THE READING RHEUM: DOCTOR WERTHLESS (2025)

 

For some years I've wondered: what kind of child was Frederic Wertham? There are no official biographies of the man who "nearly killed the comics industry." Even the friendliest overview of the psychiatrist's career, Bart Beaty's 2005 FREDERIC WERTHAM AND THE CRITIQUE OF MASS CULTURE, contained no more information than Wikipedia: born in 1895 and raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany, moved to the US in 1922 to pursue his psychiatric career. Of the childhood of the doctor who became famous for analyzing the fantasies of children, there was nothing to say if he had problems as a Jewish child in pre-Weimar Germany, or if he ever read German translations of pulp characters like Nick Carter or the (fictionalized) Buffalo Bill.

But thanks to the graphic novel DOCTOR WERTHLESS by writer Harold Schechter and artist Eric Powell, it's clear that Frederic Wertham's psychological past probably will never be plumbed. Schechter and Powell's biography-- admittedly also "fictionalized," though only in the sense of creating imagined dialogue for real-life persons-- establishes that Wertham never publicly discussed his early life. He also became estranged from the rest of his family even before moving to America, so like many other Euro-expatriates, the US was the place where Wertham re-invented himself.

And yet, that reinvention had almost nothing to with American popular culture, much less comic books, which did not become a mass medium until the late 1930s and didn't excite Wertham's attention until the late 1940s. He gained celebrity from his somewhat lurid studies of the serial murderers Albert Fish and Robert Irwin, whose crimes dominate the first half of WERTHLESS. Here I'll note that readers may need strong stomachs to tolerate the detailed descriptions of their many perfidies. And yet those details are important to understanding Wertham's career. 

WERTHLESS is careful to show that according to what records we have, Wertham was generally empathetic toward all of his patients. And this empathy is key to understanding how the doctor could treat the iniquities of an Albert Fish with clinical dispassion: to Wertham, Fish was simply sick. The source of the sickness lay outside the patient, though the labeling of that contagion would not take place until Wertham tapped into the postwar mania linking juvenile delinquency to popular culture. Other pundits of the period went after popular culture in general, but comic books became Wertham's Great White Whale; a virus he could imagine stamping out.

Despite Schechter and Powell's (correct) negative assessment of the doctor's search for easy solutions, the authors are careful to show the positive aspects of his empathy. For about a decade Wertham donated his expertise to a low-cost psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and he gave valuable court testimony that led to the downfall of "separate but equal" segregation. The authors pass a little rapidly over his association with the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but it's possible the doctor was simply fooled by their pose of innocence. Though Wertham as drawn by Powell looks unprepossessing, he had assorted minor encounters with a smattering of celebrities-- Al Capp, Richard Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Lipton-- so it would seem that Wertham possessed some charisma in addition to his empathy. Indeed, celebrity-spotting is one of the pleasures of WERTHLESS.   

Yet in both the first and last pages, Schechter and Powell make clear their disagreement with Wertham's "belief that brutal aggression was not innate in human nature but [was] the product of social and environmental forces." Wertham opposed the execution of Albert Fish because, being insane, Fish was not responsible for the many people he murdered. Yet in Wertham's 1954 alarmist screed SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the psychiatrist excoriated comic book creators as being responsible for crimes and murders, even though he never cited a single case proving that any comics story had engendered a crime. To all of those artists and editors, Wertham attributed aberrant motives for "seducing" children-- and since none of the creators were clinically insane, Wertham could condemn them absolutely as he could not morally condemn serial killers. The accumulation of knowledge about serial murderers was supposedly valuable enough to justify preserving their lives in asylums for study, even when it was clear that the killers took immense pleasure in their acts. Readers' pleasure in fictional depictions of violence and sex, however, was something for which Wertham could not or would not allow any justification. Eric Powell redraws several of the scandalous comics-images Wertham reproduced in SEDUCTION, the better to boost his crusade and to sell his book.  

Wertham never overtly retracted his opposition to fictional violence, though Schechter and Powell present a curious incident that may have been spun partly from their imaginations. It's a fact that in 1957, artist Wally Wood-- one of the artists Wertham criticized for horror-comics-- produced a satire of Wertham, "Doctor Werthless," for MAD Magazine. It may be the fantasy of the two biographers that Wertham framed the cartoon strip and kept it on his wall. If that is not just a fantasy, it could indicate an indirect admission of his biggest error. But the biographers also indicate that one of the last things Wertham wrote before his death in November 1981 was a response to a correspondent posing the question as to whether Wally Wood had "produced monsters"-- and Wertham answered in the negative. Wertham did not live a worthless life. But the crusade for which he's best known, and all the skewed data he used to support that jeremiad-- those truly are without worth.                  

ADDENDUM 5-24-26: I wrote this as part of a recommendation of DW to another blogger:

"From the title alone, one might think DW a hit job. But the authors were remarkably even-handed. They mention how he ran a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem and contributed valuable testimony to the cases that led to the Brown vs Board of Education verdict. (Despite the gravity of the testimony, FW managed to bring up his anti-comics obsession, which is quite funny.) The biggest irony of FW's life is that had he not invested so much energy into his anti-comics jeremiad, which was drivel, no one would remember any of his good works."     

                   

OUTSTANDING EPIC FANTASY COMICS

 I've been thinking about the appeal of epic fantasy-- which usually includes the subgenre of sword and sorcery, and includes at least mystical marvels even if some version of science fiction may also be present-- and then wondering about the best examples of this super-genre in comic books and comic strips (not that there are a lot in the latter medium). 

My main criterion is an epic sweep showing either a made-up world or some version of Earth's archaic past, but magic does need to be present to make it fantasy, so "sword and planet" stories like the John Carter series are out, unless magic is evoked alongside science. Mike Grell's WARLORD, which is an "inner Earth" SF-world in which magicians and demons run around, would qualify if I thought any of its arcs were outstanding in some way. For my purposes I'm also thinking only of long comics runs or arcs; no one-off short stories set in fantasy-worlds. I tend to rule out serials in which characters are too jokey or too homey, which would probably let out CEREBUS in addition to its being a domain where magic is only occasionally important to the story. Ditto ASTERIX. If someone had done original-to-comics versions of Peter Pan or the Oz books I might tend to exclude those too. I'd like to have included ELFQUEST but I'm pretty sure all of its miracles fall under the rubric of science fiction, even with all the archaisms.

So far I've come up with:

PRINCE VALIANT-- I've only read a smattering of these reprints, but I would say Hal Foster may be the only guy in newspaper comics to master the form, though I've read that the only usages of magic occur early in the strip's history

THE WIZARD KING-- technically only the first part of Wally Wood's opus is really good; he was pretty ill when he rushed out a quickie second part

CONAN-- maybe the first fifty Marvel issues. Barry Smith was the best exemplar of Conan art though John Buscema did a lot of impressive work up to that point.

KULL-- more scattershot in its first Marvel incarnation, but the second one, titled KULL THE DESTROYER at times, included some imaginative Doug Moench scenarios

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED-- a Conan ripoff, but with more emphasis on magical fantasy, with some cool Keith GIffen artwork

BEOWULF-- DC only did six issues of this character, who was a little jokey at times but still had some epic sequences

RED SONJA-- most if not all of Frank Thorne's work with the character

GHITA OF ALIZARR-- Thorne again, and the first of two albums is very good while the second is still pretty good

INU-YASHA-- medieval Japanese fantasy with an epic sweep

VIKING PRINCE-- gorgeous Kubert art in the feature's more fantastic incarnation

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION

 In the response-thread for EYES OF THESERPENT, reader AT-AT Pilot brought up the topic of mythic content with respect to comics using cheesecake art. After making my response there, I decided to build on it with respect to the overall topic of art with a “sexploitation” angle and its possible relation to myth-content.

To define the second term first, “myth-content” arises in fiction when its authors produce what I term “epistemological patterns” in their work. These patterns are drawn from real-world observations about the way things work in different aspects of reality: patterns of the physical and metaphysical properties of the cosmos, or patterns of human beings in both their individual and social matrices. These patterns, when transmuted into literature, should not be valued in the same fashion that scientific data is valued: as reproductions of how those factors function in reality. Rather, the patterns serve to deepen the symbolic universe of each myth-narrative, thus allowing readers to reflect upon all the different factors that make up experience, when seen through the free play of imaginative fantasy.

The first term, “sexploitation,” also requires some analysis. The term seems to have sprung into being as a tag for works that sold themselves to the public by focusing upon spectacular versions of sexual depiction and/or activity. This view assumes a sort of baseline for normative sexual depiction, which might extend even to those works that seek to avoid sex as much as possible, like Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND. Starting from this supposition, one must assume ever-increasing levels of sexual depiction, and for convenience I tallied three such levels in this essay. More on the levels of spectacular depiction later.

While a number of critics have sneered at sexual depiction as taking audiences’ minds away from “better things,” sex and myth are certainly not in conflict in my system—not least because sex is an important aspect of archaic religious mythologies. Since I’ve continually favored the analysis of literary works through the heuristic tool of Joseph Campbell’s four functions, I thought it would prove stimulating to look at four sexploitation works I’ve already reviewed, each from the viewpoint of a particular function.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION arises most often in literary myths involving sexuality, probably because each individual’s sexual nature is as a bedrock of that individual’s personality. In my review of Wally Wood’s PIPSQUEAK PAPERS, I noted that he encoded his fairly misogynistic feelings about women into a short series of riffs taking place in a burlesque (in more than one sense) fantasy-verse. Perhaps the most revealing projection in PIPSQUEAK is the way he undermines the sex-fantasies of main character Pip toward his perpetually nude mate, the nymph Nudina. Pip starts the story as an undersized sprite whose dinky wang can’t possibly satisfy Nudina. He acquires a “second body” that allows him to enjoy the naughty nymph, but soon finds that it’s a drag to always be defending her from rapacious villains. At the end his reward for remaining true to Nudina is that he loses his alternate body and falls into slavery alongside her, in a situation where he can no longer satisfy her and must also put up with the child he sired by her. Whatever psycho-demons Wood sought to lay to rest via this satire, he nevertheless gave them much more complexity than he did in a romp like SALLY FORTH.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION looms forth wherever a given work seeks to show how human society is affected by the disparate natures of men and women. Thus, Russ Meyer’s FASTERPUSSYCAT KILL KILL, which starts out by welcoming the audience to “violence,” shows male and female social roles breaking down by the new breed of the Sixties Women. Three go-go dancers, less criminals than lovers of life in the fast lane, become involved in murder, mostly because of their bad-tempered, karate-chopping leader Varla. Instead of butting heads with the patriarchal order in the form of lawmen, the trio of hot babes—who have abducted a young, naïve woman who witnessed the murder-- comes into conflict with a trio of men living in a remote desert-cabin. Both the three men and the three women have various dark secrets, but none of the characters have “psychologies” as such. The Old Man, father to a normal young man and to a mentally impaired hulk, represents not so much abstract patriarchy as a male sexual desire to prey on women. Varla, hoping to rob the old hermit, pits both her feminine wiles and her penchant for violence against this male prerogative, but her victory proves pyrrhic. She sacrifices both of her female followers to her greed and almost destroys all three men, only to be ignominiously defeated by the girl hostage.

THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION perks up with some loony effects in the 1961 film INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. Though the viewpoint characters are Penn and Philbrick, a pair of goofy army privates, the real stars are the titular stellar villains, the risibly named “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” CREATURES was almost certainly conceived by writer Bruno VeSota as a baggy-pants reaction to a spate of “space Amazon” films seen during American cinema’s sci-fi boom of the 1950s. As one sees in most space-babe films, Puna and Tanga are designed to provide cheesecake-fantasies for the two homely schmucks. Both alien babes are tall and stacked, and though they’ve supposedly been hidden on Earth for ten years, both have coiffed hairdos and walk around in high heels while wearing outfits that look like swimsuits with flared collars attached. They came to Earth to scout the planet for possible conquest by their people, and they’ve just managed to get their damaged ship ready to return to “the black voids of space” when the army-ants come knocking. Yet the big girls are not only spies, but also scientists, and they maintain a small standing army of “vegetable men” as guards (a conceit probably swiped from 1951’s THE THING). Unlike most space Amazons, the two women are both physically and mentally superior to the male leads, and they display impressive mastery of sciences far beyond the Earthmen. Still, the alien ladies are defeated by their biology. Tanga tells Puna that the sympathy she feels toward the puny Earthlings is the stimulation of her “maternal nature.” Nevertheless, after ten years of raising little vege-men in incubators, Puna is hard up enough that even Philbrick’s dubious charms can persuade her to “sleep with the enemy.” Tanga also falls for Penn without putting up that much resistance. Science gives you weapons and technology, but sex, even with shrimpy guys, keeps you warm at night.

THE METAPHYSICAL FUNCTION culminates with in Frank Thorne’s first graphic novel featuring GHITA OFALIZARR. Ghita, a cheerful prostitute who seems willing to have sex with nearly anyone, has her receptive feminine nature (as a metaphysician might see it) invaded by a masculine propensity for violence. Necromantic transference is at the root of it, in that Ghita gets raped by an undead king, one significantly named for a Philistine fertility-god. From then on, Ghita is a reluctant badass, able to slaughter opponents with a sword rather than inviting them to her bed. Late in the story it’s revealed that her transformation was somehow stage-managed by one of her world’s gods: Tammuz, a female deity using the name of a male Sumerian myth-figure. In this raucous ode to conjoined sex and violence, Thorne suggests that both male and female natures proceed from mirroring forces in heaven, which means that Ghita is pretty much stuck between the rock of masculinity and the soft place of femininity for the remainder of her career.

Returning quickly to the topic of the levels, I would judge that the first three of these sexploitation examples fall into the category I term “titillation.” Only GHITA falls into the most overtly spectacular category, “pornification,” insofar as Thorne is evoking the fantasy of endless, cost-free sex and violence, paralleling, though not indebted to, the dominant associations of sexual pornography.

I chose works that fit these more extreme categories since they’re the sort of thing most readers envision when they think “sexploitation.” But to be sure, sexploitation also appears in what I termed the least spectacular category, “glamor.” Examples of glamor-sexploitation might have included such works as the 1966 BATMAN—which repeatedly appealed to older male viewers with sumptuous female eye-candy—and also Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, which I also attribute to the glamor category despite the series’ frequent use of female nudity. I may devote a future essay to discussing the aesthetic that separates the three levels, but for now, that’s all folks.

CHANGING PARTNERS IN THE MONSTER-DEMIHERO DANCE

In my recent examination of the 1950s "Grave Rehearsal," I brought forth once more my narratological concern with the "dance" between monsters and demiheroes, particularly in horror stories.

In that critique, I wrote:

“Rehearsal” also interests me in being a tale where it takes a little work to figure out who is the narrative’s centric presence. The dominant pattern in horror-stories is to place the emphasis upon the narrative’s most monstrous figure, while any lesser heroes—or demiheroes, to use my preferred term for victim-types—are subordinate presences. Thus Dracula is usually the star of any story he appears in, while Jonathan Harker, not so much. There are famous characters whom I would regard more as demiheroes than as monsters, such as Victor Frankenstein. But “Grave Rehearsal,” while nowhere near as famous as these luminaries, does maintain an interesting narrative tension between the story’s monster, the lovely Madam Satin, and its foolhardy worm-who-turns, B.S. Fitts.

In reading the story, I could see ways in which "Madame Satin" might have been presented as the most focal character in the story. Nevertheless, even though the good madame succeeds in killing her victim B.S. Fitts, he, "the demihero," proves much more potent in a narrative sense than "the monster." However, I want to specify that Fitts' narrative dominance doesn't come about simply because he reverses the normal course of monster-victim stories and destroys his murderer.

Many horror-narratives follow the simple pattern of "monster kills victim," often choosing to make the victim deserving of his fate. I mentioned an example of one such destruction in the essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1: that of the 1963 Steve Ditko "The Gentle Old Man." In this short story, a grasping landlord plans to steal from his boarder, but the apparently harmless old fellow turns the tables. Though the landlord is the viewpoint character, obviously the old man, the story's "monster," is the focal presence.

However, in some cases the "monster" doesn't take a definitive form, and usually this means that the demihero's status as the victim of destruction assumes the focal position. I've already discussed in this essay  Ray Bradbury's short story "The Last Night of the World," asserting that the tale's two unnamed viewpoint characters assume the role of focal presences because of the "dignity" with which they meet their end. A similar story (in terms of narrative drive) is another Steve Ditko story, 1962's "The Speed Demon:"

The nasty demihero of the story, Speedy Simms, endangers people with his reckless driving, so of course he must meet a terrible fate. But no particular agent of Providence interacts with Speedy to put him eternally circling the rings of Saturn. Therefore the effect is as if Speedy has created, through his actions, his own private hell, and so he assumes the focal position.

Another undesirable demihero appears in "Den of Horror," from WEIRD TERROR #3 (1953). Nasty rich guy Robert Baker gets warned about the evils of his ancestors by a strange old woman whose identity is never explained. He repeats one of the deeds of a cursed ancestor, and a couple of unidentified phantoms show up to mete our punishment.

Again, as with "Grave Rehearsal," one can see ways in which the torture-happy ghosts might have been the stars of the show. But, like the old woman who warns Baker, they seem vague at best. Why are there two of them?  Two skeletons are seen chained to the wall in Baker's dream-that-isn't-just-a-dream. but the old woman only speaks of one victim cursing Baker's ancestor. It seems obvious that here too, the storyteller was more concerned with Baker setting himself up for a fall than with the agents of that demise.

There are also a number of stories in which one or more demiheroes take over for the monster. In "Partners in Blood" (JOURNEY INTO FEAR #6, 1952), two people with "victim" written all over them-- a psychic investigator named Professor Martin and his niece Rose-- move into an old German castle associated with vampires. They allow a stranded woman, Baroness Von Erich, to take shelter with them, but she turns out to be a vampire who was once exiled from her own castle and now seems very interested in vamping Rose. In the tale's hurry-up-and-finish conclusion, Martin manages to kill the Baroness, but the vampiress has already passed her unholy nature to Rose. Rose kills her uncle, and is all set to take over for the late Baroness when an over-enthusiastic servant picks up Rose and promptly causes both of them to fall to their deaths. (Apparently in the world of "Partners," vampires can be as easily killed by broken necks as by wooden stakes.) Nevertheless, even though the Baroness perishes-- as monsters sometimes do, even in horror stories-- she's still the focal presence, and would have remained so even if Martin and his niece had escaped hale and hearty.

Finally, here's an example of a "fake-out demihero" from a considerably later period, the Wally Wood story "Bridal Night" (GHOST MANOR #8, 1972). The story starts with a sexy young American girl, Helena Ayres, who shows up in a backwards German town. The moment she gets there, she's informed that a local aristocrat, Count Wolfgang Von Roemer, plans to force her to marry him, as the Count has done with many, many local women before Helena.

For the length of the story, it sounds as if innocent Helena is going to be forcibly wed to a serial murderer, albeit one who seems rather retiring, in that he only marries and kills one woman every year. Von Roemer shows no explicit sign of having supernatural powers, though his servant Otto is unusually strong. Up to the last page, it appears that helpless Helena is going to experience a fatal "bridal night" at the hands of a human monster-- only to reveal that she is actually an inhuman monster. She's apparently one of the vampires mentioned only in the opening caption, though she kills Von Roemer not with a bite to the neck but with a parody of the wedding-kiss. We never know why Helena put herself in the murderer's path, though it seems evident that she could have escaped if she so desired. Thus this apparent demihero becomes a "stealth monster," though probably anyone who's read a fair number of such stories would have guessed that there was more to her than met the eye.

ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY

I thought about relating this essay to the CRAFTING WALL STONES series, but it's not actually related to what MW herself wrote. Rather, in passing she made a partial quote of a famous passage from Matthew 12:34 (King James version):

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

In this case I chose not to check the original context of the passage, for I'm not interested in the moral stance taken by the speaker. I like the idea of "the abundance of the heart," though, for it takes me back to a subject I've not addressed much in recent years: the idea that all of the arts begin as expressive forms and only gradually are mitigated by considerations of reason, morality, et al. Ernst Cassirer was often my guide in this respect:

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

The Biblical speaker is only interested in the moral statement that bad people must and will reveal their badness through their words. I'm more interested in the fact that art, whether good or bad, proceeds from a given person's desire to express him/herself. That desire may be inextricably linked to the desire to make one's daily bread, or to any number of other personal factors, but the desire to make art is in itself sui generis. 

Now it should be obvious that what creates "abundance" in one heart may not do so in another. However, it seems indisputable that the best-regarded creators are those that are in touch with what moves them personally, rather than simply pleasing their readers. To reference briefly one aspect of CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 2, I don't think that comics-artist Marie Severin would have necessarily created work on the same level as Wood and Kurtzman had her femaleness simply been overlooked. It's quite possible that she would have given more work if the industry had not been ruled by "the old boy's network." However, it doesn't follow that she would have created works of genius had she enjoyed constant employment, since there were innumerable toilers in the vineyards whose works only occasionally rose to levels of excellence. 

Where creativity is concerned, there's something to be said for unleashing one's demons. Since Heidi McDonald mentioned Wally Wood, I'll cite the example of his PIPSQUEAK PAPERS.

Even though I extolled PAPERS as one of my chosen mythcomics, it should go without saying that this is not an example of a work with widespread appeal. The story of "baby man" Pip and his discontents with femininity, while extremely expressive, does not measure up in other respects to Wood's best EC work, or even his superhero tales. I would imagine that many would judge the PAPERS to be a misogynist work, and it's axiomatic that Wood is not particularly fair to the fairer sex herein. But then, bitching about women was something that gave "abundance" to Wally Wood's heart, and so informs his art as much as a similar negativity toward femaleness informs the art of William Faulkner.

Rumiko Takahashi, whom I used as a counter-example against Marie Severin's staid formulaic qualities, is another artist whose creativity is, in my opinion, fueled by the abundance of the heart, even when it contains extreme negativity against the male of the species. Certainly even her endless assaults upon her character of Ataru Moroboshi argue that she was in part using him as a punching-bag in retaliation for male offensiveness of one kind or another. 

Sheer expressivity, of course, is worthless by itself; it has to mediated by excellence in what I've termed the four potentialities in order to communicate anything. But contrary to the Matthew citation, both good and evil things can be spoken by real human beings, who in every culture are ruled by disparate notions of good and evil-- and this is why art is often better when it too reflects an inextricable mixture of good and evil.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE INFERIORS" (WEIRD SCIENCE FANTASY #28, 1955)

Possibly the most iconic story to spring from EC's science fiction line was the 1953 "Judgment Day." "Day" was one of publisher Gaines' many "social message" stories, and has remained celebrated today, partly because of the behind-the-scenes drama about publisher Gaines's conflicts with the Code regarding the story. However, though Joe Orlando's art is impressive, Al Feldstein's script is a routine allegory about race-relations, using two differently-hued robots to perpetuate the conflicts of Earth ethnicities.

I've been surprised, however, to see very little online criticism of "The Inferiors," a Feldstein-Wally Wood story which conveys a similar club-the-reader-over-the-head message, yet actually grounds the morality in a deeper level of symbolism.

On the first page, the story's title seems to apply to a mysterious race of vanished aliens. Exploratory forces from planet Earth have found the ruins of the unnamed aliens' culture on many planets, but there remain no clues as to why these beings committed what one authority calls "race suicide." 

Functionally there are only two characters in the story: "spit-and-polish" young lieutenant Robert Saunders and his unnamed captain, whose baldness connotes greater age and experience. Both serve on a spaceship that has discovered another Earth-type world, but the monotony of the frequent discoveries causes one low-ranking space-navy soldier to remark, "Who cares why a bunch of hairy goons with tails committed suicide, anyway?" Lt. Saunders upbraids the underling, but in his conversation with his commander, it's evident that Saunders shares the opinion that the scientific advancement of the "hairy goons" doesn't matter, for they clearly were cowards who couldn't face life's demands, as Earth-people can. The captain is not quite as sure about things as his junior officer, and even admits to a little fear himself, when their expedition comes across one edifice that seems undamaged by the forces unleashed by the mass suicides.

Since "Inferiors" is only an eight-page story, it will surprise no reader to find that the Earthmen uncover the answer to their mystery on this planet, thanks to a recording in the form of a "three dimensional projection," wherein one of the aliens gives a lecture about the fate his people plan to undergo. Thanks to the use of an "automatic translator," the humans can listen to one of the "hairy goons" explain things-- though the captain first listens to the recording alone.

Later, having built the requisite suspense, the captain allows Saunders to hear the translated recording as well. Saunders, a confirmed xenophone, remarks on how "nauseating" the image of the alien is, though Wood draws it as a bipedal lizard-creature with a tail and none of the hair Feldstein's script specifies. Saunders also can't help expressing contempt once again for the aliens' cowardice: "and these are the things some people thought were superior to man!"

Naturally, this being an EC story, "Inferiors" has a "gotcha" ending. The recording reveals that the widespread lizard-people, having endured in peace for centuries, suddenly became aware that some of their people were using violence against one another. The aliens concluded that their race has evolved as much as was possible, and that now it is doomed to devolving into mere beasts. Almost all of the aliens choose mass suicide through the use of their advanced technology, except for a small contingent of creatures who don't care about their "moral decay," wanting only to live at all costs. The aliens use brain-draining machines to erase the mentalities of the decayed lizard-people, and allow them to survive as "brainless hulks" on an obscure planet. Saunders continues to heap scorn on the "hairy goons" until the alien lecturer just happens to add a warning to any listeners: showing what they think their decayed relations will turn out like. Surprise, surprise, the hairy goons with tails are the fathers of Man.

Like "Judgment Day," "The Inferiors" is all about shattering any illusions the readership may have about the innate superiority of their culture. However, even though the "Inferiors" ending was hoary even back in the 1950s-- "And the name of the planet was EARTH!"-- Feldstein's story is grounded in the twentieth century's intellectual debates over evolution. Since the Earthmen never say anything about their own evolution from lower creatures, the broad implication is that a terminally upright type like Saunders sees his entire race as having been given the Keys to Creation from the get-go, which approximates the position of the religonists who viewed human beings as separate from Darwin's apes. Or perhaps one should say "monkeys," since Darwin's theory was so often parodied by association not with the tail-less apes, but with the various tailed species of monkeys-- hence, the "Scopes Monkey Trial," not "Ape Trial." Artist Wally Wood didn't really translate Feldstein's scripted image of the Great Wise Race as "hairy goons with tails," but this is probably fortunate, since making them look in any way like primates would have given the game away too early. By using reptilian aliens, Wood and Feldstein also conjure, however briefly, with the associations of serpents and wisdom. This proves more than a little appropriate to the story, which rewrites the Garden of Eden, the foundation of man's special destiny, into a bucolic forest where a bunch of brainless, bipedal rejects got dumped.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 2

I should first note that my statements about the *dynamis* appropriate to each of the 'four ages of man," as mentioned in Part 1, does not imply anything regarding the amount of actual power any given character within a mythos can display. In GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PT. 3 I cited examples of protagonists in four features, each of which represented one of the four Fryean mythoi, noting that all of them were roughly comparable in terms of their power, even though each of the four-- Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Ranma Saotome, and Doctor Manhattan-- was conceived to obey a very different "power-of-action." Later, in BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER, I referenced this foursome again, but decided to change the representative of irony into "Marshal Law," simply because Doctor Manhattan was just one starring character in the graphic novel WATCHMEN.


My discussion of "the four ages" in Part 1, though, makes me realize that in both arguments, I subconsciously chose at least three protagonists who were in the "summer" portions of their lives, even though only one, Buffy Summers, belonged to the mythos appropriate to summer. Harry and Ranma are, like Buffy, both within the same "summer" range, going from late teen years through the twenties. Only the two protagonists I chose for the irony-representative-- first Manhattan and then Marshal Law-- suggest something more of the protagonist who is tending toward the "autumn" of middle age.

So, just as a mental exercise, I decided to look through some of the combative ironies I'd analyzed, to see if any of them even starred characters in their "summer" years. And here's the closest I've found to a "combative irony" hero in his summer-years, pictured in a particularly doleful sketch by creator Wally Wood.

I've discussed Wood's Wizard KIng "duology" in two essays, as well as devoting a separate essay to the reasons I determined the story of Odkin to be an irony-story rather than an adventure-tale. Odkin, though an extremely reluctant hero, proves himself capable of cutting goblin-throats--

Or contending with giant insects.

To be sure, since Odkin's people "the Immi" are said to be capable of living to age 300, it's hard to say what age he is. Further, Wood undercuts the reader's Tolkien-esque expectations by making the Immi, unlike Tolkien's hobbits, to be so sexually active that Odkin's father is also his brother. This detail, which is disclosed early in the first volume of the duology, aptly communicates the tendency of the irony-mythos to depict a world dominated by irrational laws. Since our own world is governed by laws that many persons consider rational-- include proscrptions against incest-- the world that Odkin regards as normative must perforce seem somewhat out of whack.

Having established four summer-age protagonists for the four mythoi, my next inquiry leads me back to the exemplary actions formulated by Theodore Gaster for his four types of religious ritual. In Part One, I boiled these actions down to:

COMEDY-- the presentation of incongruity
ADVENTURE-- the presentation of combat
DRAMA-- the presentation of a scapegoat's explusion
IRONY-- the presentation of communal mortification

Ranma Saotome adheres strongly to the first exemplary action, given that he's a male character who's constantly humiliated after being cursed to transform into a girl when struck with cold water.

Buffy Summers, as discussed in greater detail, is focused primarily on acts of combat, encoded in her nickname of "vampire slayer."

For Harry Potter, his entire status as "the Boy Who Lived" suggests a death averted. His creator pursues this theme to the final book, DEATHLY HALLOWS, with many suggestions that Harry may meet his doom, much in the manner of the scapegoat who perishes to avert evil from the community. Harry seems to accept his doom with lamb-like equanimity, but other forces save him and death takes his enemy instead.

Odkin seems a bit like a scapegoat as well, since early on he's expelled from his community by a drawing of the shortest straw. However, the longer that the Immi-- who is a tricky type by nature-- travels in the greater culture, the more he's besieged by deceptions greater than any he can muster. Granted, the elf-like protagonist is too pragmatic to indulge in the sort of histrionics Gaster finds characteristic of the mortificative mood; actions like fasting and lamentation. Nevertheless, Odkin, unlike Harry Potter, really does die, and he only survives the remainder of his narrative because his wizard friend Alcazar creates a duplicate of him, telling the second Odkin "in a sense you are your own father and mother." Following the defeat of the evil enemy, Odkin's final words in the duology are the ironic pronouncement, "It is living that can kill you." This may be the closest Odkin can come to voicing a lament of the world's fundamental corruption.

MYTHCOMICS: PIPSQUEAK PAPERS (1967-68)

Wally Wood's PIPSQUEAK PAPERS, first serialized in Wood's WITZEND magazine and reprinted in one issue by Eros Comics in 1993, is an ironic fantasy akin to his later WIZARD KING duology, reviewed here and here. In keeping with its name, PIPSQUEAK occupies a much smaller tapestry, for the story is only twelve pages long, originally set forth in three installments, respectively four, three, and five pages long. However, the story's conciseness enables Wood to explore his psychological concerns with unusual acuity.

Without delving into Wood's biographical background, it's sufficient to state that the artist, despite showing a unique facility for drawing glamorous women, often chose to focus on the shadow side of femininity. In the hands of a lesser artist, this would have boiled down to incoherent misogyny (or, in the case of a female artist, misandry). But Wood takes the simple trope of "how men and women repeatedly screw each other, and not in the good way" and gives the bare trope the power of an obsessive sexual mythology.

The story's first panel introduces its representation of feminine nature: the perpetually nude nymph Nudina, as she awakens one morning from the heart of a flower. Wood's captions specify that as she gambols about her fantasy-forest, she has the habit of posing an "eternal question" to anyone she meets: "Are you a man?" The reader has no idea how many times she's done this, or for what purpose, though later Wood grounds her repetitive guilelessness in the fact that Nudina's virginity renews itself every morning, no matter what's happened to her in the past. In any case, the reader first sees Nudina address the question to an unmoving humanoid sitting on a rock. He doesn't respond, for reasons that are explained later.

However, Nudina has a constant admirer who has apparently professed love to her many times before, a sprite named Pip. Nudina claims that she loves him as well, but she won't join with him because he looks like a "baby man," and just isn't developed enough to satisfy her. A few panels later Nudina's "love" is called into question, for Pip tells her that "my heart is yours." Being literal-minded, the nymph tells her suitor to send the object in question to her, and when a messenger brings a heart to Nudina's corner of the forest, she shows herself to be more voracious than virginal by cooking the heart and eating it.

Immediately afterward, a demonic fellow called "Llewd" approaches Nudina, and takes her "are you a man" question as an invitation. Pip-- who didn't really send the nymph his heart, just that of a slain animal-- attacks Llewd and gets kicked to the forest-curb for it. The sprite wanders away, and bumps into the same immobile humanoid Nudina saw before. Pip figures out that it's an artificial humanoid, whose skull is open so that its maker can put in a proper brain. Pip is small enough to crawl into the android's head and take control of it, much to the annoyance of Smug, the scientist who made the artificial man, and who can't stop Pip from making off with it. Pip uses his new body to trounce Llewd, at which point the "innocent" Nudina demands that her rescuer cut off the would-be rapist's head. Llewd takes a powder and Nudina surrenders herself to her rescuer-- the implication being that somehow, Pip is able to merge his equipment and the humanoid's to good effect.

Smug, however, retaliates by summoning a giant monster, instructed to find Pip and recover the artificial man. Meanwhile Nudina, despite having Pip around, manages to lead on at least two more forest-denizens, whom Pip again has to trounce, so that he begins to suspect that she's getting herself molested on purpose.

Then Nudina finds out that Pip is inside the body of her current boyfriend. The caption tells readers that she's secretly pleased to find out that the "baby man" who loves her is her indirect lover, but this may be because it gives her an excuse to become more demanding. Pip briefly finds surcease by appealing to her vanity, devising a literal pedestal and putting her on top of it to be admired. This doesn't last long, but Pip's problems get worse when he briefly leaves the humanoid and promptly loses it. The giant monster shows up, demanding to reclaim Smug's property. Pip cravenly saves himself by convincing the creature that Nudina is the humanoid Smug wants. Despite Nudina's protests that she's going to bear Pip's baby, the sprite watches while the monster carried off Nudina, and then goes home to bed.

Jaded Pip, however, can't completely forget his early, more innocent love. He begins to experience twinges of pain, and a forest-physician tells Pip that his "little heart is breaking." The sprite goes looking for the missing android, in order to trade it for Nudina, currently in the custody of Smug and being forced to clean the scientist's cave for him.

Pip's quest is promptly interrupted by a female sprite, Lascivia, who has no problems with the size of Pip's equipment. Then Pip has pain-twinges again, and resumes his quest, although Lascivia disputes the doctor's opinion, claiming that "we sprites have no emotions." Finally Pip re-acquires the android, and takes it back to Smug. Pip considers beating up the scientist and absconding with both Nudina and the android, but Smug has too many monsters backing him up.

However, feminine desire is once more a problem even when Pip and Nudina are free, for he realizes he can't satisfy her without the android. He tries to steal it, but Smug is too clever. The scientist captures Pip and recaptures Nudina, keeping them prisoner in his cave to use as drudges. Thus Pip not only loses his freedom, he must share his quarters with a woman he loves but can't satisfy, who is more demanding than ever in her pregnancy. Further, when her birth-pangs begin, Pip's pains return in what seems like the ritual of couvade. Then Nudina has her child, and Pip tries one last time to distance himself by wondering if he's really the father. Nudina shows him that the newborn is exactly identical to Pip-- he can even walk like Pip after being born-- and so Pip can't even be unique in his misery.

If this story had a moral, it would read something like, "Don't trust women; they're just endless chasms demanding sacrifices to their egos or their desires." It's a banal moral, and presumably there are one or two hetero women somewhere who might hold similar opinions regarding men. Still, I'm not sure there's a female author who has expressed her animus with as much ingenuity as Wally Wood.

MYTHCOMICS: 'MY WORD" (BIG APPLE COMIX, 1975)

Last month Flo Steinberg passed away, and as I read the obits, I was surprised to learn that she'd had a very brief career in underground publishing once she left her job with Marvel. For over twenty years I'd owned a copy of her one-shot, BIG APPLE COMIX, and I was more than a little familiar with all of the artist-contributors, such as Neal Adams, Archie Goodwin, and Wally Wood. However, I'd never troubled to look at the magazine's indicia, where Steinberg's name was clearly displayed.

I've not come across any online recollections as to how the project came about, but it's likely that it was done by a bunch of artists who knew one another. The idea shows a "let's put on a show" mentality, as opposed to the demands of working for the Big Two. Steinberg, who had observed Marvel's production methods during her tenure at the company, possibly volunteered her services in that regard, with added help from both Linda Fite and John Verpoorten.

BIG APPLE was, even by 1975 standards, not an especially marketable idea, given that all of its contributions shared one  theme: life in New York City, "the Big Apple." The stories in BIG APPLE run the gamut of underground humor from farce to satire, but only one tale, Wally Wood's "My Word," uses layered symbolic imagery to create a demonic vision of the city. In addition, the three-page story recapitulates. in ironic form, some of the visual setups found in a longer Wood presentation, "My World," published in WEIRD SCIENCE #22 (1953). Scripted by Al Feldstein, the earlier sequence was not really a story as such, but more of an adoring meditation on the wonder-inducing tropes of science fiction. On the last page, the narrator speaks of his world as being "what I choose to make it," and in the last panel he reveals himself to be Wood poised over his drawing-board, identifying himself as "a science fiction artist."

"My Word," however, depicts a world over which the artist has no control, except in the sense that he can exaggerate the already dire reputation of New York City in the 1970s. In the far left of the splash panel, for example, one sees not only a demented version of Batman's villain The Penguin exposing himself to a little girl, while the Shadow stands to one side, apparently willing to let the Penguin do as he wants since the two of them belong to the Cyrano de Bergerac "huge schnozz" club.

But "My Word" is more than a few MAD-style in-jokes; it's a vision of a "sin city" in which sin has lost its ability to titillate. Wood calls New York many things-- "Bagdad on the Hudson," "Sodom on the Gomorrah,"  and "sin capital of the Western world." But by the third panel one of his character's remarks-- playing on the opening of the 1960-63 teleseries THE NAKED CITY-- that "there are ten million stories in the Naked City, and they're all BORING." The artist follows this up with a parody of the religious homily "where there is creation, there must be a creator" by attributing the thought to a pile of dogshit, recently "created" by a passing canine.

For the remainder of the piece, nameless characters are seen gratifying themselves in one way or another, always with the implication that sexual congress is barely distinguishable from any other form of mundane activity. Page two shows a couple locked in copulation, but the woman's also reading a book while the man's reading his newspaper.

"You must love yourself before you can love anyone else, but how many people really can?" This pessimistic appraisal is immediately followed by the old joke about the guy trying to give himself oral sex, but even in the context of satire, the narrator's line suggests that he finds himself not much less tedious than the quotidian nature of New York City, where getting mugged is the most exciting experience one can have. Most fascinating is the image in the fifth panel of Page 3:

Here, amid many other images of soul-dead sex, Wood gives the reader the ultimate recursive fantasy: a bird-like humanoid laying an egg which the creature drops into its own mouth, presumably to be devoured. (Despite this and a couple of other fantasy-images, the dominant phenomenality of the vignette is naturalistic in tone.) The main point of burlesquing the "My World" vignette seems to provide a reversal of the earlier work's boundless enthusiasm for wonder-producing tropes, one in which both professional comics-artists and their fans have no more immunity to the soul-killing influence of modern life than any other modern-day persons, whether they reside in New York City or not.

I mentioned that this is a vignette, but it does, like the examples of short mythcomics covered here and here, possess a clear progression of ideas that roughly parallel a normal-length story's "beginning, middle, and end." And of course, it is an irony in terms of its mythos, one far more acidulous than Wood's ambivalent KING OF THE WORLD.

FANTASIES OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

In my review of Wally Wood's THE KING OF THE WORLD, I had to give some thought as to what Fryean mythos it fit. I alluded to the differences between Wood's work and the work of Tolkien, whose Middle-Earth tales had some degree of influence upon KING.

Tolkien's good characters are largely good all-through, except when unduly influenced by the corruption of the One Ring. But not only is Odkin a natural born deceiver himself, he clearly lives in a world where deceit lurks around every corner. This aligns KING OF THE WORLD with Frye's concept of the "irony-mythos," which I'll discuss in a separate essay.

When Northrop Frye used the term "irony" as a category for a type of storytelling, he was of course aware that the word originally connoted a sort of intentional deceit, as per Merriam-Webster; "the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really think especially in order to be funny."

But the nature of irony is elusive, and is often confused with comedy. I've discussed the difference in various essays and won't repeat it here. But it's far more rare to see the "mortificative" effects of the irony-mythos strongly associated with the "invigorating" effects of the adventure-mythos. The majority of ironic jests at the expense of heroes and heroic fantasy are usually too emotionally distanced to allow for invigoration, a pattern seen in such films as 1967's FEARLESS FRANK and 2013's THE LONE RANGER. In my essay SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE I noted the opposed dynamic of the two mythoi:

...the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."

And yet, though I hold to the belief that every coherent story is dominated by one myth-radical, it's not impossible to juggle the fundamental appeals of two or more mythoi so that they *seem* almost inextricable-- one prominent example being the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries. In A WHIFF OF BAT-IRONY  I wrote:

It's often been observed that the teleseries-producers pursued a two-tier approach with BATMAN.  They knew that children and some adolescents would take the adventure-elements seriously, while the adults would be entertained by the ironic distancing conveyed by the dialogue and some of the more overtly absurd situations (e.g., Batgirl almost fails to rescue Batman and Robin from a death-trap because she's careful to obey local traffic laws).  Yet, because of the two-tiered approach, Dozier and Co. couldn't avoid validating-- rather than subverting-- the most representative element of the adventure-genre: the *agon*, the fight-scene in which good wins out over evil.

My initial difficulties in determining the myth-radical of KING OF THE WORLD may have stemmed from the fact that Wood also pursued something of a two-tier approach. As I stated in the review, Wood's original idea for his fantasy was formed in his childhood, and so the adult Wood surely wanted to call to mind his youthful, "innocent" love of fantasy-tropes in the course of KING. Thus KING shows invigorative elements as the young, somewhat cynical hero encounters simple wonders like an eye in the door of Alcazar's sanctum--

Or when Odkin finds himself caught up in the fury of large-scale battles, as if he had wandered into the world of Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT (reputedly one of Wood's early loves).

But note that even on the page depicting pitched battle, there's an element of deceitfulness that would have been foreign to Foster's classical-art approach. Odkin's people "the Immi" ally themselves to human soldiers against the Un-Men, and they battle with a "two-tiered approach," the Immi striking low while the soldiers strike high. The page even ends with the main character appearing to flee the battle. As it turns out, Odkin has fled to enlist the help of the giants called "the Earthmen," which became the cover-image of the original release.

But despite all these moments of exciting adventure, the reader loses some conviction in the significance of the victory for assorted reasons-- the main one being the final page, wherein Odkin realizes that the sword's influence is making him uncharacteristically heroic. He tries, and fails, to fling the sword away, and so the installment ends with the picture of him being obliged to pursue the role of stalwart hero.

There's nothing comparable to this will-lessness in William Dozier's BATMAN. Dozier's hero may be corny and square as hell, but no one forces him to dress up in a bat-suit. Dozier mocked a lot of the heroic fantasies associated with superheroes, but as I said above, the *agon,* the fight-scene, still carries its invigorating charge, even with the POWs and BAMs inserted-- largely because Dozier guessed that the younger part of his audience would not accept Batman being turned into a comic stumblebum.

In contrast, Wood's long association with the fantasy-genre gave him an almost peerless ability to conjure forth spectacles of exciting, enthralling strangeness. However, perhaps because the domain of comic books was a cutthroat business, or perhaps because he gained signal fame through his association with EC Comics, Wood chose to undercut the fantasies of heroism with Odkin-- whose wits and survival skills become the tools of a manipulative, if benign, controller.

What's interesting is that while Dozier's creative choices may have been informed by his reading of television audiences, Wood was seeking to create an audience for his own work. He could have done a "fantasy of innocence" that was barely influenced by the "fantasies of experience:" a work fully in the tradition of Tolkien, if not Foster. Yet KING OF THE WORLD, when read attentively, is a deeply ironic narrative that would seem to reflect Wood's own acerbic personality, at least far more than a straight Tolkien knock-off would have.

NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN SON OF ODKIN (1981)

To elaborate on his definition of mythical thought, Levi-Strauss drew an analogy to "bricolage": "Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual 'bricolage'" (p. 17). The French verb, "bricoler," has no English equivalent, but refers to the kind of activities that are performed by a handy-man. The "bricoleur" performs his tasks with materials and tools that are at hand, from "odds and ends." He draws from the already existent while the engineer or scientist, according to Levi-Strauss, seeks to exceed the boundaries imposed by society. "The scientist creating events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events" (p. 22).-- Janine Mileaf.

As I said in my previous essay, Wally Wood's second installment of his "Wizard King" concept-- completed at a time when Wood was seriously ill, with considerable fill-in work from his assistants-- was by no means as successful as 1978's THE KING OF THE WORLD.

For my purposes, though, ODKIN is the perfect illustration of the virtues of the "near-myth." Levi-Strauss' view of the process of "bricolage"-- which other sources compare to the idea of a "brick-layer"-- was articulated only with regard to "mythical thought," but in truth it compares to any creative thought, and therefore to the whole of literature. When Aristotle perceives the genesis of the great tragedies in the ritual dramas of the so-called "goat songs," he affirms that simple components can be used to construct larger, more ambitious structures.

Wood, who never found a long-term hospitable berth at any comics company, paid most of his bills by taking on diverse assignments. This may have inclined him to a sort of "handyman" approach to his art. KING OF THE WORLD shows Wood extending himself to emulate the classical rigor of Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT, but even in KING there are some rambling, episodic sequences, and a few concepts that don't fit the faux-medieval fantasy-world (more on which shortly). ODKIN, however, really is a work of "odds and ends," comprised of three chapters that have no more rigor than a "Dungeons and Dragons" scenario. In fact, the first chapter-- which barely relates to the other two chapters-- is titled "Table Top Land," and is named for a miniature table-game that a wizard uses against his enemies.

The latter chapters explain the meaning of the title, for Odkin literally dies in chapter two, and is resurrected in chapter three through the technological magic of the wizard Alcazar. So the second Odkin is "odd kin" indeed: Alcazar tells Second Odkin: "in a sense you are your own father and mother." In KING Wood flirted with incest-tropes by claiming that Odkin and his father shared the same mother. In addition, the lost King Atlan was preserved from death in the same way as Odkin: whenever the evil Anark managed to slay the King, the monarch simply came to life in another identical body, also implicitly the creation of Alcazar. This element was the only time I felt one of Wood's "bricks" had been badly laid, for the idea of extra bodies seems purely science-fictional, and was an idea he recycled from the "Noman" feature in 1965's THUNDER AGENTS.

In addition, the big conclusion of Odkin's quest lacks the dramatic heft that Wood set up in the first book. Odkin has been manipulated, albeit out of necessity, into infiltrating the crypt in which Atlan has been placed in an eternal sleep, much like a medieval Arthur waiting for rebirth. However, the only way Odkin can free Atlan is to chop off the head of his sleeping body, so that Atlan's spirit will re-incarnate in one of the bodies controlled by Alcazar. Since Odkin is under the wizard's control when he does the deed, this removes any potential drama from the situation-- and even First Odkin's subsequent death lacks much in the way of pathos. Later, Second Odkin must return to the site of the first one's death, in order to reclaim the magical Sword of Atlan, much as Noman often had to seek out one of his dead android bodies in order to reclaim the irreplaceable invisibility cloak.  Odkin beholds his own dead body-- but Wood can only give the scene a strange detachment. Then the story moves move on to a short-term quest, sending Odkin after a mystic jewel that's been stolen by a dragon, which seems to be little more than an unsatisfying analogue to Bilbo Baggins' encounter with Smaug. Wood also tosses out the names of two opposed gods, "IAM" and "AMNOT," but though these sound like principles of affirmation and negation, Wood refuses to invest any attention to the metaphysical symbolism he himself suggests.

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.