VARIANT REVISIONS

 In ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2, I gave two examples of established literary works, ROB ROY and IVANHOE, which respectively represented PURE and IMPURE forms of variant propositions, said purity being based on how much the narrative is based on previously established figures. However, particular icons within variant narratives may be deemed originary.

In the previous essay I analyzed "Requiem for a Titan," a TEEN TITANS story which related the first appearance of the Gargoyle. The character didn't appear very often, but because he did not, he offers a fair illustration of the way an originary icon-- albeit one situated within a variant proposition about a team of sidekicks--gets changed over time, even by the icon's creator.

 Bob Haney returned to the Gargoyle twice, but the first story, "A Titan is Born" (TEEN TITANS #35, 1971), wasn't an auspicious return. In this tale Haney tried to find something interesting to do with non-powered Titan Mal Duncan, a character introduced by Robert Kanigher during the "Relevant Titans" phase. In these seven pages, Mal pulls solitary computer-watching duty at the Titans HQ. A scientist named Heller-- the Gargoyle in disguise-- intrudes on Mal's solitude, claiming to be a colleague of the group's patron. Haney's vague on a vital point-- that somehow the Titans computer, set to perform some unspecified experiment, opened a dimensional doorway, allowing the Gargoyle to return to Earth. By story's end Mal manages to reverse the experiment and send the villain packing. The odd variance in the tale is the Gargoyle's own creator seems to have forgotten his original idea. In "Requiem," there's no indication that the tale Gargoyle told about his being an ex-convict was anything but a dodge to seed doubt into the heroes' minds. Since in "Requiem" Haney gave Gargoyle no real identity, and since in "Titan" he needed a quick-and-dirty motivation for the villain's actions, he faked one. Haney could never have anticipated how many odd turns his minor deviation from his originary story would later generate.               

Haney wrote one last story with Gargoyle, which I reviewed in detail here, and I don't need to say anything more about it except that Haney just treats the villain like a demon escaping its domain. Then in TEEN TITANS #53 (1978), writer Bob Rozakis contributed another link in the confusion. Rozakis imagines a story that supposedly took place between the canonical first and second adventures. Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Speedy and Wonder Girl team up for this "actual second Titans tale." All the sidekicks' mentors-- Batman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Wonder Woman-- have suddenly turned into remorseless criminals. The young heroes prove their stuff by capturing the evil-ized good guys, and then, by dumb luck, the Titans stumble across the solution to the mystery by attempting to hold the Justice Leaguers at the JLA headquarters. There, the Titans meet one of the dumbest looking aliens ever conceived in comics (by artists Delbo and Fuller) -- The Antithesis. 

Rozakis gives no reason as to why the Antithesis is hanging out at the JLA HQ, and the heroes don't even smoke him out. The villain pops up to keep the Titans from contacting other Leaguers, but at the same time he shows absolutely no ability to attack anyone. He followed the Leaguers "from a far corner of the galaxy" because he could gain great energy by dominating heroes and making them do bad things. (This story has nothing to do with Haney's Gargoyle, but the Antithesis and Gargoyle are not dissimilar in that raison d'etre.) As the Titans attack Antithesis, he proves immaterial, but that's because they've cut off his supply of corrupted-hero energy. The evil ET seems to be hoping his last pawn will win in the field, though that pawn is defeated and Antithesis vanishes, wailing something about "power generators." From what Rozakis writes, the only "power generators" Antithesis has access to would be his heroic pawns.     

It was left to George Perez, long after he and Marv Wolfman had reworked the TEEN TITANS concept into a sales success, to link Haney's Gargoyle with Rozakis' Antithesis, and with a separate character as well. "Pieces of the Puzzle" (SECRET ORIGINS ANNUAL #3, 1989) is mostly a mashup of selected stories from the Haney, Rozakis and Wolfman-Perez eras, conveyed to the reader by dream-scenes experienced by Nightwing as he's tormented by a cowled enemy. As a story "Puzzle" may be worse than that the Rozakis "Antithesis" tale, though the art is much better. But to make his story work, Perez interpolates an odd new detail; that the Antithesis was hiding in the JLA's own computers. This detail seems to serve no purpose, and I hypothesize that Perez confused the origin of the Antithesis with Haney's "Titan is Born" tale, where Gargoyle gets out of limbo thanks to the Titans HQ computer. Perez recounts the Haney tale at the end of "Puzzle" as he's retconning it into the narrative of Mal Duncan, but that retcon doesn't actually require the revision of the Rozakis story.      

The big Three Reveals, if one can call them such, is that (a) the cowled figure giving Nightwing bad dreams is The Gargoyle, (b) The Gargoyle is really the Titans' first foe Mister Twister (which factoid could be used to justify Haney's erroneous 1971 story), and (c) Gargoyle got all his powers, in both identities, from the Antithesis. Whenever I read this, I remember thinking it was a good idea to combine the best enemy of the original Titans with their first one. But now I recognize that Perez was a little too desperate to shoehorn together unrelated stories for a superficial effect. In fact, there's are so many retcons in "Puzzle" that there was no room for the author to expatiate on the Gargoyle-Antithesis relationship in the story proper, so it all had to be explained in a prose sidebar. 

Of course, heavy-continuity stories can be done well. But since my next essay will discuss the mythic tropes surrounding the Titans' first antagonist, I felt it necessary to explain why I thought all of these variant propositions were badly framed.         

NEAR-MYTHS: "SEALED IN BLOOD" (SGT. ROCK ANNUAL #2, 1982)

For the last Memorial Day, I decided to read some random war comics from DC, few of which I ever sampled previously. I was aware that in the late 1950s, DC's war titles, generally under the editorship of Robert Kanigher, began to evolve a regular lineup of featured characters, some of whom then began to cross over frequently in the sixties, seventies and eighties. The particular 1980s crossover I encountered was not surprising for its crossover of heroes, but for the way that Kanigher-- who certainly was not given to the Stan Lee method of endlessly recycling even the most obscure antagonists-- decided to exhume a "bad guy" so obscure, she isn't even indexed in Grand Comics Database.

So far as I can tell, the one and only time Nazi officer Helga Voss appeared in a comic was SGT. ROCK #422 (1978.)

 Lieutenant Helga Voss introduces herself to the redoubtable Rock by machine-gunning a small squad of Brit soldiers, fighting with the sergeant, and then trying to get him killed by a patrol of her countrymen, all of whom Rock kills. All the backstory we get is that Helga's father and brothers died in the field, so she took their place. Rock takes Helga prisoner and returns with her to his unit.

 

Once Helga encounters Easy Company, she finds it "easy" to make all the grunts drool over her, except for Rock-- and according to Kanigher's hints and Frank Redondo's art, even Rock is not insensible to her charms. Despite his refusal to let her cozy up, she still takes him by surprise, steals a gun and kills one of Rock's men. (Not one of the well-known ones, of course.) She leads the "feldwebel," as she repeatedly calls him, into a German ambush, but Rock triumphs even though Helga escapes. Though she swears to make another run at Rock, Kanigher apparently dropped her as a potential menace.

     Four years later, Kanigher and artist Dan Speigle launched SGT ROCK ANNUAL #2-- which I assume had a #1 under some other title. In the story proper, a flashforward scene shows Rock in the same situation seen on the cover-- Rock hanging from a cable-car while being menaced by a man with a gun-- but now we learn that that the would-be killer is Frank Rock's only brother Larry, who's fighting in the same war, but in the Philippines.

A montage, apparently in Rock's mind, rehearses how Larry, despite grievous wounds, saves the famed General MacArthur from an assassination attempt. Larry later saves MacArthur from a second attempt, and the creator of "Enemy Ace" gets into heavy poetry, using fraternal imagery to describe  Larry and the pilot of a zero plane as "murderous twins," until their bond is severed by the breaking of an "umbilical cord of madness."

Back in Rock's terrain, he gets two sets of orders (one open, one sealed) from fellow warcomics-star Lieutenant JEB Stuart and his "Haunted Tank," complete with the tank's resident Civil War ghost.  
   

When a battle temporarily incapacitates the Haunted Tank, Easy Company proceeds to follow the already opened orders, to seek out a German castle and to liberate a prisoner there. They encounter a ten-foot-tall Kraut robot whom the soldiers nickname "Goliath" before eventually taking him out with their guns. 

After the robot's demise, another pitched battle erupts, but this time Easy gets help from frequent guest-star Mademoiselle Marie, as well as returning evildoer Helga Voss. Given that Kanigher and others had already established an ongoing relationship between Rock and Marie, it's tempting to think that the only reason Kanigher revived Helga for just a few pages was to portray a machine-gun "catfight" between the French brunette and the ice-blonde Nazi.

    In order to justify the third hero-crossover, Rock gets an air-lift to the German castle by "Navajo air ace Johnny Cloud," while the rest of Easy keeps footing it overland. Somehow Marie and Cloud both know that Rock carries sealed orders that he can't open till he reaches the castle. Once Rock infiltrates the castle, he makes two discoveries. One is that Rock's frequent sparring partner The Iron Major is present in the schloss. The other is that the orders tell him to kill the prisoner if he can't rescue him. A page or so later, Rock makes a third discovery-- the identity of the prisoner-- but the more astute readers will probably have figured that Kanigher didn't keep bringing up Larry Rock for no reason.

          

As a minor twist, Kanigher reveals that the Iron Major is of an older German echelon and so doesn't approve of Nazi depravity. The depraved Nazi colonel orders the Major executed, so Rock has to save his enemy from his other enemies, and then clobber the Major when the more cultured villain gets in the hero's way. Surprisingly, Kanigher rushes past the revelation that the prisoner is Larry Rock-- maybe he thought it was so obvious, everyone would have seen the handwriting on the wall. The two Rocks escape the Germans by cable-car, but Larry's old wound makes him irrational. He demands his brother kill him to keep Larry from falling into enemy hands and being tortured to reveal vital information.  
   

   

For the big dramatic finish, Larry vanishes into the icy mountain wastes, sparing Brother Frank from having to execute the prisoner as his orders demanded. So even if the orders were "sealed in blood"-- that of fraternal blood, blood-ties that couldn't be allowed to trump the needs of the military-- Frank Rock actually defies those orders for sake of brotherly love. Larry actually has no good reason to tell Frank to kill him-- once they're on the cable-car, they're no longer in danger of recapture-- but I guess Kanigher used Larry's head-wound to justify the big sacrificial moment. Yet though it's a very contrived tale, there's just a few myth-tropes here worth preserving. And from what I've heard, I believe Larry Rock comes back later, so the big sacrifice gets overturned for the sake of another story in the Rock mythos. 

 

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 I devoted one essay in this series to "external alignment," defined thusly: 'This form of crossover I will term an "external alignment" crossover, in that one icon with archaic myth-associations appears in a cosmos with which that icon is not aligned.' I then followed it up with another essay, which defined "internal alignment" as "substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos." However, in re-reading my other essays on the topic of "alignment," I see that the essay I wrote just before these two, COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 5, also dealt with two forms of alignment, both of which might subsume the external and internal formulations.                                       

  One example I gave of internal alignment was that of the 2014 film NOAH. I remarked that this film took place in the "Noah cosmos," but that it reached into some loosely allied Biblical narratives to flesh out the cinematic storyline: narratives such as the story of Tubal-Cain, which is not directly involved in the tale of Noah. I did not mention that the film also played off of alternate Noah-stories like the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which is probably the movie's source of its "rock-giants." These two borrowings bring me to explore my description of "static alignment" in Part Five of COSMIC ALIGNMENT. In that essay, I used the Joker as an element of the "Batman cosmos" that is always aligned with Batman, no matter how many other "other-universe" characters the Joker may encounter.                                                                                           

Now, there are various narratives, whether stand-alone or serial in nature, that relate fictional stories of archaic myth-characters meeting, even though they never met in archaic stories. The archaic Hercules never met a lot of the Greek figures encountered by, say, the televised Hercules of the LEGENDARY JOURNEYS teleseries, such as the above-seen monster Echidna. But in my view, even the modern-day version of Hercules remains in a static alignment with nearly all Greek mythology, just as the modern-day Noah is in a static alignment with all Biblical mythology. The only way in which the alignment is bent, though not broken, is when an element strongly aligned with another icon-cosmos is imported into a given narrative. The rock-giants of NOAH aren't in the Old Testament text, but they are in the Book of Enoch, so the two iterations of the Deluge Story can blend with no crossover-vibe. But Tubal-Cain, though he's a distant Hebrew ancestor like Noah, properly belongs to the narrative of Cain, and so a static type of crossover ensues.                                       

                           

              

                                       

     The opposite of the "static alignment" was the "dynamic alignment." My main aim in forming this concept was to describe cases in which a particular "Sub" was not firmly bonded to the cosmos in which it first appeared, so that it could successfully migrate into other cosmoses. My examples there were super-villains like Thanos and the Cobra-Hyde team, which did not remain firmly associated with the hero-cosmos in which each originally appeared, to wit, Iron Man for Thanos, Thor for Cobra-Hyde. This also applies to the examples given in the "external alignment" argument: certain elements in a given culture's stories can be seen as dynamic in that they can and do move from one sub-cosmos to another. For example, one may posit that the Greek monsters called "Cyclopes" start out as smith-servants to Zeus, King of the Gods, crafting the heaven-lord's fatal thunderbolts. Arguably later, the poet Homer reworks these traditional figures into a race of cannibalistic giants who live apart from humankind and become menaces within the cosmos of the hero Odysseus.                                                                                                                         

                                                                             This transitive property of certain myth-figures transfers to their entirely fictional (and thus nominative) iterations. Thus Marvel Comics' Thor can meet pretty much any figure within Norse mythology-- say, the fire-god Surtur-- and it doesn't matter that Archaic Thor never crossed paths with Archaic Surtur.  This is the same intertextuality that keeps the NOAH movie's intermingling of elements from both Old Testament and apocryphal sources from meriting the crossover-vibe. The "static crossover" might still be possible if Marvel-Thor is constellated with another major figure of Nordic myth, like Roy Thomas' attempt to meld the legend of Marvel-Thor with that of Seigfried. But there's no intertextuality between Norse myth and Hindu myth, as per my example of Marvel-Thor meeting Marvel-Shiva. Thus, an encounter between any version of Thor and any version of Shiva is a dynamic one and parallels the sort of dynamic crossover one finds whenever a villan with a static default to a particular cosmos interacts with some other cosmos (The Joker hassles Superman, for example).                                                                                   

                                                                                      I felt I should be more specific on this subject also with reference to purely nominative fictional characters who are aligned with archaic mythologies, such as Wonder Woman. If Wonder Woman simply encounters a beast from Greek mythology without its "own story," such as the Chimera or the Hydra, then that's not a crossover. But if she meets a character from Greek myth that has been the "star" of his own narrative, such as Heracles, then that's a static crossover-- while if she meets myths or legends from outside the sphere of Greek myth, then that's a dynamic crossover.

NEAR-MYTHS: STAR-SPANGLED ROGUES' GALLERIES

In THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER, I made some generalized comments on the debt that Jerry Siegel's STAR-SPANGLED KID feature had to the Batman-AND-Robin team that was launched in April 1940 (with the usual allowances for inaccuracy of cover-dates). Jerry Siegel didn't rush to come up with his risible reversal of a kid hero with an adult sidekick, since STAR SPANGLED COMICS #1 debuted as a regular DC feature almost a year and a half after Robin's debut. (To be sure, the Kid and Stripesy first showed up the previous month in ACTION COMICS #40, where the raconteurs clearly hoped that Superman's fans would rush to check out the New Dynamic Duo in their own magazine.) DC editors may have thought, "Hey, Batman was conceived when Bob Kane (supposedly by himself) tried to do his version of Superman. So why wouldn't it work for the creator of Superman-- teamed with humor-artist Hal Sherman-- to riff on Batman?" At any rate, the very name of STAR-SPANGLED COMICS was clearly contrived to spotlight the name of the cover-featured hero, and for the first half dozen issues Siegel and Sherman's heroes got three adventures apiece. There were other features in SSC, but none were all that prepossessing, with only the Mort Weisinger-Hal Sharp Tarantula maintaining any place in DC history.                                                     

  Now, as the title may suggest, my main interest in these early stories is to demonstrate some early examples of the "pattern criminal," which formula I think developed largely in comic books. This conception contrasted with such pulp-favorites as the "one-gimmick villain" and "the all-purpose villain" types, which I argued were the dominant templates for the prose pulps. Thus the only two relevant features of SSC are those of Tarantula and of the Kid and Stripesy. The first adventure doesn't trouble to retell the pair's origin from their debut in ACTION COMICS, but the last one in issue #1 introduces their most persistent enemy, Doctor Weerd. After the villain's regular ID is humiliated by a rather snotty Sylvester Pemberton, the villain reveals that he has his own "Mister Hyde" potion, that changes him into a shaggy-locked, barrel-chested hulk. Unlike Siegel's Superman, whose repeat villains appeared off and on, Weerd appears in every single issue until #7, and he's clearly an all-purpose type like Luthor, whipping up diverse weapons like giant robots, a vortex machine and a mirage-maker. Did Siegel hope Weerd would be the Kid's "Joker?" It seems a fair conjecture. Issue #1 also features the first outing for Tarantula, in a forgettable exploit that doesn't give the spider-man much of an origin either.                                                               

   Issue #2 introduces the comic's first "one-gimmick villain," but in the TARANTUALA feature. Such was the Crime Candle, whose big thing was doping people with candles that exuded toxic gases.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                        Issue #3 holds nothing relevant, but in #4-- dated January 1942, and thus a month or two after Bill Finger unveiled The Penguin in a December 1941 issue of DETECTIVE COMICS-- Siegel and Sherman introduced the Needle. Now, the Needle's weapon of choice was a gun that shot needles, so he didn't "branch out" as the Penguin did, using different gimmicked umbrellas and (a little later) trained birds. But though neither Needle nor Penguin gets an origin as such, both seem to have "patterned" their respective weapons after their respective physical appearances. That said, the Penguin seems like a developed character from the first, and the Needle is a just a flat bad guy.                                                                                                         

   Siegel and Sherman distinguish themselves a bit more in SSC #5 with new villain Moonglow. A wimpy type of professor, he discovers that he can enhance both his intellect and his penchant for evil by prolonged exposure to moonlight. The small touch of characterization, though, doesn't lead to anything comparable to, say, Two-Face, or even Green Lantern's foe The Gambler. More relevant to my "pattern criminal" project, though, is the TARANTULA tale in the same issue. "Warlord of Crime," whose script GCD credits to Manly Wade Wellman, introduces a crimelord named Siva. This villain uses a whopping TWO gimmicks patterned on the mythos of the Hindu god: (1) he's served by a henchman named Ganesha, who wears an elephant-costume like that of Mythic Shiva's divine son, and (2) Siva burns rebellious followers with fire the way the Hindu god annhilated his opponents with fiery powers. However, for whatever reason Siva never appeared again, and remained at large at the end of his only story.                                                             

With issue #6, the Kid gets scaled back to two adventures (one featuring the omnipresent Doctor Weerd, again) -- and then, just one tale in issue #7, in which Simon and Kirby's NEWSBOY LEGION bumps the Kid off the covers. Robotman and TNT join Tarantula as backup features who (I believe) never get cover-featured in SSC. The solo Kid adventure does feature the comic's first villain-teamup in "The Picture That Killed," as The Needle and Doc Weerd challenge the not so dynamic duo. In #8, Manly Wade Wellman apparently caught the teamup bug from Siegel and Sherman, since he assembled three of Tarantula's very forgettable villains into "The Trio of Terror." Siegel and Sherman trumped Wellman by bringing together their three most noteworthy nasties-- Needle, Weerd and Moonglow-- in "Crime by the Chapter." None of those villains, together or separately, were as good as the best Finger foes, though at least the Sherman antagonists were more visually memorable than those of Hal Sharp (except the aforementioned Siva). And that's where I'll leave this short study, for by issue #9 it was clear that the Kid/Stripesy duo had failed to impress the kid-readers as their model had, and whatever "pattern criminals" may have appeared were then overshadowed by many more momentous features in the early forties. Despite various post-Silver Age revivals of the original characters, the two seemed to distinguish themselves most when Geoff Johns reinvented the core idea for his STARGIRL concept, which in turn begat the last good superhero TV show for the CW network. But clearly there was a good reason that no one ever bothered to bring back (to my knowledge) any of the Kid's villains, or those of any other foemen in SSC.                       

THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

NEAR-MYTHS: "BLOODSTAINED FANGS" (ZOOT #12, 1948)

Ever since the jungle-genre in comic books was kicked off (in terms of original material) by 1938's SHEENA, there had been various "jungle queen" competitions. Usually the "bad jungle queens" were white like the good ones.

Black artist Matt Baker broke into the industry in the mid-1940s. Modern readers might find it problematic for a Black creator to work on a feature starring a White jungle queen, as Baker did with his longest running jungle-concept, "Rulah, Jungle Goddess." But arguably he put an unusual spin on the trope. Without explanation, the various Black African tribes encountered by the stately brunette Rulah (herself an American girl who took up the wild life on a lark) mostly had sexy White wives. I don't believe this anomaly is ever justified. My guess is that Baker was so good at drawing sexy girls, and thus captivating lots of young male readers, that his editors didn't care about the racial makeup of his African tribes, as long as he didn't actually depict romantic interactions between Blacks and Whites.

The story "Bloodstained Fangs," though, may show Baker pushing the envelope a bit. The "bad jungle queen" here, one "Mava," is indisputably Black, and sounds like she intends a general uprising that will liberate all of Africa from colonial influence, though of course she's not a liberator in any real sense. Moreover, she's clearly romancing the White European "bomb expert" Konrad in order to secure his cooperation.

Mava's also aware that jungle guardian Rulah is a danger to her plans (yeah, who cares about silly things like the standing armies of colonial Europeans). Mava sets traps involving electrified barb wire and hordes of rats, but Rulah finds her way to the evil rebel's lair nonetheless. Mava happens to be conducting her ablutions, and thinking about how she's going to take Konrad as her "mate," when Rulah bursts in and tries to drown the bad queen. Only the presence of Mava's guards foils the heroine's assault.

But then, as happens more than once in the RULAH comics, the male villain takes a shine to the raven-tressed heroine. Konrad tries to cut Mava out of the deal, and while he's probably not planning to offer Rulah a choice in his plans for her, he never gets a chance to press his suit. Clever Mava has a knife concealed in her hair (so THAT'S where that idea came from) and she disarms Konrad. Then she consigns him to have his flesh eaten by killer ants.

Not feeling any more friendly toward Rulah, Mava sets her up to be starved slowly in the presence of ample food and drink.However, the "bloodstained fangs" of Mava's rats lead to her undoing. The rodents are attracted by the food, and Rulah rubs food on her bonds so that the rats set the heroine free. Though Mava is preparing to leave the area--another example of a villain just leaving a hero unattended so she can escape!-- she's evidently still in the vicinity of the ant-hill when Rulah comes for payback. Mava trips on the conveniently placed skull of Konrad and falls into the ant-hill, and the killer ants don't even need her to be dipped in honey to view Mava as their new favorite food.

Mava, appearing in 1948, is certainly not anywhere near the first Black villainess in jungle comics. However, she does have a lot more on the ball than the average lady witch-doctor, and so might be the first GOOD Female Fiend of Color in this particular genre.

SIDE-NOTE: Baker pursued roughly the same policy in another jungle comic of the period, JO JO CONGO KING. Although heroic Jo-Jo had a White girlfriend, the tribe they hung out with was a tribe of Black males with White females. Amusingly, when a story from JO JO #23 was reprinted in an issue of Skywald's JUNGLE ADVENTURES, the White tribes-women were colored Black, though they all still kept standard Caucasian features.

THE READING RHEUM: THE FIRES OF FU MANCHU (1987)

Before his passing, Cay Van Ash published this sequel to his Fu Manchu pastiche TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET. Van Ash began work on a second sequel but whatever rough draft he may have completed was lost after his death.

In my review of BAKER, I mentioned how Van Ash had interpolated that narrative into a time-frame of a few months between chapters in the Rohmer book HAND OF FU MANCHU. Van Ash's prologue-- in which he claims to be recapitulating the notes of Doctor Petrie for the adventure that follows-- insinuates that the remaining chapters of HAND, which conclude with Fu's apparent death at sea, also took place in 1914, rather than at the book's publication date of 1917. But 1917, when World War One has been grinding on for three years, is the timeline for FIRES OF FU MANCHU. In fact, Nayland Smith, who's usually a police commissioner with broad powers to pursue Fu Manchu, is inducted into the British army, and then sent to Cairo when there's news of new Devil-Doctor activity. By a fortunate coincidence, Smith's sidekick Doctor Petrie moved his practice to Cairo with his wife Karameneh, whom he liberated from Fu Manchu in HAND. However, before the novel even starts, Smith wires Petrie to send his wife away from their home, on the chance that the Doctor may reach out to harm his former slave. (Arguably, the real reason Karameneh is gone from the whole book is so that Petrie will get the chance to interact with three different beauties while the wife's away.)

The story commences by introducing Fu's new weapon, the super-scientific "fires" of the title, though arguably that device fades in importance of other concerns. Fu comes to Cairo looking for a renegade German scientist who has his own super-weapon-- and it doesn't take a lot of figuring to anticipate that this one is based in real science. However, Fu doesn't have a wealth of resources after all the defeats he suffered in 1914. He has some Arab allies and what appears to be some sort of animal-human hybrid, sort of a "rhino-man," which I guess anticipates the artificial humanoid seen in 1948's SHADOW OF FU MANCHU. In addition, Fu is also served by both of the femmes fatales from HAND, the cruel temptress Zarmi and the incomparable Fah Lo Suee.

The third "beauty" I referenced is one Greba Eltham. This minor character appeared in Rohmer's 1916 RETURN OF DR FU MANCHU, and Van Ash clearly cast her as Petrie's nurse-assistant in order to give Petrie more feminine problems, given that Greba's clearly in love with the physician. Greba ultimately finds true love elsewhere, but she gets into a cat-spat with none other than Fah Lo Suee. Rohmer never intimated that his version of Fah had any interest in Petrie, and arguably even her affection for Smith isn't established until late in the series. True, Fah doesn't love Petrie. She tries to seduce him early in the novel for the purpose of getting information, but after doing so, seems to consider that she's "staked out a claim" on him. Oddly, though, it's the hellcat Zarmi-- who like Greba only appeared in one Rohmer novel-- who *may* get further than first base with married man Petrie, according to a speculative footnote by Van Ash. Fah Lo Suee gets more scenes than the other two females, though I felt Van Ash's interpretation of her lacked some je ne sais qua.

As for the Devil-Doctor, he gets two speaking-scenes near the novel's beginning and at the end. While FIRES is just a good formula thriller with no deeper resonance, Van Ash is almost the only author who managed to duplicate the way Rohmer had the character speak, with a combination of dispassionate cruelty, sagacity, and an odd capacity for mercy. Only one film came close to the fascinating Fu-speech pattern, the serial DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, and none of the comic book iterations were any good on that score. Fu naturally appears to "die" again at novel's end. Rohmer never gave a diegetic reason as to why the Doctor went out of circulation between the years 1917 (not counting a flashback cameo appearance in 1918's GOLDEN SCORPION) and 1928 (which is the year in which Van Ash's prologue claims the Doctor returned). FIRES was not that novel, but perhaps there's some chance it may still be written by someone, someday.

THE READING RHEUM: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

ICONIC BONDING PT. 4

 A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.-- CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there...-- ICONIC BONDING PT. 3.

 

In the second quote, I mentioned first two types of bonded ensembles in which villains who had been "familiarity-icons" since their introduction did not incarnate a crossover-value. My first example was a duo of villains, the Enchantress and the Executioner, who had been introduced as a team in their first appearance and who remained in that configuration in most though not all of their appearances (at least up to the point where the latter character dies). The second type, as specified, was that of a coterie of evildoers more or less permanently bonded into the service of a leader. But now I've become aware of what may a third, even more rare type, thanks to beginning a re-watch of the Fox teleseries GOTHAM.

Prior to GOTHAM, I believe every adaptation of the BATMAN franchise has utilized only Batman himself as the sole superordinate icon, or else has combined Batman with various other partners, whether bonded, semi-bonded or unbonded. Most of these iterations also include a sampling of characters from the franchise to serve the same subordinate-icon purpose that they serve in the comics, such as Alfred the Butler and Commissioner Gordon.

GOTHAM formulated a relatively new approach. It's set in the years that most iterations pass over: the period immediately after twelve-year old Bruce Wayne is orphaned. But in this universe, Young Bruce receives succor not only from faithful Alfred but also from a young James Gordon. During the five years of the series, Young Bruce grows older but does not don his caped costume until the show's last episode. Nevertheless, the youth, slowly maturing toward crimefighter status, enters into a superordinate, semi-bonded ensemble with crusading cop Gordon. I say that they're semi-bonded because though both are central characters involved in investigating crimes in Gotham City, they don't "team up" as such but rather pursue parallel courses that sometimes dovetail. 

Most BATMAN iterations also maintain a subordinate ensemble, and that ensemble usually consists of icons who are allies to the hero or heroes. GOTHAM has a wealth of such characters, but the show seems unique in that some of its villains who also belong to the subordinate ensemble, in that they're present in most episodes and are woven into major story-lines. This is NOT the case with the ongoing serial comics, even when they utilize long arcs focusing on various criminal figures. 

Some of GOTHAM's ensemble-icons are relatively mundane characters, either derived from the comics (mob boss Carmine Falcone) or created for the teleseries (ambitious lady gangster Fish Mooney). And some villains from the comics are introduced in long arcs that eventually terminate, just as they do in the comics. But from the show's first episode GOTHAM set up its analogues of three comics-villains so that they would enjoy story-arcs that lasted the length of the entire series. These three were Catwoman (a fourteen-year-old street thief who befriends Bruce), Riddler (an eccentric medical examiner who eventually blossoms into a psychopath), and Penguin (a junior mobster who eventually becomes one of the crime bosses of Gotham).

Now, I've usually said that any time a given episode of a serial crosses over two distinct icons, either unbonded or semi-bonded, that counts as a crossover, even when both are regular members of the main hero's "rogue's gallery." However, much of that logic was based on the idea of the crossover being what I've called "dynamic," something that the regular reader does not expect to see on a regular basis. 

A "static" crossover generates a different aesthetic. That's why I went into laborious detail about this type of crossover in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. In AVENGERS #16, three characters who had only been subordinate icons in other features-- Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch-- were transformed into superordinate icons, possessed of stature rather than charisma. But after that first change of status, the membership of the three new inductees becomes something that the reader does expect to see on a regular basis. So as far as those three icons are concerned, only the one issue in which their status changes is a crossover-story.

A loosely similar change in status takes place in the transition of Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman from the comics-pages to GOTHAM. Within the sphere of Batman serial comics, not counting any narratives focused upon the villains as main characters, the trio are all subordinate icons. However, upon transitioning to the GOTHAM serial, they all become members of that show's cast of regular subordinate icons. None of them have stature, but they do have greater charisma than any of the shorter-term villain-adapations, like Hugo Strange and Firefly. But-- to pursue the same aesthetic I put forth with respect to the Avengers, only the first episode of GOTHAM sustains a crossover between those three characters, simply because they all have agency within the story, though none of them literally meet one another in that first episode.

Now, other episodes can be crossovers when they bring any of these characters into proximate contact with other adapted villains from the comics. A second-season arc introduces GOTHAM's version of The Firefly. The TV character has almost nothing to do with the template provided by the comics, not least in that the TV version is female. I would tend to say that Firefly just being in the same story as Penguin and Riddler is not much of a crossover, if it is one at all, specifically because the latter two have been "regularized." 

Yet in the same arc Female Firefly is befriended by Young Catwoman, and the two pull off a robbery together. And at least the specific episodes showing that interaction carry the "dynamic crossover" vibe. 

All this to say that at least the three premiere villains of GOTHAM don't automatically cross over with one another, or with other villains, unless there's a narrative effort to transition past the bond tying the three of them into high-charisma members of the subordinate ensemble.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to add "The Court of Owls," whose presence is only implied in the first episode, but who are later identified as the killers of the Waynes. They, like Penguin, Catwoman, and Riddler, are also "crossovers" only for the first episode, albeit by implication only.