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.

         

          

THE UNIQUENESS OF '66 BATMAN

Just a forum-post to clarify some of the unique factors of the TV show, responding in part to a claim that the program went downhill because of the number of episodes required in the second season.

______________

I guess we are at loggerheads on the episode thing. In terms of sheer quantity, going from a half-season for a show with about thirty half-hour episodes to a full season of 60 should not have been any bigger deal than an hour-long show with a half-season of, say, 15 episodes suddenly getting a full season order of, say, 30 episodes. 

HOWEVER, I do concede that with BATMAN, even the producers were to an extent making things up as they went along. Doing two episodes of BATMAN a week was in my outsider's opinion far more difficult than doing a weekly hour of even a good western like, say, RAWHIDE. The rules on how to do westerns had been well established long before RAWHIDE. Everyone involved in making the series would have grown with westerns, both juvenile and adult, and everyone would have known what a good western needed.

BATMAN was almost sui generis for television. ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN followed various tropes of comic book stories, but I don't think that show consistently represented the comic book of the early fifties. Some episodes roughly captured the feel of some comic stories, but the low budget meant that overall SUPERMAN couldn't really be that much like SUPERMAN the comic. Similar factors also limited other low budget adaptations like SHEENA and cheap original cartoons like COURAGEOUS CAT.

But BATMAN actually had a high budget (though some accounts claim that the showrunners acted like they had to pinch every penny). The makers could actually make the Caped Crusader as way out as the source material. But most adults had at best a friendly contempt for comic books of all genres. Hence Dozier came up with his two-pronged approach: render the comics tropes as accurately as possible to please the kids but seek to please the adults with ironic humor. Yet that balance was hard to sustain, and as we've discussed, in the end a lot of raconteurs defaulted to zaniness rather than distanced camp. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE RED HAWK (1925)

Curiously, the cover to the 1963 Ace paperback, in which the company reprinted the short ERB novels MOON MEN and RED HAWK, looks like it belongs with a standard Burroughsian SF-romance along the lines of the Mars books. But the scene, showing a normal sized man dueling a nine-foot armored giant, derives from the end of the concluding novel RED HAWK, the one with the least amount of standard science-fiction content. (In the book the giant doesn't have blue skin or pointed ears, but-- creative license.)

Like MOON MEN, RED HAWK takes place entirely on ERB's future-Earth. In MOON MEN the key conflict only appears to concern the tyrannized Earth-humans attempting (and failing) to throw off the chains of the virtually indistinguishable humanoids from the Moon, the Kalkars. But arguably the real focus is the resistance to ethnic assimilation. The good guys, all of whom are Americans, have managed to keep themselves genetically separate from the invading Kalkars. Yet the Americans are far less persecuted by the literal aliens than by their offspring, who are hybrids of Kalkars and Earth people. The American leader is the descendant of the heroic Julian from the first book, while his worst enemy is a descendant of the villainous Orthis-- and both characters perpetuate their legacy through women from the Moon, Julian through a Va-na woman and Orthis through a female Kalkar.

Three hundred years later, the scope of the conflict has taken several odd turns. If any conflict still takes place in big cities, the reader never hears of it, and the narrative concern with religious suppression utterly vanishes. Instead, the heirs of Julian and Orthis now both lead nomadic tribes in the American Southwest, and the tribes have taken the names of their progenitors: "Julians" and "Or-Tis." There's no more distinction between pure Kalkars and half-breeds, and for all one can tell, all Kalkars on Earth may be mixed-race. In contrast to the first two books, these Kalkars have gone out of their way to practice eugenics so as to distance themselves from common humanity, in that the males are on average seven feet tall. (Apparently the females stay average-sized, since there's a scene in which the hero mistakes a non-Kalkar woman for a Kalkar.) 

Said hero is the twentieth scion of the original Julian, but his main name is Red Hawk, and all the people in his tribe have names like those of Native Americans, as well as wearing Native American attire and living in teepees. (They also practice scalp-taking, though ERB does not show this.) But both the Julians and the Or-Tis (which is both a singular and plural noun) are pretty evidently White people who have, for reasons never explored, taken to living like Native Americans. (That the two tribes are not Indians is made clear by ERB's introduction of real, dark-complected people called "In-Juns," more on whom later.) The social organization of the Kalkars is not very well explained. They're not parasites like the old Kalkars, but just unrelenting brutes who treat their women like slaves. Though the line of Orthis was originally allied to the Kalkars, now the Or-Tis tribe has separated from their former patrons, though the Or-Tis and the Julians harbor more hate toward one another than they do for their giant-sized enemies.

What makes all this "Fake Indian" business fascinating is that ERB ends up pursuing the exact opposite theme from that of MOON MEN, in that Julian-Hawk becomes the fulcrum of a movement TOWARD assimilation between the Or-Tis and the Julians. Hawk is actually a fairly chauvinistic hero at the start. Then he's captured by the Or-Tis, whose leader offers the possibility of a peace between them. When Hawk refuses, he's imprisoned with a renegade Or-Tis man. This prisoner claims that the current leader is an impostor, and that there's a real direct scion of the original Orthis out there somewhere, who wants a real peace with the Julians. In actuality, the unnamed man really is this true valid leader, though he barely figures in the main plot, except in that he's the brother of the obligatory Burroughsian heroine.

After escaping the Or-Tis tribe, Hawk falls in with a curious tribe of pygmy-sized people who live in very small teepees and who call themselves "Nipons," after their ancestor, the normal-sized "Mik-do." These Japanese pygmies, whose small stature goes unexplained, are also enemies of the brutal Kalkars, and the Nipons' greatest enemy is a nine-foot giant named Raban. Hawk, being chauvinistic again, thinks Raban is just a superstitious fantasy. But upon leaving the Nipons, Hawk encounters a Kalkar man with a female prisoner, and he nobly kills the Kalkar raider even though he assumes his prisoner is Kalkar too. 

The woman Bethelda is a little more contentious than a lot of ERB heroines. Though grateful for her rescue, she withholds her true secret: that though she's not a Kalkar, she is an Or-Tis. Bethelda eventually reveals all and criticizes the warrior for holding her people responsible for the sins of an ancestor long dead. By this time, they've fallen hard for each other, so this leads to the usual ERB trope of the female being captured and the male rescuing her. And her captor is none other than the mythical Raban, who is also the nine-foot-tall armored guy on the cover. After Raban's inevitable conquest the human tribes are united, in part through the wedding of Hawk and Bethelda, and the Kalkars are at last driven to the sea.

If this wasn't already such a long post I'd linger over a lot of Burroughs' character beats here. ERB was a formula writer but he worked in a good range of dramatic and comic scenes here, far more than he has in MOON MAID and MOON MEN combined. Once he even came back to previous themes, for after dropping the matter of cannibalism that occupied a few MOON MAID chapters, the topic arises again in Raban, who purports to eat his victims. And since ERB never gives a reason for his Japanese pygmies, maybe he was just playing with Nordic myth-images, giving readers a world with both "giants" and "dwarfs."

But since I have to wrap up with something, I'll discourse on the Fake Indian thing. On one level, it's tied into Caucasian fantasies about being a nature-dwelling savage outside the bounds of civilization, like the 1984 film RED DAWN. But there's a little more to it.

Burroughs actually had been a ranch-cowboy for a time in his youth, and served with the Seventh Cavalry for a year before his health got him discharged. During his army hitch he claimed he rode with troopers seeking out the Apache Kid, as seen in this post on the FRONTIER PARTISANS blog. So though he didn't interact with the Apaches on a personal basis that we know of, he had some acquaintance with real Native Americans. It's often been noted that the Mars books place John Carter in the middle of conflicts between tribes of "good alien Indians" and "bad alien Indians," and though ERB didn't write a lot of westerns, I think it's evident that he worked a lot of Western archetypes into his books. Thus, even though the real "In-Juns" in RED HAWK have no agency in the novel, one of ERB's most unique lines in all of his stories is spoken to Red Hawk by an old Indian woman, who didn't get the standard message on the Vanishing American:

Like the coyote, the deer and the mountains, we have been here always. We belong to the land, we are the land-- when the last of our rulers has passed away, we shall still be here, as we were in the beginning, unchanged. They come and mix their blood with ours, but in a few generations the last traces of it have disappeared, swallowed up by the slow, unchanging flow of ours. You will come and go, leaving no trace, but after you are forgotten we will still be here.

 

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."

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 3

 Another note on the topic of cosmic alignment...

I discussed more than a few western-related examples of alignment in the first essay in this series, and here I'll discuss a largely forgotten western with crossover aspects. 

In the first essay, I noted that a character like Doc Holliday became a "Sub" in at least one of his fictional re-creations, where he regularly assisted buddy Wyatt Earp in the 1950s TV show of the same name. Holliday seems to have only rarely garnered solo status as a Prime, an exception being the 1971 DOC, in which the dissolute former dentist was portrayed by Stacy Keach. I also mentioned that Holliday accrued Prime stature in a 1999 TV-movie, PURGATORY, though only by teaming up with three other deceased gunfighters.

Like Holliday and Billy the Kid, Jesse James has generated numerous innominate texts about his supposed career. One such is the 1960 B-western YOUNG JESSE JAMES, in which Jesse is re-imagined as a young hothead in the "juvenile delinquent" mode still popular during the period. The film resembles little about the real lives of the James Brothers or their allies the Youngers, except in stating that they all rode at one time or another with Quantrill's Raiders. The film shows Jesse gaining vengeance on a man who killed his father, after which he tries, not very successfully, to live a just life, only to be pulled back into outlawry. 

The subject of alignment applies particularly well to the way that all other members of the James-Younger gang became "Subs" to the "Prime" presence of Jesse (Ray Strickland), including older brother Frank, Major Quantrill, and all of the Younger Brothers. For whatever reason, most depictions of the two gangs tend to make Jesse James the center of attention, whatever the realities of history.

The most curious insertion, though, is that of Belle Starr (Merry Anders). The real "shady lady" had nothing to do with Jesse James, though a disproven story did circulate about her having married the uncle of Cole Younger. I'd conjecture that the story of that tenuous relationship was the reason the writer shoehorned Belle Starr into the story, though she only has a few scenes in which she gives the outlaws a haven and has a romantic interlude with Cole Younger himself. I can imagine that the movie-makers wanted a little extra sex appeal in the mix, if only for promotional ads, since there's one moment in which Jesse makes a pass at Belle and she slaps him down, calling him a "young colt." (Amusingly, Strickland was six years older than Anders.) So in my system, while Frank James and the Youngers are normally aligned to the story-cosmos that was Jesse James, Belle Starr was "out of alignment" with Jesse's cosmos, much like the interaction with the four gunfighters in the aforementioned PURGATORY are out of alignment with one another, not having been associated either in real history or in legend. Thus YOUNG JESSE JAMES would not be a crossover film if it had confined itself to subordinating the real associates of Real Jesse James to the narrative authority of Fictional Jesse. But Belle Starr's presence makes the film a crossover, however minor.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT

The sort of "cosmos" I'm talking about in this essay is essentially the same as the word "mythos" as I've been using it to apply the totality of elements within any narrative, where a variety of Subs-- mostly antagonists and supporting characters-- interact with one or more Primes. This cosmos may be generated within the space of one narrative, as per my earlier example of the novel IVANHOE, or throughout the progress of a series, be it short-lived or long-lived. All subordinate presences within a narrative-- characters, settings, and certain types of artifacts-- are defined by their *alignment* with the stories generated by the superordinate character(s).

I indirectly alluded to this concept, not then named, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1,  regarding the character of Fu Manchu. Since Fu is the sole superordinate character of the series of books named for him, all other characters in those books are aligned with him, even those opposing him. However, when Fu becomes a subordinate character in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, he then becomes an aligned figure within the Shang-Chi cosmos.

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe. However, it's possible, particularly when the individual features of a given publisher share continuity, for subordinate presences to cross over into other features. In CROSSOVERS PT. 3,  I reviewed the way in which two villains, Mister Hyde and the Cobra, had debuted in the THOR feature but were recycled into that of DAREDEVIL. The two super-crooks never became firmly attached to the latter feature either, and they subsequently drifted into such venues as SPIDER-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Since the two evildoers never became strongly associated with any single feature, I would still tend to view them as Thor-villains who bring about a charisma-crossover every time they venture into a new character-cosmos.

 OTOH, in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock. However, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the nasty titan becomes an Avengers foe-- and will probably never be re-interpreted further in the movie-medium.

As it happens, a number of famous historical figures also cross paths, though of course these events are not being contrived for anyone's entertainment. In this essay, I addressed the subject of notorious western marauder Billy the Kid, focusing on how little all fictional treatments of the outlaw related to the real historical personage. But even though the real Billy the Kid never met a lot of the famous people of his time, much less Dracula, some "real crossovers" did take place. The Kid's sometimes criminal associate Dave Rudabaugh, for instance, is credited in this Wiki-article with also encountering Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Earp and Holliday may have met for the first time due to Earp's hunt for Rudabaugh.

The real-life association of Earp and Holliday became the stuff of many fictional westerns, most of which tended to make Earp a Prime protagonist while Holliday was relegated to Sub status. Nevertheless, Holliday had enough charisma that he occasionally migrated into other fictional cosmoses, dueling with the Rawhide Kid in one comic and making an appearance in an episode of the TV show THE HIGH CHAPPARAL.

Strangely, Holliday gets a post-mortem encounter with three western folk-heroes in the 1999 movie PURGATORY, none of whom he knew in life: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wild Bill Hickock (though the last character seems more like a faux Wyatt Earp in his characterization, since he's not that "wild.") Again, these would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

Moving from folk-legends to folklore, there are a wide number of crossovers which focus on associating figures from folktales and fairy tales. Usually these type of tales are too amorphous to establish a "cosmos" for, say, Little Red Riding Hood. But on occasion the Wolf, aligned as a subordinate character in that story, becomes the star of a given story, or he may become one of many stock folk-figures to cross over with some superordinate character, often a new, non-traditional character like Shrek.

In conclusion, I will admit that full-fledged myths are harder than folk-tales to judge in terms of alignment. Suzanne Langer and others have noted that in mythology proper figures like gods and their monstrous antagonists often become set in their own "continuity," however often this or that detail may change. Yet some gods and heroes, theoretically in the same universe, never really cross paths, despite "continuties" like those of the Iliad or the Argonautica. Does it count as a crossover if Perseus and Jason, who never meet in the old myths, appear in the same story? I would not tend to consider it a crossover if some ordinary schmuck conjures up the goddess Venus. But Venus crossing over with the mythology of Satan would certainly be a different matter. More on these matters later, perhaps.

WHAT'S IN A NOMINATIVE TEXT?

 In A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 4 I wrote:

Moving away from this type of High Charisma crossover, I want to return to the matter of "crypto-continuity" introduced in Part II, I asserted that "King Kong II," though not technically in continuity with "King Kong I," borrows enough motifs from the original that the later character may be seen as what I term a "weak template deviation." 

However, there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.

Though I may have reason later to utilize these "template deviation" terms, I'll put them aside for this essay to discuss the two types of texts from which a later narrative may deviate: the *nominative* text and the *innominate* text. Innominate texts are all texts that arise from anonymous sources, whose history is hard to determine. Nominative texts are all texts whose origins and authorship are easy to verify. 

Some texts from very archaic times may combine aspects of both, in that we know the historical placement of the BEOWULF poem and of the EPIC OF GILGAMESH, but not who wrote them. We know the name of Homer, who composed the two epics once believed to be the earliest literary works in existence, and we know the probable times in which the epics were circulated, but we know next to nothing about the author himself. Homer's epics, Beowulf and the GIlgamesh Epic were most probably built up from assorted shorter stories of myth and folklore, and indeed the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY might be considered the world's first major crossovers, given that they are forging connections between legendary characters who may not have been associated with one another in anterior eras.

 To further complicate the matter, even some legendary characters may have verifiable historical associations. The figure of Gilgamesh is attested to have been a mortal king in an early period of Sumerian history. However, in keeping with the theory of the Greek scholar Euhermus, later Sumerians used the name Gilgamesh for one of their gods, and it is as a demigod that the character appears in the aforementioned epic. For this reason I tend to regard all of the archaic works, even the epics of Homer, to be innominate because their full history is sometimes murky in its specifics.

In contrast, the majority of texts produced since the rise of European culture in the post-Renaissance era are usually known quantities for  the most part. From that time on, a much stricter distinction between fiction and non-fiction pertains in Western culture. In Shakepeare's historical plays, he feels free to change details of real history-- sometimes of historical eras very close to his own-- and this may be because he knew that his audience would dominantly regard his plays as fiction based on fact, in contrast to any archaic Greeks that may have regarded the ILIAD as the history of Troy's fall. 

In CROSSOVERS PART 4 I contrasted two characters whom I regarded as a "high-charisma crossover," the titular figures of the 1966 weird western BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA. It should go without saying that the Dracula of this film, despite having little if anything in common with the Dracula of Bram Stoker, nevertheless descends from a *nominative* text: a book published in 1897.

Billy the Kid, however, was a real historical personage, who became over time a folk-hero in a process roughly analogous to what may have happened with the historical Gilgamesh. A scholar knowledgeable in the subject of dime-novel westerns could probably cite a particular work that contributed to the growth of the Kid's repute. However, it's unlikely that any single literary or even cinematic work was responsible for the articulation of the legend. Most of the real-life exploits of the outlaw born "Henry McCarty" are not in the least admirable, and maybe not even all that daring. Yet simply because the real-life person became a figure that people could talk about, the people began building him into a legendary personage, even to the extent of making him a righteous hero. 

Thus in my system every fictional story including Billy the Kid is an *innominate* text-- even one that purports to represent the "real" Billy, like the 1972 film DIRTY LITTLE BILLY. 

An *innominate* text, because its main characters are not grounded in a text with a particular history, cannot boast characters that have any stature relevant to a crossover. Every Billy the Kid in every serial or stand-alone work is different from every other one, and so there exists not even the tenuous "crypto-continuity" that exists between the Dracula of Stoker and the Dracula of William Beaudine. 

To be sure, it's not impossible for an author to use the name of a character from a nominative text for a new character who has nothing in common with the original save the name. In a series of B-westerns starring Ken Maynard, the hero rode a horse named 'Tarzan." I assume the filmmakers legally got away with using the name of the Burroughs ape-man because no one in any audience would have believed that the horse was an attempt to imitate the copyrighted Tarzan character. 

VECTORS OF INTENTIONALITY

 

In the three-part EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS series, beginning here, I referenced the way authorial well manifested in all of the conceptual categories on which I’ve meditated here, though the three essays were concerned only with the category of centricity. This essay will be concerned with the category of literary phenomenality.

A word first, though, about my use of the word “intentionality” in the title. This term has various associations in various schools of philosophy, but here it means exactly the same as the concept of “authorial will.” Based on my readings I’ve often thought the twentieth-century concepts of “intentionality” were not substantially different from what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he spoke of “will,” and that the later term might have been introduced by writers who didn’t necessarily want to seem overly indebted to Schopenhauer. I’ve resisted using the term “intentionality” because my system does owe a lot to the Gloomy Philosopher. Yet I must admit that at times “will” is a lot less malleable as a term than the later conception. “Vectors of intentionality” simply sounds better to my ear.

My 2017 essay ECCENTRIC ORBITS supplies a case in point. At that time, I was still heavily influenced by the “circle metaphors” propounded by Northrop Frye, and so I attempted to conceive of different forms of phenomenality in terms of “centric will” and “eccentric will.” At some point I abandoned these terms, even though I still deem the logic of the ORBITS argument sound. One problem with the circle metaphors is that though they work fairly well for a complete finished work, such as a Dickens novel, said metaphors don’t work as well for serials conceived as open-ended works, whether they come to a definite end or remain indefinitely open. Whitehead’s metaphor of force-vectors works better for a teleseries like ANGEL, which, as I mentioned in the first VECTORS essay, changed its centricity-vectors from non-distributive to distributive during the process of serialization, Clearly one would not see such a transformation in a novel, even one that appeared in serialized form. It is at least easier to state, if not any easier to prove, that the character of Spike doesn’t have a centricity-vector equal to that of Buffy in her series but does have a vector equal to Angel’s.

The ORBITS essay gives several examples where the phenomenality becomes fuzzy due to authorial intentionality. There’s no doubt, for instance, that Frank Miller has a definite purpose in putting a ghost into “Nancy’s Last Dance,” one of the sub-stories of the movie SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR. This would seem to be the first time Miller put any sort of marvelous phenomenon into any SIN CITY tale. The presence of John Hartigan’s ghost, though, does not transform Miller’s cosmos into a place where ghosts or any other marvelous phenomena can be reasonably expected to make appearances. Thus, within the SIN CITY cosmos, the marvelous phenomenality possesses a subordinate vector. In contrast, Miller’s creative preoccupation with tropes of the uncanny—bizarre crimes, freakish flesh, superlative skills—appears with enough regularity that the entire series can be fairly judged as uncanny in its phenomenality. Thus even if there are occasional SIN CITY stories that lack uncanny tropes, the naturalistic phenomenality also possesses a subordinate vector.

Now, when I used the word “regularity” above, I do so while renouncing all previous attempts to *quantify * the appearances of this or that phenomenality within a work or series of works. My current conception of vectors supersedes even the concepts of “active and passive shares,” a critical stratagem by which I attempted to formulate a logical alternative to making a simple “head count” of each depiction of metaphenomenality in a series.

To hearken back to the RAWHIDE KID/RINGO KID contrast I offered while working on the active/passive formulations, both of these series, unlike SIN CITY, did not offer regular depictions of metaphenomenality, and so it would be easy to perceive both serials as dominantly isophenomenal. But where RINGO KID only has one measly mad doctor who departs from all the other naturalistic threats that the titular hero encounter, RAWHIDE KID used metaphenomenal opponents in a peripatetic manner. With RINGO, my perception is that the workaday creators, with or without the input of editors, assumed that their readers wanted westerns that were dominantly naturalistic in terms of what could happen in them: gunfights, cattle stampedes, et al. With RAWHIDE, though, the creators attempted to vary the mix. In contrast, the Rawhide Kid usually encountered gunfights and cattle stampedes, but from the earliest to the last of the series initiated by Lee and Kirby, there was always a strong vector encouraging the appearance of the metaphenomenal. As with SIN CITY, RAWHIDE KID had so few examples of marvelous phenomenality that the corresponding vector would be subordinate. However, even though the RAWHIDE creators did not keep uncanny phenomenalities front-and-center as Miller did in SIN CITY, I judge that the potential for the uncanny becomes a superordinate vector, rendering the naturalistic vector subordinate, even though the number of naturalistic stories proved superior.

A third example appears in yet another “weird western,” the teleseries KUNG FU. When I first started my project of reviewing all of the episodes in 2013, I knew that the series did not boast a huge number of episodes with a marvelous phenomenality, though on finishing the project I did find more than I anticipated (often using mild forms of marvelous tropes like telepathy or oracular pronouncements). But I knew in advance of the project that some episodes depicted Caine’s Shaolin skills as no more than naturalistic in essence—probably because those scripts didn’t need anything more—while other tales took evident pleasure in showing the priest showing off “superlative skills,” whether in minor actions like bending jailhouse bars or in major accomplishments like walking unharmed through a pit of rattlesnakes. As with RAWHIDE KID, it doesn’t matter how often the episodes were either naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous. It only matters as to which of the three phenomenalities assumed a superordinate position. That determination can’t be deduced from a simple head count, but by an intuitive assessment of a given serial’s total concept, as it is perpetuated through various creators, usually following what insiders term a “series bible.”

Over the centuries, the disciplines of science and philosophy have remained in strife. Much of this strife may be seen as a conflict between science’s intention to judge the world’s phenomena in terms of quantity, while philosophy is far more concerned with quality. Literature, though not allied to philosophy in any fundamental sense, is conceived along roughly the same propositional lines: propositions have truth based on the qualities they enhance in the lives of audiences. I attempted to see if there was any method by which arguments regarding quantity could be used to buttress those regarding quality, but I have of late decided that the conceptual divide is insuperable.

MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH

 

I've finished reading the second edition of Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS, and I'm resisting the temptation to record assorted niggles about errors or omissions. But the project is relevant to my phenomenological outlook thanks to Green's definition of "weird westerns," which offer not only those that are overtly marvelous but also a smattering of those I would deem "uncanny."

Of Green's four categories, three of them depend entirely on marvelous content, ranging from stories set in the actual Old West, in which supernatural or science fiction concepts appear, or stories set on futuristic Earths or in outer space, but with western motifs included. The fourth category deals almost entirely with the category I call "phantasmal figurations," in which, generally, ordinary human beings pretend to be supernatural boogiemen. Though this trope dates back to the Gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, Green chooses to name this category "the weird menace western," explicitly taking this term from the so-called weird menace pulp magazines of the 1930s.  To be sure, these periodicals seem much more concerned with torture and mayhem than with people dressing up like ghosts, but I suppose Green wanted to emphasize that the source of the horrors in both cases were purely human in nature.

Not surprisingly, though, Green does not view what he calls "masked cowboys" as relevant to this category. In my system, characters like the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro (more a masked cavalier than a cowboy, I suppose) are intrinsically uncanny by the virtue of their wearing "outre outfits." But Green only includes such characters if an adventure, or series of adventures, make use of either phony horror or of real supernormal phenomena.

I suppose. for Green and others of similar leanings, there's nothing intrinsically "weird" about a hero deciding to dress up in a mask and fight evil. And of course, the masks of the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro don't evoke what I term the "antipathetic affects" associated with the genre of horror. However, I would counter that such masks-- even one like Zorro's, which might be worn by any ordinary bandit-- do conjure up "sympathetic affects" that verge into the phenomenology of the uncanny. 

At the same time, one can only judge the presence or absence of the uncanny on a case-by-case basis, for as I mentioned in PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, it's possible for an author to have some major character run around for awhile in a mask for purely functional reasons. It's certainly possible that someone could write a Zorro story so down-to-earth that the hero did not attain the larger-than-life persona he has in Johnson McCully's original story. 

On a similar note, I can't be sure how uncanny the original radio dramas of the Lone Ranger were, since I never have (and probably never will) listen to any of them. But the Ranger I encountered was a larger-than-life figure, a knight using a mask rather than a helmet, selflessly devoted to the establishment of justice throughout the unruly frontier.

To be sure, even Green can't entirely avoid touching on some of the "masked cowboys" who aren't pretending to be haunts. Presumably he only includes the 1940 serial DEADWOOD DICK not because the titular hero wears a bandanna-mask, but because the villain, the Skull, goes around wearing a skull-mask. Yet to the best of my recollection, the villain isn't wearing the mask to convince anyone that he's a spook. He's just masked to conceal his identity, which is the same basic motive ascribed to Zorro and the Two-Gun Kid.

To be sure, had Green tried to compile all the masked cowboys who followed in the wake of the Lone Ranger, his ENCYCLOPEDIA might have been twice its current size-- and how many readers would have cared about non-entities like, say, early Marvel Comics' first entry into the costumed cowpoke genre, "the Masked Raider?"

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 5

This is just a quick follow-up to Part 4, which discussed the knotty problem of imputing "power" to fictional characters who have no power save that of being alive when they used to be dead. SPOILERS in advance.

In Part 4, I noted that Golden Age character Major Victory was one such character. Some afterlife judge returned a nameless patriot to life, giving him a costume and a mandate to fight the Axis. One story imputed a limited super-power to Victory, but this is seemed to have been created for the writer's convenience in that one tale. However, most readers would still deem Victory a superhero, if only because he wears a costume.

My newest inductions into the superhero idiom don't wear costumes, but like Victory, they are characters who were dead and became alive again through supernatural means. I've just finished my review of the 1999 telefilm PURGATORY, and in that review, I noted that though the story starts with a band of outlaws, it actually centers on five characters-- the one savable member of the gang, and four residents of the town Refuge. The four residents are all famous gunfighters-- Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James-- who, like the rest of the townfolk, have been brought back to life to serve a purgatorial sentence, to see if they're worthy to enter heaven.

The four reborn gunfighters, obviously, don't look like anything but ordinary men in ordinary clothes, and they have no special abilities. The rules of the game seem to suggest that they can be wounded by the guns of the mortal outlaws, although none of them are so wounded. The principal threat to their well-being is that, by fighting the bad guys, they may lose their chance at heaven. Nevertheless, there's no question that the climactic gunfight has the same combative value that it would in any commonplace western-- and since one side of the fight is fought in part by dead-alive men, it also becomes relevant to the world of metaphenomenal narratives.

Thus the four gunfighters of PURGATORY would be another example, like others discussed in this series, where the heroes have "potency" but not "power" as such.

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.