SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

 ...just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”-- STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS.

I wrote COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE partly because I knew I was about to re-screen and evaluate the Zach Snyder WATCHMEN after having re-read the Moore-Gibbons source novel. I wanted to forge a methodology regarding how an adaptation of a work generates its own "molecular assemblages" in response to those of the original work. 

I imagine that other narratologists have made the same attempt, at least amid the capacious ranks of film theorists. But as I've commented elsewhere on this blog, many modern analysts tend to speak of the meaning of the work in purely intellectual terms, because educational systems taught many if not all of them to use an intellectual approach in assessing what I term "vertical values." I've followed Jung in separating these values into a didactic potentiality, which is focused on proving a work-oriented theoretical point, and a mythopoeic potentiality, which allows a playful flow between symbolic representations, just to see what comes of their interactions. 

In FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, I put forth three works that contrasted in terms of those potentialities-- one wherein the didactic was functionally the only value, one wherein the mythopoeic was the only value, and one in which the didactic and mythopoeic intertwined. But even in the last of the three, I stressed that in "Origin of the Silver Surfer" the mythopoeic potentiality predominated over the didactic one:

 So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

I addressed a similar dichotomy in my 2015 review of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I started out saying--

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

 In my conclusion I admitted that WATCHMEN possessed strong didactic tendencies--

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. 

But I also concluded that WATCHMEN was dominated by a multi-level symbolic discourse, exemplified in part by Moore's use of syzygy-patterns throughout the art and text. So, even though Alan Moore would abominate any work of his being placed on the same level as a Stan Lee work, WATCHMEN and the Surfer origin are both excellent works dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality.

Now, in the first part of COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE, I gave an example of a secondary work that adapted a mythopoeically complex primary work. I allowed that Rider Haggard's novel SHE was of such complexity that no feature film of standard length could adapt Haggard's interwoven tropes. All adaptations of SHE have to compress the novel into a cinematic narrative, but the 1925 movie was able to choose a "molecular assemblage" from the novel that conveyed at least some of the symbolic discourse of Haggard.

Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN probably intended to do so with respect to the original graphic novel. However, most of Snyder's renderings of Moore's symbolic representations, be they syzygies or other abstractions, are extremely mediocre. So I ended up grading the movie as only "fair" in mythicity because I felt that it ended up stressing all the didactic and political tropes from Moore's script, all of which boil down to "Nasty Conservatives Ruin Everything For All Humanity." This may be why Snyder adumbrates Rorschach's origin story. I mentioned in the review that Moore's portrait of Rorschach is a mixed one, but the one in the WATCHMEN movie is not. Snyder captures none of the Nietzschean ambiguities of the chapter "The Abyss Gazes Also," which might disprove the view of at least one critic who judged Snyder a disciple of Nietzsche.

So in my view Snyder did the exact opposite in his WATCHMEN adaptation than did the writer (and maybe the two directors) of the 1925 SHE. When Snyder compressed the WATCHMEN graphic novel, he gave prominence to all the didactic narrative tropes, minimizing whatever the presence of the mythopoeic ones. The closest he got to myth was in his reworking of the story's conclusion, in that Snyder jettisoned Moore's "alien menace" concept and made Doctor Manhattan the great enemy against whom the world unites. But there weren't enough reinforcing tropes to give that myth-kernel any deep resonance, and so the WATCHMEN movie feels as preachy as one of the preachier Moore stories. 

Now, all of the above assumes the situation that the primary work is superior in some discourse to the adaptation. The opposite is also possible. But that would require further discussion in a separate essay.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2

In Part 1, I emphasized that when I spoke of my newly christened category of "interordination," I conceived it to be a subset of all those narrative strategies that Julie Kristaeva designated as "intertextuality," stating at the essay's conclusion: 

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

Upon exploring even the basic Wiki writeup of intertextuality, I find that other critics have attempted to make distinctions between different forms of the concept:

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts

The term "typological" has some appeal to me because in INTERORDINATION PT. 1, I devoted particular attention to the example of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN as comprising several forms of intertextuality, none of which relate to the subcategory of interordination as I've conceived it. But even "typological" needs some finessing. What is Alan Moore doing when he bases his WATCHMEN-heroes upon the Charlton heroes? He is *emulating* certain *tropes* that he observed in the earlier stories of the heroes, after which he then crossbreeds those tropes with other tropes. Of course, all of these were borrowed from other sources as well.

In fact, all literature as we have it now is founded in "trope emulation." From caveman times on, one author puts forth an icon of some sort (not necessarily an original one) that his auditors find pleasing, so the next author tries to emulate something about the icon in order to enjoy similar popularity. In Classical times, one can observe this process in Athens' belated attempts to formulate a city-hero, their Theseus, in loose emulation of Thebes' protector Herakles.

Now, going back to Wiki: what does the essay's author mean by "referential intertextuality?" Without going into this too much, the basic contrast is that this form directly borrows from passages in earlier works. Though this concept is not a direct parallel to my line of thought, it's close enough to suggest a contrast to "trope emulation," and that is "icon emulation." In the latter formulation, a derivative author does not choose to create a new character, but attempts to tell a new story with an old character. To be sure, "newness" is difficult to ascertain with archaic figures, given that it's impossible to be 100% sure when a given Herakles story originated. At best, archaeology can tell us the earliest known record of a given story. However, we can be relatively sure that even the earliest Herakles stories were not all devised by one writer, but by innumerable authors-- some of whose stories may have simply fallen off the cultural map. 

Returning to the importance of names outlined in I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, Moore took all of the tropes he borrowed from Steve Ditko's hero The Question, plus all those he took from other sources, and thus forged a new character, Rorschach. No matter how many fan-readers know about the influence of The Question, the name of Rorschach keeps him distinct from the Ditko character, far more than any of the formal differences between the characters.

Such formal differences are of lesser importance because in many cases an author utilizing "icon emulation" may deviate from the original model just as much as does the one utilizing "trope emulation." 

Steve Ditko's character of The Question appeared in about half a dozen stories for Charlton Comics, and since these were produced under an implicit work-for-hire contract, the stories and the character both belonged to Charlton. When DC bought up all or most of the Charlton superheroes, DC then produced several new "icon emulation" variations on those characters-- and of these variants, none diverged quite as far from the original model as the 1987 Question first produced by writer Denny O"Neil and artist Denys Cowan. Ditko supplied nearly no character traits or back history for "Vic Sage," the secret identity of his crusader, and only a very marginal rationale for the hero's blank-masked appearance, since Ditko was principally concerned with using the hero as a spokesman for philosophical belief. O'Neil not only paid zero attention to any of the philosophies exposed by the Ditko character, he formulated a detailed back history for Sage-- even to the extent of stating that his name was a revision of an Eastern European cognomen-- and gave the New Question all sorts of "film noir" adventures in which the nature of good and evil was never as distinct as it was in Ditko.

Yet, by keeping the name of the character and a few choice bits of his mythology, O'Neil's Question is an icon derived from an icon, rather than being an icon created from some of the tropes that constituted the original icon.

It's because of this "crypto-continuity," as I dubbed it earlier, that it's possible to view derivative icons as being coterminous with their original models. Thus, despite all the dissimilarities between the Kong of the 1933 film and the Kong who fights Godzilla, the two Kongs are coterminous because the second icon was grounded in the identity of the first one. The same applies to all of the various icons based on non-fictional originals like Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper. I've pointed out that such characters are based on what I term "innominate texts," meaning that the models are not purely fictional, but there's still a icon-to-icon derivation, rather than a trope-to-icon derivation.

In closing, I devoted some space in I THINK ICON to the fact that "icons" included countless entities that are not characters as such, but only cited a couple of examples. Another noteworthy example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' land of Pellucidar, an environment characterized by its assorted flora and fauna as well as its unique location at the center of the Earth. In the formal "Earth's Core" series, the entire environment of Pellucidar is simply a subordinate icon to whatever hero is the star of the story. However, in 1929 Burroughs produced his most distinctive crossover of two franchises, by having Tarzan, superordinate icon of his own series, have adventures within the environment of Pellucidar. Because Pellucidar is not normally aligned to Tarzan's adventures, this interaction rates as a "charisma-crossover."

ADDENDUM: Since I've previously made some remarks on spoof-versions of established figures, the sort I'm now calling "icons," I feel I should expand on these remarks. Spoofs are for the most part "trope emulations" because the artists simply borrow tropes from the originals, frequently (though not always) distancing the spoof-characters from the originals with goofy names like "Batboy and Rubin." But it's possible for an author to produce an "icon emulation" that is loosely coterminous with the original, even if said author decides to alter the myth-radical that dominates the established icon. Such icons as Superman, Modesty Blaise, and The Lone Ranger all belong to the mythos of adventure. However, the filmed stage play of SUPERMAN-- THE MUSICAL is a full icon emulation of Superman, but in the mode of comedy, while both Modesty Blaise and The Lone Ranger got redone into modes of irony for the big screen.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION

Now that I've set down some thoughts as to the emotional appeal of crossovers in THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING, I want to veer back to justifying that appeal in terms of what it means in  a philosophical sense to associate characters who stem from different textual "universes."

I gave some consideration to the literary concept of "intertextuality," as it was coined by Julie Kristeva in 1966 and as it's been used in numerous literary essays since, including not a few on the comics medium. Here's one of many examples of how the term has been used.

However, while the crossover-phenomenon probably should be seen as a subset of the entirety of things that can be intertextual, the term itself is too general to describe the specific phenomenon.

For instance, without even looking I'm sure that one can find numerous comments about the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons WATCHMEN being "intertextual." And such assertions would be accurate. WATCHMEN quotes instances from real-world history, from poorly understood philosophical concepts (seen in Moore's mangling of Friedrich Nietzsche), and of course, from previous comic book characters. The ensemble of heroes in WATCHMEN were famously modeled upon characters originally published by Charlton Comics, whose "universe" DC Comics had just purchased. Moore considered basing his team of heroes upon the Charlton crusaders, but instead ended up simply using the earlier characters as models for new characters.

Is this intertextual? Yes, but it has nothing to do with crossovers. Crossovers may rework established characters so drastically that their readers barely recognize them, as per my frequent example of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA. But there's always some assertion of identity between the old and the new-- and there's nothing of the kind in WATCHMEN.

What I needed was something in line with my definition of narrative in, well, THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

This meditation led me to a term that suits my needs better than intertextuality, and depends solely upon the concept of "ordination."

interordination noun

—(linguistics) A reciprocal relationship between two terms

Within my system, what this definition calls "two terms" can be expanded into "two or more presences within a narrative nexus," whether those presences are superordinate or subordinate. What I've called "stature-crossovers" concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more superordinate characters from different cosmologies. "Charisma-crossovers," in contrast, concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more subordinate characters, or between at least one superordinate character and one subordinate character from another cosmology. (Just to get away from using superhero-supervillain charisma-crossovers, I'll note that the same phenomenon appears when two supporting-characters within a cosmology forge a "reciprocal relationship," such as we see when the main stars of URUSEI YATSURA take a back seat to watching two members of their support-cast, Benten and Ryunosuke, butt heads.

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

MYTHCOMICS: FANTASTIC FOUR 1234 (2001)

Now that I've responded to Grant Morrison's remarks re: his 2001 FANTASTIC FOUR project, a reader might reasonably ask, "So, how much incest is in 1234?"

And I would answer, "If Grant Morrison hadn't referenced Freudian concepts in his interview, I for one probably wouldn't even have noticed that his evocation of that particular social transgression."

There have been a handful of of comics-serials in which the schemas of Freud are integral to the plot, as is the case with the 1987 MARSHAL LAW mini-series, and there are some in which the transgression plays a strong but more minor role, as is the case with Alan Moore's WATCHMEN. In 1234 the incest-transgression is more of a leitmotif.

Did something change between the time of Morrison's interview and the finished work? Did Marvel not want their fantastic franchise sullied, the way DC chose not to commission Alan Moore's 1987 TWILIGHT OF THE SUPERHEROES?

Probably not. At some point in his career Morrison began emphasizing themes diametrically opposed to the "grim and gritty" approach of the 1980s, with its marked emphasis upon reducing superheroes to psychological formulations (as indeed both MARSHAL LAW and WATCHMEN do). Despite Morrison's reference to Freud, he seems less concerned with putting heroes and villains on the couch than on the chess-board.

1234 (which is, incidentally, four issues, each loosely focused upon one of the FF-members), involves a great tourney between Reed Richards and his arch-foe Doctor Doom. This time, to counter the other three members of Richards' fantastic family, Doom brings in three allies of his own. Two of the three-- the Mole Man and the Sub-Mariner-- are, like Doom, the first major super-villains faced by the heroic quartet. The third ally is named "the Prime Mover." Morrison is vague on details, but it's apparently an alien machine, though Jae Lee models the Mover's appearance after an earlier "Prime Mover," a chess-playing robot created by Doom and drawn by Jim Steranko in a 1968 issue of STRANGE TALES. The Prime Mover gives Doom the ability to manipulate certain aspects of reality to Doom's liking, though Morrison also isn't clear about what the machine can and can't do.

So subtle are Doom's initial chess-moves that Ben, Sue and Johnny have no idea that they've been drawn into a mammoth game, even though it seems like another boring day around the Baxter Building, in which everyone's getting on each other's nerves. The exception is Reed, who has closeted himself in one of his labs with a "do not disturb" sign, and his absence exacerbates the irritation of his partners, particularly that of his wife, who gets a little sick of her husband disappearing to hunt down abstruse theories.

The reader doesn't learn until the last issue that Reed's self-isolation is a response to Doom's game, even as the villain starts picking off his enemies one by one-- which involves bringing in the Sub-Mariner to seduce Sue in her moment of weakness and to consign Johnny (and the Thing's girlfriend Alicia) to the subterranean world of the Mole Man. (Despite the cover of the third issue, the Sub-Mariner and the Torch never square off in an outright battle.) As for the Thing, this seems to be where the Prime Mover's talents prove most useful, in that the monstrous hero is not only changed into his human alter ego, but also reduced to his twenties and deprived of one of his arms.

Morrison's basic plot is largely indistinguishable from many similar FANTASTIC FOUR plots, but naturally the author infuses the characters with a mature sensibility foreign to the original Lee-Kirby comics. Morrison doesn't really get to the heart of Ben Grimm, and his Torch is also somewhat under-developed, despite a suggestive scene in which he deliberately provokes his sister after hearing of the alleged activities of the Sub-Mariner. But the writer does give full play to Sue Richards' feminine discontents, her healthy desire for the masculinity of Prince Namor, without compromising the reality of her abiding love for her husband.

And then there's Mister Fantastic, the group's "head honcho," a leader who manages to be at once authoritarian and self-effacing at turns. I won't detail the ways in which Reed Richards defeats Doctor Doom's gambit, though it's interesting that Reed must in part reject a "rewriting" of reality in which Doom becomes a sort of "evil shadow" to the hero. And not surprisingly, the four characters come together in their time-honored manner, re-affirming their unity despite all of their quarrelsome differences.

So, if 1234 isn't really about the displacement of hidden erotic feelings, what is it about?

In his 1944 play NO EXIT, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote one of his most famous lines, "Hell is other people." Later Sartre claimed that he did not intend this to be a general principle; it was a specific judgment of the characters in the play. But for all the fractiousness of the Fantastic Four-- who initiated the trope of "quarreling superheroes"-- it's clear that in Morrison as in Lee and Kirby, "hell is no other people."

And this is the final fate of Doom in the mini-series, who suffers an ignominious scolding from Sue Richards, who calls him to his face a "stupid, lonely, ignorant man." This is simply a more adult reading of the essential conflict between Doom, the self-made tyrant, and his four enemies. In FF#17, Doom confesses to his mirror that "I have never fully understood other human beings," contrasting his obsessed status with the Thing's ability to find love with another individual. Here, Morrison focuses more upon Doom's inability to love, which lines up with his reductive, close-to-Freudian view of humanity:

All men, even the noblest, are driven by the same base impulses. The sweet smile of the peace activist hides his raging need to make war on the makers of war. Behind every "selfless" act, behind every act of so-called heroism, there lies the craving for validation and status in the eyes of others. Is it only the lessons of our experience that makes monsters of us, or saints?

Doom asks this question of his Prime Mover, and Doom believes that he already knows the answer, that he can change the noble natures of his foes by manipulating "experience itself." And when he's proven wrong, he remains alone in his Satanic solitude, unable to anneal his suffering through the consolation of other fellow humans.

ADDENDUM: I should add that at one point in the narrative, Morrison has Doom compare three members of his fantastic foes to characters in Shakespeare's TEMPEST: Reed is Prospero, Johnny is the spirited Ariel, and Ben is scheming Caliban. The comparison significantly leaves Sue out of the comparison, and maybe Morrison wanted readers to do the work of making the only feasible connection: Sue=Miranda, the daughter of Prospero. There are some intelligent arguments out there to the effect that Prospero, despite seeking to marry his daughter to Ferdinand, may have lusted after her in his heart, and that Caliban is a reflection of that lust. Given that Caliban desires Miranda and the Lee-Kirby desires Sue, this is a pretty sharp comparison, though casting Reed Richards as "father" to the Invisible Girl seems less in tune with Shakespeare than with its later spawn, like FORBIDDEN PLANET.

MYTHCOMICS: MARSHAL LAW; FEAR AND LOATHING (1987-88)

(Note: I'm using the graphic novel designation for the untitled six-part story as originally released by Epic Comics. I have not read any additional materials within the TPB collection.)

I've referenced the Pat Mills-Kevin O'Neill creation MARSHAL LAW in various essays, like this one, but this essay is the first one I've devoted to its status as a mythcomic.

It's nearly impossible to imagine this project having been published without the influence of the 1986 WATCHMEN. Like the Moore-Gibbons work, MARSHAL LAW conforms to the mythos of the irony, but the Mills/O'Neill approach to satirizing superheroes diverges from many of the Moore/Gibbons strategies.

For one thing, the WATCHMEN superheroes evolve in much the same way as normative American superheroes: assorted characters who possess independent origins.  The superheroes of the MARSHAL LAW world share the same origin, aligning them with the "one-gimme" rule propounded by prose science fiction-- which, so far as I can tell, seems to be a rule Pat Mills usually followed in the serials he wrote for British comics. Most if not all superheroes in the LAW world are created by the technology of the U.S. government in a near-future timescape, and all for the purpose of making "supersoldiers" to serve in foreign wars. Some of the super-types merely have enhanced strength or endurance, while others have more exotic super-powers, like flying or "pumping ions."

For another comparison, whereas WATCHMEN only devotes one narrative thread to the employment of super-types as the tools of American imperialism-- mainly, the character-arc of the Comedian-- this is the primary focus of MARSHAL LAW: that supersoldiers exist so that the U.S. can ride herd on other countries. FEAR AND LOATHING does resemble WATCHMEN in that the reader barely encounters any reference to political situations or technological advancements in the world outside the U.S.: both are clearly focused upon portraying America as a thousand-pound gorilla that no other nation can oppose, and that can only be challenged, if at all, from within.

Mills and O'Neill also diverge from WATCHMEN's acknowledgement of the existence of American crime and even super-criminals, for in MARSHAL LAW, all the criminals are superheroes home from foreign wars. A few super-types have attained the lofty heights of public celebrities, usually because they function as mouthpieces for the government. But most of the retired supersoldiers have deteriorated into costumed, ultraviolent gangbangers, while a few others are simply shell-shocked basket cases.

Joe Gilmore is the only veteran seen in FEAR AND LOATHING who isn't either a basket case or a gangbanger, though everything he does is still in a sense determined by his former military service. Loathing what the modern superheroes have become, he somehow becomes a special police operative in the city of San Futuro (a bombed-out version of San Francisco). As the masked officer Marshal Law-- who wears something like a policeman's fancy dress-uniform crossed with fetish-wear-- Gilmore is able to use his special powers, and even a special superhero hideout, to monitor the activities of rogue superheroes when they cross the line and break the law. The narrative makes it clear that Gilmore hunts superheroes-- and no other criminals-- because he hates their perversions of morality, and possibly because he himself, as a former supersoldier, did things in wartime that he's not proud of. More than one character remarks that Marshal Law's outfit looks "gay," though any gayness Gilmore may possess is laced with sado-masochistic elements (Law's mask looks like bondage gear and his bare arms are encircled with lines of barbed wire).

WATCHMEN's events are triggered by one murder, but the narrative of FEAR AND LOATHING spring from the serial rape-murders of young women. All of the victims are killed while wearing the costumes of Celeste, a cape-celebrity whose sole accomplishments come down to being born with huge knockers and being affianced to America's greatest superhero, the Public Spirit (patently Mills' derogatory take on the original superhero, Superman). Marshal Law has no proof that the Public Spirit is the serial killer-- eventually identified as an ulcerous-looking "Batman type" called "the Sleepman." But for years the Marshal has borne a grudge against the Public Spirit for being the respectable face of America's imperialistic policies, and also suspects that years ago the Spirit murdered his previous fiancee, a cape-celebrity named Virago, to keep his name clear of scandal. I won't discuss the Sleepman's true identity, except to say that from the first it's plain that he's not going to be Marshal Law's most hated super-type, since there wouldn't be any suspense to such an easy resolution-- though the script comes up with a valid reason for the "hero-hunter" to go after his most loathed opponent as well.

The simplistic political outlook wouldn't give FEAR AND LOATHING any status as a mythcomic, but its psychological myths, heavily indebted to Freud, do display the necessary complexity. Marshal Law, the Public Spirit, the Sleepman and two other major characters are locked together in a complicated "family romance" that I won't attempt to lay out here. It's perhaps enough to note that one of the principal characters remarks on the "Oedipal" nature of his conflict, and then promptly tries to claim it doesn't mean that much. I take this to be the author's own process of disavowal: he wants to be able to evoke the emotional charge of Freudian tropes and patterns, but he has one of the characters distance himself from said patterns, as if trying to proclaim independence from his destiny as an authorially determined figure. While I've said many times on this blog-- even this very week-- that I don't think Freud counts for much as an observer of human nature, his tropes and patterns still possess great power within the expressive world of literature. Indeed, the Freudian matrix is perfect for this level of irony, as it helps Mills and O'Neill consistently depict a world born "inter faeces et urinam," between shit and piss.

An unintended irony of MARSHAL LAW is that the only time Mills seeks to place any positive value on anything, it's devoted to human beings who are safely deceased. After the dubious hero of the story has vanquished all of the evildoers-- and has even found himself implicated in the same evil of the Freudian "authority-figure" that takes in the Public Spirit-- he visits the gravesite of his girlfriend, one of the victims of the Sleepman. He mentally repeats his catchphrase-- "I'm a hero hunter. I hunt heroes. Haven't found any yet." Then for the final panel, the camera shows him walking through the cemetery, surrounded by gravestones and monuments, and finishes by thinking, "But I know where they are." This implies that there is some nobility to be found in the departed, implicitly the deceased soldiers with whom Gilmore served. And yet, the satire of Mills and O'Neill has shown nearly every other aspect of human activity to be fraught with hypocrisy and concupiscence, so it seems a bit of a cop-out to give special dispensation to the dead-- particularly those who willingly served in imperialistic wars.

I'll note in closing that though FEAR AND LOATHING shows that Marshal Law is implicated in the evil he fights, most of the other installments in this erratic series don't follow up on this trope. Thus the series largely devolves to assorted scenes of the hero finding new and increasingly repetitive ways to destroy superheroes, with very mixed results in terms of scoring satiricial points.

MYTHCOMICS: WATCHMEN #1-12 (1986-87)

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

I fleetingly mentioned WATCHMEN in THE ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, and I've mentioned various aspects of the graphic novel in other essays. Obviously I'm not going to try to analyze the entire novel in a single blogpost. What I will address is a theme in Moore's work that I might call (with a tip of the hat to Anthony Burgess) "the clockwork rape."

Of course, everyone knows that Alan Moore writes rapey comics. Few if any critics have commented on what part the trope of rape might play within the greater patterns of Moore's work, because most critics today are only concerned with a smug political correctness. But I'll advance the notion that in WATCHMEN at least, rape is one of many ways in which Moore-- in concert with his collaborator Dave Gibbons, naturally-- depicts the clockwork patterning of human lives.

One can hardly read WATCHMEN without having the image of the clock, in one form or another, shoved in one's face.

The workings of clocks become a primary metaphor in the life of one of the story's ensemble characters: Doctor Manhattan, who's given a watch to study as a young boy and as a superhero even builds a clockwork city on Mars. 

The image of the two hands coming into conjunction, however, is far more pervasive than its use only in clocks or clock-like objects. For instance, two human bodies can be brought into such a conjunction, in a manner that mingles Eros and Thanatos.

For the purposes of this essay I'll term all such conjunctions as "syzygies." The syzygy is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a "pair of connected or corresponding things." To my knowledge the term's never been applied to the hour hand and minute hand of a clock, but it's a fair statement to say that the two items are connected: that the clock would be close to useless without the interaction of both pieces of the clock.

Now, the above scene from issue #7 focuses on the syzygy of two humans making love. Yet nothing in this image of "love-death" contradicts the possibility of a syzygy in which one being seeks to dominate the other.  Here's the "rapey scenario" that everyone who's read the comic remembers:

Of course, the attempted rape doesn't transpire, which may a reason that the sequence doesn't merit its own syzygy-image. But such a syzygy-image does appear when Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. "Rorschach," views an ink-blot during a psychologist's "Rorschach test." 

Walter has projected his own memory of this unpleasant incident onto the ink-blot, whose corresponding shapes remind him of being abused by his mother. Moore and Gibbons are clearly being ambiguous about what the woman does to her male offspring. But if one chooses to hew to the logic used by many feminists in the comics-world-- i.e., that any use of violence by a male upon a female must constitute a displaced form of rape-- then the reverse must be true, as I demonstrated here, even if Mrs. Kovacs doesn't dispense anything but pure violence.

Even more significantly, the text of WATCHMEN makes clear that Walter Kovacs never forgives his mother for whatever she did to him. By contrast, the Comedian approaches Silk Spectre for unambiguous sexual favors, hinting that she's been sending him signals. When she doesn't give in, he beats her down, and she's saved from rape only by the intrusion of a third party. Yet at some later date she does apparently have consensual sex with the Comedian, resulting in the birth of their daughter Laurie-- though apparently the ex-superheroine forbids the Comedian from divulging the fact of his parenthood to his grown offspring. It's entirely possible that Silk Spectre's implied forgiveness irks some ultraliberals far more than the sight of the attempted rape itself.

Throughout WATCHMEN the ticking clock is conspicuously used to emphasize how time is running out-- possibly for humanity as a whole, not just the fictional characters in their character-arcs. For the characters as for the readers, the syzygies depict moments frozen in time, different from other comics-panels only in the degree of their abstraction. 

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. Neither I nor anyone else can be sure that this is his only reason for employing the situation. But in my personal estimation, if there's any author who seems gets less joy, displaced or otherwise, from the rape-spectacle than Alan Moore, I don't know who it would be.

A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE PT. 2

When I use the term "might" in the formula "might makes ego," I use it not in the sense Kant (in translation) used the term, as a level of power that evokes the sublime. I am obliged to use it in the same way it's used in the famous aphorism, "might makes right," where "might" denotes any kind of energy, or what I have called "dynamicity." For this essay it should be understood that the word "might" denotes all three of the dynamicity-levels that I have worked out in earlier essays-- "basic strength," "might," and "dominance."

According to this Wikipedia entry the aphorism "might makes right" was first coined by an American "pacifist and abolitionist," Adin Ballou. The article also comments that Abraham Lincoln once reversed the formula, asserting that "right makes might." But Ballou's saying remains a touchstone for the sort of grievances Nietzsche would call "ressentiment." Such grievances, when politicized, lead to the assumption, mentioned in Part 1, that all entities that represent a disproportionate level of "might"-- as with the so-called "status quo"-- always deserves to be overthrown, and that to defend any of them is to prove oneself a reactionary.

While it is true that there are circumstances in which an entity of "greater might" subdues one of "lesser might," these circumstances obscure the greater reality: that everything we do, every act of self-determination we take, is an act of "might" in this generalized sense.  Dressing well for a job interview.   Driving to work.  Getting your car tuned up so that you can drive to work without an unhappy incident.  Writing essays for a blog.  All of these forms of "lesser might" are mundane and very un-spectacular. Nevertheless, one's (perceived) success in performing them builds one's ego, one's sense of self, while failing to perform them invalidates the ego.  This remains an exact parallel to success and failure in more spectacular undertakings.

It's easy to sling out a pat phrase like "might makes right" in order to make some critique of conservatism, the status quo, etc.  It's much more demanding to realize the extent to which the supposedly disproportionate forms of might-- the ones that are said to be curtailing the freedoms of those who possess only "lesser might"-- are not different in kind, only in degree.  In WATCHMEN, Rorschach is implicitly condemned for using his disproportionate physical toughness to intimidate others-- both those who are unquestionably guilty and those who are comparatively innocent of wrongdoing.  Yet his more mundane act of keeping a journal-- even though it is a journal filled with bilious ultra-conservative rants-- is an act of "lesser might" that will prevail over the "greater might" of Ozymandias.

A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE PT 1

The short one appeared here:

MIGHT MAKES EGO

In that essay I admired the succinctness of Berlatsky's theme statement, though I regard the statement itself as wrong-headed on every possible level.  Thus I rewrite Berlatsky's theme statement like this:

Superheroes exemplify goodness in their willingness to place their lives on the line in defense of the greater good. For the superhero genre, the best person in the world is the one who recognizes the world as a constant struggle of egos-- Hobbes' "war of all against all"-- and realizes his own ego by defending the good.

This formulation of course relates to my concept of the "idealizing will." I will not explore this concept and its near relations except to re-iterate a relevant "theme statement" from one of the "will" essays:

I advanced a theory of the hero and villain as dominantly positive or negative incarnations of a type of will, "the idealizing will," that aspires to go beyond the bare functions of the maintenance of life.

In less theoretical terms, I also referred to the ego-based nature of the superhero-- which for me applies to the hero-persona generally-- in the comments section for Berlatsky's essay.  A respondent named "Mywa" comes much closer to my "might makes ego" formulation, though finally agreeing with Berlatsky:

Superheroes negotiate through violence, but at their core they (are supposed to) embody agency, of which violence and aggression are just a form. We like violence because we value agency, and if that agency happens to find itself situated high among the echelons of power, well, that merely transposes what we like to a rule under which to live and a status quo to value

In my formulation, "might" equates to what Mywa calls "agency," though given that we later argued on the question of "the status quo" it seems likely that he (or she) might not view agency as being integral to the individual ego, as I do. Mywa defined the character Green Lantern as an "intergalactic space cop" and asserted his relationship to his bosses the Guardians as a typical "defense of the status quo,"to which I responded:

I said that the authorities would bring GL back to the fold because they couldn’t do without him, which is not quite the same thing as [their] tolerating the hero’s tantrums. It’s a power fantasy, all right, but it’s one in which the hero, despite his occasional failings, shows himself to be the center of the cosmos and the upholder of life. That’s precisely why I don’t find the heroes to represent “ideological unity;” they’re close to being solipsistic in their emphasis upon the individual ego. Not that one can’t find the same ego-fantasies imbedded in many more allegedly sophisticated works, including those that purport to be “liberal.”

I noted in the previous essay that the principal strategy used to conflate superheroes and fascism is to disregard the actual representations of any superhero narrative's diegesis.  One maneuver is to insist that the villains attacking the status quo should be viewed as liberating influences, while the status quo automatically deserves to be torn down, as Mywa assumes:

...your exploits and desires do little to challenge the pre-existing power structure (which you are a part of) in any meaningful way. What an exhilarating, quid-pro-quo power fantasy!

But as Mywa said, "agency" logically takes in every form of agency, not just violence.  And with that in mind I present an example of a work generally deemed more "sophisticated" and "liberal" than GREEN LANTERN, but which still demonstrates the same type of ego-fantasy:

There is no violence at all in these final panels of WATCHMEN, but there certainly is "might:" the might of the written word in Rorschach's diary, where he has chronicled the truth of Ozymandias' murderous scheme.  It's true that Alan Moore keeps the conclusion ambiguous.  We do not know positively that the redheaded dunce will choose to print Rorschach's diary and reveal the scheme, just as the late Rorschach would have wanted.  But there is a strong possibility that he will do so.  If this happens, this act of truth-telling will validate Rorschach's will over that of far more powerful entities like Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan, even though Manhattan has the power of a vengeful deity.

Clearly Moore is choosing to emphasize the triumph of "lesser might" over "greater might" in defiance of what others would call the "might makes right" aspect of superhero comics-- even though Rorschach himself is one of Moore's vehicles for critiquing "might makes right" in other sections of WATCHMEN.

Nevertheless, whereas other heroes in the narrative end up going along with Ozymandias' scheme once it's a fait accompli, Rorschach the Fascist Believer in Violence is the vehicle through which truth is realized.  To me Rorschach's "attack on the status quo"-- a status quo represented by Manhattan and the other heroes-- is no more or less egoistic than Green Lantern's supposed "defense of the status quo."

I should note in closing that in the still ongoing comments-argument between myself and Berlatsky, Berlatsky has not yet responded to one of my observations re: "non-fascist superheroes:"

BTW, if there was a superhero series where the character ran away helping insurgents throw off their chains– wouldn’t that still be a case of “might makes right?”

More to come.

MISSING: ONE OUTRAGED POST

An odd thing happened on THE BEAT this week: a blogpost on a particular type of fannish outrage was *bleeped* out of existence, presumably through the auspices of the editors.

As of today one can still call up either of THE BEAT's two posts on the death of Joe Kubert, and see a small display under "Related Stories" that references the missing post, but clicking on the icon takes you noplace.  Presumably the link will go away in future.

The substance of the missing post was a mini-controversy started when some publicity-person at DC Comics responded to Kubert's death by highlighting his contribution to a current BEFORE WATCHMEN title, rather than his many earlier and more esteemed productions.  It was a gaffe that DC later corrected somewhat with an amended comment stressing Kubert's long history (though BEFORE WATCHMEN was still listed).

The only point of interest for me in this minor kerfluffle was that another poster directed me to a post by Alan David Doane, on his blog TROUBLE WITH COMICS. After Doane celebrates Kubert's immense influence and talent, Doane says:

Unfortunately, and because of [Kubert's] own choice, I’ll always also remember Joe Kubert as a scab artist who chose a paycheck over decency in signing on to DC’s egregious Before Watchmen project. The disgust I felt when people like Brian Azzarello or J. Michael Straczynski signed on board was nothing compared to the enormous confusion and disappointment I felt when people like Kubert, or Len Wein, or Darwyn Cooke agreed to be a part of Before Watchmen, against the clearly stated wishes of the writer of Watchmen, Alan Moore.

I responded on the BEAT post, saying something to the effect that this was a "noxious" thing to say about Joe Kubert.  It's certainly possible to take up a moral position against DC's decision to bring out BEFORE WATCHMEN, though most of the rhetoric against it I've found poorly reasoned.  But comparing Joe Kubert to scab labor isn't even a good metaphor for the situation between Alan Moore (who is, one might like to remember, only one of WATCHMEN's two creators) and DC Comics. 

Fans may not like it, but Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons signed a legally binding agreement with DC Comics, thus making it possible for the characters to be "farmed out" in whatever way DC Comics might please.  No professional, regardless of their high or low status, owes Alan Moore the favor of refusing to execute such a continuation simply because Moore made a bad deal.

Case closed.

Except this quick ADDENDA--

I'll note that Doane originally had even harsher words for Joe Kubert than "scab artist" in his original post, and anyone curious can find reference to those remarks online.

Also, the vanished BEAT post also referenced Tom Spurgeon cursing out DC for their disrespect to Kubert's memory.  A couple of posters took issue with Spurgeon, so it's likely that McDonald took the post down for excessive toxicity.  Spurgeon later expressed regret, not for his anger, but for detracting from the appreciation of Kubert's legacy-- a general spirit with which I concur.

BADASS BABES EMBATTLED?

OK, so contrary to my last post this one isn't about literary modes after all, thanks to Heidi McDonald's 3-9-09 post which says:

"Suffice to say that the days of female badasses like Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, and Lucy Lawless are long over in the movies."

Putting aside the quibble that Lawless was only a big star on the small screen, "bigness" of the physical kind seems to be the reason Heidi makes this claim, with reference to WATCHMEN's only female hero, Silk Spectre.

"And then there’s Silk Spectre. Malin Ackerman wasn’t quite as bad as I had been warned but casting yet another willowy ex-model instead of a potential tough guy makes her character more a refugee from America’s Next Top Model than a crimefighter."

That Ackerman is indeed willowy cannot be denied. She's also not especially tough-looking though the cinematic character does get a lot more kickass-scenes than the GN original received. But still, I wouldn't be so quick to proclaim the demise of the badass babe.

True, as others beside myself have pointed out, they do somewhat better as lead or at least co-lead characters on the small screen than the big one. Still, regarding the two actresses Heidi names who made their bones in multiplexes, I'm not sure that Sigourney "ALIENS" Weaver and Linda "T2" Hamilton are a dying breed.

Granted, I haven't yet found any action-actresses who are quite as tall as Weaver and Lawless (both 5'11''), but on television CHUCK's Yvonne Strahovski comes close at 5'9", and though she's a glamorpuss she's not by any means "willowy." Indeed, though the action on CHUCK can be supplied by one of two agents guarding the titular character-- Strahovski and Adam Baldwin-- Strahovski clearly gets the lion's share of fight-scenes on the show, both against men and other women.

Similar caveats abound for current actresses like Kate Beckinsale (5'7"), who originated the kickass Selene role on two UNDERWORLD films, and for Rhona Mitra (same height), who took over Selene in the last film in that series. I can't comment on said last film as I've not seen it but Mitra was a good badass babe in the earlier DOOMSDAY-- as believable, I'd say, as Linda Hamilton in T2 (who is one inch shorter).

Yes, today's badass babe does have to live down CATWOMAN. But even in the 90s heyday of Weaver and Hamilton, they had to put up with the ignominy of this guy's films.

Compared to these, even CATWOMAN starts to look a little better.

UNMOORED, PART 4

Though I didn't mention it in PART 1 of this blogpost-series (collect them all!), I also have some issues with Moore's comments on adaptation that dovetail with my concepts of literary modes.

I'm not going to deal at length with Moore's numerous attacks in the WIRED interview on both modern FX-cinema and on all film-adaptations of his comics-work. I think his justifications for why comics shouldn't be adapted into films make no more sense than saying that literary characters not explicitly created to "cross over" with one another are inherently damaged by such antics, which I've refuted here. Obviously the art of pastiche is the whole raison d'etre of LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, moments of social satire notwithstanding.

I've stated here the simple maxim that anything that can be done well is worth doing. From this notion follows the pluralist principle that there's no inherent superiority between, say, the act of creating a good action-adventure story and that of creating a good satire of that story. Elsewhere, as an example of this principle, I elaborated that although Frank Miller's film THE SPIRIT was a poor film, Miller's approach to his adaptation of Eisner, which approach involved switching from one mode to another, was not inherently a bad thing, any more than Robert Aldrich's travesty of the KISS ME DEADLY source novel was inherently bad. In certain iterations the movement from the subtle to the gross can be as interesting as the reverse, though elitists will of course privilege the latter.

Now, about that WATCHMEN film--

Just to indulge in a little advance hypothesizing, I think that whatever emerges from the directorial lens of Zack Snyder will also probably result in a change of modes. In MERIT RAISED IV I analyzed the Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN as being characteristic of the ironic mode due to the way it portrays the consequences of seeking power, so that:

"the mythological universe of Moore and Gibbons seems like one of those visions from Gnostic theology: a world of pure suffering and alienation"

I predict that Snyder will go all-out to make a faithful adaptation of Moore and Gibbons, but that it won't present such a world, for all that a recent sneak peek seemed to be faithfully rendering Rorschach's "descent into the abyss." In making this hypothesis I partially agree with Alan Moore's assertion that the nature of the medium (at least in its Hollywood manifestation) will mitigate against presenting the graphic novel in its original mode. I think in all likelihood it will come closer to Frye's mode of the "high mimetic:" that is, it will be either epic in tone, tragic in tone, or a little of both. This is pretty much what Snyder's 300 was in modal terms, though neither it nor its source material were particularly good examples of the high mimetic mode.

Amusingly, in this LA TIMES piece, Snyder sounds at least as authoritarian as Moore on the subject of how unique his work is:

"We're killing the comic-book movie, we're ending it," Snyder said. "This movie is the last comic-book movie, for good or bad."

In other words, if it succeeds, Snyder can claim he exceeded all previous accomplishments (though it's doubtful it'll top DARK KNIGHT's receipts). And if it flops-- "I meant to do that."

UNMOORED, PART 3

I've seen a lot of fans rank Alan Moore as the best writer of superheroes. I've never agreed with that assessment (though a discussion of who is might be fruitful).

Alan Moore is only the best writer of superheroes within an ironic literary mode, as per my remarks here:

"Both of these modes ["high mimetic" and "ironic"] as well as Frye's "low mimetic" mode (which might include something like Bendis' POWERS) exist in a descending scale from the mode of romance. In this mode, protagonists have a "power of action" which, though not capable of creating aspects of reality as are the powers of the gods of myth, is still ineluctably positive. In romance (which connotes what most people call "adventure"). the hero's actions generally result in desireable outcomes, occasionally marked by tragic, comic or ironic touches but not fundamentally attuned to the demands of those mode-forms. As the "power of action" becomes increasingly attenuated going down the scale, the mode becomes more responsive to the perceived demands of "reality," even in works that have the phenomenal content of fantasies. Thus the "power of action" generally becomes more and more negative in tone going from romance to high mimetic to low mimetic to irony."

Moore's own attachment to irony is testified in these remarks from his recent WIRED interview, which directly follow the section I quoted in Part 2:

"That wasn't what it used to mean. That wasn't what it used to mean to me when I was a child. What I was getting out of it was this unbridled world of the imagination, and the superhero was a perfect vehicle for that when I was much younger. But looking at the superhero today, it seems to me an awful lot like Watchmen without the irony, that with Watchmen we were talking very much about the potential abuses of this kind of masked vigilante justice and the kind of people that it would in all likelihood attract if these things were taking place in a more realistic world. But that was not meant approvingly."

So Moore admits that he was not doing a pure superhero story like those with which he grew up-- a story meant to unleash "the unbridled world of the imagination"-- but one which incorporated "irony" and a "progressive spirit." Moore may not see these narrative elements as fundamentally opposed, as I do, but I agree that he was incredibly naive if he assumed that mainsteam superhero stories were going to take no influence from him once the WATCHMEN work both demonstrated strong sales and sustained favorable reviews. In fact, his story that he was only hoping to stimulate other works like unto his own sounds less like naivete than a Monday-morning quarterbacking attempt to un-implicate himself from association with whatever lesser works might have taken inspiration from him.

Frankly, I think the move toward "doom and gloom" started long before either Moore or Frank Miller entered mainstream American comics, but that's another story, which must wait while I critique Moore's impression-- which he himself admits may be "simplistic"-- of superheroes as an incarnation of "massive tactical superiority."

Note that though most of the time Moore's talking about how he's become 'distanced" from the caped crusader genre because it's become so bleak and superficial, he invokes that didactic "superiority" interpretation in terms of Superman. He implies that he's talking about not just current Superman comics, but the original Golden Age comics that posited Superman as an alien given superiority over humans thanks to "Earth's lesser gravity."

Yet these are, as he's said elsewhere, among the comics that introduced him to "the unbridled world of imagination." Could it be that the substance of power-fantasies and that of the imagination are not as distinct as Moore sometimes implies?

Equally wrong is his attempt to characterize superheroes as uniquely American. The fact that Moore may be attempting to do to old European heroes in LXG what he did for American superheroes in WATCHMEN-- to see them through a lens of literary irony in order to make intellectual comments upon them-- doesn't mean that the original characters weren't also all about "massive tactical superiority."

In KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Allan Quatermain and his three allies ride herd on a "lost race" of black Africans, convincing the tribesmen that the four white men are gods thanks to their superior weapons.

In 20.000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Captain Nemo (who is perhaps more an antihero than a hero) has the world's only submarine, and even if he uses it against corrupt ruling powers, it's still a fantasy of "massive tactical superiority."

And the original Bulldog Drummond, though lacking super-powers, was as much a "strongman fantasy" as Superman, as the four books I've read constantly harp upon Drummond's phenomenal-if-natural strength. One book even has Drummond win a fight with a gorilla, with the excuse that it was only a "small" one. In BLACK DOSSIER Moore's "Hugo Drummond" is a reincarnation of the original brawler of the books, who, unlike the cinematic Drummond, was a crude bigot who cheerfully railed against Jews and darkies and anything else against which his Brit working-class audience liked to assail. Moore plays this aspect of Drummond for laughs, but in addition, the prose Drummond actually committed the sort of fascist actions that Fredric Wertham and Gersom Legman falsely attributed to American superheroes, for in THE BLACK GANG Drummond and his fellows arrange to kidnap prominent British Communists and to confine them on a desert island until they learn the error of their ways. Moore doesn't reference this little escapade, though I feel sure that he must have known of it. Maybe if he had brought it in, the author's contrast between Hugo Drummond and James Bond-- or Moore's super-imperialist version of James Bond-- would have seemed less pertinent.

I find it fairly obvious, then, that in terms of indulging power-fantasies there's no demonstrable difference between heroes without powers and/or costumes and heroes with 'em. The satisfying dynamizations of power are what the mode of romance is all about, just as the mode of irony is about critiquing the very notion of power in such a way that power seems not only impossible but fundamentally undesireable.

On some level I feel sure that Moore must've known that the originals of his LEAGUE-heroes were as much power-fantasies as any caped crusader. So why scapegoat superheroes as a symbol of the American lust for "tactical superiority?" Why not just say that he liked superheroes as a young reader but that he finds them irrelevant now (except, of course, for his ironical versions thereof)?

In the same interview Moore goes on a long diatribe against modern FX-movies in general, in part as a way of describing his alienation from both the upcoming WATCHMEN movie and all previous (and future?) cinematic adaptations of his work. Of course, a lot of authors have had problems with adaptations where special effects were not a concern, including Raymond Chandler, whom Moore references toward the interview's end. But I find myself wondering whether or not Moore's real animus is that (a) modern special-FX make it possible for the movies to do "straight" versions of superheroes that please a larger audience than any other era of superhero-filmmaking has enjoyed, which (b) insures some level of cultural validation of the genre of superheroes with that larger audience, which in turn (c) makes it possible for more people to appreciate a genre in which Moore himself has lost interest and which he may think is taking up the appreciation due to better things, whether they are things he does or things by other authors that he admires.

Of course, maybe none of that even remotely resembles what goes through Alan Moore's head. Maybe by imagining that, I am just "putting the worst construction" on him. But if so, it's just a case of tit for tat:

"[Modern comics are] being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols."

I'm sure that, despite his blanket putdowns of both Americans and comics fans, I'll probably enjoy Alan Moore's works in future, the same way I can enjoy any other entertainment by anyone else with whom I disagree. He'll probably remain the best writer of superheroes in an ironic mode.

But whenever he talks about unbridled worlds of wonder, I'm going to wonder how much of his literary religion depends on the rhetoric of the scapegoat.

UNMOORED, PART 2

I guess I'll go in reverse order of importance when analyzing the following passage from the Alan Moore : political analysis first, then literary analysis.

"Moore: During the 7/7 bombings over here, it was announced a couple days later that as soon as the first two trains had gone up, all of the American forces that were in London were recalled to safe distance outside the M24 orbital motorway. After a few days, when they realized that it was safe to go back into London, they realized also that it looked kind of bad, sort of rushing out of the capital at the first sign of any trouble when the main reason for the bombing was England's support of America in the Iraq war.
It does seem to me that massive tactical superiority might be a key to the superhero phenomenon. That, if it's a military situation, then you've got carpet bombing from altitude, which is kind of the equivalent of having come from Krypton as a baby and to have gained unusual strength and the ability to fly because of Earth's lesser gravity. I don't know, that may be a simplistic interpretation, but that's the way I tend to see superheroes today."

This statement shows a rhetorical tendency shared by all political persuasions, though one that makes more sense for those labelled "conservatives" than for those who can be fairly called "liberals." (And yes, I think that label applies to self-described "anarchists" like Alan Moore.) The rhetorical tendency is that of scapegoating, of which I've written in more depth here.

Now, scapegoating has an indispensible function in both literature and religion. The notion that one can dispense with evil (be it moral evil or mere physical calamity) by dispensing with a representative of evil is well-suited to both of these forms (to use the Cassirer term).

Scapegoating isn't quite as suited to politics. It's true that every political system advances itself by excoriating (whether directly or by implication) an opponent who represents a contrary belief. It's also true that this excoriation can sometimes lend to a process of scapegoating. But political systems inherently require compromise between rival factions. Even Machiavelli, who as Cassirer noted was the first to speak openly of the *realpolitik* that took place in Renaissance versions of the smoke-filled back room, admitted the necessity for compromise between rival powers.

A scapegoat, then, is not the same as an opponent. You may compromise or come to terms with the latter, but the former exists to be sacrificed.

Now, Moore's interview only touches on the background of the Iraq War that informs the incident of the 7/7 bombings, which in turn he uses as a means of both (a) expatiating on the American national character, and (b) scapegoating superheroes. However, given other statements by Moore about his feelings toward conservative political systems, I think it's pretty much a given that Moore opposes both American and British involvement in Iraq.

I have no problem with Moore's opposition to said involvement, or to his pointing out the hypocrisy of the 7/7 incident, in which certain *particular* detachments of American forces in Britain may have made an overly-hasty retreat from a site of conflict. I am, like most liberals, continually appalled that in the past two elections my countrymen voted in substantial numbers for the representatives of a radical-Right psuedo-theocracy that made the fictional regime of Lewis' IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE look like a season at Scout Camp.

My political problem with Moore's statement is that here his expatiation on the American national character is predicated on an incident too limited to be exemplary of anything. Yes, it could be argued those British-based American detachments showed poor judgment in letting themselves look like they were running away from danger.

But how in the world does such a piddling incident demonstrate anything about the American national character?

If Moore wanted to attack America for its fascist tendencies, he should go after us for the whole damned Iraq War, not just for a transitory and trivial matter that irked Moore when he read about it over his morning coffee in Northampton (or wherever the heck he lives these days).

In comic-bookspeak Moore's statement is the equivalent of saying that Professor Moriarty was a bad guy not because he killed or enslaved people, but because he made a rude comment about Mina Harker.

In addition, you could probably find far better examples of American's supposed desire to shoot for "massive tactical superiority" less than a century ago, starting with a little thing called "the A-bomb." But I think a more judicious view would be that most (if not all) human cultures strive to get the upper hand and to keep it. Does the American pursuit of "tactical superiority" really tell us anything distinctive about the American character, or is it simply a development from earlier manifestations of making war, like English history's version of carpet bombing?

Not to mention them durn vanishin' Neanderthals.

Though in UNMOORED PART 3 I'll hold forth more thoroughly on Moore's use of superheroes as a scapegoat to attack the evils of radical-Right politics, here I'm moved to wonder why he would make such an equivalence. Does Moore think Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld formed their notions of *realpolitik* through some childhood exposure to Superman comics? Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly represent the rhetorical tendency I mentioned before, to transmute rival powers into scapegoats; e.g., the famed "Axis of Evil." But I submit that they could have conceivably come up with such a phrase without ever having read a funnybook or even seeing a CHALLENGE OF THE SUPERFRIENDS cartoon.

(And of course it's the guy who's got to clean up their mess who's made his comics-reading public. But I digress.)

I don't think Moore is being a good liberal by resorting to the political rhetoric of the scapegoat. I believe that it's entirely right to downgrade your political opponents, but you have to go after them for real and substantial abuses, not for picayune crap. I would think the conservatives of recent decades have done so much similar crap ("Kerrey threw away his medals! The horror! The horror!") that any good liberal ought to be ashamed to resort to the same superficial strategies.