MYTHCOMICS: “MOTHERLAND” (Y THE LAST MAN #49-52)

                                             

 

Men have long been a necessary evil for the continuation of the species, but the moment that evil become obsolete, nature righted its course.—Doctor Matsumori, Y THE LAST MAN.

The above quote is not precisely the theme statement of Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s highly touted series Y THE LAST MAN, though any such theme would have to admit to a fair amount of anti-masculine rhetoric. In addition, the quote reveals a third level to the series’ title.

Two levels will be readily apparent to anyone who even skims the early issues. Vaughan and Guerra’s world suffers a mysterious disease that wipes out almost every on Planet Earth who possesses the “Y” chromosome, leaving a nearly all-female world. The one remaining male, at least according to early issues, sports a name that begins with the same letter of the expunged chromosome. Protagonist Yorick Brown—named, like his sister Hero, for a Shakespearean character by an academically-inclined father—isn’t precisely the empty skull over which Hamlet soliloquizes. That said, it’s highly significant that Yorick’s sister gets both the name and the assertive qualities of a “hero.” It’s quite as if Vaughan and Guerra have designed their entire tapestry to answer the implied question “Why the last man?” Or, to word the question more precisely, “why should anyone want men in a world where it’s constantly proven how self-sufficient women can be without the male of the species?”

Clearly the creators conceived this project as a reaction against more familiar versions of the “Amazon society” trope. This trope usually appears in one of two principal forms: either women have taken over a society once ruled by men, continuing to co-exist with men as their societal inferiors, or women have established some separate domain without the participation of men. Given that all of these stories were written for an audience where men and women co-exist in varying states of equity, the dominant denouement is that the female-centric society is overthrown or modified in some way. A tiny number of tales may allow the female society to persist, as we see in the WONDER WOMAN mythos and in occasional stand-alone works like the 1945 film TARZAN AND THEAMAZONS. But LAST MAN was formulated to advance the ideology that women can and should be able to run the whole world, even though those who desire the extinction of all men—including the unfortunate Yorick—are condemned as extremists who don’t get a seat at the table.

Unlike more masculinist forms of the male hero, Yorick has no desire to overthrow the new order. He’s naturally invested in the project to learn what unknown forces brought forth what is termed “the gendercide,” but even this knowledge isn’t a priority in his quest. His foremost desire is to find Julie, the love of his life, so that the two of them can share a happy ending. Not surprisingly, Yorick does not get a happy heterosexual union at the story’s end, and Brian Vaughan more or less telegraphs this development with his repeated rejections of what some academics call “heteronormative desire.” This is particularly underscored by the fact that throughout most of Yorick’s quest, the youth—portrayed as a slacker whose only modest talent is that of picking locks—needs the help of three strong women, all of whom have sex with one another at some point, though only two are committed lesbians and the third is actually in love with Yorick.

In terms of structure Y THE LAST MAN follows the form I've termed "the episodic novel,” in that its events are unified by a pre-determined plot with a specific conclusion. Despite its obvious strengths—Guerra’s skill in depicting facial emotions, and Vaughan’s skill with Yorick’s many humorous asides—the symbolic discourse is not organized enough to stand as a mythcomic in standing with other long works like HELLSING and DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. It’s certainly not impossible to come up with a serialized novel in which the exaltation of the double-X gender attains mythic concrescence; I’ve cited numerous examples of mythcomics wherein the author’s didactic overthought complements his symbolic underthought. But LAST MAN is just a little too facile to reach those depths.

The one story-arc that manages to be mythic is what might be termed the “origin-story,” not of unheroic Yorick but of the gendercide. “Motherland” reveals the somewhat ambiguous answer to this mystery late in the series, prior to the sorting-out of Yorick’s romantic destiny. During this arc, Yorick and his three female allies travel to China, in part because the physician of their group, the coyly named Allison Mann, suffers from an illness brought on by her research into cloning. Allison comes from a family of scientists and has reacted to the gendercide by attempting to create male clones from Yorick’s cells, not because she holds high esteem for men—she’s one of the lesbians—but because she feels the need for “equilibrium” in human affairs. Her illness stems from her having carried one of her clones to term in her own womb, so she tells her compatriots that she needs help from Doctor Ming in China. Allison had an ambivalent relationship to Ming in that the latter was sleeping with Allison’s father Doctor Matsumori while he was married to Allison’s actual mother. But Yorick and the other women contrive to get Allison to China nonetheless.

In that land the protagonists discover not only that Allison’s father is the only other living man on Earth save Yorick, but also that he is responsible for the gendercide. The explanation proves more inventive than the usual world-doom brought about by a bomb or a pestilence, for Vaughan invokes Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of “morphic resonance.” Matsumori believes that this quasi-mystical phenomenon caused the immediate extinction of almost all men on Earth, and that through this medium “Nature” was responding to Matsumori’s creation of a female clone in his laboratory, some time before Allison birthed an unviable male offspring. Given that Matsumori has been thought dead for most of the series, Vaughan didn’t spotlight his role in Allison’s own psychological development, but the writer makes up for it here. The reader is told that Matsumori and his daughter had a fractious relationship, and that he was jealous enough of her own clone-project to sabotage it, making it possible that his project succeeded first, albeit with catastrophic results. Vaughan explains that not only was the first clone taken from Allison’s cell-material, Matsumori has also created several other Allison-clones, many of whom have grown to pre-teen status—all, it would seem, with the object of creating a more perfect daughter to replace the one with whom he just could not get along.

That said, Matsumori has also decided that his own gender has outlived its usefulness, and so he announces his plan to exterminate “the Last Man” prior to taking his own life. The fact that Yorick must be saved by a woman—as usual—is not surprising, nor is it surprising that the woman is the original Allison, bringing her father’s reign to an end. But Yorick’s response to Matsumori’s threat is rather peculiar:

Every guy goes through a period where he’s scared shitless and completely baffled by girls, right? But then we’re supposed to grow up, figure out that the best place for all the great women probably isn’t behind every great man.

This is a singularly tortured play on the old saw “Behind every great man is a woman,” not to mention a weird lecture to come from a man in danger of being killed. But it’s the sort of phrase that reveals how often Vaughan bends over backwards to adhere to ideology, even when it makes no sense to the fictional situation. It’s implied that at some time Matsumori may have been a typical exploitative male, one who wanted to keep his daughter from exceeding him in scientific repute—though this isn’t quite the same as keeping his daughter “behind” him. But following the gendercide, Matsumori is anything but a “males first” guy. He tells his captive audience that he considers his sex to be “flawed animals,” and if his later actions are in any way motivated by egotism, one might suppose him to be exalted by seeing his daughter continue his research. He tells Yorick that Allison “can continue my work. She and her mother will see that women live on beyond this generation. But you and I—we didn’t belong in this world before the plague, and we certainly don’t belong here now.”

While Matsumori doesn’t succeed in ending the life of the “penultimate man,” Vaughan never really refutes his villain; never articulates any strong reason why men should continue to exist in a world of strong women. Yorick lives to create others of his sex, but there’s no suggestion that men can ever recapture their hold over the post-gendercide world, and even Allison’s notion of “equilibrium” is barely referenced after “Motherland.” I believe this arc was strong symbolically because, despite his overall glibness, Vaughan had to grapple with some of the issues about the natures of men and women in order to make the origin-story work. And even though the revelation of the villain’s gender suggests that “Fatherland” might have made a better title—since Matsumori literally fathers a mostly-female world—the combative relationship between Allison and her father is a worthy addition to the many myths of “the war between men and women.”

MYTHCOMICS: NEVADA 1-6 (1998)

In general I didn't like a lot of Steve Gerber's post-Bronze Age work. The antic creativity present in such 1970s features as THE DEFENDERS, MAN-THING and HOWARD THE DUCK faded in favor of an often nihilistic sourness. Possibly this feeling caused me to quickly pass over NEVADA, a six-issue 1998 Vertigo series by Gerber and artist Phil Winslade. But now it seems to me one of Gerber's best accomplishments from the latter part of his career.

In a roundabout way, NEVADA arose from one of the author's more bizarre inspirations. The story goes that in 1977 Gerber missed his deadline for HOWARD THE DUCK #16, and that, rather than simply reprinting an earlier HOWARD story, he and some artists whipped together a series of illustrated meditations on life, the universe, and everything, sometimes through the eyes of the acerbic duck, sometimes from Gerber himself. One two-page piece allowed Gerber to express his absurdist take on the then-prevalent "obligatory fight scene," in which a Las Vegas chorus girl and her pet ostrich battled an animated lamp. Many fans didn't care for the stratagem-- one reader wrote simply "Next time go reprint"-- but supposedly Neil Gaiman opined that he'd actually like to see such a story. Twenty years later, Gerber and Winslade produced NEVADA, though not from Marvel, the publisher of HOWARD, but under DC's Vertigo imprint.

Like many Gerber protagonists, the Vegas showgirl Nevada, whose birth-name is not disclosed, would have no luck if not for the bad kind. She dances for her living at the tacky "Nile Hotel and Casino," has an assortment of cool, trippy friends, and shows her essential kind-heartedness by rescuing her pet Bolero (named for the Ravel ballet composition) from an ostrich farm. Though she has some ongoing hassles, like a rejected boyfriend who won't take "no" for an answer, she came to Vegas to start a new life. To be sure, we learn nothing about the old life except that at nine years she auditioned for a Christmas church play by portraying the Virgin Mary with a pillow that realistically showed the icon as "great with child," thus evoking the ire of Christians who didn't like too much reality in their religion. As if to satirize religion in general, her featured dance at the Nile is a re-enactment of the Egyptian story of Osiris' dismemberment, but given a snarky feminist denouement.

However, soon Nevada has bigger problems than a stalker (who, by the way, gets totally trounced by one of Bolero's deadly kicks). Some innocent tourists at the Nile get literally dismembered by an alien visitor from another realm, and Nevada finds herself the victim of time-slips, causing her to encounter cavemen or to witness a guillotine-execution during the Reign of Terror. Who's responsible? Is it Mister DeVesuvio, a mysterious crime-boss who has a glass tube in place of his head? (A similar character, Ruby Thursday, appeared in Gerber's DEFENDERS.) Or is it the drunken sot Odgen Locke, who once taught theoretical physics but now seems to be able to transform himself into an angel-winged warrior? But no, the real culprit is a cosmic event breaking down the boundaries between worlds, which incidentally makes possible the invasion of the aforementioned killer alien. Nevada actually meets and kills the alien, but there's an unnamed higher power who wants her special talents to be a "Rift Warrior," a defender of the cosmic order.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of reluctant heroes since the debut of Marvel Comics, but Gerber isn't interested in characters who make token protestations before easily acceding to the call of destiny. Through the author's Bronze Age work alone it's clear that Gerber enjoyed the allure of combative heroes while still feeling a lot of ambivalence about the use of violence, particularly sanitized violence, as a means of escape. Thus when Nevada's abducted by the "higher power" to put her through an ordeal called "the Hammer," we're not talking a few strenuous training-sessions with Master Yoda. Instead, Nevada goes through tons and tons of patented Gerber mindfuckery, leaving the reader wondering if her cosmic perceptor is on the side of the angels or not. But Gerber does make Nameless Higher Power the vessel of one essential nugget of wisdom: that most of sentient suffering arises from a hunger so great that it rises to the level of universal decay, not unlike the principle of entropy expoused by the villains in the Man-Thing tale "How Will We Keep Warm When the Last Flame Dies."  Nevada, despite her distrust of her perceptor, Nevada does have the stuff to fight back a downfall that could be brought about not by an evil overlord, but rather by "some moronic soul whose ego cannot endure being second in line." And thus Nevada does become a Rift Warrior and forces back a greater invasion of alien dipsticks bent on destroying the fabric of space-time

After this, the dancer returns to reality, though not without more attendant troubles. Clearly, the author left the door open for more stories with Nevada, Bolero and their quirky pals, but since it was a creator-owned project, this was the last show for the Vegas showgirl. Perhaps it's just as well that she went out on a high note. Nevada sums up her situation and her mordant but courageous philosophy in a letter, ending in part with the words:

"So what do you do when reality bites back and the new life falls apart. I can only speak for myself. Fuck it raw and keep dancing."

VERTIGO REVISIONS

I asked on the Captain Comics Forum whether or not there were any "big events' in the comics industry around the turn of the century, and one poster asserted that around that time Vertigo Comics revised certain contractual terms, resulting in many properties being published by Image and other publishers. I will update this item when I have more information, but here I wanted to preserve my thoughts on the subject.

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Right now I think that we're at a point when the comics medium is about as popular as it's going to get. While American comics will probably never again have the huge readership seen in the Golden Age, and probably won't even ever equal the medium's popularity in Asia, we're now at a point where collections of genre works-- which to me means BONE as much as BATMAN-- share bookstore shelf space with the arty stuff, even when that "shelf space" is a virtual one like on AMAZON.

I had not heard anything about what Mark said about Vertigo changing its licensing terms, and thus making it possible for Image to upgrade its, er, image. At a glance this would seem to make it possible for Image and other companies that aren't the Big Two to cross over into the profitable "young adult" market, since by all indications no one can beat the Big Two at superheroes.


So if this change took place in the late nineties, then yes, that would be an industry game-changer, and might indeed mark the conclusion of the Late Bronze Age, as Image and others managed to garner the bookstore acceptance that many eighties companies-- not least my old stomping-ground Fantagraphics-- sought for so long.


Does anyone have further info on the licensing revisions?


ADDENDUM 6-6-17: I could've sworn I posted this somewhere on the Archive, but here's my current breakdown of the Comic Book Ages, as I represented on the aforementioned forum:

GOLDEN AGE-- 1936 (or slightly earlier)-1955-- The form gets physically defined and is marketed mostly to kids even before the debut of SUPERMAN, though the Man of Steel is definitely the first property that puts comic books on the map in pop culture.

SILVER AGE(1955-1970)- the comics are hemmed in by the Code, though oddly this has the effect of forcing at least two companies, DC and Atlas-cum-Marvel, to get better.

EARLY BRONZE AGE (1970-1986)-- Though undergrounds and Warren magazines  paved the wall, 1970 marks the industry's first concerted efforts to appeal to older readers with CONAN, GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, the return of horror comics, and, when newstand distribution withers away, attempts to woo the direct market with adult material

LATE BRONZE AGE (1986- 2000, maybe)-- DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, MAUS and WATCHMEN are the first graphic novels to really catch the attention of the mainstream press, which marks the first time comics have a chance to break out of the ghetto. There are some movements that may have seemed like steps backward, like Image in the 90s, but even Image Comics didn't stick to their own "bulky and banal" brand much beyond that decade. The nineties is also the era that manga TPBs made significant gains in bookstores, which gave bookstores in America-- and, I assume, other nations as well-- the financial base to start carrying more graphic novels. 

MODERN AGE, or IRON AGE (if you can avoid the negative connotations) might be from 2000 to now, except that I can't think of a particular publication or industry development that takes place in 2000 or shortly thereafter. There's one development outside the realm of comics, since 2000's X-MEN IMO initiates the first of the big-screen superhero films not based on Superman or Batman. (Whatever the successes of the Burton BATMANs, BLADE, and the Turtles, I would say X-MEN made superheroes seem like a dependable commodity.) But Hollywood's response to comics seems outside the boundaries of the comics industry, so I don't really want to use X-MEN as a transition-point-- even though it sorta is. 

And now I'll add that I've decided that the correct marker for the Iron Age is, indeed, the shift of DC Comics away from creator-owned properties, which has been enormously important for Image and many other companies insofar as giving those publishers "first look" at valuable properties-- almost as important as the shrinkage of the market that gave rise to the Silver Age.

MYTHCOMICS "A WALTZ OF SCREAMS" (VERTIGO VISIONS: DR. OCCULT, 1994)

Thus far in my reviews of mythcomics and null-myths, I’ve barely touched upon the attempts made by DC, and, to a lesser extent Marvel, to render “adult” versions of their own “superhero universes.” While this has led to a fair number of bad comics, I tend to think that the experiment has resulted in more good comics, mythic or otherwise, than the influence of confessional dramas upon the so-called “artcomics.”

Not all of the comic books in DC’s VERTIGO line are based on characters once aimed at the general juvenile audience that once purchased comic books from mainstream newsstands. The refurbished SWAMP THING remains the jewel in the Vertigo crown, albeit more in terms of prestige than sales: Gaiman’s SANDMAN possibly came closer to winning “pride of place” in that department, if I may be allowed a mixed metaphor. Gaiman also launched the mini-series BOOKS OF MAGIC, which comprised a sort of “occult history of DC Comics.” The mini-series spawned a fairly long-lived regular series, as well as a curious one-shot—the latter being my chosen subject. 

The 1994 “Doctor Occult” one-shot probably never had a fair shot at generating a series at the time, even though the titular character had been revived in the course of the 1991 BOOKS OF MAGIC mini-series. To this date DC has never reprinted the adventures of the character, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster in 1935, a few years prior to the publication of the creators’ signature character Superman. (This blogzine reprints a short "Occult" story from an ostensible ashcan issue DC published in the 1930s.)

If hardcore fans remember Doctor Occult, they will remember him as (1) having been patterned on Seabury Quinn's popular ghost-hunter “Jules de Grandin” from many issues of WEIRD TALES during the 1930s, and (2) from excerpted scenes that showed Occult temporarily donning a Superman-like costume, in a tale published before Superman himself saw print. Even more hardcore fans may know that in some stories Occult had a “power” most uncharacteristic of manly males of the time-period  Like fabled Tiresias, Doctor Occult was a man who could change into a woman.

“A Waltz of Screams,” written by Dave Louapre and rendered by Dan Sweetman, focuses on Doctor Occult and his female alter ego Rose, two identities locked in the same body. Louapre spends no time telling the reader how this state of affairs came about, and only a one-page text prelude establishes Occult’s mythos. In keeping with various details from the Siegel-Shuster stories, as well as some retconned material, Occult is a mystic seeker who is allied to a beneficent group of magicians, “the Seven,” and is opposed to malign magi ruled by a villain named “Koth.” But Louapre’s concern is not with mystic battles, but with Occult’s “dark night of two souls.” In the course of the tale, Occult becomes separated from his feminine alter ego, and must seek through assorted mystic realms to achieve re-integration.

Whatever the merits of the “gender politics” of the LGBT community, those politics have resulted in a fair number of the bad comics mentioned. Louapre’s script for DOCTOR OCCULT shows an awareness of the evanescent nature of sexual characteristics, but by page 6 he at least shows that he has a sense of humor about the matter. The first five pages of the story deal with Occult being brought into a case dealing with a hysterical rape-victim, during which Occult repeatedly shifts into his alter ego of Rose, and vice versa. But this portentous opening is followed by a scene in the doctor's office, where his secretary Marly is watching a TV talk-show with the following line of dialogue: 

“It’s my right as a man to be a woman if I want. This is America!”

I won’t dwell on Louapre’s plot at length. It's a fairly standard one, being little more than an excuse to separate the male and female sides of the hero and then put both spirits through various phantasmagorical ordeals. Eventually they are able to discover the fiend manipulating them, the aforementioned Koth, and hero and heroine regain their unity. What elevates Louapre’s script is not his plot but his poetic exploration of the theme of seduction. In the first five pages, when Occult/Rose enter the dream-consciousness of the rape-victim Rachel, the sex-shifting hero(ine) has the sensation of falling. He/she thinks:

“Not a fall from grace—grace is for the uninitiated. But a fall toward the waiting arms of awakening—and the alluring caress of sexual chaos."

In these two sentences, Loupare puts across three distinct thoughts:

1. He distances his characters from the Christian idea of “grace” as a beneficent gift from an all-knowing father-god, asserting that humans who have undergone mystic initiation have learned some deeper truth.
2. He associated the act of falling with awakening rather than succumbing to sleep.
3. He raises the notion that sex itself is alluring precisely because it is chaotic.

I’ll admit that one’s tolerance for Louapre’s poetic effusions might have been strained by a longer continuity. But “Waltz” is just long enough to put across the politically incorrect notion that “everyone wants to be taken at some point.” This is not of course a validation of the Rachel-character’s violation, but is rather an acknowledgment that human beings are, even under the best circumstances, fascinated by power and pain. 

Following the inevitable defeat of Koth, Occult meditates on Rachel’s recovery by thinking, “It hurts to abandon the beautiful lies, but then pain is a natural component of healing.” Rachel’s innocence is taken from her, but her attempt to hold onto it, to deem it a “treasure” in its own right, is the psychic malady that the psychic detective must heal, in part by reuniting his/her own sexual nature.

Over the years Doctor Occult and his feminine alter ego have remained minor players in the DC universe. The Louapre-Sweetman story does indicate a deeper, I might even say Bataillean potential in the revised character-- though if BOOKS OF MAGIC didn't jump-start the character's career as a "Vertigo Vision," I doubt he'll catch fire from any of his various guest-starring gigs in JUSTICE LEAGUE storylines.  

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 2

So here's the exchange that prompted Tom Spurgeon's unveiling of his elitist tendencies, despite an earlier denial of same on THE BEAT.

Rich Johnson, seeking to choose the top comics-oriented story for 2010, chose the management changes at DC Comics. In truth, it was less a writeup of the particular changes from 2010 than a general summing-up of the company's past 20 years. This is roughly when the Vertigo imprint was created, which earns Johnson's restrained praise: "[DC] launched imprints like Vertigo to expand what comics storytelling could achieve."

After sketching a number of examples of DC's expansion-- Vertigo, Wildstorm, Paradox, and assorted merchandising efforts-- Johnson asks the questions:

Will the new DC Entertainment be as experimental and have a vision? Is the vision mining the existing characters for new movies and TV franchises?

Maybe other publishers will pick up the mantle of publishing innovation. There are certainly more out there now, more willing to take a chance on a new artist or author and take a chance on that new story.

Tom Spurgeon's response was to label this a "DC Comics blowjob." He devoted the rest of a rather confused paragraph to a harangue about DC's "shameful" ripoff of the Superman property, which for some reason he associates with 1978 rather than 1938. Then we get him accusing Johnson of having regurgitating DC's PR statements:

"Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die."

I've always reprinted my first response in part 1. It was a bit supercilious but it contained a valid point: that EC stories also were not reinventing the wheel. I didn't address undergrounds as I was trying to keep the argument focused on a one-to-one comparison, but I would be happy to extend the same principle to the undergrounds. I would also note that there's really only *one* genre that Vertigo, EC and SOME underground comics all attempted-- and that's the horror genre. Where are the equivalents of Crumb's confessional comics at Vertigo? How many undergrounds devoted themselves to science fiction in the EC mold? Either there weren't that many, or I must've missed all those SF-issues of HORNY BIKER SLUTS.

Spurgeon's response to this argument was a restatement of what he'd already said, sans any justification but personal opinion:

I think the fact that EC did work at a lot like Vertigo of a similar if not superior quality 50 years earlier, and that all sorts of taboos as to genre and content in the alt-undground world were being broken in the 30 years leading up to Vertigo’s founding, kind of makes Vertigo less of the awesomely groundbreaking imprint than is frequently and broadly asserted on its behalf.

My response, to which TS declined to respond by saying he didn't understand it:

Is Moore’s SWAMP THING (admittedly a belated V-offering) not an expansion? Is SANDMAN not an expansion? Were Moore and Gaiman supposed to bow their heads in reverence before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb, for even daring to think they could add more to comics than he already had?

Vertigo is certainly not immune to fair criticism, but claiming that it isn't as good because it wasn't first to break all those taboos is hardly fair. Johnson does not actually claim that Vertigo reinvented the wheel, even the wheel labelled "great comic-book taboos." All he says is that Vertigo expanded "what comic book storytelling could achieve," which is simple truth. SWAMP THING and SANDMAN did expand the horizons, just as EC and the undergrounds had, albeit not the exact same horizons.

This is why pluralism as a critical discipline proves valuable. Though Spurgeon says he has enjoyed some Vertigo products, clearly he enjoyed the EC titles and at least some undergrounds more. This is his privilege. But it's a poor (and elitist) critique that asserts that any taste that finds SANDMAN more of a breakthrough than WEIRD SCIENCE-FANTASY must be the result of the author's desire to keep his tongue firmly applied to the boots of DC Comics.

As a side-note, it's significant that both EC and the undergrounds, like most other comic books of their respective periods, predominantly featured short stories. Many of these were good, many were bad. But in other media aside from comic books, the model of the short story has pretty much given way to extended continuities. The progress of the television medium displays this increasing focus on the long story, going from the never-ending soap opera to the punchily-syncopated overlapping arcs of HILL STREET BLUES to the metatextual epic of LOST. And no matter what one thinks of the tastes of the direct-market comics-audience, this audience also has moved toward long stories rather than short stories. Thus one might fairly conclude that the boundary-expansions of SANDMAN and SWAMP THING (for all that Alan Moore borrows a helluva lot from EC Comics) may be, for this time, greater breakthroughs than those of bygone eras.

Of course a true pluralist attitude doesn't assume that one type of fiction is better than another because the former breaks more taboos than the other. An elitist one does, however, as elitism reifies itself by claiming that it pursues what Theodor Adorno fallaciously called "ideas," as against popular literature, which is only about the sensual. But it may be that any elitism that champions taboo-breaking as an absolute good in itself is not really interested in "ideas" as such, for "ideas" are not universally tied to the breaking of taboos, and I for one can find more interesting "ideas" in a decades' worth of DC Comics-- any decade one cares to name-- than in any decades' worth of undergrounds.

As William James noted, the true answer to any question depends on the terms by which the question is stated. And if the short version of this essay might be rendered, "Is a respect for Vertigo Comics' achievements an automatic 'blowjob' for DC Comics?", then I think I've made my answer more than clear.