DOUBLING YOUR IDENTITY PLEASURES

A random turn of mind took me back to some of my ruminations in my 2012 post FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE.  In this essay-- in which I was still using "focal presence" rather than what I now call a "focal icon"-- I gave two examples of narratives in which "fake phenomena" outshone the actual characters in the two stories. One is the Headless Horseman, who, as any reader knows from reading the tale, may be a boogieman spawned entirely by the imagination of Brom Bones, trying to freak out his competitor in romance, timid Ichabod Crane. Yet despite the possibility that the alleged Hessian ghost might just be Brom in a costume, the Horseman has arguably transcended his origins, becoming a diegetically-real character in other narratives.

In the same essay I also discussed the 1935 film MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. In this film, a man is murdered by some blood-letting contrivance. A year later, two apparent vampires begin stalking the family of the murdered man. Unlike the Hessian ghost, these supposed bloodsuckers, Count Mora and his daughter Luna, are apparently a part of the region's established history. The narrative twist is that the haunting horrors are just actors, hired by a detective to expose the murderer from the previous year. Yet though the actors themselves are not important, any more than the detective or his quarry. The images of Mora and Luna, of a father-and-daughter clutch of vampires, are the icons that dominate the movie-- even though, like the Horseman, they're not diegetically real.

I then had the thought that most of the "double identities" throughout the history of fiction carry the same dynamic. Brom Bones doesn't get unmasked as the headless phantom, but a million other Gothic ghost-makers do. Yet even once the hoaxers' identities are revealed, who cares about them anymore? From reading Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, I know that the phantom hound is an illusion created by a schemer named Stapleton, and I even dimly remember his motivation behind his scheme. But readers don't remember Stapleton. They remember the giant hound.

The same thing is generally true of both heroes and villains who assume costumed identities. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne sustain more interest than Stapleton, but still, not as much as their costumed identities. The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man might be the first superhero in which there was a strong concentration on the trials and vicissitudes in the life of the hero's private life. Still, Peter Parker is only important because he's Spider-Man.

Now, it's not impossible to have someone don a mask or costume in which no new identity is created. In the 2014 essay PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, I mentioned a minor masked rustler from Zane Grey's RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. Yet this character, name of Bess, does not sustain a separate identity; she just goes about wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she's female. This sort of action I termed merely "functional" in the narrative; it doesn't carry any symbolic value beyond its base function in the story.

By extension, then, "super-functionality" applies to all those stories-- no matter how well or badly executed-- in which a schemer creates a phantasmal second identity. To be sure, I'm not sure there's ever been a masked western badman who was "mythic" in the full sense of my use of the word. In comics there seem to be dozens of these mediocre sagebrush malefactors, often based on animals-- the Fox, the Cougar, the Tarantula, The Masked Maverick. None of them are super-functional in an epicosmic sense, but they can be considered so in an ontocosmic sense. Similarly, most of the masked champions in all popular media aren't too much more memorable than their regular identities, except for Zorro, the Lone Ranger (and Tonto), and possibly the 1950s Ghost Rider.

Indeed, the act of a character donning what in my system is called "an outre outfit"-- whether or not the outfit is meant to mask his/her identity-- is an illusion that conveys the truth within the story-- and thus this trope becomes intimately associated with that of the "phantasmal figuration." 

ADDENDUM: For a lark I scanned through all the "outre outfit" entries on my movie-blog, to see how often such uncanny works had resulted in movies with epicosmic mythicity. Tarzan got the most entries, which is interesting because his "outfit" is his near-total lack of clothes, signifying not a calculated illusion but his linkage to his beast-patrons. The Phantom of the Opera does fit the "phantasm" category, since he does pretend to be a ghost, though his imposture is not the most compelling aspect of his mythos.

         

          

CURIOSITIES: KID COLT OUTLAW #1 (1948)

 If you were a "Marvelite" of a certain age, and you even dipped for a little while into Marvel's line of westerns, you probably encountered the origin of Kid Colt, one of the company's oldest frontier heroes. And what you probably encountered was a four-page condensation of the origin, probably produced at a period when most of the character's adventures were of a similar length.

The "original origin," though no great classic even for the genre, has considerably more meat on its bones. On the first page, we meet Blaine Colt as he takes on a crooked deputy whipping one of the hands who works the ranch of Blaine's father. Blaine too gets whipped, in part because he wears no guns.

Slightly later, Blaine explains his reluctance to wear guns to the ranch-hand: he fears that his quick temper will cause him to take a life. But this attempt to enjoy a peaceful existence ends when Blaine is framed for the murder of his own father. The culprit is the crooked sheriff, whereas I believe the father's killer in the condensed version is just some owlhoot.

     

Blaine shoots it out with the crooked sheriff, and for good measure turns the whip of the crooked deputy on the malefactor, declaring that it's the end of crooked law in the town. However, though the origin probably doesn't explicitly come up again, Blaine's shooting of a lawman, however crooked, goes a long way toward explaining why he becomes Kid Colt, a fugitive wanted over numerous states (though this was never a consistent restriction). I'm not sure when the familiar condensed version was produced, but it seems likely that the idea of corrupt lawmen was elided to make the story more generic. Said "original origin," BTW, is credited to artist Bill Walsh and writer Ernie Hart. Hart was also a collaborator on the first ANT-MAN story to feature The Wasp, as I discussed in this post.    

  

CURIOSITIES #44: BLACK RIDER

 This retelling of The Black Rider's origin from 1950 struck me as a little more fulsomely dramatic than the average Golden Age origin.         

 And from issue 12 in 1951, this atypical oater shows the hero defending the right of Mormons to practice their own customs in a democracy. The message is undermined a bit by the consistent misspelling, "Mormans."                                                                           

  

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #29: WESTERN ADVENTURES

Thanks to an excellent article on the history of Ace Comics by one Mark Carlton-Ghost in ALTER EGO #144, I went curiosity-hunting in the six-issue run of Ace's WESTERN ADVENTURES (1948-49). None of the stories therein bear close analysis, but as an overall phenomenon, they comprise an interesting variation on western themes.

The feature included a few cross-genre products, such as "western romances" and "western true crime stories," but most of the stories feature cover-starring hero "The Cross-Draw Kid," whose specialty was confusing his enemies with a cross-drawing technique, as well as inciting pitter-patter in the hearts of numerous fillies to whom he barely paid attention. His enemies included a couple of very minor masked villains, hardly a match for the more distinctive villains in Ace's superhero line, and one mundane owlhoot who shared the name of the villain in the 2011 cartoon film RANGO: the name of "Rattlesnake Jake." 

But the most amusing moment in Cross-Draw's short history was the one time he did seem interested in a girl, it was one who hadn't been a woman for very long. Early in the story he says he hasn't seen young Dorothea since "she was in pigtails," and that when he meets her as a mostly grown woman, he says he "always figgered you'd grow up cute." And if she's "frontier jailbait," at least the feeling goes both ways, since fawning Dorothea makes it clear she's had her eye on him as well. None of the fully adult women inspire such mutual affection in Cross-Draw's world-- though of course at the end of the story the cowboy once again rides off in the company of his horse.

The standout feature in WESTERN, though, was the story of an independent young western woman, Sally Starr, who accepted the job of sheriff of her town, and so became SHERIFF SAL for all six issues of WA. Now, there had been many female heroes in comics since 1938, and most of them were written by male authors. Not many of these heroines can be fairly called "feminist"-- "feminist-adjacent" might be more accurate, inasmuch as such features were meant to hold some appeal for female purchasers. But SHERIFF SAL really was feminist. Not only did Sal defeat all of her outlaw challengers, and resist the attempts of her boyfriend Flash to get her to quit her job and marry him, three times she called on help from other women in the town-- an idea that almost never comes up in any westerns in any medium. 

Barely any Ace Comics credit authors, but since the Carlton-Ghost article mentions that one prominent female writer he tracked down was one Isabel Mangum, she's a likely candidate for having scripted SHERIFF SAL. The above dialogue about "intuition" doesn't sound to me like just another male writer voicing sentiments for the sake of a paycheck.

As a western adventure, WESTERN ADVENTURES flopped, and its publisher rebranded it as a western romance comic, which died after three issues. Sheriff Sal had her last adventure in issue #7, in which she gave up her heroic independence for the married life. I didn't closely read any of the romance stories, but I did come across one that took the same egalitarian stance as SAL, and might've have come from the same writer. Rodeo girl Dallas loves manly man Tal, but can't help embarrassing him with her skills. He tries to make her jealous with another woman, but Tal ends up teaming up with Dallas to corral a loco steer, a feat which is clearly said to require both of them working in tandem. So even as romance killed off Sheriff Sal's stance of independence, at least one love-tale still put across a slight feminist touch or two.

HOW MANY WESTERN MYTHS HAVE I FOUND?

I stated in the previous essay that on my two main review-blogs I had not devoted much space to any isophenomenal westerns, mythic or otherwise. Despite this caveat, I did devote two long posts to two such non-fantastic western works:

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

DJANGO UNCHAINED

So of the all other westerns, or western-associated productions I will list here, they will all have some metaphenomenal content.

Not all of them take place, however, within the same era as the traditional western, or even as the so-called "Eastern western," which concerned the American Revolutionary era. I find that western iconography spans three broad periods:

THE PRE-WESTERN ERA

Stories fitting this heading take place prior to any major European incursions in any of the Americas, North or South. Typically this will concern only stories about Indian tribes who have not yet encountered any persons associated with the colonial efforts from the 16th century onward-- though I would have no problem with stories in which Indians met Viking travelers or even Phoenician sea-traders. In literature, there's really only major pre-western narrative.

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

In theory, certain comic-book series like Gold Key's TUROK SON OF STONE and DC's SUPER CHIEF would qualify for this category, if they possesses the sort of mythopoeically rendered epistemological patterns that constitutes good mythicity.

Then at the other end of the temporal spectrum, there is--

THE POST-WESTERN ERA

This includes any narrative with western iconography taking place after the dawn of the twentieth century, whether or not the narratives takes place in the American West or even in any physical place corresponding to the North and South American continents. In addition to 20th-century stories with some major connection to western story-tropes or icons, this category can also embrace so-called "space westerns," though the significance of the trope or icon has to be very strong. I for one do NOT deem STAR WARS a "space western," even though the series used western tropes (like the "cantina scene") from western cinema. And I would not regard the entirety of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars series" of books to be space westerns either, though the first one counts, because its 20th-century protagonist starts out his narrative fighting wild Indians. So the first book qualified for high mythicity.

A PRINCESS OF MARS

And so does this Osamu Tezuka take on Western mythology:

CAPTAIN KEN

I also include here stories where some significant character uses western iconography, even if some other genre is dominant. Thus the story in SPIDER-MAN #10 is predominantly a superhero story, but it is "western-adjacent" because one of the villains wears a ten-gallon hat and twirls a lasso as his only weapon.

THE ENFORCERS

Finally, I come to the meatiest category, taking in all narratives centered within the domain of the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries, though obviously not all of these have western iconography. (For instance, stories about the Civil War take place in the same time-frame as the "winning of the West" stories, but only a few of these tales are likely to boast strong western tropes or icons.)  All of my other Mythic Westerns are as follows:

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER 

THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD

THE NIGHT OF THE VICIOUS VALENTINE

PURGATORY

THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK

RANGO

THE SHAMAN

SCALP HUNTER

Technically, SCALP HUNTER, one of the "Son of Tomahawk" stories, is not a metaphenomenal story, and might better be listed alongside Django and the Purple Sage Riders. I've also left off this list all of the individual "good" episodes of the teleseries KUNG FU. This program sported a high percentage of stories with either a "good" or a "fair" mythicity rating, and so I prefer to associate the series as a whole with my next category: all the "fair" westerns that weren't quite epistemologically complex enough to be good, but which at least included important myth-motifs.

THE LONE RANGER (1938)

MACKENNA'S GOLD

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920)

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940)

THE MASK OF ZORRO

THE WHITE BUFFALO

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION

ZORRO THE GAY BLADE

And finally, I made brief reference to a very "post-Western" storyline in THE WEST COAST AVENGERS here.

I may add to this list over time, as I encounter new "good myths" or "fair myths" worth collating.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #14

 While scanning through issues of JUMBO COMICS to chart the progress of the character Sheena, I came across a "weird western" feature named "Wilton of the West," which lasted from issues #1-24 of the title. While the majority of early forties western comics are depressingly isophenomenal, "Wilton"-- allegedly drawn for three issues by Jack Kirby and then by Lou Fine-- had his first brush with the uncanny when he encountered a red-garbed masked crusader, the Crimson Rider in JUMBO #9 (1939). The Rider turns out to be female, making her one of the first masked heroines in comic books, though she's not in every story and is always a support character.

Wilton has a few other encounters with bizarre phenomena, such as a mutilating serial killer (no mutilations actually seen, though) and a town full of Lilliputians, liberally borrowed from the Travels of You Know Who. But the only story worth exhuming I've titled "The Ghost of Moose Ridge." While even in 1939 phony ghosts in the Old West were commonplace, in issue #15 Wilton and the Crimson Rider encounter a weird spook with some "Headless Horseman" similarities. For some reason Crimson Rider becomes an expert in the occult for this one story.

By comparison, for those first 24 issues Sheena's issues are fairly pedestrian, except for #20. Sheena, as a tiny number of fans know, was not the raised-by-animals type of jungle hero. Instead, she was a white child adopted by a tribe of Afro-Mongols, from whom she learns skills with knife and spear. The story, given the mostly irrelevant cover-title of "Spoilers of the Wild," has Sheena and Bob explore a hidden valley. They're taken prisoner by a bunch of gorillas under the control of a human female, Keela, who's as strong as a gorilla and was apparently raised among them. Keela tries to edge Sheena out with Bob, and Sheena uses superior skill to vanquish "Keela of the Apes." Since at least one gorilla is unusually hostile to Bob and Sheena, I find myself wondering if he was a rejected suitor, though the story does not say so. (Also, what's with a tribe of apes having a place where they "make wishes?")

Neither of these stories is articulated well enough even to count as a "near myth," but they do present some odd "raw material."

MYTHCOMICS: CAPTAIN KEN (WEEKLY SHONEN SUNDAY, 1960-61)

I hope to slowly work my way through the early works of Osamu Tezuka in quest of mythcomics, since the only ones I've mentioned thus far have stemmed from the latter part of his career. So far I've found nothing in the corpus of his most famous creation, ASTRO BOY, which his PRINCESS KNIGHT works didn't quite make my cut. But CAPTAIN KEN, a "space western" from 1960, proves a happy exception. This essay makes heavy use of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't have any knowledge of Tezuka's no-doubt-complex feelings toward American culture, given that it was the source of many of the early comics that influenced him, yet also spawned the atomic bomb with which American forces humbled the martial might of Japan. I doubt that he set down any thoughts about one of the most archetypal genres of America, the western, but in CAPTAIN KEN the artist managed to produce a commentary on the genre that may offer a reconciliation of both good and bad sentiments.

According to a prologue, uttered by a member of the Martian race (the "Indians" of the story), the first Earthlings to colonize Mars in 1983 were Americans, and so these are the people who institute the wholesale slaughter and enslavement of the natives for several generations to come. However, the prologue also mentions a single Earthling who saves the Martian race. American westerns had their share of "savior-figures" who sought to save Native Americans from a dire fate, however temporarily, and in modern politics these are deemed as bad juju for not allowing the Indians to save themselves, or something like that. Long before this political trope evolved, Tezuka dodged this particular bullet by making his savior-hero a member of a marginalized community on Mars: Japanese colonists, who have become part and parcel of American's Westernization of the Martian environment.

Mamoru, who fills the part of a viewpoint character for the work's early chapters, has lived on Mars all his life, though Tezuka is careful to point out that some if not all Japanese emigrants still esteem the culture of their society on Earth. Mamoru is attacked by hostile Martian tribes known as "the Moro," but he's saved by a strange young man known as Captain Ken, accompanied by Arrow, his resourceful robot horse. Mamoru assumes that the so-called captain is a distant relative who's expected to visit Mamoru's family, but the young man disappears. When Mamoru gets home, he finds that the actual traveler, a young woman named Kenn Minakami, has appeared at his family's house. Since she looks to be the spitting image of Captain Ken, but says she has no siblings or similar relatives, Mamoru wonders if Ken and Kenn are one and the same.

Tezuka keeps this suspicion going for several chapters, probably encouraging readers to believe that he Tezuka was mining the same tropes he'd used with PRINCESS KNIGHT, wherein a young woman masqueraded as a male for fight for justice. I'll spoil the big reveal right now: Captain Ken is the time-traveling son of the adult woman that Kenn will later become, which explains the resemblance. Ken's mission will also be revealed late in the series, and once the reader knows it, it may seem somewhat counter-intuitional for the hero to run around fighting assorted menaces that don't have anything to do with his main mission.

Still, on some level Tezuka wanted his readers to invest in a traditional Western protagonist, who does not hesitate to stand up for what's right, even when most of the people in his culture have become corrupt. So Ken, with or without help from the locals, opposes the town's corrupt mayor, his rowdy son Double, the gunfighter Lamp and a mysterious supercriminal named Napoleon. He also champions the insect-like Moro against the ruthless exploiters from Earth, and bonds with a female Moro named Papillon (French for "butterfly"). Despite the fact that they are of different species, Tezuka strongly implies that Papillon cherishes erotic feelings for Ken, though the hero does not notice her lovelorn nature and remains focused on his general mission.

After several peripatetic adventures, some of which find ingenious ways for the hero to interact with the Martian environment, the Moro launch a major offensive against the Earthlings. This pushes the Earthling president-- who is actually the criminal Napoleon-- to launch a solar bomb designed to wipe out the Martians, with all the settlers as collateral damage. Around the same time, Ken reveals to Mamoru his true origins: that he comes from another time-line in which the solar bomb went off and caused his mother, Kenn Minakami, to suffer awful delayed-reaction symptoms. Utilizing a convenient time machine, Ken and his robot horse travel back to the earlier phase of Martian history to undo the injury to Ken's mother. This mission also dovetails with saving the Martian race from extinction, but given Ken's democratic treatment of the natives, the two goals seem coterminous in terms of justice rather than mutually exclusive. Ken, accompanied by Papillon in what might be read as a "love-death," sacrifices his life to avert the solar bomb. His mother Kenn never knows what her son is destined to do, but Mamoru does, and by story's end it's clear that Mamoru is destined to marry Kennn and become the father of the doomed hero.

Like many time-travel paradoxes, one is not meant to poke at the dominos too much. If in the new reality Kenn never suffers the solar bomb's effects, then does Ken have any motive to go back in time and change reality? Does he go back at all, and if he doesn't, does the original reality re-assert itself? The time-travel part of the story is CAPTAIN KEN's least interesting aspect. A note from Tezuka in the manga's second observes that the artist's readers didn't quite know what to make of this space-western, with the result that CAPTAIN wasn't as popular as other contemporaneous works. Perhaps those Japanese readers weren't quite ready to grapple with the trope of the Western hero, an idealized hero who was meant to redeem the misdeeds of his own culture in the name of higher justice.

The 2014 English-language reprints of the manga also include a disclaimer about Tezuka's representations of race. Maybe this was a boilerplate they prepared for other works in which Tezuka made use of caricatures now considered politically incorrect, but there are no such images in CAPTAIN KEN, unless one is triggered by the idea of the insect-Martians being compared to real Native Americans.

NULL-MYTHS: "GHOST RIDER VS. FRANKENSTEIN" (GHOST RIDER #10, 1952)

Given my enthusiasm for crossovers, I allowed myself to get my hopes up for this one. Yet even as I started the story, I was pretty sure that this Golden Age GHOST RIDER story was going to resort to the old "guy pretending to be a monster" schtick, and sure enough, that's all it was. But this encounter certainly had a lot more mythic potential than, say, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.

One amusing detail: the theory about how the monster escaped death references not the Mary Shelley monster, but the 1931 Universal FRANKENSTEIN film, wherein the creature is almost slain in a burning windmill. I guess the story's writer didn't want to bring in any of the other monster-slayings in the Universal Frank-series-- least of all, the one that really ended the series, where the lumbering horror perishes thanks in part to the efforts of Abbott and Costello.

The full story can be read at THE HORRORS OF IT ALL.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK" (TOMAHAWK #112, 1967)

Though I wasn't looking for a mythcomic to ring in the New Year, a story set during the "birth of this nation," the era of the Revolutionary War, seems moderately appropriate. The cover accurately depicts a scene in the story by writer Bill Finger and artist Fred Ray: a falling-out between the titular hero and one of his subordinate "Rangers," which, contrary to the cover-copy, would only qualify as "the scrap of the century" if the reader was only considering scraps of the 18th century. The fight is only a tiny part of the main story-- henceforth called RANGERS for short-- while the true emphasis centers upon a conflict in the bosom of hero Tom Hawk, a.k.a. "Tomahawk."

The character is largely forgotten by modern comics-readers, but he enjoyed a long run at DC Comics from 1947 to 1972. In the forties and fifties he wore a coonskin cap seven years before the affectation was popularized by Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett" series, and his longevity probably qualifies him as DC's most successful "western" character prior to Jonah Hex. For most of his early years, Tomahawk's character was identical to almost every other DC starring character: a man of boundless competence, never at a loss for a plan, whether he was fighting Indians, British soldiers, or the occasional revived dinosaur. Bill Finger, however, displayed in many of his scripts an interest in the hidden depths of the human psyche, and RANGERS is a done-in-one story wherein the indefatigable hero has something of a breakdown-- which of course is never again referenced in any ensuing stories. 

The basic idea of the story may have been derived from the 1960 WWII film CIRCLE OF DECEPTION, in which British intelligence feeds false information about the pending European invasion to an officer and then contrives to let him be captured, so that the Nazis will torture the information out of him and act on the bad intel. RANGERS's setup involves Tomahawk himself volunteering to be captured by a regiment of German mercenaries, a.k.a. "Hessians," but only so that he can pretend to break after some time in captivity and feed the commanders false information. 

However, the "competent man" finds himself exposed to an evil deeper than he ever encountered in earlier exploits. The commander, (or rather "commandant") of the Hessian mercenaries is Von Grote, an anticipation of Nazism long before the phenomenon actually existed. Finger cleverly sells this by referencing the common knowledge that the sign of the swastika was widely dispersed across many continents, so that it's slightly logical for this Nazi-in-training to wear an Indian medallion with the symbol, and to place the same symbol on the uniforms of his men. 

Because Von Grote (in German the name means "big," though Finger was probably thinking of "grotesque") is a foretaste of the twentieth century's concept of Ultimate Evil, Tomahawk's tortures are far more intense than the stalwart woodsman ever expected. Thus he becomes obsessed with finding and killing the Hessian commander, and he refuses medical treatment for his injured leg. "I want [my leg] like it is-- so every time I take a step and the agonizin' pain shoots up through my body-- I want it to remind me-- remind me of Von Grote -- the man I gotta kill!" 

I won't say that this transition of a bland hero into an obsessed avenger was ground-breaking-- I imagine that even DC Comics occasionally had some of their war-heroes go off the deep end, however temporarily. But Finger isn't content to anticipate the Ultimate Evil of Nazism in Revolutionary America; he also glosses the semi-crippled hero's predicament with that of a sea captain who "swore to kill a great white whale which had taken his leg." The fact that Finger recounts the supposed existence of Moby Dick in the 1770s (or his real-life model "Mocha Dick") is treated lightly: after one Ranger tells the story, another one says. "I bet someone will write a book about it one day." Yet Finger is careful to mention that the whale kills not only the obsessed captain, but his crew as well.

While Tomahawk's subordinates struggle to cope with the changes in their leader's psyche, Von Grote, being a pre-Nazi, does what comes naturally: he establishes a prison camp for captured American soldiers. No tortured or starved prisoners are ever seen, though the villain has a good line about using stables to hold people instead of horses. Tomahawk and his men invade Von Grote's camp, and after hero and villain match their chosen weapons against one another-- frontier tomahawk vs. German knife-- Von Grote reveals that he's set a trap to capture and execute all of the rebels. Tomahawk finally reveals that his obsession has imperiled his men, so he finds a last-minute solution to overpower the Hessians, one that, with typical DC irony, involves the hero turning the villain's own weapon against him. Tomahawk then captures but does not kill Von Grote, and promises his men that he'll get his leg repaired now that he's sane again. The last panel, in which a wooden swastika is seen burning, creates a similitude between the defeat of these proto-Nazis and the future defeat of the ultimate Axis evil. (I'd reprint the end scene like the others here, from Read Comics Online, except that the scene loses something by sharing page-space with one of DC's goofy humor-strips.) 

One can't tell from this story whether or not Finger was familiar with the complexities of Melville's novel, in which Moby Dick often seems to be the incarnation of cosmic evil; the sense that the universe cares nothing about human suffering. From the Ranger's summation of the supposedly "real" story, Finger may have believed that the white whale was nothing but a brute beast, rather than cosmic evil. Even one character in the book, the whaler Starbuck, makes that interpretation, and professes that to seek vengeance on a brute beast is "blasphemous."

 Yet Von Grote is not just a Nazi, but a Nazi sadist. (Tomahawk seems astonished that his enemy takes pleasure in suffering). The concept of a pitiless Human Evil is not equivalent to the concept of a pitiless Cosmic Evil. But in both MOBY DICK and of this Bill Finger story, the correct response to evil is not to forget all other considerations save vengeance, with the result that one sacrifices one's own comrades. 

In closing, I will note that the only thing that makes this story "uncanny"-- like Melville's novel, but unlike the movie CIRCLE OF DECEPTION-- is the contrivance of the spring-action knife, the  "diabolical device" with which the villain strives to impale the hero.  

MYTHCOMICS: "WOLFTIMES" (JOURNEY #22, 1985)

This is another mythcomic that hasn't seen a lot of scans online, perhaps because it was largely published by two of the "independent" publishers of the 1980s: Aardvark-Vanaheim and Fantagraphics. In addition, the series, titled JOURNEY: THE ADVENTURES OF WOLVERINE MCALLISTER, concerned subject matter not overly popular in fan-circles, as the title character is a trapper/backwoodsman living in Revolutionary-Era America. Most of the time the subject matter was largely naturalistic, though the series sometimes involved marvelous elements, as does the short arc "Wolftimes," which boasts a ghost in the midst of its B-story.

This short arc takes place in the midst of an extended and somewhat rambling long arc, and largely concerns what the title character calls a "feud" between himself and a marauding grey wolf. McAllister, as stated, is a backwoodsman who usually stays clear of civilized territories, but for complicated reasons he ends up seeking out a frontier-town, New Hope. Traveling alongside the woodsman is a citified Easterner, Elmer Alyn Craft, who provides a lot of the serial's humor as well as being a combination spoof of both Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Since I find no scans of internal pages from JOURNEY, here's a cover showing McAllister and Craft together.

Not long after McAllister and Craft arrives in New Hope, a wolf begins raiding the community's stock of turkeys. Writer-artist Bill Messner-Loebs begins the story in the wolf's POV, having the creature ruminate in a fashion comparable to Jack London in CALL OF THE WILD:

Blood calls to blood... you can smell it on the wind... it's warm...living... your life... dwelling in another's flesh... it is time to take it back.

Two pages later, as the wolf corners one of the turkeys in its coop, the wolf thinks:

The feathered meat fears and yet hopes... for at the level of the cells, where nerve and muscle meet... soul is but electricity yearning for discharge... Death is joy... and blood calls to blood...

Though McAllister does not see the wolf make its kill, he senses that it's his old enemy, and volunteers to go along with Mandrell, the foremost hunter of the New Hope community. Why the citified Craft goes along with the two men is a point Messner-Loebs does not address, though it's probably just so he could make the comments that any other non-woodsman might make:

I can't see how you fellows can even see to track in this snow.

This gives Mandrell the change to state his credo of the woodsman:

It's livin' wild, Craft. My bones lead me t' that wolf!

Later, Mandrell even re-states the lupine's gospel of identity with the prey in his own terms:

...well, when you slay, it oughtta be like [sex]... takin' and givin' at once.. runnin' through you like lightning... killer an' killed get mixed...

 Mandrell, however, is not fated to meet the wolf at all. McAllister slips away from the other two, sensing another presence in the snowy wasteland. It turns out to be a lone Native American who's not even aware of the hunting-party. The Indian links to a later plotline, but here his own purpose for being in the story is to distract McAllister long enough for the woodsman's old enemy the wolf to attack. For four pages the hunted fights the hunter, until they plunge over a cliff and get buried in the snow-- their survival depending on who gets free first.

Before the cliffhanger conclusion of the story, Messner-Loebs also devotes considerable space to the aforementioned B-story, in which three previously introduced characters-- two brothers and "Jemmy Acorn" (a spoof of Johnny Appleseed)-- run into a French necromancer named "Pere Winter." This turns out well for the trio, because they're being haunted by the spirit of the brothers' deceased sibling. Winter, after listening patiently to the ramblings of the three goofs, simply banishes the ghost by saying:

'Ey, Cochon! Wake up! You're dead!

Though this encounter with the world of the deceased is played for laughs, it provides a counterpoint to the serious life-and-death battle of the hero and his nemesis. For any readers who don't have JOURNEY #23 handy, the conflict is concluded to McAllister's advantage therein, though not exactly in the approved "Dan'l Boone killed him a bar when he was three" manner. To get into that plotline would be to examine the longer arc of the ongoing "New Hope" story-- and what makes "Wolftimes" mythic is its attempt to connect the psychology of the hunter with the biological urges of the predator, and even with that of sexual congress.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SHAMAN" (SHOWCASE #87, 1969)

"The Shaman" was the third and last story in SHOWCASE to feature the "white Indian" teen Firehair. All of the stories were both written and drawn by the character's creator Joe Kubert, but whereas the first two stories fall into a purely naturalistic domain, this one, as the cover clearly shows, seems to depict magical phenomena. I'll give the game away from the start, however: most of the young hero's mystic experiences take place within a fever-dream, so that the story falls into the domain of the uncanny through its use of the "delirious dreams" trope.

It's established in the two previous entries that Firehair doesn't fit into either the white or the Indian world, and thus he begins "The Shaman" alone, riding his pinto into a "strange land" that seems to be "scarred with a terrible wound" (the Grand Canyon). Firehair ponders that any tribe that might live here "must be as strange as the land on which they live." He's then immediately attacked by a hungry mountain-lion, which knocks him off his horse. As Firehair's mount flees, the young man tries to fight off the big cat. He and the creature fall off a cliff, but Firehair saves himself by grabbing a root and hauling himself back to solid ground. He's been badly clawed though, and he's forced to wander on foot, looking for someone who can help him. At some point in the real world he collapses into a dream, and the dream begins with him encountering the "strange" tribe he imagined before.

As the above section shows, the tribe immediately accuses Firehair of being guarded by an evil spirit, and the tribal shaman claims that he sent the mountain cat to kill him. The witch-doctor also demonstrates his supernatural power upon the youth, but refrains from killing him because "the death of evil should be a lesson for all." Firehair is then placed on upon a pedestal-like rock in the center of a pit filled with rattlesnakes: "the Circle of Venom." This pointless punishment takes the form of an initiatory ordeal, given that the hero must then strive to keep from falling asleep, lest he tumble into the snake-pit. Firehair blacks out briefly, but though he doesn't fall off the pedestal, he does behold that the tribal grounds have become enswathed by a "colorless sky mist." Then the tribesmen remove him from the pedestal with a bridge, and the shaman leads Firehair and a small party of braves to their next rendezvous. The Shaman goes in front, and the hero thinks of him as "the poisonous head of a writhing serpent."

The group ends up in one of the canyons-- referred to as "the earth's bowels"-- and Firehair sees the cave "drenched in a red light." The Shaman positions himself in front of a "bottomless abyss," calls out to a "spirit of the nether-world." Out of the abyss, filled with red smoke, rises a colossal man with the head of a coyote, and this spirit-figure declares that he cannot take Firehair into his domain until he faces the "supreme trial," facing "He-That-Holds-the-World."

This means that the group must now seek out the site of "the Black Pool," another cave where all of the lighting is blue and everything is cold and overgrown with ice-shapes. The Indians arrive at the shore of the forbidding Black Pool and tie their human sacrifice to a nearby "stone shaft." Then out of the pool comes He-That-Holds-the-World, a gigantic prehistoric-looking turtle, intent on gobbling down its victim. Faced with a creature too huge to fight, the hero takes his first decisive action in the dream: screaming the Blackfoot "cry of battle." This somehow results not only in the splintering of the shaft holding the hero, but also the collapse of the ceiling above. Firehair's last thought, as the dream ends, is that "all was darkness-- the end of life."

However, the next moment he awakens from his fever-fantasy in the care of a friendly tribe of Navajos. He meets in real life the same shaman he met in his dream, who informs Firehair that he's been unconscious for three days, because his wounds had become "poisonous" (by which Kubert certainly means "infected"). He even uttered his war-cry while in his delirium, and now that he's awake, he sees a kachina doll that some tribal child made to help him through his illness.

There's nothing startlingly original about Kubert's main concept: of a character who sees aspects of reality reflected in a fever-dream, but there are a lot of good touches here: that the "evil" that the dream-shaman wishes to cast out is actually the real-life infection that the good shaman seeks to defeat. The Circle of Venom is also a further elaboration of the poison-effect. The chilling effect of the second cave is probably meant to connote the hero's bodily chills, and something similar is probably true of the red cave, even though it's not specifically said to be hot. It's possible to interpret Firehair's prescient visualizations of both the shaman and his doll as dream-interpretations of things he sees in his delirium, though the possibility of some psychic intuition is also left open.

In addition, Kubert has loosely evoked familiar Native American myth-figures here for his dream-journey. Since these figures have different names in different languages, many texts simply use generalizing English names like "Coyote" and "Turtle."  However, I think Kubert might have been less inspired by actual Native American myths than by the "weighing of the heart" ritual in Egyptian myth, wherein jackal-headed Anubis weighs the heart of the deceased-- and if the dead soul is found wanting, he's devoured by the monster Ammit. Additionally, the "sky is falling" myth-theme is a vital one in general world mythology. There's a fascinating parallel between the tuirtle-creature that "holds the world," which is defeated when Firehair more or less breaks a pillar, also a common symbol for whatever-supports-the-sky-- though here the destruction of both turtle and pillar result in the end of the dream, rather than of the real world. It's a shame that Joe Kubert didn't turn his superb artistic tales to this sort of mythopoeic story more often during his nonetheless impressive career.

MYTHCOMICS: "SCALP HUNTER" (TOMAHAWK #133, 1971)

Though Native Americans arguably got no better treatment from the white citizens of early America than did people from Africa and Asia, "Indians" excited the imagination of the European mind, both on the continent and in the U.S. Noble red men-- and sometimes equally noble red women-- appear in great profusion in most of the fiction we deem "westerns." Arguably one might rename the genre 'frontier stories," since many of the stories took place in the Eastern United States-- thus becoming "eastern westerns," as some wit styled them. One such example is DC Comics' original TOMAHAWK series, whose original adventures rarely strayed past Texas.

As this reproduction of the first Tomahawk story shows, Tomahawk's heroic path is thoroughly imbricated with that of the Red Man. Though he's already an adult when he receives tutelage from a kindly Indian tribe, he becomes an expert in woodcraft and even modifies his regular name, Tom Hawk, to one emblematic of Indian culture. In the first story he even has an Indian girlfriend-- Fenimore Cooper would never have approved!-- but I presume that she was never seen again.

However, the idea of white/red intermingling reappeared toward the end of the DC series. During the late 1960s the title was faltering under the aegis of talents like Ed Herron and Fred Ray, so there was an attempt in the last years of editor Murray Boltinoff's reign to give Tomahawk's frontier adventures a more realistic edge. TOMAHAWK #131, which began Joe Kubert's editorship, tried one last-ditch effort to revitalize the title, retitling the feature "Son of Tomahawk" (albeit only on the cover; the indicia-title stayed the same). In this reworking, a young Tomahawk met and married an Indian woman, settled down, and raised a family. Given that the original character's adventures always took place prior to the end of the Revolutionary War-- and given that Tomahawk and his wife were drawn to look like they were in their sixties in SON OF TOMAHAWK-- it would appear that it took a while for the couple to conceive, for "Hawk Son of Tomahawk" was portrayed as a tempestuous young man in his twenties. In any case, for the last ten issues of the title, the stories by Robert Kanigher and Frank Thorne depicted the lives of Hawk, his parents, and his little brother Small Eagle as they found themselves continually embroiled in violent conflict, often involving racial tensions (Hawk looked white while his brother looked Indian, but their community knew them both as "half-breeds.")

Most of the Kanigher-Thorne stories are good frontier adventure, but the story entitled "Scalp Hunter" is their most mythic evocation of the racial theme. Hawk finds himself targeted by a cyclopean enemy known only as "Bounty Hunter." (I suspect that the original intention was to call him "Scalp Hunter," since that's the name he's given on the cover; perhaps someone at DC wanted to soften the impact by changing the name inside the comic.) Hunter is a white man who carries around a "trophy pole" adorned with dozens of Indian scalps, but he's never been convicted for murder because he's claimed self-defense every time. The killer targets Hawk, calling him both "injun" and "half-breed," so the young man attempts to leave to protect his family. Hunter captures Hawk and tells him how he became obsessed with murdering every Indian he could find: an Indian raiding-party killed and scalped the man's family while he was away scouting for land on which they could all settle. The horror of his loss so unhinges the Hunter that after he buries his mutilated relatives, he swears at their gravesite to take enough Indian scalps to stretch from the graves to the top of nearby mountain "Snow Peak." For good measure, Hunter even explains the bear-claw necklace he wears; that he stole it from one of a medicine-man victim even as the Indian warned him that the amulet would bring Hunter bad luck.

Though Hunter has Hawk at his mercy, he decides not to shoot him outright-- "That'd be too easy! You're special!"-- but orders to strip off his shirt, gives Hawk a knife and a headstart, and begins to hunt him down. Hunter also strips down but remains armed with a pistol. Hawk, who's stated earlier that he has no Indian woodcraft, has to learn the hard way how to walk softly in the forest, but it doesn't help. Thus he strikes for high ground, scaling Snow Peak (which just happens to be in the area where Hunter took Hawk prisoner). Eventually Hunter triggers an avalanche to deluge the young hero. However, when the villain tries to claim the buried body-- boasting of the "good luck" his amulet has brought him-- Hawk stops playing possum. In the ensuing fight Hunter almost goes over a cliff but catches himself on the edge. Hawk reflects is tempted to let the killer die: "the weight of the scalps he took-- are draggin' him down!" The young hero reconsiders and tries to pull Hunter up, but Hunter refuses his charity and allows himself to fall: "If you wanna beat me, redskin-- you'll have to follow me plumb tuh hell!" Hawk watches the villain fall, laughing all the way. Then he returns home with a token of his adventure; the bear-claw necklace. When his father asks him if he found out "how much o' you is Indian, " Hawk replies, "as much as this claw is bear."

Between them, Hawk and Hunter form two responses to the mythic tension between white and red races. Hawk, of course, signifies the humanity that binds the races as being essentially identical. Hunter, despite his hatred of Indians, has taken up a life that most white people of the time would have deemed "savage," and thus not far from the life of real Indians. Not only has he taken up the practice of scalping, thus imitating the horror perpetrated by his family's killers, he even emulates an Indian-like ritual by hunting Hawk. Kanigher doesn't try to draw a deep portrait of Hunter's racism or his insanity. However, one may speculate that the only reason the character would consider Hawk "special" is because he Hawk is a product of two races, and so Hawk is a living testament that the separation Hunter cherishes can be abolished. Thus he prefers to die with the belief that if he takes his own life, Hawk has not managed to beat him, while to accept Hawk's charity would be to admit that a red man could best him.

I called Bounty Hunter "cyclopean" earlier, because I think Kanigher and Thorne have modeled him on the figure of the cannibalistic giant. though of course Hunter does not literally consume his victims. Even Hunter's insane scheme for vengeance-- to create a trail of scalps connecting his family gravesite to the top of a mountain-- bespeaks the ambition of a giant, rather than that of a merely mortal man.

In the flashback scene, the medicine-man predicts that Hunter will have bad luck if he steals the bear-claw necklace. The trope of the villain "hoist on his own petard" was one commonly used by Kanigher; about a year previous to this story, the author pitted the young Tomahawk against a fiend with a penchant for hangings, who is undone when his scarf gets entangled in a tree-branch, hanging him. However, the bear-claw necklace plays no role in Hunter's defeat. I'll speculate that because of the final parallel between "the claw that is all bear" and "the half-breed who is all Indian" suggests that Hawk himself is Hunter's "bad luck" personified; he masters the killer of red men in a rough parallel to the way men, particularly red men, can master animals. And while Hawk is a liminal figure connecting the worlds of red and white men, the character's final words indicate that the Indian way of existence, of blending with the environment to survive, may be more fundamental than the civilized mode of life-- which may be the very thing that has made Native Americans so popular in popular culture.