MYTHCOMICS: DAY OF VENGEANCE (2005)

 

One of my main purposes in maintaining my mythcomics-project is that I'm engaged with the ideal that great myths sometimes arise from the humblest (if not literally crappiest) prima materia. But I never quite saw my thesis validated quite so quickly as today. A day or two ago, I decided to work my way through a library loaner, THE DETECTIVE CHIMP CASEBOOK, which collected all of the Golden/Silver Age stories of the analytical animal. I didn't like any of the scripts or even Infantino's artwork, but it made me curious to find out: when exactly did DC Comics decide not only to revive "Bobo T. Chimpanzee," and why did someone decide to stick the ape in the midst of DC's newly-forged "Weirdoverse?" It was easy enough to find out that Chimp started hanging out with magic-users in the 2005 six-issue series DAY OF VENGEANCE, penciled by Justiniano and written by Bill Willingham of ELEMENTALS and FABLES fame. I hadn't read that series, but since it seemed in predictated on the "Green Spectre" storyline from DAY OF JUDGMENT, I had to re-read that limited series for the first time in 25 years. As I noted in my review today, this Geoff Johns item may be one of the worst of its type out there.         

So, as I said, I never read VENGEANCE in the twenty years since it came out, and I more or less expected some adequate formula from Willingham at best, as opposed to Johns' extremely lame hackwork. The only thing VENGEANCE took from JUDGMENT was the idea that The Spectre, the divine "Spirit of Vengeance" in the DC Universe, needed a mortal body in which to exist. He apparently had Hal Jordan's body to occupy for about four years after the events of JUDGMENT, but at some point, they got a divorce, and at the beginning of VENGEANCE, the Ghostly Guardian has gone a little nuts. Eclipso, one of the Universe's foremost tempter-figures, decides that it takes a nut to crack a nut, so he manages to possess the body of Jean Loring, who joined the domain of the cuckoos in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. In this new female form, Eclipso-Jean uses feminine wiles to tame the unquiet spirit and give him an inventive new mission. Since the Spectre is opposed to all lawbreaking, why not destroy all magic within the Universe, since magic is based on breaking, or at least bending, natural law? The Spectre, being a sucker for a bad girl, falls for this queasy logic and begins a jeremiad against all things mystical.                 

I suppose that Willingham sorta-borrowed one other thing from Johns: a loose confederation of magic-affiliated heroes who would save "the Day." But Johns whipped together a bunch of big-name magi and gave them the portentous name of "The Sentinels of Magic." Willingham came up with a new lineup and coined the group-name "Shadowpact," which would get its own DC title the very next year. Willingham purposely got many of the "big guns" out of the way for his story-- Doctor Fate, Phantom Stranger-- and concentrated on a Defenders-like collection of oddballs: Ragman, Enchantress, Nightshade, Blue Devil, the aforementioned analyst-ape, and the sword-and-sorcery type Nightmaster, who like the chimp had only recently been revived for a handful of stories.             

Though there are still one or two powerful forces to be enlisted against the Spectre, not least being the Original Captain Marvel, the less powerful Shadowpact members have to seek to use strategy against the supremely powerful spirit. It may not be total coincidence that this was also the modus operandi of the 1980s SUICIDE SQUAD, which is also where most DC readers would have previously encountered both Nightshade and Enchantress. The heroes' chances are not improved by the fact that Enchantress herself has an "evil self" that sometimes emerges to muck things up, or that she and Nightshade shared the same body for a time during their SQUAD days.  

Shadowpact's initial strategy is twofold: Enchantress does a spell that draws power from other magicians and funnels it to help Captain Marvel, while the others take on Jean-Eclipso, who's considerably less powerful than her astral ally. As a backup plan, Nightshade and Chimp go looking for a trump card in Black Alice, a side-character introduced in Gail Simone's BIRDS OF PREY comic. It's during this section that Willingham explains how Chimp became one of the magic-users who hung out at Nightmaster's "Oblivion Bar." In line with a 1981 story that showed Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog both becoming immortal from drinking at the Fountain of Youth, Willingham asserts that now Chimp also has the power to talk to animals as well as to converse in human speech (which wasn't a property of "Bobo T. Chimpanzee.") 

  

 

    

Suffice to say that despite lots of heady, cosmos-shattering battles-- the very thing JUDGMENT did not offer-- Jean-Eclipso and the Spectre aren't easily defeated, and a scene in which the crazed Spirit of Vengeance contends with the wizard Shazam upon the Rock of Eternity looks a bit like what might happen if Spectre contended with the standard long-bearded image of the Judeo-Christian God. Shazam has one of the best lines in the series when he tries to reach the Spectre and warn him that he can't do away with magic, that all he can accomplish will be to is to remove all the controls that centuries of magecraft have elaborated-- a topic that also figures into this 2018 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK arc. Shadowpact does finally defeat Jean-Eclipso by sending both the insane Jean and her puppet-master into permanent sunlight. However, that's all the closure the reader will get, because Willingham was obliged to leave things in a state of partial chaos for the sake of the ensuing INFINITE CRISIS story by Geoff Johns. All that said, Willingham actually gave the nature of the "Weirdoverse" some thought, as well as coming up with some genuinely funny badinage for the motley crew of heroes. I'm not sure if he originated the idea that former S&S stalwart Nightmaster was now a greying fifty-something who ran the Oblivion Bar where Detective Chimp came to get drunk. But I liked the varied number of cameos that the writer and artists worked into the bar's background scenes, such as Arion, The Vixen, Andrew Bennett, Animal-Man, Jennifer Morgan of WARLORD and Valda from ARAK SON OF THUNDER.               

EDIT: On 5-23-25, I was able to read a supplement that more or less provided closure for the VENGEANCE series: a follow-up, again by Willingham and Justiniano, called DAY OF VENGEANCE-INFINITE CRISIS SPECIAL. Though the story wasn't as well-plotted as the six-issue series, the special showed various occult heroes (1) solved the problem of the Spectre running amok and (2) re-assembled the Rock of Eternity after the Ghostly Guardian shattered it. Thus, even though like DAY OF JUDGMENT the conclusion juggled more characters than it needed, the special counts as the conclusion to VENGEANCE-- even though the special also generated some new plotlines that played into both Geoff Johns' INFINITE CRISIS and Willingham's ongoing SHADOWPACT series that same year of 2005. 

NULL-MYTHS: DAY OF JUDGMENT (1999)

 

Though I have never tried to follow the vast majority of the DC and Marvel multi-character crossovers, I think I actually bought and read DAY OF JUDGMENT'S five issues back in The Day. I remembered nothing about the story 25 years later, except that it spotlighted the hare-brained (and quickly reversed) idea of following up Hal Jordan's crimes as a mind-controlled mass-murderer by turning the Silver Age Green Lantern into a new incarnation of The Spectre. Rereading it now, I'm ready to pronounce it not only an egregious example of a null-myth, but one even worse than the one I usually cited as the worst such multi-feature crossover, Jim Shooter's 1984 SECRET WARS. I think that even had I not reread WARS for that 2016 review, I would probably have at least remembered some of the story's events, clunky as they were. DAY is nothing but writer Geoff Johns and artist Matt Smith setting up the lame Green Spectre concept.                                  

Of course, WARS had 12 issues and DAY has only five, but that in my mind just more fully indicts the editors and creators who stuffed the story with Too Many Damn Characters. It doesn't help that artist Smith and writer Johns are just not suited to depicting a big cosmic cataclysm-story, so there are a lot of scenes with colorful figures standing around exchanging dull snatches of dialogue. Unleashing all the demons of Hell upon Earth was a plot that had been done before this by both DC and Marvel many times. But this one may be the least hellraising raisings of hell ever.     

Given that the Green Spectre idea turned into a whole lot of nothing, the only significance this DAY can be judged to possess would be that it was one of the first 1990s attempts of DC to exploit its "Weirdoverse," as discussed here. So at most DAY might have provided a stepping-stone to better things. But then, it's so bad, it would almost have to.      

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SEARCH FOR GOD" (THE SPECTRE #57-62, 1997-98)

The DC character The Spectre, despite being one of the more interesting characters originated by Jerry Siegel after his breakthrough conception of Superman, has never been particularly successful in any of his incarnations. This may be because the character extended the superhero's devotion to justice-- with its concomitant eschewing of domestic commitments-- into the realm of a perpetually vengeful spirit. Other Golden Age heroes occasionally took the lives of their enemies in the heat of battle, but the Spectre never had that excuse, being almost omnipotent and given to smiting evildoers with extreme prejudice. The fact that Spectre had died by criminal violence, and that he was given such powers by some entity in the Judeo-Christian heaven, may have made both him and his mission unrelatable for the average reader. It remains a minor mystery as to why this basically unsuccessful character was revived by DC in the mid-1960s, without any of the focus on divine vengeance. A 1970s series by Michael Fleischer and Jim Aparo took the opposing tack, but this still did not succeed, though the grotesque EC-style executions of crooks made the stories popular with the fan contingent.

I have not read the entire sixty-two issues of the character's nineties revival by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, but I perused enough individual issues to get the general sense of the creators' take on the franchise. I debated whether or not to read all of the online stories before devoting a post to the concluding six-part arc. I decided not to do so, since in theory the arc should be able to stand as a mythcomic whatever else the authors did in the course of the series.

Ostrander was probably dominantly responsible for seeking ways to "justify the ways of the Spectre to fans." He formulated the notion that Spectre was the incarnation of "the Wrath of God," or specifically that of the Judeo-Christian God Spectre's alter ego Jim Corrigan had grown up with. However, unlike Siegel and Fleischer Ostrander also sought to place the avenging apparition in situations where a clear-cut choice between good and evil was not available. One such conundrum crops up at the end of issue #56 sparks a conflict between the persona of the Spectre and that of his "vessel" Jim Corrigan. Spectre seeks out adjudication with the powers of Heaven, only to find the Pearly Gates wide open and all of Heaven's inhabitants, including the reigning deity, gone.

Spectre plays detective, trying to find God in all of his "usual haunts." The unquiet spirit Deadman provides the first inkling that God's presence may be a matter of perspective, since Deadman believes that his own deity Rama Kushna is the actual being in charge of things. Spectre then seeks out the mythological domains of two pagan belief-systems, and gets no answer. He gets a better clue, though, from Jack Kirby-- or, more specifically, from an ambiguous deific force, "the Source," invented by Kirby for his NEW GODS series.

The Source only gives the Spectre a vague oracle, which leads the Ghostly Guardian into ambivalent contacts with a race of aliens who deem their "hive-mind" to be their deity, and with the spirit of the Earth-Goddess, who complains a lot about mortals murdering the biosphere. But Gaea directs Spectre to seek the answer in the history of Jim Corrigan. 

The Spectre learns assorted new aspects of Jim Corrigan's early existence, all of which culminate in both Spectre and Corrigan experiencing a "Job moment."

In answer to this demand for justice from God, the hero and his alter ego get a very different answer than did the postulant from the Book of Job. A being claiming to be God manifests, looking for all the world like a moronic version of the Greco-Roman Cronos/Saturn, claiming that he simply ate everyone in Heaven. After Corrigan defies God, the demented deity sends him on another voyage of discovery. Corrigan sees yet more sinfulness in his lineage, such as a grandfather who participated in a murderous rage upon Cherokee Indians (not exempted from their own sinfulness, since Ostrander specifies that these were slave-holding Indians). 

This second katabasis actually allows Corrigan an "aha" realization about the nature of evil, which allows him to banish the vision of the imbecile God and to return to the side of his sometimes confessor Father Craemer. Craemer supplies Corrigan with the gloss to the Search for God: "What you have done is confront your image of God and found your old beliefs are not enough." However, because the magazine was on DC's chopping block-- which Ostrander and Mandrake certainly knew when beginning this arc-- there's no time for Corrigan to embrace any new visions of deity. The detective decides it's finally time to "give up the ghost"-- that is, separating himself from the Spectre in order that Corrigan can go to his eternal rest-- assuming, of course, that the perception of Heaven's non-existence was just a bump in the road of the Ghostly Guardian and his alter ego.

It's bracing to behold the DC version of the God of Abraham depicted as something like Twain's "malevolent thug." Of course Ostrander and Mandrake must supply a mitigation of this vision, because they're playing with DC's toys, and therefore must leave the doors open for whatever the next author wants to do with God, Heaven, the Spectre or Jim Corrigan. For all I know, Corrigan may have been revived one or more times by now. So "The Search for God" must be an exploration not of any final vision of deity but of all the contingent factors that may go into forming that vision. Nevertheless, this "Search" is a pretty good metaphysical primer on religious relativism and moral ambivalence-- certainly not the sort of thing the Golden Age character was intended to explore.

QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2

The “longer formulation” of quantum literary theory that I mentioned in Part 1 represents an attempt to apply the insights regarding the master tropes of the combative mode, expressed in 2019’s GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE  to the discourses of the four potentialities. In 2017’s GOOD WILLQUANTUMS PT. 2  I wrote that “the primary criterion of ficti onal excellence in any potentiality” was that of “density/complexity,” which criterion was merely a conflation of two covalent terms I’d used separately over the years. Not until late 2018, with the essay CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE,  did I decide that the authorial process of creating complexity merited its own term, and that this process, called concrescence, pertained to any work, no matter which of the potentialities proved dominant in the author’s intentions. I devoted one 2019 essay, CLANSGRESSION COUNTDOWN, to listing fifty separate works, all of which dealt with similar subject matter, and then showing how each work emphasized one of the four potentialities more than it did any of the other three.

I wrote GIVE-AND-TAKE in late 2019, but that essay was the culmination of many years of meditating on the different forms that the combative mode took in fictional narratives, with special reference to forms which did not end with a “give-and-take” of energies between combatants. Apparently, I was reasonably satisfied with these makework terms for the two tropes throughout most of 2020. However, during 2020 I finally read PROCESS AND REALITY, and this caused me to re-interpret some of my critical parameters in terms of the “vector metaphor” Whitehead used in PROCESS. Thanks to this process of re-interpretation, I gave further thought to the two tropes of GIVE-AND-TAKE in terms of vectors.

With the trope originally designated as “the killing stroke,” recently renamed “the deathblow,” I noted that the combative energies could flow in one of two directions:

From inferior force to superior force, as with the humans who blind the mighty Cyclops as well as the humans who vanquish mighty Godzilla with an “oxygen destroyer”—

Or from superior force to inferior force, as with Dionysus’s destruction of Pentheus and with the Spectre’s destruction of pestilential criminals.

However, with the trope originally designated as “give-and-take” and renamed “deathmatch,” the flow of energies must be on roughly the same plane. Often the deathmatch-trope takes place between just two entities of roughly equal power, such as Aeneas and Turnus, or Orion and Kalibak. A second variation would be that of two formidable warriors taking a larger number of opponents with some disadvantages (Odysseus and Telemachus vs. the suitors, who lack full armor and weapons, Batman and Robin vs. gangs of armed hoods who lack any special combative skills). A third popular variation is that of a huge assemblage of combatants vs. another huge assemblage of equally skilled opponents (the Greek gods vs. the Titans, the Justice Society vs. the Injustice Society), and a fourth can pit a large assemblage of heroes against one superior opponent, as with the Greek gods fighting Typhon and the Teen Titans battling Trigon. But all of these variations are subsumed by a vector showing energies flowing in both directions.

Because the “strength-quanta” energies of the deathblow-trope focus upon a vector going only in one direction, I choose to label this trope as *univectoral. *

However, because the “strength-quanta” energies of the deathmatch-trope flow in at least two directions at minimum, I choose to label this trope as *multivectoral. *

In GIVE-AND-TAKE, I erred on the side of caution by stating that I wasn’t yet certain that the two combative tropes were the only significant ones. However, having rethought the tropes in terms of vectoral analysis, I’ll now state that these two are the only principal tropes for “strength-quanta,” and that everything in between the two is simply a variation of one or the other.

Now, how does this affect potentialities whose tropes deal with different quanta? I will submit that excellence in all of the other three potentialities arises from a concrescence of energies that also follows either a *univectoral * or a *multivectoral * process.

Some loose examples:

In a work dominated by the dramatic potentiality, the work might be *univectoral * if it focuses only upon how one character’s “affect-quanta” influences other persons, as with Ibsen’s HEDDA GABLER. Another work might be *multivectoral * if it focused on how a group of characters influenced one another with their quanta, as would be the case in the same author’s ROSMERSHOLM. Similarly, one might have two works dominated by the didactic potentiality, one in which the author wishes to expatiate only one ideology, while in another the author wishes to oppose at least two ideologies in order to show one as superior to the other. Both Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE and Jack London’s THE IRON HEEL concern the ideology of socialism. But London provides an argument for the counter-ideology of capitalism, while Sinclair does not.

As for the mythopoeic potentiality, the one that arguably receives the greatest attention on this blog, I may as well use as illustrations the last two mythcomics I analyzed here. “Ixar, Sinister Statue of the Cyclades” is *univectoral,* in that all of the symbol-quanta are invested in the giant statue’s recapitulation of the myth of Orion and Cedalion, while all other characters, settings and plot-actions in the story are symbolically nugatory.

In contrast, the two-part story “PublicEnemy/Lifedeath” is *mutivectoral.* The first part begins by showing the interactions of two heroes, Storm and Rogue, as they overcome their initial conflicts and forge a bond of superheroic sisterhood, in part thanks to Rogue being able to “become” Storm by assimilating Storm’s command of natural forces. The sequence then concludes by showing a different set of symbolic interactions between Storm and potential lover Forge. Forge, an incarnation of the de-mythifying power of science, accidentally brings about the eradication of Storm’s godlike mutant abilities. Because Storm does not know that Forge is responsible for her loss, she comes close to being seduced both by his virility and his state of wounded-ness (missing leg replaced by a mechanical substitute). When she learns of his culpability, she rejects any bond with him, except in the sense that she swears to overcome the state of abjection he’s forced upon her, promising that she will find a way to “fly” again, if only in a metaphorical sense.

Time will tell whether or not I will explore other potentialities in terms of their vectoral nature. If so, I would have to devise trope-names appropriate to the other three potentialities, since “deathmatch” and “deathblow” apply only to the kinetic.

DEATHMATCH AND DEATHBLOW

One of my title words sounds like the name of an Image superhero, and the other sounds like it might as well be one. But these are, for the time being, working titles for the tropes I discussed in GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE—neither of which names were ever more than provisional placeholders.

The trope I call “deathblow” subsumes two structurally related sub-tropes. One sub-trope represents the concentration of will/power in order for a megadynamic character to overthrow a character of far greater dynamicity, and in GIVE-AND-TAKE I cited the example of Odysseus and his men wounding Polyphemus in such a way to cripple, though not totally enervate, the Cyclops. The other sub-trope is practically the obverse of the first and concerns a character of superior dynamicity concentrating will/power to overthrow a character of lesser dynamicity. In the essay SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3, I used the temporary term “reverse killing stroke” to signify both Classical examples like Dionysus’s destruction of Pentheus and pop-cultural examples like the Spectre hurling “the wrath of God” down upon lowly criminals.

The trope I call “deathmatch” is more unitary, and for most of this blog’s history it was the sole trope by which I defined the mode of the combative: that of roughly matched adversaries matching their respective forms of “might” against one another. In the essay ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY I mentioned a variation on this form, that of the “indirect commander” who doesn’t usually contend with an opponent himself but has “henchmen” who do his fighting for him, which was the case with almost all of the Fu Manchu novels. But the “deathmatch” in all forms requires the opposition of roughly equivalent incarnations of dynamicity, as opposed to the “inferior vs. superior” and “superior vs. inferior” sub-tropes.

Now, in 1913’s THE ETHIC OF THECOMBATIVE PART 2, I wrote “One only proceeds away from the condition of ‘non-might’ by acquiring ‘might’ oneself.” But over the years I progressed away from the idea that megadynamicity was determined only by a certain level of physical power, and I allowed for the idea that the condition of “self-mastery” could be equally significant. In 1912 I rated Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA as merely “mesodynamic” because he wasn’t an extraordinary all-around fighter. However, in the series WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS I viewed Burton’s mastery of his “one good trick” as a factor that allowed him to enter the ranks of the megadynamic. Yet I would still disallow from those ranks many characters who conquer superior forces through the use of tricks that don’t indicate self-mastery, such as the folktale-kids Hansel and Gretel. By the same token, there are many examples of “superior force” that don’t connote self-mastery. The Spectre shows self-mastery whenever he punishes a mortal transgressor with some diabolical fate, but there exist dozens of monsters who reverse the Hansel and Gretel paradigm, luring hapless victims into traps but not really doling out well-crafted punishments. In fact, Freddy Kruger starts as this sort of subcombative ghost. But with the third installment the filmmakers begin to endow Freddy’s opponents with the ability to engage in oneric “deathmatches” with the evil spirit—. Oddly, it’s after that film that Freddy himself starts making more use of the “deathblow” trope.

And though it seems obvious to me, I should note at this point that "deathmatch" and "deathblow" are metaphors, and as such can apply to situations where no life is actually taken, or even truly threatened, as in the ONE POUND GOSPEL stories of Rumiko Takahashi, where the starring boxer is never in literal peril of losing his life.

SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3

My application of the “killing stroke” trope to the combative mode may serve me in formulating an answer to one long and nagging theoretical problem: that of combative characters who are not overtly challenged by most of their opponents.

In THE SAD STORY OF SUPERHERO SADISM I mentioned that during the Golden Age characters like Superman and the Spectre (both, as all sagacious fans know, linked by the authorship of Jerry Siegel) only occasionally encountered opponents who could fight them in terms of “give-and-take” combat. Even other powerhouses of the period were given convenient vulnerabilities so that they could be placed into peril—said vulnerabilities ranging from a special weakness, like Green Lantern’s inability to influence wood, or something more generic, wherein a super-strong character like Wonder Woman could be downed by a blow to the back of her skull. At the time, my main rationale for still deeming Golden Age Superman and Spectre as combative heroes was that, even though their individual gangland-foes were no challenge, Crime as a Whole was a constant menace not to the heroes but to law-abiding innocents.

Now, as per my Cyclopean example, the “killing stroke” usually represents a weaker character’s attempt to marshal both skill and strength to overcome a more powerful enemy, usually in some appropriate way (a one-eyed monster is made to lose his only means of seeing his prey). But it’s occurred to me that if one reverses the valences of power in the killing-stroke paradigm, what one has is akin to “the curse of the gods.” Greek mythology in particular is replete with numerous stories of gods who strike impious mortals with curses that fit those mortals’ impieties. Lycurgus the reaper is made to reap his own kindred, Pentheus the foe of Dionysus ends up meeting being ripped apart by Dionysian maidens, and so on.

Again, while both of Siegel’s co-creations would have many fully combative adventures during and after the Silver Age, it’s important to point out that their combative status in the Golden Age doesn’t depend on the trope of the “back-and-forth” fight. Instead, Superman and the Spectre depend on a trope I choose to term “the reverse killing stroke.” In contrast to a relatively weak character who slays a more powerful entity via strategy, the practitioner of the “reverse killing stroke” is, like a Greek god, far more powerful than any of the mortals he blights. But, for the extrinsic sake of the story, this godlike hero can’t just destroy his criminal targets any old way. The superhero-god must use his power strategically, for the sake of imposing a divine irony upon the victim.

The second part of Superman’s debut story, retitled “the Coming ofSuperman,” shows the hero acting the part of a trickster-god. Once Superman ferrets out the identity of a nasty munitions-maker, obviously the Kryptonian could destroy or imprison the villain in any number of ways. But in order to make a good story, Superman badgers the fellow into joining the U.S, armed forces—at which point he’s forced to face the real-life conditions of the wars he’s fostered. To be sure, the hero allows this villain the chance to reform, but in other contemporaneous stories, the Man of Steel uses his power judiciously, in order to make the enemies of law and order destroy themselves.

The Spectre presents a more bald-faced evocation of the “wrath of God” motif, which may be one reason the character wasn’t especially popular in the Golden Age (nor have any subsequent treatments scored that well, with or without the emphasis on said wrath). Siegel didn’t seem to exploit the idea of the “reverse killing stroke” quite as artfully as he did in Superman, but there’s a little use of irony in the origin-story. After Jim Corrigan is slain by gangster Gat Benson and his two cronies, the heroic cop rises from the dead, empowered by the power of Heaven to war on crime. Not yet donning his crimefighting togs, Corrigan overtakes his murderers, and the first one to meet Corrigan’s gaze instantly dies. Not much irony there. Yet the second death is more accomplished. When the second thug fails to kill Corrigan with bullets, he unwisely tries to grapple with the dead policeman. He pays for this “impiety,” since touching Corrigan causes the thug’s flesh to dissolve, making him into a living skeleton for a few macabre seconds, before Corrigan decisively slays him. Curiously, the gang-leader Benson is spared, as Corrigan merely allows him to fall unconscious and to be arrested. In subsequent stories, some of the Spectre’s killing strokes had an ironic appeal, and others were nothing special. Arguably the Bronze Age series by Fleischer and Aparo exploited the gruesome potential of the concept to greater effect, in that the Ghostly Guardian consistently devised dooms for dastardly villains that would have fit the EC horror-anthologies.

So, can one call any aspect of these godlike punishments “self-mastery?” Certainly such “reverse killing strokes” don’t engage one’s sympathies in the same way as the normative killing-stroke. Nevertheless, Superman and the Spectre must be judicious in order to destroy evildoers in an ironically meaningful way, and this ties in with my general concept that self-mastery entails a form of self-limitation. Thus the killing strokes used by these heroes to deter criminals can be deemed a special form of strategy-combat, and thus qualify for the combative mode even without a lot of back-and-forth battles.

PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE

I've now completed my survey of the 1965-68 teleseries LOST IN SPACE, in order to determine whether or not this clearly marvelous-metaphenomenal series should be judged as belonging to the combative mode, and therefore as belonging to the category of "the superhero idiom." I've addressed this topic in various essays but the essay most relevant to this investigation is 2012's CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST.  Though this piece concentrated primarily on how to make determinations as to a given work's "Fryean mythos," it was in this essay that I put forth the "51 percent rule,"which I'd formulated earlier in order to suss out what serial works belonged to the superhero idiom by virtue of being dominantly both metaphenomenal and combative. Here's what I wrote about the rule in CHALLENGE:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

In 2015 I decided that the 51 percent rule, modeled on my perceptions of economic patterns, needed to be supplemented by a corollary principle, described in ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE:

Yet as I played around with the rule in the provisional "super-idiom list" that I mentioned in the first "51 percent" essay, I realized that even some characters who didn't satisfy the "51 percent rule" seemed important to the list... [so] I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid. And yet, it's evident that for a time, the Kid's creators Lee and Kirby were making a significant attempt to place their combative cowpoke into superhero situations.

Thanks to a little more research, I evolved my corollary principle:

...from the strict view of the "51 percent rule," both Ringo and Rawhide are "minority shareholders" in the realm of the metaphenomenal. However, to extend the above distinction into the realm of literature, Ringo Kid's adventures display only a "minority passive interest" in matters metaphenomenal, while Rawhide Kid's display a "minority active interest"-- that is, Rawhide's encounters with metaphenomenal presences remain a vital part of his mythos, even if they're not numerically superior to all the naturalistic exploits.

So the "Marvel" serial character The Ringo Kid does not belong to the category of the superhero idiom because he satisfies the combative qualification but does not satisfy the qualification of the necessary phenomenality. LOST IN SPACE was my first attempt to evaluate a serial work in terms that was clearly metaphenomenal but was more "ambivalent" in terms of its combative elements. I posed the question thusly in the first LIS-survey essay:

...on what occasions is it possible for a given series to achieve the combative mode, less because of an emphasis on the continual encounter of megadynamic forces than because of an emphasis upon the outward *form* of such an encounter?...By way of exploring this "outward form" possibility further, I'm going to devote a series of posts to a television series whose status with regard to the combative mode has always been dubious to me.

"Outward form" was a clumsy way of saying that the work under investigation reproduced the form of some pattern that had been articulated frequently enough to become a literary archetype. My example in that essay, the Spectre of the Golden Age, conforms to the archetype of the "metaphenomenal combative" even though he spends an awful lot of time taking on enemies who can't really fight him, and only occasionally vying against entities of comparable power. So the Spectre would be an example of an "active share" type of character-- not in terms of his pheomenality, which is clearly marvelous-- but in terms of the rarity of his truly megadynamic encounters. Mundane gangsters are thus a lower manifestation of the general evil that the Spectre fights.

Now, I've defined the LOST IN SPACE characters as demiheroes in this essay, but characters belonging to that persona can belong to the category of the superhero idiom as easily as the other three personas of hero, villain, and monster. It's easy to determine a demihero's status with respect to the combative mode when he gets into fights all the time, like the one examined here.

From 1965 to 1968 LOST IN SPACE portrayed an ensemble of eight regular spacefaring characters: John Robinson and his wife Maureen, their children Will, Judy, and Penny, ship's navigator Don West, the cowardly stowaway Doctor Smith, and the ship's robot, known only as "the Robot." Doctor Smith had no combative abilities whatever, and Maureen and her three kids sometimes wielded guns but were never seen doing much of anything. As for Don West, he acted like a tough guy and could clearly handle a gun, but he was always played as "the sidekick who gets knocked out to make the main character look good." Ship's captain John Robinson-- played by the same actor who had played Zorro in a 1957-59 teleseries-- was the only human character who showed megadynamic power in his battle with aliens and androids. However, the Robot became something of an "ace in the hole" for the space travelers, and often used his superior technological arsenal against enemies too tough to be taken down by a human wielding a ray-gun (or a sword). Since the Robot soon evolved from a simple resource into a full-fledged (if cornball) character, I have no problem in judging him to be part of the ensemble, and thus the automaton and the ship's captain are the only "megadynamic" presences who starred in the series.

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality.

However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series. (NOTE: in this and in ACTIVE SHARE PASSIVE SHARE, I'm using the word "mythos" in a general, non-Fryean sense.)

Some stories are resolved by overt peacemaking between factions who just need to know each other better, as in "The Sky is Falling." There are also enemies who display megadynamic powers and use those powers to menace the Robinson party, as in "Kidnapped in Space," wherein the group is attacked by androids serving a super-computer. However, in that story a combative conclusion is put aside in favor of another negotiation. Sometimes enemies are persuaded to abandon their hostile intentions, as with the Junkman of "Junkyard of Space," and sometimes villains who are utterly intransigent are destroyed by chance rather than pitched combat, as when Doctor Smith accidentally blows up the nasty alien in "The Golden Man." And as I covered in the survey, there are many stories in which some functional violence occurs at a narrative's end, but none of the spectacle one needs to create megadynamic conflict.

Thus I conclude that despite the presence of a few "superhero-like" adventures within the mythos of LOST IN SPACE, the dominant ethos is directed away from combative resolutions, in contrast to the serial's contemporary competitor STAR TREK, which talked a lot about peace and understanding but took a lot of pleasure in the spectacle of fight-scenes. For this reason LOST IN SPACE possesses only a "minority passive share" in the category of the combative, and so does not belong to the larger category of the superhero idiom.

NEAR MYTHS: ALL-STAR COMICS #4 (1941)

In the first part of STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY, I wrote:

Comic books used to be "weak continuity" in practice, and for the same reason: no publisher could be sure that his juvenile audience would buy even two Superman comics in a row (though there were some early experiments that used continued stories, often in the "cliffhanger" format from movie-serials). But I'd maintain that "strong continuity" was their *in posse* storytelling strategy, simply because they were in a mode that combined pictures with words that had to be read and absorbed.

I also wrote yesterday that I'd been trying to think of a mythcomic for my 100th post that was at least indicative of the superhero genre's "deeper potential," but that I didn't want to focus on FANTASTIC FOUR #1, even though I believe that first issue did the most to open that potential. Thus I found myself casting about for, so to speak, gateways that led to the "gateway drug."

It thus occurred to me that there would have been no FANTASTIC FOUR if there had been no JUSTICE LEAGUE-- and equally, that JUSTICE LEAGUE was in essence a recapitulation of the 1940s JUSTICE SOCIETY title. Maybe on some level I just wanted to descant on a fresh topic for post #100, but in any case, I found myself drawn to the first official "superhero team" in comic books.

The story in ALL-STAR COMICS #4-- "For America and Democracy," written by Gardner Fox and penciled by a small horde of artists-- is not a mythcomic, but a near myth. Nevertheless, even a near myth can open new possibilities.

As superhero historians all know, the ALL-STAR COMICS title began as just another anthology title, and the stories in the first two issues are completely unconnected to one another, following the "weak continuity" paradigm of most published comic books as described in the quote above. The third issue convenes the Justice Society of America, possibly the brain-child of editor Sheldon Mayer, but the setup just barely promotes the idea of a continuity between several of the features published by DC Comics (or, to be specific, one department of DC Comics, though I won't get into that now). There's only minimal interaction between the heroes, except for comic business provided by Johnny Thunder, and the main idea is to have all the heroes tell stories about their completely separate adventures, as if they were spinning tall tales at a meeting of the Elks Club.

ALL-STAR COMICS #4, however, takes full advantage of the Justice Society's potential as a "gathering of great heroes" myth.  A mysterious personage billed only as "the FBI chief" summons all of the heroes to Washington, where he charges them all with a mission: to unearth the many spies and fifth columnists taking advantage of American social freedoms.

Now, I can't say that any of these missions are, in themselves, deeply symbolic. "For America and Democracy," published in April 1941, is a propaganda comic book. It's primarily aimed at juveniles who were aware of the perilous state of the European and Asian war-fronts, and of the possibility-- realized in December of that same year-- that America might be drawn into that conflict. The story thus pursues a very straightforward course in terms of having the eight Society members, seen on the cover above, root out a variety of ilicit espionage activities, entirely associated with people who sound German but are not explicitly identified as Germans.

Propaganda comics can of course be mythic, but usually only if a particular artist channels his imagination into an obsessive demonization of a particular phenomenon. Jack Cole's 1947 story "A Match for Satan," myth-analyzed here, shows how an artist could demonize such a phenomenon, in this case that of "crime," and make it seem positively Satanic. But while Fox possessed one of the greatest imaginations in the history of the American Golden Age of comics, here he's just resorting to the most obvious cliches about manipulative German Bund operatives.

What makes the story a "near myth" is that it does focus upon the "gathering of heroes" as a mythic act. The superheroes are summoned to a mysterious rendezvous by an unnamed mentor. True, his assignments are just penny-ante investigations of espionage and sabotage. Yet, prior to "For America and Democracy," the occasional crossovers of superheroes lacked a sense of sharing a great mission, and even the next major crossover of this type, "Daredevil Battles Hitler" (July 1941), is no more than an assortment of separate stories in which the various featured characters of DAREDEVIL COMICS took shots at the Fuhrer's dignity. There was in "DBH" a shared sense of purpose, but not a shared sense of greatness.

Only once or twice does Fox really get beyond simple rhetoric, and portray something with symbolic potential. After the almighty Spectre finishes his task, he is arbitrarily attacked by "vampire globes" from another dimension that have absolutely nothing to do with his mission. However, what saves the Ghostly Guardian from extinction-- which he himself longs to embrace-- is his sense of patriotic duty.

When your cause is just enough not only to cause the living to sacrifice their lives, but also the dead to sacrifice eternal peace, you know you're dealing with something pretty damn special.

THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PT. 2

In Part 1 I pointed out that even in stories of high mythicity, not all characters are given super-functional treatment, and that indeed even the characters who are the stars of the show-- characters who may have garnered many archetypal associations in past stories-- may be given purely functional treatment. My opening example was JUSTICE LEAGUE #2, in which the starring heroes take a symbolic back seat to the villains.


On Dictionary.com, "amplitude's" primary defintion is as follows:

the state or quality of being ample, especially as to breadth or width;

largeness; greatness of extent.

Philip Wheelwright invokes the term as a metaphor for explaining why "certain particulars have a more archetypal quality than others." I've correlated this insight with my distinction between "functional" and "super-functional" modes, which appears early in this blog's history, before my acquaintance with Wheelwright, to the best of my recollection.

It occurs to me that in one previous essay, though I was not employing the term "amplitude" at all, I referred to something very similar, when I wrote that "the aspect of the combinatory-sublime may affect the way in which a given protagonist's *dynamis* is received." To illustrate this, I compared two stories in which a murder gave rise to an avenging spirit.

One was the origin story of the Spectre. As Jim Corrigan, he's murdered by mobster Gat Benson. Corrigan's spirit becomes the Spectre, who avenges his murder and then goes on to haunt other criminals as well.

The other was a stand-alone film, TOPPER RETURNS. An innocent woman, Gail Richards, is murdered by a masked man. Gail comes back as a ghost who wants to know who killed her, and so she enlists the aid of befuddled Cosmo Topper to do so. Gail's ghostly powers are much more modest than those of the Spectre, but she can turn invisible and hit people as if she were solid-- which she does in a scene where she fends off the masked murderer before he can kill again. In the end the killer is exposed as a schemer named Carrington, who didn't even mean to murder Gail, but rather her heiress friend.

In both films, the mundane murderer really has no chance to fight back against the ghostly avenger. This alone might mark both stories as subcombative going by the "Hamlet example" I cited here,though in contrast to Shakespeare's play it's the antagonist, not the protagonist, who isn't "sufficient to stand" against a superior force. If the SPECTRE story had appeared as a one-shot horror tale, I would have no problem in deeming it as just as subcombative as TOPPER RETURNS. But patently the murder of Corrigan is a setup for the Ghostly Guardian's continuing adventures, and Gail Richards' murder served no such purpose. Further, though the Spectre's mundane opponents in general aren't able to give the hero much of a fight, they still have something of a super-functional quality in that "criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest."

I might have added that Gat Benson and his thugs also demonstrated greater dynamicity than Cartington, who did nothing more formidable than strangle an unskilled woman. By the principles I established here, Gat Benson and all similar mundane Spectre-opponents might be deemed as occupying the "lower level of megadynamicity," simply for having enough moxie to prove an impediment to a godlike opponent. This moxie gives all of the mundane gangsters in THE SPECTRE "the quality of being ample," for which Wheelwright's term "amplitude" may prove efficacious.

In the same essay I also wondered if the killer in TOPPER RETURNS might have registered as a more formidable opponent had he shown some "more prepossessing aspect." I neglected to mention that he does at least don a concealing hat, mask, and dark clothes to commit his murder, but I don't attribute any "quality of being ample" to these. The outfit Carrington wears is merely functional, in contrast to that of some of the other dark-clad uncanny types I've recently reviewed on my film-blog, such as 1932's THE NIGHT RIDER and 1933's THE SHADOW.

COMBAT PLAY PT. 4

As the Nietzsche citation in Part 3 should make clear, the philosopher believed in the principle of mastery, or "overcoming" (German *uberwindung*) as a necessary aspect of the human spirit. At the same time, he believed more profoundly that the possessor of a "master morality" should also practice *selbstuberwindung,* usually translated as "self-overcoming." As I observed here, Nietzsche expressed a marginal preference for the corrupt, real-life Cesare Borgia over the simon-pure fictional character Parsifal, essentially because Parsifal had no real "self" to be overcome. For similar reasons, Nietzsche expressed disgust at those whom he deemed adherents of "slave morality" because he felt that they weren't really any more free from the impulse of aggression than the representatives of "master morality." Rather, adherents of "slave morality" merely projected the illusion of self-mastery. Only those who consciously admitted the allure of mastery, of wielding power over others, had any true capacity for self-overcoming.

In other segments of COMBAT PLAY I've sought to provide somewhat more personal motives for advocating the importance of combat-fantasies, and for arguing that they can represent "positive compensation" when dealing with the travails of ordinary life. I would add-- without bringing in all the Hegelian arguments about the nature of freedom-- that it's psychically necessary for any individual human to feel as if he or she can, as the occasion demands, fight back against oppression of any kind. At the same time, the notion of "fair play" becomes important within the sphere of fiction and fantasy, possibly more important than it can ever be in the real world of political negotiation and compulsion. In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming." Clearly the importance of this concept has led me to author essays like this one, where my main concern is to account for certain pop-culture figures, such as the Golden Age Spectre, who seem to know little if any "self-limitation." In the original series, whose tone was set by scripter Jerry Siegel, there's no question that the Spectre is positioned as a hero-- and yet only occasionally does this hero encounter opponents able to wield forces equal to his own.

In the aforesaid essay DECIDEDLY SEEKING SYMMETRY, I argued that occasional heroes who worked without the limitations of the "fair play" were a "natural, and probably inevitable, counterpoint" to the statistically dominant type of hero who tends to meet his foes on a level playing-field. I say that it's inevitable because it's the nature of affective freedom that individual authors can diverge from any statistically dominant model of a given concept, be it "the hero" or anything else. The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."  But the existence of this model, while statistically dominant, does not prevent individual creators from diverging from it. For whatever reasons, Jerry Siegel conceptualized the Spectre as having such near-omnipotence that he could "overcome" most of his villains without the limitations of fair play. I wasn't entirely serious in SYMMETRY when I labeled such heroes as "sadists," for a true sadist would not possess the Spectre's empathy toward ordinary humans oppressed by mortal evildoers. That empathy, as well as the determination to better the world through the positive form of the idealizing will, still qualifies the Spectre as a hero. Later versions of the Spectre conformed to the dominant model, giving the Ghostly Guardian more high-energy foes to combat. But had the character never appeared anywhere but in his Golden Age adventures, I might have to view him as a "subcombative superhero," in that only rarely did the original Spectre combat megadynamic entities like himself.

By the same parallel, the nature of affective freedom also makes it possible for individual authors to diverge from the statistically dominant model of "the monster." In contrast to the hero, the monster often appears as the sole megadynamic entity in his universe, and his opponents, usually demiheroes, are not usually able to stand against him. In SYMMETRY I mentioned Freddy Krueger as an exception to this rule, in that the majority of his films end when another megadynamic entity-- usually the so-called "final girl"-- manages to defeat the dastardly dream-creature with her own display of dynamicity.

However, a better-known example would probably the combative relationship between the starring monsters of the original ALIENS film-franchise and their most "persistent" demihero-enemy, Ellen Ripley. Ripley starts out as a typical demihero, and in her first appearance she only manages to stave off the assault of one monstrous extraterrestrial by getting him in the right place for his elimination, rather than beating him one-and-one.

In the second film, however, Ripley resorts to mechanical aid to fight a Queen Alien on its own terms, and even though Ripley loses that battle and must once more trick the creature into defeat, the narrative places far more emphasis on Ripley as a megadynamic figure.

Though the character also does not directly defeat any Aliens in the last two films in the original franchise either, Ripley continues to display a megadynamic formidability, so that she is, unlike most monster-victims, a combative demihero. The fact that the Aliens' most prominent human foe can fight them back doesn't alter their persona as monsters, but their divergence sets them slightly to one side of the dominant model for monsters, just as Original Spectre's divergence sets him slightly to one side of the dominant hero-model.