps remarking on how hard Mrs. Flizby is hitting her husband: "She must've taking boxing lessons when she was young." This sort of remark adds what Northrop Frye called "the protective wall of play," making clear that this is a comedic setup, in which no one is really harmed.

Anyway, Dagwood just goes back to scoping out the neighbors' fight. Once again, Blondie makes moralistic pronouncements while sneaking more than a peek this time. Dagwood acquires binoculars from his son Alexander and stations himself on a balcony to get a better look. Blondie shows up, scolds him again, but somehow ends up using the binocs herself. (Even Daisy the dog gets in on the scopophilia.) Then the pugilistic Mrs. Flizby shows up and sarcastically suggests that both nosy neighbors ought to come over and watch the fight close up. Blondie refuses, claiming she's "insulted," while Dagwood is only too happy to have a ringside seat, peacefully smoking a pipe as if he were watching a TV show. 

This is a rare departure for Chic Young in that Dagwood isn't the Goat for once, except in a very minor way: his son charges him for renting the binocs, and Dagwood accepts the condition. Blondie scolds Dagwood, but she's the main source of humor since she won't admit her nosiness as Dagwood does, and even pretends to be offended when she's correctly called out for her intrusive curiosity. Dagwood pays no real price for satisfying his curiosity, though the spectacle he gets to watch is still that of a male humiliation, as the beleaguered Mr. Flizby is clearly getting the worst of it. But in the more frequent altercations in which Herb Woodley or Mr. Dithers get clobbered by their termagant wives, sometimes the violence would spill over onto Dagwood-- but never, significantly, onto Blondie. This time Dagwood is as insulated from the violence as the readers of the comic strip. 

MYTHCOMICS: "SPLAT-OUKA" (THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, 2023)

Anyone who partakes of Japanese manga, particularly in the allied genres of romance and comedy, soon notices that the manga-authors work a lot of clansgression into the mix. I use the term "clansgression" here because it includes not only romantic combinations including literal incest, but all combinations that seem like "transgressions against proper clan-relationships." THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN is a recent production of this kind, authored by Reiji Miyajima, who gained fame for the roller-coaster rom-com RENT-A-GIRLFRIEND.

The setup: seven teens, the two sons and five daughters of the titular Shiunji Family, have spent their lives together on their rich father's estate, his wife having passed away some time ago. In contrast to dramas in which full-blooded siblings fall in love with one another, such as ANGEL SANCTUARY, all of the siblings seem generally well-adjusted to one another. Youngest brother Shion doesn't interact with the sisters that much, since they seem to focus all of their teasing upon the oldest brother, Arata. From eldest to youngest, Banri, Seiha, Ouka, and Minami all give their handsome older brother-- who at age sixteen has never had a romantic relationship-- a hard time, accusing him, without justification, of looking at them lustfully. The one exception is the youngest sister, fourteen-year-old Kotono, who's too shy to tease anyone. Yet she also provides a sort of crack in their facade of normalcy, for her naivete causes her to profess a desire to marry Arata.

None of the siblings take Kotono seriously. Yet this transgressive feeling proves catching, thanks to a revelation by the teens' father on Kotono's 14th birthday. The siblings' supposed sire reveals that none of them are related to him or his late wife; all were adopted as infants or small children. Shion and Minami alone are siblings by blood, both adopted from the same source, and thus none of the sisters are related to Arata at all. After coping with their surprise, all of the adoptive Shiunjis, particularly Arata, strive to keep regarding one another as symbolic siblings. And yet, from the second episode on, all the females reflect on the fact that legally, any of them could marry Arata.

While the series is still too new to be sure if Miyajima has any deeper psychological myths he intends to plumb, there are some interesting indications. Older sisters Banri and Seiha seem content to tease Arata a bit more intensely, while the younger ones are more upset by the changed status quo. In the story "Twister Seiha," Seiha, a science-nerd type, talks Arata into participating in a game of Twister, while she lectures him on the human body's chemical makeup with respect to emotions of love and passion. Of particular interest is her emphasis upon "trust and other scientifically uncertain feelings." The sisters' trust in Arata in his capacity of "protective older brother" seems to be the gateway drug to considering him as a prospective mate.

"Splat-Ouka," the story immediately after "Twister Seiha," follows a similar pattern in using a game to expose possible true feelings. Middle sister Ouka, who at sixteen is the same age as Arata, has always deemed herself Arata's twin in a symbolic sense. She is also probably the most forceful of the sisters, for before agreeing to play, Arata reflects that in the past he would always win their competitions, and she would seek revenge by putting him in "a lock-hold." Being a well-bred Japanese boy, Arata would never fight back. Nevertheless, he agrees to play against her in the Nintendo video-game Splatoon, from which the story's title is derived.

This time, Ouka has upped her game, and she scores some victories in which her female icon bests his male icon. However, Arata finally decides to play to his utmost, and he begins winning. At this point Ouka reverts to her usual form, attacking him from behind with a headlock. He protests that she's hurting him, just as he did when he was younger, but Ouka won't back off. And then--

Arata finally exerts himself in this respect as well, throwing his smaller, lighter sister off and pinning her to the floor. He's subsequently aware that pinning down any female-- particularly one to whom he's not really related-- looks like he intends to have sex with her. He tries to normalize their encounter as just another "small fight" between siblings.

Ouka, however, expresses a very ambivalent sentiment, for she says that he's "a man now." Neither of them breaks down this sentiment, but it holds two likely implications. One is that Ouka pronounces Arata a mature male because he throws off the conditioning of politeness and uses his greater male strength to quit taking her abuse. The other is the context that a "man" is capable of initiating sex when given the go-ahead by the willing female. Ouka sexualizes his physical conquest of her in order to point out that the two of them could indeed have sex as could any unrelated male and female-- even though, as most readers will expect, nothing actually happens.

Ouka then disengages and goes her way, leaving Arata utterly perplexed. For the reader's benefit alone, she then utters a line that could be taken in a sexual manner or a neutral one: "Next time don't go easy on me." Given what the reader knows of Ouka, it seems unlikely that she wanted her ex-brother to ravish her, even using the definition of that word I specified in this essay. But what this fictional character may have "wanted," in line with her creator's intentions, was to test the waters of both Arata's feelings and her own. One may speculate that if he had lost control and ravished her, she might have accepted it without protest, because her assault on him held the strong possibility of provoking such a response. But since other stories emphasize that she fears the loss of her imagined sibling bond with Arata, it's possible that Ouka is playing mind-games with herself as much as with Arata, trying to figure out if she can replace one bond with another.

MYTHCOMICS: ["ON THAT DAY, I MET SENPAI"], PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, PTS. 140-144 (2023)

 One compensation for the conclusion of the NAGATORO manga is that as a critic I can now view it as a finished work. Had I never seen the ending for any reason, I believe my determination in this essay-- that the manga is principally governed by the dramatic potentiality-- would still have been valid. But viewing the actual conclusion gives me the opportunity to reinforce that opinion.

My title for the essay, SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH, held a touch of irony, since I argued that the particular set of NAGATORO melodramas I had analyzed did not have the "long range" symbolic qualities that I seek in pinpointing literary myths.

Thus, when I search for a psychological myth, I look for an elaboration of symbolic resonances into mythopoeic concrescence, which is only possible when the author is a "long-range" mode. A dramatic concrescence can be formed from any number of "short-range" emotional states, but that concrescence does not depend on any abstractions as does the mythopoeic type. 

And now that I've seen the whole design of the series, aside from a forthcoming epilogue, I can assert that all of the NAGATORO stories I've looked at so far are at best "near-myths." Only in one section, about ten installments from the end of the main narrative, does author Nanashi develop his characters into deeper symbolic presences. But the symbolism does not involve the Buberian arguments I invoked in my last two essays, but an opposition that arguably is more central to Japanese culture: the conflict between instinctual existence and a disciplined, reasoned outlook.

For almost eighty installments, Nanashi keeps the reader in the viewpoint of the male protagonist Naoto, a.k.a. "Senpai." There are two or three exceptions where the viewpoint is Nagatoro's-- she has a nightmare, she talks with her sister-- but the reader is never privy to Nagatoro's thoughts, while Naoto's thoughts are ever-present. As Naoto is drawn out of his protective shell by his "kohai's" teasing and demands for attention, he becomes more interested in learning more about her life apart from him. After Part 80, Nanashi begins developing parallel plotlines for the two protagonists with respect to the avocations they have pursued: Naoto with respect to becoming a better artist, and Nagatoro's with respect to mastering the sport of judo. Both avocations will become pathways to general career goals, as indicated by the final episode. But the paths followed also indicate the process by which each protagonist has assimilated aspects of the other's "strong points," with the tightly wound Naoto becoming more open to following his instincts, while Nagatoro becomes more focused, more disciplined.

Episode 140, the one from which I take my umbrella-title, is the first one to delve into Nagatoro's thoughts. Previous episodes have revealed to Naoto that though Nagatoro had been practicing judo since elementary school, she abandoned the hobby after suffering a humiliating defeat at the end of her last middle-school year. Up to that point, Nagatoro's judo depended on her innate abilities-- her superlative speed and her instinctive mastery of techniques. But a rival, one Orihara, was so frustrated by Nagatoro's superiority that she trained until she reached Olympic levels of accomplishment, and so handed Nagatoro her first real defeat.

During Nagatoro's first year at high school, she and her friends accidentally encounter Naoto, and get a look at the fantasy-manga he draws. In the first episode, the reader has no idea why Nagatoro chooses to bully Naoto far more than her friends, though it's soon evident that it's wrapped up in a physical attraction that she won't admit to others and barely admits to herself. According to her mental dialogue, her judgment of her senpai's art is ruthless, calling it "awkward" and "delusional." Yet at the same time, she senses that "he tried his best," and that appeals to her on some level-- an instinctual one, since Nagatoro, though she reads manga, does not have any interest in art as such.

There is, without doubt, a classic bullying-angle to her aggression: because of a failure in her own life, Nagatoro is moved to humiliate someone weaker than herself. But because Naoto becomes solicitous about her having abandoned her passion for judo, she forces herself back into the fray. In fact, Nagatoro's meditations on the past take place in the middle of a climactic battle with her rival Orihara at a school-sponsored judo tournament, with Naoto cheering her on. 

Nagatoro wins her match with Orihara. Yet while Naoto is glad for his almost-girlfriend, he feels that she's assumed a dominant role in their relationship once more. Amusingly, he imagines her as a malicious horned oni-demon, complete with an iron club and a tiger-skin bikini (which sounds more like Lum of URUSEI YATSURA than any traditional Japanese folk-myth.) And though in reality she presents no physical danger to Naoto, his fears are justified by the fact that she still loves to harangue him, presumably as a cover for her own feelings. Not surprisingly, Naoto flashes back to his first encounters with his kohai, when she attacked him with demonic sadism.

Thus, when the young fellow overcomes his trepidations in order to confess his feelings, he becomes far more outspoken than ever before, admitting that his first encounter with her was like a meeting with a wild beast. This doesn't exactly please a cute high school girl, and she retaliates that she thought of him as a "really really gross wharf roach." Yet Naoto simply rolls with the insult, admitting that her bestial attack served the purpose of dragging him out of "the shadows" and into "sunlight." 

Then, once Nagatoro works through all of her protests about Senpai's "grossness," she's finally able to admit that when they met, she was just as purposeless and adrift as he was, once she surrendered her passion for judo.

And so the young lovers reach a rapprochement as they finally become a couple, though once again, Nanashi reminds his readers that even if Nagatoro doesn't wield an iron club, she still has a lot of "the oni" in her.

After I selected this section of NAGATORO as the serial's only concrescent myth-discourse, I did a little research and learned that when Nanashi created his prototypical version of the series, in the form of a five-part webcomic, he ended that comic on a scene parallel to this one, with the Naoto-prototype confessing to the Nagatoro-prototype. I have not read the webcomic and from what summaries I've seen, it didn't go into a lot of character depth but rather portrayed its Nagatoro as a thoroughgoing sadist. This might make for an interesting comparison somewhere down the line, but as far as the series proper is concerned, the protagonists' struggle between the instinctive life and the life of premeditation remains the "master trope" of the narrative as a whole.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE KILLER SLOT" (ALL-AMERICAN MEN AT WAR #109, 1965)

The vast majority of DC war comics of the Silver Age-- which I, as a non-expert, perceive to be the heyday of the company's execution  of the genre-- tend to be fairly straightforward "gotta out-tough the enemy" potboilers. Robert Kanigher produced tons of these by-the-numbers combat-capers< But as with his superhero and western works, on occasion he came up with something in a mythic mode. In "The Killer Slot," he sought to work in his (undoubtedly simplified) comprehension of Amerindian psychology into just such a "tough it out" scenario.

"The Killer Slot"-- which is a pilot's name for a zone in which one plane has another at a disadvantage-- begins in media res. WWII "Navajo Ace" Johnny Cloud has been forced to land by another ace, one Von Kleit, Grinning goosesteppers take him prisoner, and for good measure mock him for being a Red Man:

 

Naturally, Cloud breaks free without getting immediately shot dead. Yet, rather than being, like most protagonists, solely concerned with his mission, Cloud becomes morose for having brought shame on his warrior heritage. This conveniently reminds him of an incident in his youth on the reservation, wherein he and his girlfriend rescued a falcon from a marauding hawk. This whole situation takes place near the cave of local shaman-type "Smoke-Maker," and that's where Cloud and his girlfriend take the smaller bird, believing that the falcon is dead. Smoke-Maker claims that even dead birds cannot rest without taking a last strike at an enemy. Providentially, the falcon seems to come to life, at least long enough to attack the hawk, after which both are joined in death.

This doesn't exactly sound like a good omen for the hero of a continuing serial. Having finished this segue into the distant past, Cloud finally fills in the reader on the dogfight that led to his current situation. After shooting down some enemy planes, Cloud sees a lone American soldier on the ground, being menaced by a German tank. Cloud rescues the grunt, with the amusing thought that the tank-gun reminds him of  "a cowboy with a six-shooter." Naturally, this time the "Indian" wins.

However, Cloud's heroic action leaves him open to his plane being forced down by two German fighters, and thus we return the reader to the present time. Cloud wanders around a while, moping about being shamed because he didn't manage to strike back against the enemy, and then finds the soldier he saved. The unnamed fellow expresses his shame for having failed his own martial attempts, at which point Cloud realizes that white people also feel the same shame as Indians over failure, which presumably soothed the egos of the readership.

The soldier, even in his wounded condition, helps Cloud regain his downed airplane. As the Navajo Ace takes off, he only has a split second to shoot down the enemy ace Von Kleit (never actually seen on-panel) before he Cloud falls victim to the Killer Slot. Probably no readers were surprised when Cloud, in taking down his enemy, did not suffer the fate of the dead falcon. But even if "Killer Slot"-- graced with somke really nice aviation-art by Irv Novick-- doesn't transcend the formula of the "tough-guy war-hero," Kanigher did somewhat better here in melding the psychology of shame with the imagined warrior code of a Native American hero.

MYTHCOMICS: THE CABBIE (1987)

Since some years had passed since I'd read THE CABBIE, Marti Riera's ironic satire of DICK TRACY, I decided to peruse some randomly chosen Chester Gould continuities before I put forth any comments on Riera's work. I found that not only did Riera successfully ape the cartoony grotesqueries of Gould's work, he also successfully riffed on Gould's righteous "crime does not pay" nostrums.

To my knowledge CABBIE seems to be Riera's best-known work in the United States. I saw some talk online about a possible sequel to the one-shot work from 1987, but I had no problem with regarding this comics-album as a stand-alone work, despite an ending that's mean to frustrate the average reader's desire for closure.

No actual name is given to the titular protagionist. A spirit-voice calls him "Cabbie ForHIre" once, but I think this was probably a pun. Even his sister just calls the blond cab-driver "Cabbie." He's just an ordinary working-stiff, but his life changes when he thwarts a thief trying to rip off one of the Cabbie's passengers.

The Cabbie gains a measure of social approval for his brave act, but his home life shows that he's no hero. He lives a macabre existence, for his mother has kept the dead body of Cabbie's father inside a coffin in their apartment. In addition, she holds over his head the promise of a great inheritance Cabbie's father left behind. It seems likely that the mother takes this action to make sure Cabbie keeps her with him, rather than packing her off to an old-folks home.

However, the criminal whom Cabbie sends to jail, the aged John Smith, just happens to encounter his equally crooked son while in prison. John Smith Junior-- whose name reminds one of Dick Tracy's faithful adopted son Junior-- swears vengeance on Cabbie. Once Junior is out of stir, he finds Cabbie's apartment and takes out his wrath on the driver's mother. This accidentally works to Junior's advantage. When Cabbie comes home, Junior hides in another room, and he overhears the mother-- albeit reluctantly-- reveal that the inheritance is hidden in the father's coffin.

Junior and Cabbie then begin a long battle over the bounty in the coffin. Cabbie plays detective and follows the thief to a shack near a sewage dump, where Jones's white-trash family lives. However, though Cabbie overtakes Junior, the would-be hero lets his guard down when Honey, Junior's under-aged sister, comes on to Cabbie and slips him a mickey. Thus Cabbie ends up in a standard Gould death-trap, though with a modernistic touch in that the hero is doomed to be drowned in sewage and shit.

Cabbie escapes, of course, and in a very roundabout way he crosses paths with Junior again, which also aligns with Gould's frequent utilization of wild coincidence. However, Riera uses coincidence to undermine Gould's adventure-mythos. Cabbie's sister Mary-- who is a "working girl"-- comes back into his life after the mother's passing. At the same time, Junior, despite having gained Cabbie's fortune, thinks it's a great idea for his dimbulb little sister to get trained in the arts of prostitution, just as if it was a perfectly respectable profession. And guess who gets tapped to train Honey?

Other developments: Cabbie kidnaps Honey, which results in Junior half-killing Mary, and John Smith Senior busts out of jail. I mentioned above that there's a moment where a spirit-voice, claiming to be from Saint Christopher, patron of motorists, speaks to Cabbie, and the voice does so a second time, but from the mouth of the unconscious Honey. But because the voice never has any great effect on the narrative, I tend to dismiss these spiritual manifestations as hallucinations on Cabbie's part, as well as sarcastic send-ups of Chester Gould's tendency to wrap his sympathetic characters in Christian pieties.

After tons of blood-curdling violence and suffering, most of the Jones family perishes, and Cabbie pursues Junior back to the sewage dump. There's no final battle, though, and it's just chance that allows Cabbie to survive while Junior is consumed by the earth, as is all the money he stole from Cabbie. (I suggest that Riera was promoting some equivalence between money and shit.) That lack of closure I mentioned suggests that Cabbie and Honey, the last survivors of their respective families, may cross paths once more, but Riera frustrates that possibility, and leaves the Cabbie amiless and impoverished, "a straight-arrow hero [who] ends up on the zig-zag path of disorder."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE REMAINS OF DREAMS" (WEEKLY YOUNG SUNDAY, 1987?)

In my review of the ONE POUND GOSPEL arc”The Lamb Resurrected,” I called attention to the way artist-writer Rumiko Takahashi used the genre of boxing-stories to put forth “a modern-day reading of samurai battle ethics.” A naïve critic might try to impose on Takahashi’s series some superficial oppositional interpretation, in which the comical blunders of the male boxer, amiable dolt Kosaku Hatanaka, served to “deconstruct masculinity” or some such nonsense. In truth, the female author of GOSPEL shows herself to be more than a little fascinated with the ethos of the male warrior, both in this series and others like RANMA ½ and INU-YASHA. The fact that Takahashi’s male heroes often need to be taken down a peg by the women in their lives doesn’t signify a rebellion against the patriarchy. Rather, such a trope more often signals the classical notion that men and women exist to counterbalance one another, in terms of both strengths and failings.

To be sure, Kosaku’s dim-witted but sincere desire for the woman in his life, the novice nun Sister Angela, doesn’t appear in “Dreams” as more than a side-element. This five-part arc was the third storyline in the series, so the young just-turned-pro boxer has already invited Angela to become his girlfriend, only to be summarily rebuffed. Implicity Takahashi intends to line up Kosaku’s general thick-headedness in romance with his similar incomprehension as to the discipline a boxer must observe, if he has any “dreams” of attaining a level of excellence.

The first two arcs also establish the comic rationale of the series: Kosaku loves the sport of boxing, but he loves food as much or more. At one point in the story Sister Angela remarks that if not for her acquaintance with Kosaku, she would never have known that boxers had to watch their weight at all times—a remark that allows her to stand in for uninformed readers, who will have their curiosity about the sport slaked by assorted lectures on the sport. (In contrast, readers don’t get many insights on Catholicism just because Angela’s a nun. Takahashi portrays Kosaku making Angela’s acquaintance by unburdening himself to her in the confession-box—though I rather doubt that nuns usually hear confessions, even in Japan.)

For the first time in the series, Takahashi establishes the reason why Kosaku is so focused on both fighting and feeding: in his heart of hearts, he nurtures the primitive notion that the more he eats, the stronger he is. In “Dreams” the young boxer gets the chance to test his theory. At a time when Kosaku’s already got a bad rep in the fight-game for his inability to manage his weight, the boxer and his long-despairing manager Mukaida get the chance for another bout—only to find that it’s offered by a boxer, Kappei Onimaru, whose reputation isn’t much better than Kosaku’s. Further, in order to fight welterweight Onimaru, featherweight Kosaku must gain twenty pounds. Kosaku takes the fight as an opportunity to pig out in the extreme.

Mukaida allows Kosaku to chase his phantom, and sure enough, the boxer learns how badly his new diet affects his speed and coordination when, as Mukaida puts it, the youth has “twenty-two pounds of dead meat strapped to his body.” Meanwhile, challenger Onimaru is chasing his own demons— or, as the title suggests, dreams that are about to come to an end. Unlike Kosaku, who’s won some bouts despite his bad rep, Onimaru has no wins to his credit, despite the fact that he takes the sport far more seriously than Kosaku does. Initially Onimaru’s manager schedules Onimaru’s battle with Kosaku just to give the older boxer a win—not least because he’s probably going to have to give up the sport, since he’s had no success and his wife has a baby on the way. But even before the two men fight, Onimaru recognizes Kosaku’s inherent skill and power, and becomes angry with Kosaku for abusing his body so flagrantly. Kosaku and Angela even learn that Onimaru keeps a shrine to all of his previous opponents, in order that Onimaru can express how deeply he feels about the sport, even in defeat.

When the water breaks for Onimaru’s unnamed wife—who, incidentally, gives him verbal hell for his stubbornness—the dedicated boxer is on fire to get at least one victory before his child is born. Indeed, Onimaru is so certain that his masculine pride will finally be vindicated that he decides that the name of the child—which he’s sure will be a boy—will be “Victor.” (The wife sarcastically asks, “If it’s a girl, will you want to name her ‘Loser?’”) The fight ensues, and though Kosaku has a hard time of it thanks to his extra weight, he remains the superior fighter and emerges victorious. Onimaru is at last chastened enough to give up on the last remnants of his boxing-dream, and reconciles himself with his new status as father—naturally, of a little girl.

In contrast, though Kosaku no longer believes in his dream of eating anything he wants, it’s axiomatic that he’ll continue to aggravate his trainers by sneaking snacks. But Angela is encouraged both by Kosaku’s good intentions and his inability to live up to them—for this state of affairs ensures that he will always need a “mother confessor. ” Thus she will be able to remain a part of the handsome boxer’s life, even if she’s not quite ready to confess her own feelings in the matter.

MYTHCOMICS: "RESEARCH ANIMALS" (LUPIN III, 1977?)

Hopefully this will be the last barely illustrated mythcomic I'll do for a while. At least this time, though, I'm motivated by the desire to touch on LUPIN III, the best known series of Monkey Punch, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. By coincidence so did another major manga-artist, Kazuo Koike, but I've already done two LONE WOLF analyses.

LUPIN III was launched in 1967 in WEEKLY MANGA ACTION, a Japanese "men's manga." The creator constructed a loose backstory for the titular character, who was supposedly the grandson of the 1905 "gentleman thief" Arsene Lupin, but Monkey Punch was not particularly concerned with continuity. Though 35 volumes of Lupin stories were released in Japan, few of these have been translated into English, not even online. However, there have been enough reprints-- largely from 1990 editions of the earlier works-- to establish that the Lupin stories usually follow a proscribed pattern. Lupin III is a master thief devoted to ripping off the fabulously wealthy, often though not always aided by his gangster-confederates Jigen and Goemon. Though Lupin often seems extravagant and foolish--  Monkey Punch's art emphasizing his frenetic, Jerry Lewis-like energy-- most stories show him winning in the end, demonstrating that he can out-think almost anyone who challenges him, either on the right or wrong side of the law.

The one opponent who frequently gets the upper hand against Lupin is Fujiko Mine, a busty adventuress who's also a slick master thief and manages to hijack Lupin's loot at the end of some stories. She's like Irene Adler to Lupin's Holmes, though the principal weapon in her arsenal is her hotness, which often causes the priapic Lupin to lose his cool. Her precise feelings for Lupin are not stated outright in the translated manga, but at the very least the two of them enjoy one-upping one another.

"Research Animals" is an atypical comic romp even for an artist as gonzo as Monkey Punch. The first panels take place in a shadowed forest at nighttime, which looks forbidding save for one potentially comic image, the sight of a bound man hanging upside down from a tree.

The man is Lupin, and as he awakens, he sees that Fujiko stands before him. He speculates that she knocked him out in his sleep, which all the backstory we get. Fujiko, whose usual pattern is to horn in on the master thief's schemes, explains that she's become curious to know Lupin's "true identity." The thief-hero rails at her past history of stabbing him in the back, but Fujiko's current scheme has nothing to do with profit. She's become a member of the "United Nations Secret College," and in order to graduate from this institution, she has to analyze Lupin's criminal genius.

Lupin breaks free and tries to attack Fujiko, and, to complicate things further (and also to set up a later joke), a dog pops out of nowhere, apparently responding to Lupin's cry of "Sic 'em," and joins the melee. However, Fujiko isn't alone either: two of her college-confederates lasso Lupin and drag him to a temporary tent-HQ. The dog simply vanishes until it's time for it to play its role later.

At this point, Lupin is subjected to a series of comical tortures: being conked on the head by a machine wielding differently-sized hammers, or having spears hurled at him. Fujiko doesn't seem to take any sadistic pleasure in clobbering Lupin; she seems blase about his sufferings, though going by the translation it's hard to see what she has to gain from her loopy experiments, or what her findings are going to mean to the United Nations. It's not impossible to imagine her going through this rigmarole because she simply wants to one-up Lupin in a new way. Certainly Monkey Punch gives the reader no clue, though gender-conflict still seems to be at the root of things.

Then one of the other students tells Fujiko that Lupin's agility is "at the level of a wild  dog." Fujiko looks outside the tent and sees Lupin's dog skulking around. At the same time she hears the embattled Lupin yipping in canine fashion, and jumps to the conclusion that Lupin is actually outside in a dog costume, while his dog has taken his place on the experimental table. (Absurd as this sounds, such a scenario is not unusual in the ongoing series.) The dog saunters off and Fujiko tells her two aides to pack everything up to leave. She then wonders if they ought to take the dog with them for future analysis, but-- surprise! It's been the real Lupin all along, and in a conclusion that could appear only in a dominantly male venue, the master thief spends the last panel taking his pleasure with Fujiko, quite against her will.

So here we have a much more nonsensical version of the situation seen in Robert E. Howard's story, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." In my discussion of this story here, I noted that although many readers wouldn't care for Conan taking his pleasure with the daughter of the title, her near-rape is entirely her own responsibility, given her attempt to set up Conan to be killed. Lupin III's life may not be in danger, but it's also hard to fault him for taking revenge for the pains he suffers. Going by the discontinuous nature of the series, I strongly doubt that Monkey Punch ever references this event again. Still, given the flamboyant nature of the Lupin-Fujiko relationship, it's hard to imagine her bearing a grudge against him for his retaliation. If anything, in Monkey Punch's fantasy-universe, it would have done no more than embolden her to even greater efforts to undermine and flummox her destined opponent.

ADDENDUM: I should note that since it was a regular thing in many Monkey Punch stories to show Lupin waving his wang about (usually obscured by the Greek symbol for "manhood,") it may be significant that most of Fujiko's assaults on Lupin in "Research Animals" consist of pounding on his head to test his stamina. I don't know if the contrast "big head vs. little head" had any natural parallel in Japanese culture, but since it's likely that the artist had encountered the symbolism somewhere, one might assert that Fukiko's making a quasi-sexual assault on Lupin long before he turns things around and does the same to her.

MYTHCOMICS: "GIANT KILLER" (SICK #38, 1965)

After re-evaluating Joe Simon's BROTHER POWER issues here, I occasionally contemplated checking out Simon's 1960s magazine SICK. I never read it in The Day, but its first incarnation enjoyed some duration, presumably providing Simon with his daily bread for the decade. I picked up a back issue at random, and found that the issue was modestly entertaining, evincing a darker sense of humor than the MAD of the 1960s.

Humor magazines didn't get a lot of fan-coverage over the years, and similarly, not many online fans have labored to scan issues of old humor mags, and so this essay will be almost image-free, like my analysis of THE MAIDEN AND THE DRAGON. However, "Giant Killer" is only one page, consisting of five panels, so it's not that hard to describe. SICK didn't provide credits in their contents-page, and the signature on the piece is difficult to make out, so based on other info I'm tentatively crediting the work to SICK contributor Arnoldo Franchione. In the unlikely event that someone corrects me, I'll issue a retraction. (Hah.)

PANEL 1: The "Giant Killer" of the title is the Biblical David, seen at the moment of his first heroic act,  at the moment that he slays the hulking warrior Goliath with a stone from his sling. No one else is seen but the two combatants. Goliath looks to be over ten feet tall and is bearded; David is a beardless youth with something of a Dudley Do-Right profile.

PANEL 2: The colossal feet of dead Goliath are seen at right, and out of nowhere a bunch of identical, black-bearded figures appear to acclaim David. Though the context would suggest that they are Israelites, they look like the stereotype of the Arab, since all of them wear the traditional burnoose and thawb (robe) that mark said stereotype. Here's an approximation of the visual stereotype, taken via Google from a news-story on a controversial high school mascot.

PANEL 3: The burnoosed men, all smiling toothy smiles, take David upon their shoulders. He seems genially pleased with their attention.

PANEL 4: The maybe-Jews start walking, carrying David along, as he raises his arms over his head in a "aren't I great" gesture. He doesn't notice that the group is approaching a palm tree.

PANEL 5: At left David is now dead, hanging by the neck from the palm tree, and the maybe-Jews are walking away in triumph.

Now, the obvious "lateral meaning" here could be boiled to, "One day you're a hero, the next you're a blood sacrifice." And if Franohione had chosen to make his ironic point with, say, a historical figure like Julius Caesar, maybe that would be all there would be to it.

But because Franchoine chose to invoke the myth-story of the Israelite king David, this means that this one-page cartoon reaches into a different set of references. In my essay NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES  I noted how some myth-works may "structure [a] narrative... as a commentary on other narratives"-- the narrative in this case being the grand scheme of patrilineal descent that ties King David to Jesus of Nazareth (however tortuously).

In the Old Testament, of course, David does not get sacrificed. The very popularity he gains from killing Goliath endangers his life, when current monarch Saul tries to eliminate the competition. But David lives to a ripe old age, and his passing has nothing to do with hanging-- though images of hanging play a definite role in the fate of the House of David.

Long after David has become king, one of his sons, Absalom, attempts to stage a coup and become the new ruler. The rebellion fails. Absalom flees, but he's captured and killed after his long hair gets caught in a tree's branches, pulling him from his steed.

Much later, Jesus of Nazareth suffers a death that involves an image of hanging, albeit not by the neck.

Finally, contemporaneous with the death of Jesus, his betrayer Judas-- who is admittedly not tied to the House of David-- chooses to execute himself (at least in one of the Gospels) in the same manner as Franchione's hero.

I don't advance here the view that Franchione was attempting any sort of structured allegory. Nevertheless, I think there is a raw creativity here that goes beyond the simple ironic moral of the one-page narrative. I'm particularly interested in the appearance of David's killers, for they don't share the image of "saintly Israelites" that SICK's readers would have seen in the cinema of the sixties. They look, rather, like "evil Arabs." For the audience of the time, would have been an image that could be seen as guilty of sacrificing a heroic Biblical figure. It would be going too far to implicate Franchione, decades after the fact, for perpetuating a disguised version of the Jewish "blood libel." At the same time, there's something going on in this brief cartoon that goes beyond just a quick ironic joke, in which the triumphant figure of the Biblical David is travestied by subjecting him to an execution not unlike many other sacred sacrificial figures.